10 ms·

DNS Providers as Piracy Fighters?

BitPirate 4y ago
It's obvious why the content industry is cracking down on DNS providers. If they succeed, the most likely outcome is overblocking with platforms like Netflix, Disney & Co on a curated whitelist.
bitwize 4y ago
Again, a politically neutral network is a dream of the 90s that isn't even alive in Portland. The network will enforce the will of whomever puts enough political pressure on it.
Test0129 4y ago
Same thing happens with firearms yet no one seems to care, or actively promotes, the methods "policy groups" use to strip rights away from citizens. Now, the same tactics are being used here. I suspect many commenters will suggest these cannot be compared but I suggest generalizing a little: The government and people interested in stopping this sort of thing realize there's no legal easy-button they can press to make it all go away. Firearms won't go away, neither will piracy. But, they can do the next best thing. Inundate the companies in the middle with lawsuits, mostly frivolous in nature, in order to tie up and burn capital and (they hope) bring the demise the companies allegedly "involved" in the "crime". This doubles as something that has a tremendous chilling effect on other related services. It starts with DNS, goes to VPNs, etc. It's so effective the government does not even need to enforce laws to make it happen. All it takes is a little encouragement of the right groups of people and the lawsuits take care of the rest. It is de-facto illegal to do something because the alternative is to be mired in billions of dollars worth of lawsuits for any perceived mistake. This is why it's so important to support all forms of freedom. The tactic used to bring one to it's knees will be used to stifle other freedoms as well. In this case, they're now coming after information. Use your imagination to figure out what is next.
- Roark66 4y ago
  One could argue this is a fault of the juidicial systems involved. Laws should be written clearly enough for any judge on whose desk such lawsuit lands to throw it out or face ridicule from their peers.
- Gordonjcp 4y ago
  > This is why it's so important to support all forms of freedom. So you agree we should stop people from having free and easy access to guns? Because I'm all about the freedom to send my children to school without worrying they're going to get shot.
  - hnov 4y ago
    I don’t think children get shot at school often enough for that to be a realistic worry
    - Gordonjcp 4y ago
      Interesting take. So you'd say that a non-zero amount of child murders is good? Something to be maintained?
      - hellojesus 4y ago
        Restricting freedoms to make everyone free-er doesn't actually increase freedom. Your children already are covered by laws against murder. Banning guns may decrease the rate of school shootings, but it won't guarantee they cease. You'll never live in a world worry-free of gun violence, especially now that anyone can 3d print them at home.
        Gordonjcp 4y ago
        And yet the country I live in has had exactly one school shooting, and has a fraction of the murder rate of the US per capita. You can't then say "aha but the UK has more knife crime", because again, per capita, the UK has a tiny fraction as much knife crime as the US.
roenxi 4y ago
A movie can be several gigabytes of data, an IP is several bytes. I don't like their odds of taking on the DNS system if they can't handle piracy directly. Steganography is a lot easier than learning how to use a torrent client.
witrak 4y ago
Next example of spreading costs of defense of interests of a small number of benefactors trying to enforce a business model they prefer over all parties involved in the support of infrastructure used by exactly these benefactors.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
avidiax 4y ago
There's a pro and con to this. Pro is, if the rights holders win, it may fan the flames of decentralized naming schemes and alternate roots, and start crystallizing the need for a free internet in people's minds. Con, of course, is that this is not going to be enough, and the next target is going to be the routers themselves. Your ISP will need to do deep packet inspection like what occurs in India and other countries. Then that won't be enough, and you'll have to give a root of trust to your ISP, so they can read and censor your encrypted streams. And all the while, trusted computing will be spreading in the background, stamping out anything not aligned with corporate and government interests.
- stingraycharles 4y ago
  > Pro is, if the rights holders win, it may fan the flames of decentralized naming schemes and alternate roots, and start crystallizing the need for a free internet in people's minds. Hasn’t the main trend of the past few decades been that, despite limiting our freedoms, everything gets more and more centralized, mainly because it’s more reliable / convenient / cheaper ? I’m doubtful in DNS ever being replaced with an even more decentralized version. It’s already one of the most decentralized protocols widely in use right now, and the trend has clearly been more centralization of DNS, not less.
  - dividedbyzero 4y ago
    I guess it would be both, like with Linux on phones and desktops as a reaction to proprietary OSes becoming more restrictive – it fans the flames for LibreDNS and Stallmann-approved Gnu-DNS in some circles like the privacy-conscious subset of HN, and some of those actually use it where possible, but overall they are an inconsequential rounding error, and everyone else gets centralized and non-overridable SecureDNS™.
    - mistrial9 4y ago
      nothing occurs in a vacuum; as has been well-described here, when Freedoms are fringe, then Freedom-minded people get the strange bedfellows of actually depraved and actually criminal, while the Law-and-Order people isolate themselves and their populations with distrust, circular-restrictions and unchangeable rules. Its not the active people, its the bandwagon that the active people have to live with as a social consequence
tjpnz 4y ago
Why not just make content available to everyone for a reasonable fee? If I have to subscribe to half a dozen streaming services in order to watch what I want to watch I'm going to pirate it instead.
- michaelt 4y ago
  Content makers know that some people in the US will pay $200/month for cable. So the price of Netflix, at $15/month, is less than some people will pay. If every American could access everything for $15/month, they would have to forego the $185/month some Americans are willing to pay. Corporations hate this.
- Mindwipe 4y ago
  > Why not just make content available to everyone for a reasonable fee? Because your definition of "reasonable fee" isn't.
- josteink 4y ago
  > Why not just make content available to everyone for a reasonable fee? If I have to subscribe to half a dozen streaming services in order to watch what I want to watch I'm going to pirate it instead. Because the economy of it doesn't scale? When Spotify was new, I was amazed by it. A simple monthly fee and I could instantly access all the music(tm)? Who wouldn't sign up for that? As time went by I definitely wanted a similar service for video. Basically, the same recipe: A reasonable monthly fee, and I'd like to watch all the video(tm) please. But that's not what we got, because they are different markets, offering different goods, which has a different cost and which is used differently. It probably costs more to make a single episode of a popular TV-show than it costs to make 100 albums of music. And unlike music, where people typically have favourites, which they will listen to again and again, most TV-series are watch-once, be-done type of entertainment. That means that I'll keep my music streaming service forever because I want to be able to keep listening to the music I love, but I will cancel a video-streaming service the instant I've seen the series I signed up for. So what is a reasonable fee? I agree it's annoying to have to deal with multiple video-streaming providers, but if they were to follow the music-stream model (all providers have all the content), then the price you would have to pay per provider with probably be 10x what it is now. And nobody is going to pay that. Isn't it more reasonable to pay for what you use, when you use it, and then pay nothing when you're not using it (something which really isn't a realistic option for music-streaming)?
nix23 4y ago
Let's change to Yggdrasil ;) https://yggdrasil-network.github.io/ https://yggdrasil-network.github.io/
- Ajedi32 4y ago
  I personally think something like Handshake[1] would be ideal. However, a major problem with most of these decentralized "internet alternatives" (including Handshake) is that they aren't designed to be compatible with the existing internet, which creates a chicken-egg problem where site operators don't want to bother supporting your system because it has no users, and users don't want to bother using your system because it has no (or few) sites. If someone really wants to replace DNS with a decentralized system, what they need to do is: 1. Develop a well designed decentralized naming system (many have already done this) 2. Buy a TLD on the existing DNS and point it at a proxy server that allows incompatible clients access to your decentralized network through a centralized proxy 3. Work to get support for accessing that TLD through the decentralized protocol baked into browsers, first through extensions and eventually natively supported. [1]: https://handshake.org/ https://handshake.org/
belorn 4y ago
There is a funny aspect to this. Registry and registrars already has a tradition to sell dns blocking registrations for a fee, and when copyright rights holder (or even the police/government) want to block something, that fee is still required and it need to be paid each year. As an example, when it came to piratebay.se the Swedish police budget has been paying it every year since the court made the decision to take it. It not much for a single domain but it does not scale and the police really do not want more of them. It is for this reason I suspect that rights holders targets ISPs. Supporting a block list is in comparison free and ISP has yet to start to take a yearly fee each time they add a new domain to the list.
ultra_nick 4y ago
P2P networks sure are taking a long time to spread awareness. Maybe I can help. Here's a p2p network layer: https://reticulum.network/ https://reticulum.network/ Here's a p2p dns layer: https://docs.ipfs.tech/concepts/ipns/#mutability-in-ipfs https://docs.ipfs.tech/concepts/ipns/#mutability-in-ipfs Here's a p2p http layer: https://ipfs.io/ https://ipfs.io/
- goodpoint 4y ago
  That's not very helpful.
  - _chu1 4y ago
    They're pretty good for piracy, just got As Daylight Dies by Killswitch Engage and The Equalizer (2014) over BitTorrent not too long ago
- eteos 4y ago
  Correct me if I'm wrong, but using all of this will still leave the option open for enforcers to go after the registrar or the cdn or host of the endpoint. So there is always a 'secondary infringer' to find, that is capable of removing (the endpoint of) the content.
Pr0GrasTiNati0n 4y ago
ok123456 4y ago
The DNS providers who don't do this sort of filtering will become the defacto standard.
jobs_throwaway 4y ago
So much ink spilled and so many lives wasted trying to fight a thing that's actually good for the industry. Sometimes you just have to laugh at the sheer absurdity of it.
_23sd 4y ago
Targeting DNS providers is only worth it because of the growing power of resolvers like Quad9 and 1.1.1.1. Otherwise they would have to go back to getting orders against every ISP in a jurisdiction, which should be near-impossible in a free country but admittedly European countries have disappointed on this issue. Web browser vendors and Cloudflare decided for some reason that everyone needs to use DoH, and while I'm still waiting for news of an actual attack happening to someone that DoH would have foiled, Hollywood isn't waiting to use this increasing centralization for their attacks on web users.
- charcircuit 4y ago
  >I'm still waiting for news of an actual attack happening to someone that DoH would have foiled There exist ISPs who currently MitM attack any DNS requests to block them / replace them with ads if it doesn't exist. 3rd party DNS over UDP doesn't help, but over HTTPS does.
  - _23sd 4y ago
    True, though in my opinion that's not nearly widespread or impactful enough that people needed to be opted in to DoH by default as in Firefox, or sold DoH as a "safer" option like Cloudflare does.
IndigoIncognito 4y ago
I think a total of 2 (two) people are affected by blocking via DNS

It's obvious why the content industry is cracking down on DNS providers. If they succeed, the most likely outcome is overblocking with platforms like Netflix, Disney & Co on a curated whitelist.

bitwize 4y ago

Again, a politically neutral network is a dream of the 90s that isn't even alive in Portland. The network will enforce the will of whomever puts enough political pressure on it.

Test0129 4y ago

Same thing happens with firearms yet no one seems to care, or actively promotes, the methods "policy groups" use to strip rights away from citizens. Now, the same tactics are being used here. I suspect many commenters will suggest these cannot be compared but I suggest generalizing a little: The government and people interested in stopping this sort of thing realize there's no legal easy-button they can press to make it all go away. Firearms won't go away, neither will piracy. But, they can do the next best thing. Inundate the companies in the middle with lawsuits, mostly frivolous in nature, in order to tie up and burn capital and (they hope) bring the demise the companies allegedly "involved" in the "crime". This doubles as something that has a tremendous chilling effect on other related services. It starts with DNS, goes to VPNs, etc. It's so effective the government does not even need to enforce laws to make it happen. All it takes is a little encouragement of the right groups of people and the lawsuits take care of the rest. It is de-facto illegal to do something because the alternative is to be mired in billions of dollars worth of lawsuits for any perceived mistake. This is why it's so important to support all forms of freedom. The tactic used to bring one to it's knees will be used to stifle other freedoms as well. In this case, they're now coming after information. Use your imagination to figure out what is next.

Roark66 4y ago
One could argue this is a fault of the juidicial systems involved. Laws should be written clearly enough for any judge on whose desk such lawsuit lands to throw it out or face ridicule from their peers.
Gordonjcp 4y ago
> This is why it's so important to support all forms of freedom. So you agree we should stop people from having free and easy access to guns? Because I'm all about the freedom to send my children to school without worrying they're going to get shot.
- hnov 4y ago
  I don’t think children get shot at school often enough for that to be a realistic worry
  - Gordonjcp 4y ago
    Interesting take. So you'd say that a non-zero amount of child murders is good? Something to be maintained?
    - hellojesus 4y ago
      Restricting freedoms to make everyone free-er doesn't actually increase freedom. Your children already are covered by laws against murder. Banning guns may decrease the rate of school shootings, but it won't guarantee they cease. You'll never live in a world worry-free of gun violence, especially now that anyone can 3d print them at home.
      - Gordonjcp 4y ago
        And yet the country I live in has had exactly one school shooting, and has a fraction of the murder rate of the US per capita. You can't then say "aha but the UK has more knife crime", because again, per capita, the UK has a tiny fraction as much knife crime as the US.

roenxi 4y ago

A movie can be several gigabytes of data, an IP is several bytes. I don't like their odds of taking on the DNS system if they can't handle piracy directly. Steganography is a lot easier than learning how to use a torrent client.

witrak 4y ago

Next example of spreading costs of defense of interests of a small number of benefactors trying to enforce a business model they prefer over all parties involved in the support of infrastructure used by exactly these benefactors.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

avidiax 4y ago

There's a pro and con to this. Pro is, if the rights holders win, it may fan the flames of decentralized naming schemes and alternate roots, and start crystallizing the need for a free internet in people's minds. Con, of course, is that this is not going to be enough, and the next target is going to be the routers themselves. Your ISP will need to do deep packet inspection like what occurs in India and other countries. Then that won't be enough, and you'll have to give a root of trust to your ISP, so they can read and censor your encrypted streams. And all the while, trusted computing will be spreading in the background, stamping out anything not aligned with corporate and government interests.

stingraycharles 4y ago
> Pro is, if the rights holders win, it may fan the flames of decentralized naming schemes and alternate roots, and start crystallizing the need for a free internet in people's minds. Hasn’t the main trend of the past few decades been that, despite limiting our freedoms, everything gets more and more centralized, mainly because it’s more reliable / convenient / cheaper ? I’m doubtful in DNS ever being replaced with an even more decentralized version. It’s already one of the most decentralized protocols widely in use right now, and the trend has clearly been more centralization of DNS, not less.
- dividedbyzero 4y ago
  I guess it would be both, like with Linux on phones and desktops as a reaction to proprietary OSes becoming more restrictive – it fans the flames for LibreDNS and Stallmann-approved Gnu-DNS in some circles like the privacy-conscious subset of HN, and some of those actually use it where possible, but overall they are an inconsequential rounding error, and everyone else gets centralized and non-overridable SecureDNS™.
  - mistrial9 4y ago
    nothing occurs in a vacuum; as has been well-described here, when Freedoms are fringe, then Freedom-minded people get the strange bedfellows of actually depraved and actually criminal, while the Law-and-Order people isolate themselves and their populations with distrust, circular-restrictions and unchangeable rules. Its not the active people, its the bandwagon that the active people have to live with as a social consequence

tjpnz 4y ago

Why not just make content available to everyone for a reasonable fee? If I have to subscribe to half a dozen streaming services in order to watch what I want to watch I'm going to pirate it instead.

michaelt 4y ago
Content makers know that some people in the US will pay $200/month for cable. So the price of Netflix, at $15/month, is less than some people will pay. If every American could access everything for $15/month, they would have to forego the $185/month some Americans are willing to pay. Corporations hate this.
Mindwipe 4y ago
> Why not just make content available to everyone for a reasonable fee? Because your definition of "reasonable fee" isn't.
josteink 4y ago
> Why not just make content available to everyone for a reasonable fee? If I have to subscribe to half a dozen streaming services in order to watch what I want to watch I'm going to pirate it instead. Because the economy of it doesn't scale? When Spotify was new, I was amazed by it. A simple monthly fee and I could instantly access all the music(tm)? Who wouldn't sign up for that? As time went by I definitely wanted a similar service for video. Basically, the same recipe: A reasonable monthly fee, and I'd like to watch all the video(tm) please. But that's not what we got, because they are different markets, offering different goods, which has a different cost and which is used differently. It probably costs more to make a single episode of a popular TV-show than it costs to make 100 albums of music. And unlike music, where people typically have favourites, which they will listen to again and again, most TV-series are watch-once, be-done type of entertainment. That means that I'll keep my music streaming service forever because I want to be able to keep listening to the music I love, but I will cancel a video-streaming service the instant I've seen the series I signed up for. So what is a reasonable fee? I agree it's annoying to have to deal with multiple video-streaming providers, but if they were to follow the music-stream model (all providers have all the content), then the price you would have to pay per provider with probably be 10x what it is now. And nobody is going to pay that. Isn't it more reasonable to pay for what you use, when you use it, and then pay nothing when you're not using it (something which really isn't a realistic option for music-streaming)?

nix23 4y ago

Let's change to Yggdrasil ;) https://yggdrasil-network.github.io/ https://yggdrasil-network.github.io/

Ajedi32 4y ago
I personally think something like Handshake[1] would be ideal. However, a major problem with most of these decentralized "internet alternatives" (including Handshake) is that they aren't designed to be compatible with the existing internet, which creates a chicken-egg problem where site operators don't want to bother supporting your system because it has no users, and users don't want to bother using your system because it has no (or few) sites. If someone really wants to replace DNS with a decentralized system, what they need to do is: 1. Develop a well designed decentralized naming system (many have already done this) 2. Buy a TLD on the existing DNS and point it at a proxy server that allows incompatible clients access to your decentralized network through a centralized proxy 3. Work to get support for accessing that TLD through the decentralized protocol baked into browsers, first through extensions and eventually natively supported. [1]: https://handshake.org/ https://handshake.org/

belorn 4y ago

There is a funny aspect to this. Registry and registrars already has a tradition to sell dns blocking registrations for a fee, and when copyright rights holder (or even the police/government) want to block something, that fee is still required and it need to be paid each year. As an example, when it came to piratebay.se the Swedish police budget has been paying it every year since the court made the decision to take it. It not much for a single domain but it does not scale and the police really do not want more of them. It is for this reason I suspect that rights holders targets ISPs. Supporting a block list is in comparison free and ISP has yet to start to take a yearly fee each time they add a new domain to the list.

ultra_nick 4y ago

P2P networks sure are taking a long time to spread awareness. Maybe I can help. Here's a p2p network layer: https://reticulum.network/ https://reticulum.network/ Here's a p2p dns layer: https://docs.ipfs.tech/concepts/ipns/#mutability-in-ipfs https://docs.ipfs.tech/concepts/ipns/#mutability-in-ipfs Here's a p2p http layer: https://ipfs.io/ https://ipfs.io/

goodpoint 4y ago
That's not very helpful.
- _chu1 4y ago
  They're pretty good for piracy, just got As Daylight Dies by Killswitch Engage and The Equalizer (2014) over BitTorrent not too long ago
eteos 4y ago
Correct me if I'm wrong, but using all of this will still leave the option open for enforcers to go after the registrar or the cdn or host of the endpoint. So there is always a 'secondary infringer' to find, that is capable of removing (the endpoint of) the content.

Pr0GrasTiNati0n 4y ago

ok123456 4y ago

The DNS providers who don't do this sort of filtering will become the defacto standard.

jobs_throwaway 4y ago

So much ink spilled and so many lives wasted trying to fight a thing that's actually good for the industry. Sometimes you just have to laugh at the sheer absurdity of it.

_23sd 4y ago

Targeting DNS providers is only worth it because of the growing power of resolvers like Quad9 and 1.1.1.1. Otherwise they would have to go back to getting orders against every ISP in a jurisdiction, which should be near-impossible in a free country but admittedly European countries have disappointed on this issue. Web browser vendors and Cloudflare decided for some reason that everyone needs to use DoH, and while I'm still waiting for news of an actual attack happening to someone that DoH would have foiled, Hollywood isn't waiting to use this increasing centralization for their attacks on web users.

charcircuit 4y ago
>I'm still waiting for news of an actual attack happening to someone that DoH would have foiled There exist ISPs who currently MitM attack any DNS requests to block them / replace them with ads if it doesn't exist. 3rd party DNS over UDP doesn't help, but over HTTPS does.
- _23sd 4y ago
  True, though in my opinion that's not nearly widespread or impactful enough that people needed to be opted in to DoH by default as in Firefox, or sold DoH as a "safer" option like Cloudflare does.

IndigoIncognito 4y ago

I think a total of 2 (two) people are affected by blocking via DNS