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Internet blacklist bill COICA one step closer to becoming law

77 pointsby starknessover 14 years ago

11 comments

jrockwayover 14 years ago
I emailed Dick Durbin and he told me that this legislation was "vitally important to America", and that he would be voting for it. I told him that I wouldn't be voting for him.
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olefooover 14 years ago
Once again Americans are or should be embarrassed by their legislators. This puts us in the same boat as China in that we are attempting to block bad knowledge by fiat rather than with education.<p>How can we decry repressive censorship regimes in other countries when we reserve the right to blackhole sites that we disapprove of on whatever grounds?
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jamboover 14 years ago
What if bit.ly and other shorteners supplant DNS for affected sites, e.g. <a href="http://bit.ly/xAwIp" rel="nofollow">http://bit.ly/xAwIp</a> redirects to thepiratebay.org's address, 194.71.107.15.<p>Will bit.ly have to start breaking every previously shortened URL that redirects to the IP address of an offending site? Or more likely, any shortened URL that redirects to an IP address directly at all?
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lkrubnerover 14 years ago
Interesting:<p>"After a flurry of last-minute lobbying from representatives of content providers including the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA)..."<p>Well, I am glad they listened to so many diverse groups. I mean, the MPAA and the RIAA? That ensures the legislators heard every possible viewpoint on this issue.
friscoover 14 years ago
Once again, the government fails to understand how the Internet works.
ewjordanover 14 years ago
One thing I was wondering was whether or not, for instance, Google would be prohibited from returning a direct IP address link to (say) the Pirate Bay in response to a search for "pirate bay".<p>The text in the bill says:<p><i>`(i) a service provider, as that term is defined in section 512(k)(1) of title 17, United States Code, or other operator of a domain name system server shall take reasonable steps that will prevent a domain name from resolving to that domain name's Internet protocol address;</i><p>...and the definition of "service provider" as referenced is:<p><i>(1) Service provider. — (A) As used in subsection (a), the term “service provider” means an entity offering the transmission, routing, or providing of connections for digital online communications, between or among points specified by a user, of material of the user's choosing, without modification to the content of the material as sent or received.<p>(B) As used in this section, other than subsection (a), the term “service provider” means a provider of online services or network access, or the operator of facilities therefor, and includes an entity described in subparagraph (A).</i><p>It looks like Google would probably fall under (B) there, so if they received a court order, they couldn't specifically do DNS routing; it's probably questionable whether returning a link as the first result to the IP address that the domain name would resolve to if it wasn't blocked counts as resolving a domain name, I'd imagine the government would make an argument that it does.<p>But there's still a <i>gaping</i> loophole here: the bill says that a service provider must "prevent a domain name from resolving to that domain name's Internet protocol address", so fine, maybe Google couldn't return a link to 194.71.107.15 in response to "thepiratebay.org", but there's absolutely nothing in the bill that says they couldn't return a link to 194.71.107.15 in response to "Pirate Bay", "piratebay", "thepiratebay", etc. There's also nothing in the bill that prohibits them from responding to a "thepiratebay.org" query with a message telling the user that the link they were looking for was filtered out, and suggesting that they strip the suffix off of the search term to get around the domain name resolution restriction.<p>I realize this doesn't solve the problems of broken links on the net or anything like that, but it's an indication of the fact that this bill, horrible as it is, will likely just be routed around like many other problems on the Internet, with a lot of effort wasted in order to do so.
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Ixiausover 14 years ago
Illicit material will always exist, it may just be less visible to the average joe/public (who, honestly, are dumb enough anyway that it's a pointless battle to educate them) and the legislators are simply making it more difficult to track people by forcing them to use innovative and private measures. VPN? Check. Self hosted DNS? Check. GNUnet/Freenet? Check.<p>Dinosaur politicians and corporate lobbying will always be behind the times, nothing we can do about that except do what <i>we</i> do best: hack. Do the "illicit" stuff under the radar and keep your shit to yourself.
devmonkover 14 years ago
(posted this in related thread)<p>Contact your senators and tell them to just say no to S. 3804:<p><a href="http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=s111-3804" rel="nofollow">http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=s111-3804</a><p><a href="http://www.senate.gov/reference/common/faq/How_to_contact_senators.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.senate.gov/reference/common/faq/How_to_contact_se...</a><p>No good can come of the gov't trying to control what domains can be accessed, and it won't stop those that wish to do us harm or take advantage of us, because they'll just use another domain.
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hartrorover 14 years ago
So if this gets passed there will be a numerous ways of circumventing this as people will organise around it. Also once this starts happening it will provide huge promotion for the sites that are inflicted with this legislation.<p>Can we volunteer to go first? I'm sure I can find a snippet of a Disney movie to post under the grounds of fair use.
devmonkover 14 years ago
Related comments: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1918594" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1918594</a>
mrschwabeover 14 years ago
Okay. So what's the best .com alternative domain name extension; one that will not be subject to this tyrannical law?