In case SOPA passes: IP addresses of popular websites
reddit.com
reddit.com
As the torrent sites go down they'll come back up as tor hidden services. Once we're on tor or something like it the game changes entirely. As we stop trusting the root DNS, we'll start trusting something like a bitcoin hash chain based DNS system, as we create an anonymized, decentralized internet freedom of expression increases exponentially. No URDP, no SOPA, no unencrypted protocols, security of the person in their effects will be guaranteed by mathematics and not the good will of politicians.
With all the monitoring, etc thats already in place it's only a matter of time. We have the opportunity to lay the foundations of a decentralized internet over something as trivial as copyright rather than freedom of speech. We'll stop having to rely on a government to respect our liberties and instead instill them in the design of the system.
Decentralized information, decentralized currency, decentralized control over the future of humanity.
While it's true that this system created by SOPA will inevitably be abused to curtail civil rights, the important thing to remember is that most people care far more about getting their music than getting their rights.
Lets give the people their music, and they'll get their rights as they go along for the ride.
We should be doing the really right thing in the first place, not wait for really bad things to happen.
As an example, nobody was worrying about an AIDS vaccine in the early 1700s...because AIDS wasn't a problem then.
When you think about it, public key cryptography is just plain awesome. We can generate a pair of numbers that let you hide and authenticate messages! Why would you not want to use that?
Much more recently I became aware of these other technologies that amount to a secure public title registry. Distributed currency and name resolution. Awesome! I want to learn about these things and put them to use, and soon. The hacker appeal of these is just staggering!
The very idea that a government would even consider saying I can't or shouldn't use these (shouldn't do a certian kind of math) is merely a reason to hurry up and do it faster. How dare they.
DNS hacks are nice but don't solve the real underlying problems that will actually kill businesses and bankrupt people because of abuse of this law.
That said, a lot of these "solutions" that people are coming up with just end up getting closer and closer to what the DNS already accomplishes.
The worst case scenario here is just a fragmented DNS, and the US losing control of the .com TLD. The "doomsday" scenario here is that DNS servers stop trusting the root servers, and don't take updates from them.
This is a gigantic headache for network and system administrators. It is not the end of the internet.
If you guys really really care that much, here: http://www.verisigninc.com/en_US/products-and-services/domai...
Apply for access to the .com zone files, download them, and up your own DNS servers. Don't accept any updates from anybody ever and you'll have a much, much, much more complete, much more "you can query this as a daemon" version of these silly lists.
That is the best case scenario.
In other words, a reasonably effective implementation that would effect Joe Sixpack.
The US is already abusing their alleged jurisdiction over the .com TLD and unfortunately there doesn't yet seem to be a real risk of fragmentation.
It's one thing to pass PATRIOT or SOPA, but try passing legislation to create a multi-billion dollar firewall to effectively block other DNS servers and block offending IP addresses.
Funny, the EFF and Google don't seem to think so.
And have you not noticed Wikipedia's donation campaigns? Do you really think they can afford the legal fees associated with fighting SOPA claims every time some corporate/political entity feels slighted by an article and feels like submitting a takedown?
To be considered for acceptance into the program,
please print and complete the appropriate applications
and fax the forms to +1-703-421-5828.
I've always heard that faxes may have some kind of legal status that other electronic communications don't (why?), but this is just getting silly.
Would it prevent somebody from requesting them who needed them for their business?
(That's why)
and from a technical standpoint, most of those websites listed use CDNs for static assets, so unless you list the constantly-changing IPs of akamai and other servers for all of the weird random-looking hostnames used by those CDNs, many of those sites will not even load to a usable state. (and porn sites? really?)
also, from the reddit thread:
As some posters suggested, you can use another DNS server. The two server I'm reasonably certain about are OpenDNS and Google DNS. Both of them are US based but I think Google will move it's server to Europe if SOPA passes.
using a resolver in the EU from the US would be frustratingly slow due to the latency. you're better off showing users how to setup their own caching servers to bypass their ISP (i've always run my own caching server just for technical reasons).
and do you really think google cares about SOPA? they have done practically nothing to stop it; no notice on their homepage, no public awareness, only one legal representative sent to the preliminary hearing, etc. this is the same company that partnered with china and supported their censorship just to make some additional ad revenue.
In the meatspace world, see tasers and pepper spray which are only supposed to be used when a gun would have been, so they are less than lethal - then there is warrantless everything these days, or no-knock warrants on the wrong house from a "tip" and they kill your dog for good measure (happens so often it's a cliche already).
On the net see the DMCA mission creep and the thousands of Patriot Act "cannot tell anyone you were served, not even your lawyer" National Security Letters nonsense.
If someone copies the code to crack bluray or something like that to wikipedia - why wouldn't SONY's lawyers use SOPA to take down all of wikipedia for 10 days?
i didn't say that, and i realize why the bill is dangerous. but to fear that it's suddenly going to shut down a bunch of popular sites overnight and we have to scramble to revert back to an /etc/hosts-over-ftp distribution of addressing is silly.
we should be focusing on stopping the bill from passing first, rather than worry about how we'll get to the pirate bay in a few months.
Reality is we cannot stop it from passing, the people in charge of the committee want it to pass so the hearing is just pretend to go through the motions. In some form or another it's going to pass, so start planning.
If all else fails maybe we can get it declared to be unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. And even if the Supreme Court fails us, then we just have to vote some new people into Congress and overturn the law.
No. Just no. That's so delusional it's not even funny anymore. It doesn't matter who "you" vote into congress, it's the same shit with different assholes. They are ALL corporate sellouts.
What's broken is the current system, where people who have no clue what so ever are allowed to vote on things they do not understand even on a surface level, dismiss the opinions of experts with comments such as "I'm not a nerd so I wouldn't understand" and vote "No" to everything because they've been told to do so.
Stop believing that "the next election surely will change everything". It's bullshit and you should know it. Worse, most people will think that their responsibility is done after voting, sheepishly waiting for the next election where they fall for the same empty promises and banal phrases as they did in the previous election.
Furthermore, even if we get SOPA to be repealed, the same shit will come up not even half a year later in a new disguise, I can promise you that with absolute certainty. As I said, the system is broken, and that is what needs to be fixed. Fighting SOPA and other abominations is just a never-ending battle with the symptoms.
That's my point. It's impossible to fix it. Representative democracy is broken to its very core. It will inevitably lead to concentration of power towards groups or individuals who do NOT have the interest of the public or the advancement of humanity in mind.
>then what are you going to do?
Exactly what I've been doing anyways: advocate anarchism and technocracy. Only a society focused on scientific progress and advancement of humanity as a whole, centered around knowledge and logic, and opposing all forms of unnatural authority can bring us into the future.
I'm more concerned that unpopular sites will be shut down. Or never created to begin with.
Fantastic.
As if SOPA needed to look any worse, now it has the appearance of being a protection racket for the extortion of contributions.
edit: it was raised by Jared Polis - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jared_Polis - who is in the anti-SOPA camp.
I don't understand this visceral hatred of pornography. Like it or not, it's an indisposable part of modern Western culture. It fulfills a need that is as old as mankind itself. Why can't we just acknowledge it for what it is instead of sweeping it under the rug?
Depends on the entire structure of the site, and no not only porn sites. If you run chrome, hit up your Network Inspector in the dev tools and go to YouTube (or RedTube if you want, it's just about the same) to watch a video. The random video I had in my chrome history loaded from o-o.preferred.nuq04s10.v21.lscache3.c.youtube.com , and all images loaded from *.ytimg.com
If Youtube were to go down and I tossed their IP address into my hostfile, I could visit their homepage, but there's a pretty good chance thumbnail images wouldn't load, and a 100% chance I would not have every single (seemingly dynamic) content server in my hostfile, so none of the videos would load anyways.
Now, back to my original assertion. Assuming we're all adults here, and are aware of what a modern porn scene looks and sounds like, I challenge you, or any other downvoter, to explain exactly how so is the porn industry not demeaning or not humiliating or does not objectify women.
Besides, you do not have the right to define what is humiliating and degrading for anyone else. You can only define that for yourself.
Why specify Western culture?
In any case, my familiarity with non-Western cultures is rather limited, and therefore I didn't want to unintentionally comment on any others in my initial post.
It seems you are referring to the latter, but you should be careful bandying around such terms. There are highly secular democracies with muslim populations, such as turkey.
And while it is not impossible for Muslim-majority nations to be secular and/or democratic, it's highly unusual. Moreover, going back to the origin of this discussion, even in secular Turkey, the recent conservative movement there resulted in the banning of pornography in 2004. If you know Turkish, you can read the law yourself here: http://www.tbmm.gov.tr/kanunlar/k5237.html
If there were no demand or supply, why make the law?
You suggest exterminating pornography would have a minor effect. If so many people want to exterminate it that they make it illegal (I suspect without checking that at times illegal under draconian punishment) but it still hasn't been exterminated, that seems another argument for indispensability.
But these points are irrelevant to my original question. Why specify Western culture?
Even if pornography were dispensable in some Islamic cultures (whether we label them as Western or not), that doesn't say it isn't also indispensable in non-Western cultures or dispensable in some Western cultures or both.
I don't understand this comment. Can you explain it?
I'm not sure if you know how senate hearings work. There's a reason that no other tech companies were at that hearing, and it's not because they all support SOPA.
Use this one to go there directly:
http://www.reddit.com/r/SOPA/comments/nf5p1/sopa_emergency_l...
The trouble will come when websites get blocked that do not have enough public support to bring them back again.
As long as Facebook and Gmail are up, it's only nerds like us who will care.
At the very least it will tie up the system
Or it might actually show these guys what kind of monster they have brought about ... kind of like Sarcozy's household being disconnected from the internet
http://torrentfreak.com/french-presidents-residence-busted-f...
http://www.futureofcopyright.com/home/blog-post/2011/10/04/g...
But it's OK when THEY do it, right?
However, if there are only foreign sites (registrar is abroad), then I doubt any major sites are hosted there, besides
http://bit.ly http://t.co http://youtu.be http://goo.gl
Correct me if I'm wrong, but under the current SOPA, only FOREIGN SITES can have their financials cut off, right? I thought the Operation In Our Sites is able to already seize domain names registered locally. So it seems to me that the SOPA simply adds provisions to censor sites registered abroad, in American DNS only, because their registrar is beyond US jurisdiction.
For example Russians use vkontakte.ru to listen to any song. What would SOPA do about this?
However, YouTube contains lots of uploaded songs and the US government could have seized their domain for a long time already, but didn't.
So I think the threat is more to the purity and security of the worldwide DNS system, as well as to the costs of the ISPs, than it is to social networking sites. At least, I hope. Does SOPA override the DMCA for locally-registered sites, or did Operation In Our Sites just give carte blanche to the government to take out sites?
Correct me if I'm wrong here, but isn't this what the DMCA safe harbor protection is for? They can't just pull their domain if they are responding in a timely manner to reasonable DMCA takedown requests.
Or am I missing a point you're making? Entirely possible. It's 4:55. I'm burnt out.
However, this list is interesting because it draws attention to the fact that these huge sites COULD legally vanish without a trace. Although I doubt anyone's going to seriously try to take down Facebook or Amazon using SOPA, it's still scary to imagine.
The fact remains that piracy is dishonest, and only serves to legitimize the claims of Big Media. Say what you want about DRM, copyright law and ridiculous terms of service, but if you're really someone who believes in free government and the important role of the Internet in preserving it, I hope you join with me in rolling your eyes at people who torrent illegal media and worry about the effect of SOPA on their porn viewing. There are plenty of ways to buy inexpensive, DRM-free music, and plenty of ways to actually support the artists who make the music.
a better approach would probably be to just hit that non-DNS cache for sites that don't resolve, or push out a list of known "killed" sites. if SOPA makes sites given the "death penalty" resolve to an ICE-style page, then the extension could just store the IP addresses of those government-run servers and consult the cache for sites that resolve to them.
Just a thought.
No need for a browser extension.
EDIT: Can someone show me specifically what I said that is objectively technically incorrect?
You may disagree with security through obscurity, and I agree with you that obscurity isn't a very strong defense mechanism, but that doesn't change the technical merit of it.
What is preventing any 'cracker' from a list of IP addresses of webservers? You can VERY easily find out the IP address of anything you please...
That's not what I'm talking about though. If google released a list of all crawled websites and their IP addresses, if I was inclined I could then take those IP's and scan them for known vulnerabilities. Essentially what you're giving an attacker is a prequalified list of IP addresses to attack instead of attacking a specific range.
You can already do that. You want a list of IPs running websites? So scan port 80? Your port 80 scan will be finding hosts and adding them to the list faster than the vuln scanning can grab them off the list.
My point is that this is more efficient, not that it is some super secret 1337 way to hack.
1. Have websites that been indexed by google with a PR 2+.
2. Run Web Servers
3. Bonus Points if you can tell me which web servers run the most PR 2+ sites.
Now hopefully you can see how useful this list would be! I don't think nmap will do that for you.
No, you are again correct. But if I know the IP address and the domains associated with it's very easy to determine PR 2+ websites and also from there figure out which ones have multiple websites hosted on them.
Will you promise you're not trolling me?
it allows for dated updates, distributing in web pages, etc, but it's only a command line interface. i hoped someone might add a gui...
It's: C:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
not C:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts.txt
https://github.com/denen99/fightsopa (shameless plug from http:/www.fightsopa.com)
Call your local representative and get them to shut down Reddit and Google Docs via SOPA! </2012>
Like everyone has been saying, it. does. nothing. good.
Cary Sherman, the head of the Recording Industry Association of America, wrote in a guest column for CNET that SOPA could be used to force Internet providers to block by "Internet Protocol [IP] address" and deny "access to only the illegal part of the site." The RIAA, along with the Motion Picture Association of America and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, strongly supports the legislation.
[...]
An aide to the House Judiciary committee -- chaired by Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Tex.), SOPA's principal sponsor -- did not dispute that IP address blocking and deep packet inspection could be required. It would be up to a judge to determine the nature of the court order that would be needed to block the site, the aide told CNET this afternoon.
They are definitely looking to block by IP, not just DNS.
The sky is not falling. Shame to see the "I need to be outraged by something, regardless of whether it's true or not" spilling over here from Reddit.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/12/internet-inventors-war...
Do you really think the DNS entry for wikipedia.org will be removed? In the stupidly ridiculously rare event that it did, obviously they'd quickly remedy it, or we'd all just proxy through other countries etc, or it'd get mirrored onto other domains.
We had the same "The sky is falling" for the UKs "Digital Economy Bill". It's a ridiculous law, and is now being revised/investigated. ISPs are against it, and it'll never be enforced. People again wasted hours of their lives worrying about it.