Private IP Registry

[Decaf]

With all the talk about how SOPA is going to ruin the internet I got to thinking, so what if it passes. I suppose its the same reason I have a Zombie plan, but this one might actually be useful.

SOPA allows the government to read domain names in transit and block offending addresses. It does this through the DNS system, basically a blacklist on what is currently an IP directory. If you type in the IP address of a site, however, DNS doesn't get involved. What if someone set up a private IP registry? It could torrent an updated list of IP addresses legally, allowing people to visit all blocked sites at their discretion. The only way to prevent that would be to shut off access to entire IP blocks, but that isn't currently a provision of SOPA.

Thoughts?

 

[ProxyAmenRa]

They may try to remove the DNS of private IP registries. Though, such things already exist in the dark areas of the net.

 

[Decaf]

They may try to remove the DNS of private IP registries. Though, such things already exist in the dark areas of the net.

True, the registry would have to sit on a static IP so people could always find it, or maybe tie into a Firefox plugin. If SOPA passes, I think you're gonna find that much of the net is a dark area.

 

[Meer]

I'm pretty sure the DNS filtering parts of the bill have been abandoned, right?

Either way, SOPA also mentions injunctions for "a product or service designed or marketed for the circumvention or bypassing of measures described."

Which could include a lot of legitimate tools for anonymity.

I'm sure people are already thinking about ways to take piracy further underground.

 

[Decaf]

I'm sure people are already thinking about ways to take piracy further underground.

That's the point though. This would block much more than legitimate pirates. This forum, for example, has lots of copyrighted material in the form of youtube videos, images and quoted text. This site could easily be put on the blacklist, but are we pirating anything?

You no longer have to be making a profit to be punished for distributing copyrighted material.

 

[Oblivious]

I should really go finish that networking assignment...

 

[Ragnar]

That could be useful. Although to be fair, were such things to be then the censoring would only apply to US citizens: however, one of the troubles the rest of the world has is that the USA doesn't really recognize other jurisdictions and insists --- in a rather world-communistic way, part of democratic exceptionalism, no doubt --- that her Law has primacy over any competing. As is seen in the English courts agreeing to render for extradition a student with no connection to America whose action was illegal in America but not in Great Britain ( he set up a website with links to sites hosting TV downloads ).


In the meantime there is an experimental Firefox extension to keep in reserve


DeSopa


that seeks alternative DNS servers in turn for an address blocked.


It's the users of IE I feel sorry for.











Not really....

 

[Oblivious]

No love for us chrome users yet I'm afraid.

 

[BigApplePi]

T This forum, for example, has lots of copyrighted material in the form of youtube videos, images and quoted text. This site could easily be put on the blacklist, but are we pirating anything?

I am totally naive about this. If I see a utube that speaks to me, I say, hey. Take a lot at this. How do I know if it's copyrighted? Fair one-time use? I'm not selling it. Even if the owner copyrighted it, if it were not allowed, I wouldn't buy it. But if you see it, it could be construed as advertising and you would go out and buy it or related vids or have I rationalized the crime? If I am selling it, that's different.

 

[walfin]

http://www.dotsauce.com/2011/02/04/experimental-numeric-tld-42-domain/

Not enough, though. Legislation may consider all this stuff to be Internet, since after all it uses IP. A clearer way to set such a domain apart would be to *not* use IP at all. Perhaps we should look at developing a new-and-improved IPX/SPX (not unimaginable given that Novell is now pro-Linux) to compete with IPv6.

 

[scorpiomover]

I was actually thinking of this. The hosts file used to be used for matching domain names to IP addresses, before the global DNS system came along. In some situations, it is still useful. The facility to use domain name lookups from a local file on your computer, remains on most computers for legacy reasons. So in theory, you could just make a list of your favourite websites and their IP addresses, and then pass that on to your friends. They could add their faves, and pass them on to you, and so on. With the size of hard disks going into hundreds of Gigabytes, storing ALL the domain names of the world in a single file on your computer, would be a cinch. So really, DNS filtering was never going to be a big problem for those who wanted to bypass it, by passing around underground text files.

That DNS filtering was put in the bill in the first place, when it was so easily bypassed, and then was taken out, suggests to me, that it was a smokescreen, an old political trick. It was designed to give the public the impression that they had beaten SOPA, so that people would not fight the other parts of the bill, which was want the politicians REALLY wanted to happen.