🚀 go-pugleaf

Mark Anderson <mea@nospambradnylion.com> wrote:

> With the passage of SOPA there will be demand for alternate DNS and not 
> just for pirates.  I haven't read much about the great Chinese firewall 
> but wonder how that's enforced.  Do they blacklist IP ranges at the 
> nation's edge routers?  If so, how is this blacklist maintained?  Inside 
> China Internet censorship would be easy to enforce.  Just track down the 
> violator's IP to their home address and send a team to roust the 
> bastards.  I'm sure they don't have to go through any pesky court 
> proceedings with all the due process mamby pamby stuff.

I think in China, the way I understand it, the pressure is put on the ISP
and networking companies. They get a list of banned sites and ip addresses
and it's up to them to make sure the customers are blocked or re-routed to
state sanctioned sites.

That in itself isn't much different than the early days here in the states.

When Ripco started, being we were a commercial business, unless we
filed/signed a NSF agreement, we couldn't get to tax-paid-for networks with
the colleges and univerities. Our upstream (uunet) just took the routes out.
There wasn't anything cloak and dagger, it was understood that is the way it
worked.

The bit with SOPA, I beleive what people are worried about, is beyond that
bit of censorship with domain names. In China, if you were anti-government
and like set up a blog in Italy, they'll start digging through logs trying
to figure out who it is, without any kind of due process. They'll pressure
the ISP/network company to start looking for China-to-Italy connections and
turn them over.

SOPA here opens the same door. In theory, the way I read it, if someone like
uploads a video to YouTube which is copyrighted to someone else, YouTube has
like 5 days to remove video and turn over all info they have about the
uploader, else they will feel the same rath. What is worse is it seems links
to copyrighted material falls under the same crime. So if Kenji posts a
reddit link which leads to another link leading to some copyright crime,
they can come after me, reddit and end up with Kenji, without having to step
into a courtroom.

It's too much power being handed over to idiots.

> The court battles with alternate DNS could be interesting however.  
> Let's say Microsoft builds their own DNS which maps all google requests 
> to bing.  Is that violating any law?  It's their DNS and people 
> voluntarily choose to use their DNS so how could google complain?

I don't think it's illegal, but it's easy to make it so.

If MS does that, I don't think it's a problem.

But if MS contacts like Comcast and makes some backroom deal with them to
push their DNS servers to the end customers, that probably would be illegal.
The end customer wouldn't know. Class action suit anyway.

Remember the DNS servers on your home computer (unless you manually put them
in) were given by DHCP when it booted. The router told the computer what DNS
servers to use, the router got those numbers from the ISP upstream.

It's trivial for the upstream to change that profile to anything they
wanted. I'm just saying if they did it for a you scratch my back, I'll
scratch yours reason, that would be illegal unless they disclosed it to
their customers and gave them options.

Actually what you bring up is the basis for some of the viruses and trojans
going around. It modifies a file on your computer called hosts which is
usually checked before a dns query is made. If the virus can modify the file
and add in an entry, like "1.2.3.4   www.google.com", everytime you try to
go to google, it'll go to whatever is answering 1.2.3.4 instead.

Handy for getting people to hand over their login and passwords in the
clear if you can get 1.2.3.4 to look like what they are expecting.

-bruce
bje@ripco.com