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Comment by username332211 | Hacker News Reader

How does step 5 work? Switching DNS servers is trivial.

For you - not for 99% of the public.

Ehh, if a youth of digital piracy has taught me anything, it's that people will develop the necessary computer literacy to get the entertainment they want. Even if they've completely failed to develop that same skill in the pursuit of self improvement.

I feel that says something about human psychology. Probably something very unpleasant.

Human adaptivity is perhaps both our biggest strength and biggest weakness. It's the same force behind our greatest innovations and our greatest tragedies, and even fuels the apathetic indifference towards those tragedies, too.

https://mullvad.net/en/help/dns-over-https-and-dns-over-tls

The iOS instructions are the most onerous (IMO) but still easy enough to follow. It's 15 minutes of fumbling around for the non-technical person, then they're protected.

(Though, as others have pointed out, this is probably moot. The blocking is more effectively done by ISPs.)

>It's 15 minutes of fumbling around for the non-technical person, then they're protected.

You and I have very different ideas of what "non-technical" means. If it involves anything beyond pressing "download" on the app store, it's out of reach of the vast majority of users.

Fair enough, there's a wide variance there. I'd still hesitate to say it's out of reach for most people as they'll likely have someone they know who would be able to follow those instructions for them. For the purpose of being able to access something they used to be able to access, I think most people will be able to figure this out. The point is that it's one-and-done in most instances. (To that end there's a reasonable worry that OS updates reset these settings but that's kind of a separate problem.)

Mulvad is totally non technical, you just download it and press “connect” and boom you’re on a vpn?

Is that really so complex the average person can’t do it? It’s less complex than sending an email.

The instructions I linked are to set up DoH/DoT with their (free!) service, so it's a little bit more involved than downloading an app; just not too much more involved to someone who's motivated to regain something they lost.

In countries like Iran 80%+ of the population knows how to.

It’s all a matter of incentives.

This. Practically the entire Middle East has blocks on sites like porn. Every household I know pays for a VPN that they share with all their family members.

Millions of British people are already engaged in a cat-and-mouse game against online censorship, for one main reason - football (soccer).

If you're a British football fan and want to watch every live televised match, you'll need to pay £75 a month for subscriptions to both Sky Sports and TNT Sports. That won't actually allow you to watch all of the matches that are played, because for weird historical reasons there's a TV blackout on matches played on Saturday afternoon - even if you've paid for your subscriptions, you'll only be able to watch about half of all league matches on TV.

Alternatively, you can pay some bloke in the pub £50 for a Fire TV Stick pre-programmed with access to a bunch of pirated IPTV streams and a VPN to circumvent blocking, or get a mate to show you how to do it yourself - no subscription, no blackout. As a bonus, you get free access to Netflix and Disney+ and everything else.

Sellers of dodgy Fire Sticks occasionally get caught and imprisoned, a handful of users occasionally get nasty letters from the Federation Against Copyright Theft, but it's too widespread to really stop. Practically every workplace or secondary school class has someone who knows the ins-and-outs of circumventing DNS- and IP-level blocking; the lad who showed you how to watch live football on your phone or get free Netflix will be more than happy to show you how to access adult sites without verifying your age.

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/illicit-streaming...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_football_on_television...

I've tried the "IPTV streams" to watch blacked out NHL games, and they are often terribly overloaded or just don't work at all. Not something I'd pay for.

Just search for the name of the sport and “bite” and you’ll find some sketchy successor of the original subreddits for pirated sports streams (“r/nflbite,” “r/nbabite,” etc.) Or find the latest streameast mirror which is usually the best.

Make sure your ad blocker is working. Then it’s just a matter of finding the best stream, extracting the playlist, and opening VLC.

I documented [0] some useful tricks for this technique and the comments also include more useful snippets and bookmarklets.

[0] https://gist.github.com/milesrichardson/4661c311199b98023701...

£75 a month seems very reasonable for sports nerds, compared to the cost and availability in the past

People don’t want to ly for content, that’s as old as the hills.

I don’t do sport, and I wouldn’t fund such a terrible exploitative industry (televised sports is all about getting people hooked on gambling), but I’ve certainly spent that much for entertainment I do like in the past - and far more. A night at the theatre will cost a lot more than subscribing to all the sports channels. A weekly cinema visit too.

>£75 a month seems very reasonable for sports nerds, compared to the cost and availability in the past

good that you ignore the actual point of the comment that you replied to

>That won't actually allow you to watch all of the matches that are played, because for weird historical reasons there's a TV blackout on matches played on Saturday afternoon - even if you've paid for your subscriptions, you'll only be able to watch about half of all league matches on TV.

Given the cost was the first thing mentioned it seems that would be the actual point.

Personally I have no problem with people acquiring shows which are otherwise unavailable, as long as it’s not simply an excuse not to pay, which it so often is.

My dad can hardly use a mouse, but the systems I put in place for him are pretty complex. He has no idea.

DNS poisoning and rejection of TLS handshakes based on SNI.

This is why I’m really pissed off at how long ECH has taken.

And it’s all because of corporate interests at IETF.

That's one domain down. Only 3,524 domains that just cropped up yesterday to go.

Never mind the fact that doing a Google search will surface pages on various wikis, git repositories, and other sites that conveniently list all of the mirrors.

Big enough barrier to stop most users

Most users default to search engines instead of typing in a URL. I searched for "pirate bay" just now and all of the top results are mirrors or lists of mirrors.

Encrypted Client Hello and DNS over HTTPS.

Drop all ECH TLS connections, as China does.

Creating the "Great Firewall of the UK" without actually calling it that: Priceless.

step 6: Block non-compliant DNS servers

Step 7: Camera AI that can catch the people scribbling “Sci-Hub is 190.115.31.218” on a bathroom wall.

Does that even work anymore? I thought plain IP addresses were a thing of the past ever since we started doing virtual hosts 25 years ago. I just get a 503 when I use the address you posted...

Put it in your hosts file ;)

What domain name we need to put into hosts file?

Whatever is included on the bathroom wall

"scihub.invalid 192.168.19.17"

Literally DNS-over-sneakernet

If you just point your browser to https://<ip_address> then it won't work. You also need to have the correct hostname in the http request headers.

The easiest way to accomplish this is to add the address into your .hosts file (as sibling post says) and just use the name.

As well as SNI, most reverse proxies need to know which TLS cert to serve. Lower than layer 7.

There's literally no perfect law in the world. So I'm not exactly sure what your point is.

And yet most people won't bother doing it.

Same way most attempts to stop piracy work. The people who are serious about getting around the blocks will find ways, but the less motivated will just give up (again, this is most people).

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