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I really, really don't like DNS censorship. I think that if a site is bad enough to warrant being taken down, it should be taken down by the authorities that ho

I really, really don't like DNS censorship. I think that if a site is bad enough to warrant being taken down, it should be taken down by the authorities that host it. OR, these governments should have a formal enforcement regime that monitors and sends takedown requests to DNS resolvers. Then, high-tech people will either use .onion, or we will see again the popularity of alt-root DNS services. So will the alt-root DNS website (whose domain is on the "official" root) be taken down, because it is a pointer to a pointer to potentially illegal stuff? Where does it end? Or will the goal be simply to make it hard enough that only 1% of people know how to access it, vs. 20%?

programmarchy 5y ago
Check out blockchain domains [1] which implement an NFT standard for domain names. So far Opera and Brave have added built-in support for .crypto and there are extensions for other browsers. [1] https://unstoppabledomains.com https://unstoppabledomains.com
- ryan29 5y ago
  I've looked at blockchain based domains. There's also ENS (.eth) and HNS (namebase.io). The biggest problem with them is they're a huge pain to purchase. You need to buy their vBucks style coins first (ETH or HNS) and many western governments treat those like a security. That makes it tough for someone like me who wants to buy legit, brandable domains in those systems. So the only people left are the ones mining coins and skirting KYC/AML laws and I think that leads to a scenario where they'll gain a reputation of being a "nefarious" technology even though there's _some_ merit in the idea. DNS based censorship by western countries is a risky game IMO. That makes the system vulnerable to a developing country coming in, setting up alternate DNS roots, and refusing to filter / censor for copyright infringement. It won't take much for western users to learn they need to use a foreign search engine to find things the western countries want censored. China's citizens will be using US search engines and US citizens will be using Chinese search engines. Lol.
  - Karrot_Kream 5y ago
    > I've looked at blockchain based domains. There's also ENS (.eth) and HNS (namebase.io). The biggest problem with them is they're a huge pain to purchase. You need to buy their vBucks style coins first (ETH or HNS) and many western governments treat those like a security. That makes it tough for someone like me who wants to buy legit, brandable domains in those systems. Yeah I don't know why any of these blockchain DNS systems don't have an easy fiat on-ramp. Most people don't care about holding a token, they just want their domain name. It's fairly easy these days too with all the stablecoins around.
    - blablablerg 5y ago
      Because then they need to do KYC and all kind of other regulatory stuff.
    - mike_d 5y ago
      Namebase is pretty painless for getting Handshake names.
      - ryan29 5y ago
        I signed up, but didn't do any of the verification. I'm from Canada and they're not in FINTRAC (our KYC/AML regulator), so I'm not willing to give them any personal information beyond what I'd use for a normal credit card transaction. The thing is I wanted a brandable name that I could likely get for less than $.50, but I'd be willing to pay $50 via credit card to avoid dealing with HNS. I would literally pay 100x the market rate to avoid dealing with their crypto currency because, by the time I deal with the bookkeeping and taxes of a crypto purchase, it costs me more than $50 in time and effort.
    - ryan29 5y ago
      > Most people don't care about holding a token I definitely do NOT want the token/coin. As soon as I touch it the transaction becomes a taxable event for me. It's a nightmare. Imagine if every store in your city used a different foreign currency and the government made you track every transaction you make so you can report your foreign currency gains/losses on your taxes.
javajosh 5y ago
I don't like it either, but I think it's the lesser evil. Consider the fact that you don't even need DNS to put something on the internet; ergo, removing a DNS entry only increases the friction to accessing the resource. I think the approach the MPAA is taking is indeed to just make it harder for the 20%, and probably have a realistic understanding that they'll never get to 0 and approach a low asymptote, and have to be satisfied with that. Or, to put it another way, the MPAA is attacking discovery not hosting. Which I think is pretty smart - its good bang for the buck. The people who have legit binaries to share can do so pretty easily (e.g. torrent a linux distro). It would step over the line if they tried to, I don't know, outlaw the bittorrent protocol. But taking down freemoviesXXX.com doesn't exactly raise my hackles.
- yarcob 5y ago
  Also, making illegal sites slightly harder to visit by blocking certain domains is really a rather mild form of copyright enforcement. I'd much rather have that then companies suing some kid who downloaded a torrent.
  - bwoodcock 5y ago
    That's not the point here. The music companies all know that they make way more money on music that gets pirated than music that doesn't; lots of studies have borne that out. The point of this ruling is that it lets them extract money from people who DON'T have a relationship with an infringing party. The neighbor of the kid who downloaded the torrent.
  - lugged 5y ago
    That's what they want. If they sued the kids downloading this shit they'd be demolished by society. This way they get what they want and we pay the cost because nobody cares enough.
- michaelmrose 5y ago
  Taking down freemoviesXXX.com in the court of the nation where it is hosted is materially different from making a DNS provider fail to resolve a valid address hosted elsewhere. If you want to be heard you must both fight for the legal right to host content in one county and the right to be read in every other country. This creates both a concept of there being a censorship list one can be added to and incentivizes escalating attempts to control what can be viewed. DNS is extremely easy to bypass which is really only half the problem. The other half is the complexity of bypassing blocking can trivially be outsourced to devs of sharing apps who can both implement search and DNS or even vpn. Technical barriers that are basically boxes for clients to tick are entirely useless your citizens may manage limited complexity budgets but they can outsource those to developers. The logical path this leads you to are technical and restrictions on what content applications are allowed to display, what applications one is allowed to install based on their compliance with point one, restrictions on what OS one is allowed to install based on compliance with point two. Then you can control ability to access network resources based on compliance with point three. This was all speced out decades ago and the technology embedded in your motherboard and somewhat in play on mobile platforms. Once you have this you will actually have effective censorship tools and now have to worry about how they might be misused when previously we might be reassured by our ability to bypass censorship at need. When you come down to it the entire content producing industry is of only modest value compared to say science and technology and has more resources than it's ever had before and freemoviesxxx.com is little actual threat to it's existence. It mostly prevents useless people without a creative bone in their body who have never contributed to society in any fashion from maximizing their revenue sufficient to afford a second yacht. Twisting consumer tech the necessary gateway for all modern communication and culture to increase their revenue slightly is the tail wagging the dog. Any attempt to take one step down the road ought to result in the offenders being nuked from orbit because their entire destruction would be better end result for society than their success.
pyrale 5y ago
> I think that if a site is bad enough to warrant being taken down, it should be taken down by the authorities that host it. That is essentially saying that nothing is bad enough to warrant being taken down ever. People shouldn't have to tour every possible jurisdiction on earth to have something taken down in the jurisdiction they live in.
- caeril 5y ago
  > People shouldn't have to tour every possible jurisdiction on earth to have something taken down in the jurisdiction they live in. Yes, they should. Or they can save a lot of effort and just block it locally. One sovereign people shouldn't be prevented by another sovereign people from conducting their lives as they see fit. Global rules are incompatible with respecting the vast diversity of humans on this planet. Hopefully, 9.9.9.9 can apply this ruling specifically to German CIDRs and be done with it.
  - pyrale 5y ago
    > Or they can save a lot of effort and just block it locally. That's essentially the purpose of DNS bans. They are enforced by a given jurisdiction, but they let you solve the root problem rather than running around host providers in foreign jurisdictions.
    - bwoodcock 5y ago
      No, that doesn't work. If anybody could say what should happen globally, and nobody would argue about it, then we wouldn't need courts and borders. The whole point of courts and borders and jurisdictions is to resolve disputes. We wouldn't have copyright law if there weren't copyright disputes. So you can't just say "if any court anywhere decides something, it should apply globally." Because the next court over, in the next jurisdiction, can rule the opposite way. What then?
      - pyrale 5y ago
        You seem to believe that my comment implies that laws should apply worldwide, while it simply states that DNS bans are by construction localized.
superkuh 5y ago
Unfortunately .onion is not a permanent address. All .onion addresses are transient and The Tor Project reserves the right to completely remove support for addresses whenever they feel it might impact the privacy/security of the tor network. For example, on October 15th of this year all Tor addresses from the last 15 years of Tor v2 will stop being supported and will vanish into thin air.
- zaarn 5y ago
  That's in part because it's become feasible to brute force v2 Onion addresses, hence enforcing the use of v3.

programmarchy 5y ago

Check out blockchain domains [1] which implement an NFT standard for domain names. So far Opera and Brave have added built-in support for .crypto and there are extensions for other browsers. [1] https://unstoppabledomains.com https://unstoppabledomains.com

ryan29 5y ago
I've looked at blockchain based domains. There's also ENS (.eth) and HNS (namebase.io). The biggest problem with them is they're a huge pain to purchase. You need to buy their vBucks style coins first (ETH or HNS) and many western governments treat those like a security. That makes it tough for someone like me who wants to buy legit, brandable domains in those systems. So the only people left are the ones mining coins and skirting KYC/AML laws and I think that leads to a scenario where they'll gain a reputation of being a "nefarious" technology even though there's _some_ merit in the idea. DNS based censorship by western countries is a risky game IMO. That makes the system vulnerable to a developing country coming in, setting up alternate DNS roots, and refusing to filter / censor for copyright infringement. It won't take much for western users to learn they need to use a foreign search engine to find things the western countries want censored. China's citizens will be using US search engines and US citizens will be using Chinese search engines. Lol.
- Karrot_Kream 5y ago
  > I've looked at blockchain based domains. There's also ENS (.eth) and HNS (namebase.io). The biggest problem with them is they're a huge pain to purchase. You need to buy their vBucks style coins first (ETH or HNS) and many western governments treat those like a security. That makes it tough for someone like me who wants to buy legit, brandable domains in those systems. Yeah I don't know why any of these blockchain DNS systems don't have an easy fiat on-ramp. Most people don't care about holding a token, they just want their domain name. It's fairly easy these days too with all the stablecoins around.
  - blablablerg 5y ago
    Because then they need to do KYC and all kind of other regulatory stuff.
  - mike_d 5y ago
    Namebase is pretty painless for getting Handshake names.
    - ryan29 5y ago
      I signed up, but didn't do any of the verification. I'm from Canada and they're not in FINTRAC (our KYC/AML regulator), so I'm not willing to give them any personal information beyond what I'd use for a normal credit card transaction. The thing is I wanted a brandable name that I could likely get for less than $.50, but I'd be willing to pay $50 via credit card to avoid dealing with HNS. I would literally pay 100x the market rate to avoid dealing with their crypto currency because, by the time I deal with the bookkeeping and taxes of a crypto purchase, it costs me more than $50 in time and effort.
  - ryan29 5y ago
    > Most people don't care about holding a token I definitely do NOT want the token/coin. As soon as I touch it the transaction becomes a taxable event for me. It's a nightmare. Imagine if every store in your city used a different foreign currency and the government made you track every transaction you make so you can report your foreign currency gains/losses on your taxes.

javajosh 5y ago

I don't like it either, but I think it's the lesser evil. Consider the fact that you don't even need DNS to put something on the internet; ergo, removing a DNS entry only increases the friction to accessing the resource. I think the approach the MPAA is taking is indeed to just make it harder for the 20%, and probably have a realistic understanding that they'll never get to 0 and approach a low asymptote, and have to be satisfied with that. Or, to put it another way, the MPAA is attacking discovery not hosting. Which I think is pretty smart - its good bang for the buck. The people who have legit binaries to share can do so pretty easily (e.g. torrent a linux distro). It would step over the line if they tried to, I don't know, outlaw the bittorrent protocol. But taking down freemoviesXXX.com doesn't exactly raise my hackles.

yarcob 5y ago
Also, making illegal sites slightly harder to visit by blocking certain domains is really a rather mild form of copyright enforcement. I'd much rather have that then companies suing some kid who downloaded a torrent.
- bwoodcock 5y ago
  That's not the point here. The music companies all know that they make way more money on music that gets pirated than music that doesn't; lots of studies have borne that out. The point of this ruling is that it lets them extract money from people who DON'T have a relationship with an infringing party. The neighbor of the kid who downloaded the torrent.
- lugged 5y ago
  That's what they want. If they sued the kids downloading this shit they'd be demolished by society. This way they get what they want and we pay the cost because nobody cares enough.
michaelmrose 5y ago
Taking down freemoviesXXX.com in the court of the nation where it is hosted is materially different from making a DNS provider fail to resolve a valid address hosted elsewhere. If you want to be heard you must both fight for the legal right to host content in one county and the right to be read in every other country. This creates both a concept of there being a censorship list one can be added to and incentivizes escalating attempts to control what can be viewed. DNS is extremely easy to bypass which is really only half the problem. The other half is the complexity of bypassing blocking can trivially be outsourced to devs of sharing apps who can both implement search and DNS or even vpn. Technical barriers that are basically boxes for clients to tick are entirely useless your citizens may manage limited complexity budgets but they can outsource those to developers. The logical path this leads you to are technical and restrictions on what content applications are allowed to display, what applications one is allowed to install based on their compliance with point one, restrictions on what OS one is allowed to install based on compliance with point two. Then you can control ability to access network resources based on compliance with point three. This was all speced out decades ago and the technology embedded in your motherboard and somewhat in play on mobile platforms. Once you have this you will actually have effective censorship tools and now have to worry about how they might be misused when previously we might be reassured by our ability to bypass censorship at need. When you come down to it the entire content producing industry is of only modest value compared to say science and technology and has more resources than it's ever had before and freemoviesxxx.com is little actual threat to it's existence. It mostly prevents useless people without a creative bone in their body who have never contributed to society in any fashion from maximizing their revenue sufficient to afford a second yacht. Twisting consumer tech the necessary gateway for all modern communication and culture to increase their revenue slightly is the tail wagging the dog. Any attempt to take one step down the road ought to result in the offenders being nuked from orbit because their entire destruction would be better end result for society than their success.

pyrale 5y ago

> I think that if a site is bad enough to warrant being taken down, it should be taken down by the authorities that host it. That is essentially saying that nothing is bad enough to warrant being taken down ever. People shouldn't have to tour every possible jurisdiction on earth to have something taken down in the jurisdiction they live in.

caeril 5y ago
> People shouldn't have to tour every possible jurisdiction on earth to have something taken down in the jurisdiction they live in. Yes, they should. Or they can save a lot of effort and just block it locally. One sovereign people shouldn't be prevented by another sovereign people from conducting their lives as they see fit. Global rules are incompatible with respecting the vast diversity of humans on this planet. Hopefully, 9.9.9.9 can apply this ruling specifically to German CIDRs and be done with it.
- pyrale 5y ago
  > Or they can save a lot of effort and just block it locally. That's essentially the purpose of DNS bans. They are enforced by a given jurisdiction, but they let you solve the root problem rather than running around host providers in foreign jurisdictions.
  - bwoodcock 5y ago
    No, that doesn't work. If anybody could say what should happen globally, and nobody would argue about it, then we wouldn't need courts and borders. The whole point of courts and borders and jurisdictions is to resolve disputes. We wouldn't have copyright law if there weren't copyright disputes. So you can't just say "if any court anywhere decides something, it should apply globally." Because the next court over, in the next jurisdiction, can rule the opposite way. What then?
    - pyrale 5y ago
      You seem to believe that my comment implies that laws should apply worldwide, while it simply states that DNS bans are by construction localized.

superkuh 5y ago

Unfortunately .onion is not a permanent address. All .onion addresses are transient and The Tor Project reserves the right to completely remove support for addresses whenever they feel it might impact the privacy/security of the tor network. For example, on October 15th of this year all Tor addresses from the last 15 years of Tor v2 will stop being supported and will vanish into thin air.

zaarn 5y ago
That's in part because it's become feasible to brute force v2 Onion addresses, hence enforcing the use of v3.