Use different DNS servers for specific domains | Hacker News Reader

Use different DNS servers for specific domains

blog.lexfriedman.com

82 pointslibovness81 comments

This is actually illegal.

The DCMA and perhaps some earlier electronic circumvention laws make this act a very real breach of US law. Publicly stating it is a bit dangerous and could cost the author if the NFL decided to pursue a case. How crazy is that?

Of course, while illegal, I personally think it is very RIGHT.

It is not RIGHT. The NFL has the _right_ to sell their content however they like, and they coordinate their blackout rules with the cable channels who pay for them. If you don't like it, the RIGHT action is to pay for cable, buy tickets, or do what I do and go without.

Substitute "how things ought to be" for right. I'd be willing to pay a fair price, say $20/mo to stream NFL games and watch my out-of-market hometown team. I shouldn't have to pay for $100/mo of services I don't want to get access to them. Ideally, the market would be allowing me to purchase the good that I want, in practice, they have contracts that don't allow them to sell it to me.

Talking about "right" in regards to copyright law is a bit sticky given that the entire legal underpinning is 'how long ago do we have to extend it to keep Mickey Mouse in ABC/Disney's IP portfolio".

i know this doesnt help everyone out. but if you have verizon, you can pay $5 a month for mobile streaming most of (if not all) the games. plus if you have an appleTV you can airplay them over to your actual TV. this works well enough for me.

I still can't get them on my 65" TV though- and I would pay for it. I just don't want to have to get satellite.

I'm on the fence here. The NFL is not HBO. They're not locking down content and forcing you into old business models to get to their content. The NFL goes to GREAT LENGTHS to make content available to you without cheating. GREAT LENGTHS.

* Sunday Ticket is free for DirecTV users

* Sunday Ticket is $40/season with the purchase of $60 Madden 25 (meaning, $100/total for the whole season of Sunday Ticket), and does not require a cable/satellite package of any kind

* NFL Rewind offers all games and condensed games next-day (not live) for $40/season (or $10/mo)

* HDTV Bunny Ears or Aereo will provide local in-market games for free (or the cost of Aereo)

* Many games are broadcast online for free on NFL.com or through the website of the network showing the game, like Fox or CBS

And I'm sure there are other options, too.

My friends and I are discussing the NFL Rewind option, while it's not live, it does include condensed games which is great for fantasy players with lots of players across lots of teams.

> Sunday Ticket is free for DirecTV users

No, it is $60 per month or $300 / season.

> Sunday Ticket is $40/season with the purchase of $60 Madden 25 (meaning, $100/total for the whole season of Sunday Ticket), and does not require a cable/satellite package of any kind

That's a little misleading. A) It sold out before the season began. B) The cost is $100, because for people like me who don't own an XBOX or PS3 and bought the game for the coupon, I now have a game I'm never going to play. I shouldn't have any issues selling it, but it will be at a used game price.

Also, you are supposed to only be allowed the streaming option only if you can't get DirecTV service, which most people in the US can. IMO, skirting that rule (as I've done) is no better/worse than using a European IP. You are either being dishonest to the NFL, or to DirecTV.

> HDTV Bunny Ears or Aereo will provide local in-market games for free (or the cost of Aereo)

As they have for 40+ years. This discussion isn't about in-market games, it's for out-of-market. Also, depending on who you talk to (certainly the networks and the NFL), Aereo is considered cheating.

> Many games are broadcast online for free on NFL.com or through the website of the network showing the game, like Fox or CBS

No, many aren't. Some are. But the key is I want to watch my team every week, and my team (as most) only play a few primetime games per season, which tend to be streamed.

To conclude, I'm a avid sports fan who lives out of market, and I pay for the MLB package, the MLS package, various college sports subscriptions, and have paid the $300 for DirecTV NFL Sunday Ticket in the past. I'm happy to pay for my sports, and I'd love to pay the NFL a reasonable price for an NFL package, but since they don't offer one, I have to resort to cheating DirecTV.

If you pay $300 for Sunday ticket with DirectTV call them up RIGHT NOW and get your refund. That's what someone pays at full price doing zero work to lower their bill. That's the price people pay who don't even try to get a lower price, the easy price.

I literally have never met someone who pays the $300 for Sunday Ticket, and I've never heard of DirectTV enforcing the $300 price tag. Sounds like you've had some terrible luck.

I notice you replied to everything except for Rewind.

The fact remains that there are many options depending on device, and the fact that you don't realize the price of DirectTV Sunday Ticket tells me that you seem to be more willing to cheat them than to find the right deal.

Seriously, if you want to cheat DirectTV call them up, go to retentions for cancelling service, and get FREE (or heavily discounted) Sunday Ticket, just like many others.

> Seriously, if you want to cheat DirectTV call them up, go to retentions for cancelling service, and get FREE (or heavily discounted) Sunday Ticket, just like many others.

Your entire first post was about getting NFL content without cheating (see: "The NFL goes to GREAT LENGTHS to make content available to you without cheating"). Whether you are dishonest to DirecTV's retention dept, or you are dishonest about your IP location, or are dishonest about your ability to get DirecTV service, or a slew of any other methods, it all involves being dishonest to someone.

The root problem is there is no way to get out of market games without resorting to cheating. Every other American sports league offers this type of subscription package.

The NFL has stated they're shopping the exclusivity of Sunday Ticket to carriers other than DirecTV starting next season. Hopefully that is the case so they can address this glaring hole.

> I notice you replied to everything except for Rewind.

I ignored Rewind because that doesn't involve live NFL games.

No offense but you have a lot of 'privledge' to insist that you are owed live broadcast of sports. So owed, in fact, that you can justify stealing it when same-day or next-day options are available to you.

I mean, go ahead, I justify a large amount of piracy myself, but you sound like someone dismissing a minimum of work (I have to CALL them and ASK to pay less? UGH!) in favor of reverting to piracy.

Please explain to me the difference in outcomes between piracy and using Aereo. In both cases you are getting someone to retransmit you a feed over the Internet, while paying nothing to the NFL in exchange, yet one of them is stealing and the other is perfectly alright.

I find the cognitive dissonance fascinating.

Because the NFL explicitly allows over-the-air broadcasts in-market and explicitly denies illegal, unlicensed global internet streams.

When your internet stream places a PHYSICAL antenna IN-MARKET that only you can access, then you have grounds to call your internet stream equivalent to Aereo. But the fact is, I rent a physical antenna from Aereo to enjoy local broadcast content, while you utilize a (likely foreign and obviously illegal) internet rebroadcast of licensed content.

The amount of cognitive dissonance it takes for you to dismiss basic licensing is fascinating.

Seems odd that you mention Aereo, since that's a whole company essentially doing a trick similar to OP, not exactly an NFL-approved content distribution system.

OTA is an approved content distribution system. How I choose to tune into OTA broadcast is my own business.

Sure, but it's not exactly a good example of the great lengths the NFL goes to provide content, since it wasn't intended

Which is why it was included in the same line as bunny ears HDTV, which captures 100% of what Aereo does and is free, and supported by the NFL.

Within a subset of the problem, this is a pretty accurate point, actually. I won't argue it! The reason I feel it's right in a larger sense is in protest of not having a reasonable way to consume the content for this guy. He's being denied service by policy even though he's a willing customer.

Yes, they can bar anyone from buying their product and place whatever restrictions they want. Those restrictions, however, are not fair. They can be wrong but within their rights. Protest is a fair way to express yourself. Not buying and doing without is also a form a protest which is fair as well. At least that's my opinion.

> The NFL has the _right_ to sell their content however they like, and they coordinate their blackout rules with the cable channels who pay for them.

No one is infringing on that right.

Yeah, well, that's just, like, your opinion, man.

Just so people who are just showing up understand:

The title of this post was originally along the lines of "Avoid NFL blackouts online for just $2/month using domain-specific DNS resolution". That's what this comment is addressing.

While I can see a colorable argument that under DMCA this is illegal (circumventing a copyright protection), I think that the argument that there are a variety of reasons a user could change to a different DNS server, and relying on DNS to identify the location of users is an inherently incomplete copyright protection, would prevail.

IANAL, but I think that's terrible advice. The DMCA doesn't say your copyright protection scheme has to be airtight or even very good. The blog post is specifically about circumventing the NFL's copyright control technology.

Source?

"No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title."

http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201

What if I used this DNS for other reasons and just happened to find that I could watch NFL? Would that still be illegal? Is it my responsibility to know where/why/how they block content so that I don't inadvertently access it without the owners permission? I imagine it isn't as if they have a giant banner across the site saying "Americans with funky DNS, keep out!"

ignorance of the law is not an excuse for violating the law... or something like that...

But is that really ignorance of the law? Wouldn't there be a difference between knowing the law and knowing whether the content is blocked under other "normal" conditions?

The word "circumvent" implies intention.

The anti-circumvention laws are definitely vague enough to prohibit this (as well as most other access of remove resources). It's not at all covered by the DMCA though, right?

Not sure what you mean... that is a quote from the DMCA.

This is completely misleading. You still need to pay for NFL Game Pass which is several hundred dollars for the season.

I do something similar with a proxy server for NBA. I connect to a Swedish VPN and purchase a season pass. I can then connect to the VPN, start a game, and watch my home team without blackout issue.

You can also disconnect after the initial connection and not have to worry about issues with slowdown going through the VPN.

it's free in the netherlands.

How exactly does this work? Is the NFL's only protection against Americans viewing for free the fact that American DNS servers give access to a different server, instead of actually checking the IP?

If this were the case, why pay for a DNS service when you can just find the relevant entries and put them in your /etc/hosts file?

I believe they redirect certain hostnames through their servers and proxy those connections. It's also possible that the NFL, etc, use dynamically generated CNAMEs.

You are exactly right. The DNS part of this is only that by pointing your DNS entries at them, they can override specific domains to go through proxies. In this case using proxies in the NL, which is apparently the single and only European country that gets this free viewing right (and likely will find that right quickly disappear as a bunch of Americans start proxying through it).

For articles like this the author really needs to save the justification because it is a) ridiculous to the people who see through it, b) unnecessary to the people who already buy in.

"You thus get to watch every NFL game streaming online in high definition, since the league offers that option to folks in Europe at no charge."

Where did you get that? I'm based in EU and I need a GamePass at 150€ to watch games, or pay 12€ per week.

I'm not sure what he meant, but I read it to mean that HD is free in Europe for those who've purchased SD, where as it costs extra in the US. Does that make sense?

I think the deal only works for .nl

tl;dr - this solution does not work, but Aereo, as of 2013, does.

I was successfully able to watch the Summer Olympics last year using a VPN in this manner. Actually ended up watching the whole thing via the BBC -- it was oddly enjoyable to listen to the British commentators remark about the Yanks as if we are a race of athletically superior, somewhat lovable, giant children that are obviously in every other way doofuses :) .

The solution as proposed does not work from the USA for NFL Season Pass. I've tried, very hard, to find a way to make it work. (I cleared cookies, caches, changed the clock on my computer, deleted an installed a browser for the sole purpose of watching these games, etc. etc., to no avail.)

But every time, the NFL can somehow, someway, sniff out that I am a US user, and directs me to the page saying to sign up through your local cable provider. I've never owned a TV or subscribed to cable, so... grrrr.

Happily, Aereo, which last season was blurry, blotchy, and somewhat inferior to going to the local bar / friends', is this year very, very good. I set up the NFL games on CBS and NBC yesterday to record. They recorded, and I watched them from a giant Dell screen I have set up for the purpose. We also watch our Netflix and Hulu stuff on the same screen.

They do have a tough time with games that go over the scheduled time, like last night's Seahawks-49ers game. If you see that that is going to happen you have to go to the next show, and the next, next show, and click "record". So that even though you have no intention of watching local news at 11, Aereo is recording the correct station at the correct time.

For a non-TV, occasional sports fan who does not need a whole bunch of bells and whistles, Aereo is a fine solution.

(And, no, I have no professional, personal or other affiliation with Aereo other than the $10 a month they nick me for the service.)

> tl;dr - this solution does not work, but Aereo, as of 2013, does.

I use one of these services for Pandora, and it also supports the NFL thing. I just went to the site, and it works (I can watch a game, although I have no interest in NFL), so that preamble is wrong.

The solution does not work for US-based users.

Why not? How does it know if you're in the US, if you're going through a proxy?

I used it yesterday. It works.

> last night's Seahawks-49ers game

Ugh, I was hoping to come here to escape any mention of that game last night :(

The title is misleading. You still have to buy NFL Game Pass. I think it is $25/week or $250 for the season.

Not sure, but Game Pass might have been free the first weekend. Sunday ticket in the US has a free preview the first week of the season. The original poster might have thought the free preview meant it was free every week, but just speculating.

Assuming that it's true that you can watch the NFL for free from Europe (as asserted in the article), why not just use a VPN service or fire up your own AWS instance in Europe?

Not all of Europe.

Here in Germany e.g. it doesn't work.

It does however work using a VPN to the Netherlands.

1. $2 usd is cheaper and already works.

2. Maybe you want to watch netflix on your TV, and there you can only change DNS servers.

1. Depending on how many games you want to watch, there are VPNs out there with free plans. I used to watch Hulu using one.

2. You can configure the gateway (router, whatever) to route the TV through the VPN. That said, I'd rather pay the $2.

How does a DNS service like AdFree prevent non-subscribers from using their servers?

You have to log in and they associate your IP with your paying account. So they only accept requests from known IPs.

Its a DNS server, it doesn't change your IP. Only changes the IP for the hostname that you lookup.

I wasn't clear. The service knows your IP and then can resolve DNS queries for you.

If your IP isn't in their system, they can ignore it. That prevents non-paying users from using the service.

I get where this poster is going with the idea of using different resolvers for different services, but there's some serious flaws in the logic. 1) Many sites utilize a redirect in order to force the user back into the optimal datacenter. Using anycast name resolution the user will always end up in the closest datacenter. This is a pretty standard CDN offering by the first tier providers. This is utilized mostly because using a DNS provider like Google would otherwise result in traffic flowing to datacenters thousands of miles from your home. It's also used to to ensure geo restrictions, which would kill this method for many sites. 2) The poster mentions setting domains like Netflix back to the original DNS server. Content delivery is a bit trickier than this. Fire up Wireshark when you're watching Netflix and you'll see there's a large number of domains involved, and the actual content comes off a third party CDNs. Setting DNS servers per site is a lot more complex than choosing a single domain name and setting it to a server.

I do not find the "scholarly legal document"[1] very convincing. The DMCA says, "No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title."

[1] https://adfreetime.com/wp_super_faq/is-this-service-legal/

The service is legal. Your use of it to watch NFL games from the US may not be.

The service is not legal according to US law. I don't know where they're based or what the laws are there, but I wouldn't make any bets either way. They may well have their .com domain seized by the US Gov't some day.

"Ad-free time! is located in beautiful Victoria, British-Columbia, Canada."

That means they're less likely to have their servers and data seized by the US Gov't (assuming it's all hosted in Canada, and not an EC2-US instance), but the .com address is a US asset that can still be seized.

Deleted comment

The resolver's IP is what they see. If you're behind a big, geographically diverse resolver (like public DNS), they'll have a bad time trying to map you to the closest server.

edns fixes this by propagating the original client IP, and while some of the public resolvers support it, support is lacking on the other side (CDNs, netflix, etc.)

I use privateinternetaccess VPN to achieve the same, and get complete encryption and anonymity for all my web activity to go along with it. $40/year.

EDIT: the Netherlands has NFL gamepass for free btw

How do you know privateinternetaccess isn't logging everything you do?

They say repeatedly on their site and in reviews that they log nothing. Of course you have to trust that they actually do what they say.

It's still not worth the money. I watch a small amount of NFL during the season. Occasional I might sit down to watch a portion of a good game. However, I'm not willing to spend much more than a few dollars a month (that's how it sounds from the comments) to watch a few out-of-market games on Sunday. NFL charges too much. I guess it's OK though because obviously some people are willing to pay for it.

Different strokes. I got a pass to watch all the Sunday games for free this year by preordering the Madden video game, but barring that I'd gladly pay $2/month (or even a little more) to watch games. Still way cheaper than paying for cable.

I'd pay $2/month, if that's what the price really was. I thought about purchasing Madden, but decided not to do so. I have to have cable at the moment though to watch college football.

Fair enough, if I had cable then I probably wouldn't care about any of this. I currently live out of market for the teams I like (USC and Seattle) so I have to rely on streams of iffy quality and questionable legality, so the increase in quality and reliability alone was worth it with the Madden deal.

Does /etc/resolver/* work on Linux?

I am really interested in this too, however I could not find any indication of it in "man 5 resolver" :(

You can do this with dnsmasq by using the --server option where you can pass individual upstream servers for different domains (in addition to the default ones read from /etc/resolv.conf):

  --server=/google.com/1.2.3.4 --server=/www.google.com/2.3.4.5 will send queries for *.google.com to 1.2.3.4, except *www.google.com, which will go to 2.3.4.5

A similar provider is unblock.us. The /etc/resolver tip is OS X specific. On Linux you can use dnsmasq.

I use this for Pandora/Netflix, but I don't like giving that company the ability to MITM any site I visit. If you're running dnsmasq, you can tell it to only use that DNS server for a few domains like so:

    server=/netflix.com/pandora.com/yourserverip

Google passes your /24 in a DNS extension, so I'd hope that companies like Netflix take advantage of this information.

https://developers.google.com/speed/public-dns/faq#cdn

In Germany, the NFL website doesn't allow you to watch all games for free. You have to purchase the NFL game pass, which is around $200 per season IIRC (there's multiple packages), which is the same you'd pay in the US.

Interesting, but it is more work than just finding an online stream of the game.

It works for me! http://i.imgur.com/TamLSvf.png

As an aside, does anyone have any good hacks for watching cable television online? If I don't have cable? ESPN, E!...

Really interesting that Mac OS offers this. Neat.

It's DNS. Mac OS isn't offering anything, it's just using some DNS servers.

No, the part where the system resolver calls different DNS servers based on the domain is certainly part of Mac OSX.

No, the stub resolver on Mac OS has extended resolution functionality to offer domain (or even FQDN) level granularity. This is actually a feature we've built into our resolver, but haven't seen in the wild too often.

DNSMasq has a similar feature built-in.

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