"Anna's Archive" blocked following publishers' complaint
torrentfreak.com
torrentfreak.com
To me, this is the most worrying part: how did they get a valid certificate for that "Anna's Archive" domain name, so that their blocking page is shown instead of a certificate mismatch error?
The default DNS servers used by ISPs reply with the government notice website’s IP address, instead of what other global authoritative resolvers are providing. HTTPS does not prevent this from happening.
Instead, I believe you are thinking of DNSSEC (1), which would prevent such dns rebinding.
(Is there a way to permanently opt a DNS name out of such things, I wonder? It seems unlikely that anything would survive a DNS name transfer.)
https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/prod-support-for-rfc8657...
https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8657
Though if your threat-model includes local- and/or internet authorities, you probably want to start thinking about alternative roots of trust.
Econ 101: Content is now (has been for a while) non-rival - we can make identical copies, A's use of A's copy does not deny B use of their copy.
Content is also non-excludable - excluding access, there's no other description is what (some) publishers are trying to do.
* And it played out for music just fine, after a while. The RIAA fought tooth and nail. I don't think Elsivier et al can fight harder than they did. Perhaps they'll try dirtier.
Music is the harbinger of academic and book publishing. The faster this is realised, and they're really really show, the better off society will be. Do a spotify for books and papers, whatever. That much of the academic world lives in Zotero (or JabRef), LaTeX, (perhaps, I do) Zettlr and a motley crew of other grass-roots open source projects created for necessity, old-skool subscriptions and terrible terrible terrible library search engines suggests a field ripe for some picking. If content makes it onto a screen, it makes it into the wild.
tho i don't like the idea at all, given the small slice streaming services pay their creators
[0] https://twitter.com/AnEriksenWife/status/1742405151116140907
I wouldn't go so far as to say that it played out "just fine". The RIAA and MPA have gained incredible powers that threaten us all in their fight to protect their profits and role as gatekeeper of what we're allowed to see/hear/publish.
Circumventing DRM is a crime. The DMCA is routinely abused to block criticism and competition. There is an extortion racket where individuals (innocent or otherwise) are threatened to pay media companies or face legal action they can't possibly afford (this scheme doesn't go well for them when they target someone who can afford to fight back: https://torrentfreak.com/appeals-court-affirms-retired-polic...). Companies are being forced to spend vast amounts of time, money, and other resources while working for free as copyright enforcement for the media industry. That same media industry now has the ability to force ISPs to instantly block access to whatever website they object to without any oversight in some countries, and they're pushing for that here in the US. Judges in US have already ruled that ISPs have to permanently disconnect the internet service of any customer if they receive an unspecified number of unproved accusations of infringement by the RIAA and they can face literal billions in fines if they fail to do so. The RIAA has been fighting against your freedoms for decades and they have been winning.
The book publishers don't have to fight harder than the RIAA, the RIAA has already done much of their work for them. They just have to continue to nudge things in the direction they are already going.
And according to this guy, it won:
https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/12/31/artificial-intelligence...
But the default ISP ones all block some websites related to piracy, and sadly for most people that’s enough to deter them or worse, it leads them to visit suspicious websites and download viruses.
I think personal computers should simply ship with a local recursive resolver installed and configured. The resource burden is tiny, and it's likely to be faster than most ISP's resolvers. And it'll tell you the Truth about what's in the DNS tree.
I understand that many ISPs use slow DNS servers as a way of throttling their users.
DNS over HTTPS would solve the problem, but some countries might outlaw browsers that ship with it if it became too much of a problem.
DNS-over-HTTPS is a move in the wrong direction, if you ask me. There aren't many DOH servers, so it concentrates control even more than traditional DNS. But if you are running your own recursive resolver, the only ways to control the results are to control the authoritative servers (nope), or to control the roots (most of them are physically in the USA, and run by corporations, so that's sort-of possible).
To block that, you have to either tamper with the root servers, or get control of the authoritative servers.
I don't think so. The ISP can just reply to the DNS packets itself, without sending them to the root servers. Your local recursive resolver will think the response is from other DNS servers but in fact they would all be from your ISP.
Unless you have DNS-over-HTTPS.
My (niche) ISP is rather benevolent; as far as I'm aware they don't block at all, and they brag about providing "real internet service". At any rate, I'm not aware that my recursive resolver has ever encountered an answer that was forged by my ISP.
Indeed they would.
> My resolver respects DNS signing…
I’m not honestly certain how big of a hurdle this is. I would figure that if a site is to be blocked, then the ISP substitutes their own “authoritative” response, which would include cryptographic signing details (even pretending their public key is the official one.)
> My (niche) ISP is rather benevolent …
I think most are. In my market, even the big guys haven’t done this, though I have heard about it happening in larger markets when big ISPs are up to no good (like inserting ads or whatever.)
This is a two line configuration in unbound and does not require creating and maintaining your own certificates.
9.9.9.9 is free or you can use nextdns as your upstream and get the benefits of a pi-hole in the cloud.
Everyone should do this.
Has the same benefits and works Triple-A-superplusgood.
The gridlock is simply the manifested reality that legislation is fully pay to play, but if you're paying that's not your problem.
No.
Japan has figuratively chosen to be the Cayman Islands of AI.
(I have five figures of karma with which to fight this battle)
Please do correct me if I'm wrong though
It won't change much for the power users; they can configure their computers to query other DNS servers. My local network has a DNS cache (dnsmasq) that uses alternative DNS servers for a handmade list of domains.
So in theory if Cloudflare cooperates, at least one of the provider is burned, but not all.
Another problem is that with torrents you have to do the initial seed from some public IP. Looking at who seeds Anna's torrents, you can very readily see the first seed currently flows through an IP in Ukraine. That's another way adversaries might identify your providers.
They seem to have prepared for this situation when they built the infra with multi DNS and multi provider in mind. But the cat and mouse game is harder when the providers (like Cloudflare) immediately cooperate. And harder still when you're seeding your own torrents vs just hosting a page through a CDN.
Seeding over Tor should work though. So although it's technically a public IP, it's also just a cut-out (from the uploaders perspective).
https://blog.torproject.org/bittorrent-over-tor-isnt-good-id...
Of course, but that doesn't mean it wouldn't technically work for the situations that don't have (safe) alternatives.
> It's _very_ easy to accidentally de-anonimize yourself ...
Using Tails would pretty much solve that yeah?
Rather toothless. No experienced user is using their ISP's DNS anyway.
Part of it is already preserved fairly well, especially the Sci-Hub torrents and many of the Libgen torrents, but there is currently ~150TB with <4 seeders.
Head over to the "/torrents" page if you'd like to help!
Projects like SciHub should thrive forever to combat this bullshit.
Is that bad? How would they get paid if all articles were free?
> curation seems like a problem the internet can solve well
"The internet" isn't anything more than a (supposedly) robust telecommunications network. Anyone can curate anything, but that is meaningless without trust.
> deriving one's trust from Elsevier or Springer is not great model
Any centralised trust model is broken by default. We've had practical web of trust security for decades at this point. But for various reasons nobody will use it. It would be perfect for things like this.
I'm guessing these sites are like the old WHQ BBS's.
Is is absolutely amazing and fascinating how the 'scene' has evolved over the decades and is crazy and impressive that books are part of it.
What is the demand of the book scene vs the music, warez, movie scene at the moment? I know that books are smaller that 1080p movies and software.
Absolutely fascinating \o/
We can play this game of whack-a-mole forever.
Copyright needs reform, this madness is wasting countless lifehours and holding back humanity as a whole. Copyright is broken and doesn’t fulfill its intended purpose anymore.
if his head had been frozen and cryogenically preserved would his copyright(s) have persisted . . .
Do any of the cryo crowd on ice get their artistic rights back if they were ever successfully decanted?
I suspect legally dead is dead wrt rights and I doubt anyone frozen to date is coming back .. but it's potboiler for when ... sometime in some future.
(and now we know where Disney will be investing) :)
Don't forget the Birthday Song fiasco by our friends in Warner/Chappell! (https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/hap...!)
For such a massive breach, why do they wait a year? And why only the Italian publishers?
In the early 90s we had the legendary UK Usborne BASIC programming books, but trying to find books about Amiga programming in AREXX, Assembler or Amiga C was not going to be possible.
It is great that now these books are available.
I also like looking at all the old CAD books from late 80s to early 90s to see how they have evolved, I can understand that libraries would not have the shelf capacity to store those books.
Also the libraries only keep the more popular books, a lot of the books from the 50s-70s are good and even Robert Ludlum books are no longer there only the more recent ones where authors have paid the estate to carry on the Bourne Genre. I understand you have to make space available for new authours. Also if you do buy a ebook who knows if the provider is going to delete it (i.e Sony)
But yeah free availability of research papers help a lot and other technical papers (RFCs) is great, it's great when I see ISOs available (books not CDs)
So and so has published a paper on such and such topic is a fact, right?
[0] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/canary-domain-use-appli...
No ISP is going to do nonsense like that for something like copywrite related compliance unless lots of money is forthcoming. An ISP can NXDOMAIN on their own DNS servers at a minimal cost. Doing 53/udp fiddling for all customers means CAM or similar expensive resource usage.
If you do find that your DNS is being redirected as TrueDuality describes, then yes DoH is an option. However if this is an issue then you have far bigger problems than not being able to access Anna's Archive.
It was so well designed in the sense that a single platonic decision somewhere does affect people else where in the network.
It's well decentralised.
Kudos to who ever contributed in designing these internet protocols. DNS, ICANN, TCP/IP et Al.
I wonder who these people are or if they have any documentation that describes how they arrived at their decisions? I suspect people designing the fediverse can learn alot from them.
Who are these people? I only hear of Vint Cerf.
Velcro, The Internet... Silly US government projects sometimes have down stream impact.
Even in defense, the government funding science is how we got here. Look at early computing (UINVAC, to CRAY) the history and the people have all sorts of ties to early crypto research and the navy!
Later private industry gets in on the act. UNIX is a byproduct of AT&T, the monopoly version. The stuff that came out of bell labs that got tossed into the public because of a settlement is amazing.
DNS, however, is thoroughly centralised and not part of the internet per se. I'm also not sure how redundant and robust the internet is in practice these days. The web certainly has single points of failure like Cloudflare etc. The GNU Name System is an example of a decentralised name system.
https://shop.dasung.com/products/dasung-25-3-e-ink-monitor-p...