9 ms·

In case SOPA passes: IP addresses of popular websites

270 points by RyanMcGreal 15y ago

nu23 15y ago
I thought blocking IP addresses itself was a part of the proposed law. If that happens, this wont help. Using proxies is a solution, but this will make things much slower, especially for videos.
AdamFernandez 15y ago
I'm sure we could come up with some sort of host file synchronization application to circumvent the DNS changes. It would be awful compared to DNS, but at least it would be more workable than remembering and saving IP addresses.
- mattadams 15y ago
  HOSTS.TXT anyone?
  - sukuriant 15y ago
    Just hosts, actually. It's: C:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts not C:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts.txt
    - mattadams 15y ago
      Not even. You misunderstood what I was referring to: http://goo.gl/6iXui http://goo.gl/6iXui
      - sukuriant 15y ago
        Oh, I see. I'm sorry. Carry on :)
- dberg 15y ago
  Thats why i created a github repo for this. We should probably have one for US, EMEA, ASIA so we can keep the regional ips more efficient. https://github.com/denen99/fightsopa https://github.com/denen99/fightsopa (shameless plug from http:/www.fightsopa.com)
leeoniya 15y ago
wonder if it's time to code an FF extension that aggregates and stores IP addresses of sites i visit and bypasses the resolver/DNS from this DB.
- there 15y ago
  bypassing DNS is going to break the internet as much as SOPA is. content distribution networks rely on DNS for load balancing. legitimate sites moving to new servers rely on being able to push out records with low TTLs. by statically caching things for long periods of time, you are going to cause more problems with legitimate sites than you are going to fix to get to "rogue" sites that get taken down by SOPA. a better approach would probably be to just hit that non-DNS cache for sites that don't resolve, or push out a list of known "killed" sites. if SOPA makes sites given the "death penalty" resolve to an ICE-style page, then the extension could just store the IP addresses of those government-run servers and consult the cache for sites that resolve to them.
- morganw 15y ago
  Not quite what you suggested, but achieves some of the same things https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/mafiaafire-redirector/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/mafiaafire-re...
- nikcub 15y ago
  or how about instead of storing it on the client we store it in a distributed server architecture
ryanwhitney 15y ago
<2012> Hm, that Reddit thread and the corresponding Google Doc both link to sites with illegal and pirated content on them. Call your local representative and get them to shut down Reddit and Google Docs via SOPA! </2012>
there 15y ago
i'm as big a hater of SOPA as the next guy, but this fearmongering is getting a bit silly. as if SOPA is going to pass and overnight all of those popular commercially-run websites are going to vanish with no notice or court hearings. and from a technical standpoint, most of those websites listed use CDNs for static assets, so unless you list the constantly-changing IPs of akamai and other servers for all of the weird random-looking hostnames used by those CDNs, many of those sites will not even load to a usable state. (and porn sites? really?) also, from the reddit thread: As some posters suggested, you can use another DNS server. The two server I'm reasonably certain about are OpenDNS and Google DNS. Both of them are US based but I think Google will move it's server to Europe if SOPA passes. using a resolver in the EU from the US would be frustratingly slow due to the latency. you're better off showing users how to setup their own caching servers to bypass their ISP (i've always run my own caching server just for technical reasons). and do you really think google cares about SOPA? they have done practically nothing to stop it; no notice on their homepage, no public awareness, only one legal representative sent to the preliminary hearing, etc. this is the same company that partnered with china and supported their censorship just to make some additional ad revenue.
- burgerbrain 15y ago
  "and porn sites? really?" I don't understand this comment. Can you explain it?
- ck2 15y ago
  Right because enforcement never overreaches and never abuses any weapon they are given. In the meatspace world, see tasers and pepper spray which are only supposed to be used when a gun would have been, so they are less than lethal - then there is warrantless everything these days, or no-knock warrants on the wrong house from a "tip" and they kill your dog for good measure (happens so often it's a cliche already). On the net see the DMCA mission creep and the thousands of Patriot Act "cannot tell anyone you were served, not even your lawyer" National Security Letters nonsense. If someone copies the code to crack bluray or something like that to wikipedia - why wouldn't SONY's lawyers use SOPA to take down all of wikipedia for 10 days?
larrik 15y ago
The BoingBoing link is a worthless waste of time. Use this one to go there directly: http://www.reddit.com/r/SOPA/comments/nf5p1/sopa_emergency_list/ http://www.reddit.com/r/SOPA/comments/nf5p1/sopa_emergency_l...
leeoniya 15y ago
maybe google in their fight against SOPA can come to the rescue and release a database publicly of all its crawled websites, which can be syndicated somehow via p2p. i mean they gotta have this info.
- noahc 15y ago
  This is a horrible idea. What more could a cracker want than a list of IP addresses that are known web servers. Sure, the big guys are safe. But what about the mom and pop shop that pays $20 a month to host their website on a server that is running a 3 year old version of apache. EDIT: Can someone show me specifically what I said that is objectively technically incorrect? You may disagree with security through obscurity, and I agree with you that obscurity isn't a very strong defense mechanism, but that doesn't change the technical merit of it.
  - nik_0_0 15y ago
    Sorry, what? What is preventing any 'cracker' from a list of IP addresses of webservers? You can VERY easily find out the IP address of anything you please...
    - noahc 15y ago
      There is nothing preventing a cracker from getting a list of IP addresses. There are a number of ways to get an IP address of a specific server: whois on the domain, even pinging the domain on a *nix OS kicks back an IP address. Doing a trace route same thing. That's not what I'm talking about though. If google released a list of all crawled websites and their IP addresses, if I was inclined I could then take those IP's and scan them for known vulnerabilities. Essentially what you're giving an attacker is a prequalified list of IP addresses to attack instead of attacking a specific range.
      - Dobbs 15y ago
        whois or ping are not a good way to find the ip of a hostname. Use either a dns library or dig.
Permit 15y ago
If people have serious concerns, would it not be possible to build a Google Chrome/Firefox Plugin that acted as a sort of DNS service? It would be a lot easier for the average user to install one of these in one click than it might be for them to change their DNS settings. Just a thought.
- rmc 15y ago
  It is probably easier to just run your own DNS caching server on your machine. No need for a browser extension.
IvarTJ 15y ago
I have often wished for a way to see a history of what IP addresses domains are resolved to, from my system’s resolver or a DNS server. This, in contrast, seems awfully primitive.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
  - IvarTJ 15y ago
    I may not know that a domain no longer directs to the desired service before I am no longer getting it, and by that time I presume any caches from the previous resolvings have been deleted. This happens not just because of legal troubles, but also because the website owners have forgotten to update their domain name.
forsaken 15y ago
Sounds like the eventual outcome of this is a dark/grey net DNS system. I wouldn't be surprised if something like this already existed, but now it will be much more useful and interesting to everyday people.
yangez 15y ago
On a surface level, most of the items on this list are pretty absurd. Sites like Facebook, Amazon, and Youtube aren't immediately going down as soon as SOPA passes, except the torrent sites. There's a good chance they won't be affected at all by SOPA. However, this list is interesting because it draws attention to the fact that these huge sites COULD legally vanish without a trace. Although I doubt anyone's going to seriously try to take down Facebook or Amazon using SOPA, it's still scary to imagine.
flyt 15y ago
I would recommend against using these IP addresses for large sites. Most of them (Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc) use geographic load balancing to redirect users to servers as logically close to them as possible. Using this list could result in accessing much slower services via server clusters on the other side of the world.
pavelkaroukin 15y ago
Please, adopt Namecoin. There are already open source DNS servers available I believe. :) Using google document or hosts file do not scale at all, while namecoin now have all hashing power of bitcoin thanks to merged mining.
bgarbiak 15y ago
Facebook (and, probably, some others too) redirects you from IP address to the domain anyway, so...
blhack 15y ago
Okay, first, the chances of youtube.com, or wikipedia (why?) disappearing tomorrow are approximately 0. That said, a lot of these "solutions" that people are coming up with just end up getting closer and closer to what the DNS already accomplishes. The worst case scenario here is just a fragmented DNS, and the US losing control of the .com TLD. The "doomsday" scenario here is that DNS servers stop trusting the root servers, and don't take updates from them. This is a gigantic headache for network and system administrators. It is not the end of the internet. If you guys really really care that much, here: http://www.verisigninc.com/en_US/products-and-services/domain-name-services/grow-your-domain-name-business/analyze/tld-zone-access/index.xhtml?loc=en_US http://www.verisigninc.com/en_US/products-and-services/domai... Apply for access to the .com zone files, download them, and up your own DNS servers. Don't accept any updates from anybody ever and you'll have a much, much, much more complete, much more "you can query this as a daemon" version of these silly lists.
- burgerbrain 15y ago
  "The worst case scenario here is just a fragmented DNS, and the US losing control of the .com TLD." That is the best case scenario.
  - blhack 15y ago
    Please explain your alternate worst-case.
    - burgerbrain 15y ago
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Firewall_of_China\ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Firewall_of_China\ In other words, a reasonably effective implementation that would effect Joe Sixpack. The US is already abusing their alleged jurisdiction over the .com TLD and unfortunately there doesn't yet seem to be a real risk of fragmentation.
      - burgerbrain 15y ago
        Sorry, remove that final char to use the link. Not sure how that got on there.
maximusprime 15y ago
Flagged. Up-voters should be ashamed perpetuating scaremongering propaganda. The sky is not falling. Shame to see the "I need to be outraged by something, regardless of whether it's true or not" spilling over here from Reddit.
- abstractbill 15y ago
  The people who designed important pieces of its infrastructure (tcp/ip, dns, http, and so on) seem to be very concerned about what SOPA would allow politicians to do to the internet. Do you know something they don't? https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/12/internet-inventors-warn-against-sopa-and-pipa https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/12/internet-inventors-war...
  - maximusprime 15y ago
    There's being against proposed legislation, and there's "OH no! soon DNS will not work, we need to quickly collect IP addresses. Lets build an alternate DNS system. Lets overthrow the government!". Do you really think the DNS entry for wikipedia.org will be removed? In the stupidly ridiculously rare event that it did, obviously they'd quickly remedy it, or we'd all just proxy through other countries etc, or it'd get mirrored onto other domains. We had the same "The sky is falling" for the UKs "Digital Economy Bill". It's a ridiculous law, and is now being revised/investigated. ISPs are against it, and it'll never be enforced. People again wasted hours of their lives worrying about it.
nikcub 15y ago
SOPA is definitely having the opposite effect because I just found a couple of great sites that I didn't know about
showdog 15y ago
Don't fix your hosts files, fix your broken political system!
fleitz 15y ago
I think we should stop viewing this as a bad thing and start viewing it as a huge opportunity. Phone your congress person or senator and encourage them to vote for it. As the torrent sites go down they'll come back up as tor hidden services. Once we're on tor or something like it the game changes entirely. As we stop trusting the root DNS, we'll start trusting something like a bitcoin hash chain based DNS system, as we create an anonymized, decentralized internet freedom of expression increases exponentially. No URDP, no SOPA, no unencrypted protocols, security of the person in their effects will be guaranteed by mathematics and not the good will of politicians. With all the monitoring, etc thats already in place it's only a matter of time. We have the opportunity to lay the foundations of a decentralized internet over something as trivial as copyright rather than freedom of speech. We'll stop having to rely on a government to respect our liberties and instead instill them in the design of the system. Decentralized information, decentralized currency, decentralized control over the future of humanity. While it's true that this system created by SOPA will inevitably be abused to curtail civil rights, the important thing to remember is that most people care far more about getting their music than getting their rights. Lets give the people their music, and they'll get their rights as they go along for the ride.
- EdSkrillex 15y ago
  12212012;11:11 - Imagine.
- kiba 15y ago
  Why do people wish really bad things happen so that people will do the really right thing? We should be doing the really right thing in the first place, not wait for really bad things to happen.
  - fleitz 15y ago
    Because mankind is more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.
    - kingkilr 15y ago
koenigdavidmj 15y ago
It's not the popular websites that will get hit. The public will flip out if their bread and Facebook, er, circuses, go away, and SOPA will not be in effect for very long. The trouble will come when websites get blocked that do not have enough public support to bring them back again. As long as Facebook and Gmail are up, it's only nerds like us who will care.
EGreg 15y ago
If SOPA passes, can lots of people call the financial companies, ad companies and others doing business with the RIAA, MPAA, and so forth, and "allege" that they are "facilitating" copyright and trademark infringement. According to the SOPA law as it is now, they will have to be shut down. At the very least it will tie up the system Or it might actually show these guys what kind of monster they have brought about ... kind of like Sarcozy's household being disconnected from the internet http://torrentfreak.com/french-presidents-residence-busted-for-bittorrent-piracy-111215/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter http://torrentfreak.com/french-presidents-residence-busted-f... http://www.futureofcopyright.com/home/blog-post/2011/10/04/german-politician-violates-own-two-strikes-out-bill.html http://www.futureofcopyright.com/home/blog-post/2011/10/04/g... But it's OK when THEY do it, right? However, if there are only foreign sites (registrar is abroad), then I doubt any major sites are hosted there, besides http://bit.ly http://bit.ly http://t.co http://t.co http://youtu.be http://youtu.be http://goo.gl http://goo.gl Correct me if I'm wrong, but under the current SOPA, only FOREIGN SITES can have their financials cut off, right? I thought the Operation In Our Sites is able to already seize domain names registered locally. So it seems to me that the SOPA simply adds provisions to censor sites registered abroad, in American DNS only, because their registrar is beyond US jurisdiction. For example Russians use vkontakte.ru to listen to any song. What would SOPA do about this? However, YouTube contains lots of uploaded songs and the US government could have seized their domain for a long time already, but didn't. So I think the threat is more to the purity and security of the worldwide DNS system, as well as to the costs of the ISPs, than it is to social networking sites. At least, I hope. Does SOPA override the DMCA for locally-registered sites, or did Operation In Our Sites just give carte blanche to the government to take out sites?
- msquared 15y ago
  > However, YouTube contains lots of uploaded songs and the US government could have seized their domain for a long time already, but didn't. Correct me if I'm wrong here, but isn't this what the DMCA safe harbor protection is for? They can't just pull their domain if they are responding in a timely manner to reasonable DMCA takedown requests. Or am I missing a point you're making? Entirely possible. It's 4:55. I'm burnt out.
micheljansen 15y ago
I really hope that the internet anthropologists of the future will someday read this thread and have a hearty laugh on our behalf in the knowledge that all our worries were for nothing.
andrewcooke 15y ago
i wrote a small python script that helps handle DNS updates like this. if anyone is interested it's at https://github.com/ghettonet/GhettoNet https://github.com/ghettonet/GhettoNet it allows for dated updates, distributing in web pages, etc, but it's only a command line interface. i hoped someone might add a gui...
evo_9 15y ago
HN's IP, just in case: 174.132.225.106
sed1q 15y ago
<sarcasm> Whatever you do do not use HOSTS file. Do not run your own recursive or authoritative DNS server. Do not use your own cache listening on 127.0.0.1 Do not use IP addresses. Do not create your own aliases for websites instead of using DNS. It will not work. And terrible things will happen. Trust me. I've been doing this for 30 years and I am an expert. You don't know what you're doing. </sarcasm>
randomtyler 15y ago
I'm not sure why this is being up-voted so much. It won't work. SOPA works by not routing specific IPs, not by failing to resolve domains (which is why it fundamentally breaks the internet). Additionally, a single IP won't work for a major site like YouTube or Facebook, which work off multiple data-centers and CDNs (which also complicates how to "block" a site served by 50 IPs that may also be distributing content for another major brand). This is bigger than a hosts file.
- sukuriant 15y ago
  SOPA works by failing to resolve domain names, it does nothing to stop a user from entering a particular IP address. Like everyone has been saying, it. does. nothing. good.
  - randomtyler 15y ago
    I don't think that's true. According to http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-57328045-281/sopas-latest-threat-ip-blocking-privacy-busting-packet-inspection/ http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-57328045-281/sopas-latest-... Cary Sherman, the head of the Recording Industry Association of America, wrote in a guest column for CNET that SOPA could be used to force Internet providers to block by "Internet Protocol [IP] address" and deny "access to only the illegal part of the site." The RIAA, along with the Motion Picture Association of America and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, strongly supports the legislation. [...] An aide to the House Judiciary committee -- chaired by Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Tex.), SOPA's principal sponsor -- did not dispute that IP address blocking and deep packet inspection could be required. It would be up to a judge to determine the nature of the court order that would be needed to block the site, the aide told CNET this afternoon. They are definitely looking to block by IP, not just DNS.
dholowiski 15y ago
Does anyone notice the irony... back when the internet was new, dns was just a bunch of dns/ip mappings in a text file... then we went to a big distributed system... now the US government is going to force us to go back to distributing text files.
TallGuyShort 15y ago
The list saddens me, to be quite honest. Yes, SOPA is morally wrong and technically stupid, and I don't think the government can or should fight piracy like this. But I think it devalues the cause if such a large portion of the "emergency list" is porno and piracy web sites. Seriously? The real reasons this is dangerous is because of civil rights and the damage that's already been caused to legitimate businesses by government incompetence (e.g. erroneously changing the DNS of small businesses to forward to an accusation of child sex crimes because they happened to share infrastructure with the real criminal). The fact remains that piracy is dishonest, and only serves to legitimize the claims of Big Media. Say what you want about DRM, copyright law and ridiculous terms of service, but if you're really someone who believes in free government and the important role of the Internet in preserving it, I hope you join with me in rolling your eyes at people who torrent illegal media and worry about the effect of SOPA on their porn viewing. There are plenty of ways to buy inexpensive, DRM-free music, and plenty of ways to actually support the artists who make the music.

270 points by RyanMcGreal 15y ago

nu23 15y ago

I thought blocking IP addresses itself was a part of the proposed law. If that happens, this wont help. Using proxies is a solution, but this will make things much slower, especially for videos.

AdamFernandez 15y ago

I'm sure we could come up with some sort of host file synchronization application to circumvent the DNS changes. It would be awful compared to DNS, but at least it would be more workable than remembering and saving IP addresses.

mattadams 15y ago
HOSTS.TXT anyone?
- sukuriant 15y ago
  Just hosts, actually. It's: C:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts not C:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts.txt
  - mattadams 15y ago
    Not even. You misunderstood what I was referring to: http://goo.gl/6iXui http://goo.gl/6iXui
    - sukuriant 15y ago
      Oh, I see. I'm sorry. Carry on :)
dberg 15y ago
Thats why i created a github repo for this. We should probably have one for US, EMEA, ASIA so we can keep the regional ips more efficient. https://github.com/denen99/fightsopa https://github.com/denen99/fightsopa (shameless plug from http:/www.fightsopa.com)

leeoniya 15y ago

wonder if it's time to code an FF extension that aggregates and stores IP addresses of sites i visit and bypasses the resolver/DNS from this DB.

there 15y ago
bypassing DNS is going to break the internet as much as SOPA is. content distribution networks rely on DNS for load balancing. legitimate sites moving to new servers rely on being able to push out records with low TTLs. by statically caching things for long periods of time, you are going to cause more problems with legitimate sites than you are going to fix to get to "rogue" sites that get taken down by SOPA. a better approach would probably be to just hit that non-DNS cache for sites that don't resolve, or push out a list of known "killed" sites. if SOPA makes sites given the "death penalty" resolve to an ICE-style page, then the extension could just store the IP addresses of those government-run servers and consult the cache for sites that resolve to them.
morganw 15y ago
Not quite what you suggested, but achieves some of the same things https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/mafiaafire-redirector/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/mafiaafire-re...
nikcub 15y ago
or how about instead of storing it on the client we store it in a distributed server architecture

ryanwhitney 15y ago

<2012> Hm, that Reddit thread and the corresponding Google Doc both link to sites with illegal and pirated content on them. Call your local representative and get them to shut down Reddit and Google Docs via SOPA! </2012>

there 15y ago

i'm as big a hater of SOPA as the next guy, but this fearmongering is getting a bit silly. as if SOPA is going to pass and overnight all of those popular commercially-run websites are going to vanish with no notice or court hearings. and from a technical standpoint, most of those websites listed use CDNs for static assets, so unless you list the constantly-changing IPs of akamai and other servers for all of the weird random-looking hostnames used by those CDNs, many of those sites will not even load to a usable state. (and porn sites? really?) also, from the reddit thread: As some posters suggested, you can use another DNS server. The two server I'm reasonably certain about are OpenDNS and Google DNS. Both of them are US based but I think Google will move it's server to Europe if SOPA passes. using a resolver in the EU from the US would be frustratingly slow due to the latency. you're better off showing users how to setup their own caching servers to bypass their ISP (i've always run my own caching server just for technical reasons). and do you really think google cares about SOPA? they have done practically nothing to stop it; no notice on their homepage, no public awareness, only one legal representative sent to the preliminary hearing, etc. this is the same company that partnered with china and supported their censorship just to make some additional ad revenue.

burgerbrain 15y ago
"and porn sites? really?" I don't understand this comment. Can you explain it?
ck2 15y ago
Right because enforcement never overreaches and never abuses any weapon they are given. In the meatspace world, see tasers and pepper spray which are only supposed to be used when a gun would have been, so they are less than lethal - then there is warrantless everything these days, or no-knock warrants on the wrong house from a "tip" and they kill your dog for good measure (happens so often it's a cliche already). On the net see the DMCA mission creep and the thousands of Patriot Act "cannot tell anyone you were served, not even your lawyer" National Security Letters nonsense. If someone copies the code to crack bluray or something like that to wikipedia - why wouldn't SONY's lawyers use SOPA to take down all of wikipedia for 10 days?

larrik 15y ago

The BoingBoing link is a worthless waste of time. Use this one to go there directly: http://www.reddit.com/r/SOPA/comments/nf5p1/sopa_emergency_list/ http://www.reddit.com/r/SOPA/comments/nf5p1/sopa_emergency_l...

leeoniya 15y ago

maybe google in their fight against SOPA can come to the rescue and release a database publicly of all its crawled websites, which can be syndicated somehow via p2p. i mean they gotta have this info.

noahc 15y ago
This is a horrible idea. What more could a cracker want than a list of IP addresses that are known web servers. Sure, the big guys are safe. But what about the mom and pop shop that pays $20 a month to host their website on a server that is running a 3 year old version of apache. EDIT: Can someone show me specifically what I said that is objectively technically incorrect? You may disagree with security through obscurity, and I agree with you that obscurity isn't a very strong defense mechanism, but that doesn't change the technical merit of it.
- nik_0_0 15y ago
  Sorry, what? What is preventing any 'cracker' from a list of IP addresses of webservers? You can VERY easily find out the IP address of anything you please...
  - noahc 15y ago
    There is nothing preventing a cracker from getting a list of IP addresses. There are a number of ways to get an IP address of a specific server: whois on the domain, even pinging the domain on a *nix OS kicks back an IP address. Doing a trace route same thing. That's not what I'm talking about though. If google released a list of all crawled websites and their IP addresses, if I was inclined I could then take those IP's and scan them for known vulnerabilities. Essentially what you're giving an attacker is a prequalified list of IP addresses to attack instead of attacking a specific range.
    - Dobbs 15y ago
      whois or ping are not a good way to find the ip of a hostname. Use either a dns library or dig.

Permit 15y ago

If people have serious concerns, would it not be possible to build a Google Chrome/Firefox Plugin that acted as a sort of DNS service? It would be a lot easier for the average user to install one of these in one click than it might be for them to change their DNS settings. Just a thought.

rmc 15y ago
It is probably easier to just run your own DNS caching server on your machine. No need for a browser extension.

IvarTJ 15y ago

I have often wished for a way to see a history of what IP addresses domains are resolved to, from my system’s resolver or a DNS server. This, in contrast, seems awfully primitive.

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
- IvarTJ 15y ago
  I may not know that a domain no longer directs to the desired service before I am no longer getting it, and by that time I presume any caches from the previous resolvings have been deleted. This happens not just because of legal troubles, but also because the website owners have forgotten to update their domain name.

forsaken 15y ago

Sounds like the eventual outcome of this is a dark/grey net DNS system. I wouldn't be surprised if something like this already existed, but now it will be much more useful and interesting to everyday people.

yangez 15y ago

On a surface level, most of the items on this list are pretty absurd. Sites like Facebook, Amazon, and Youtube aren't immediately going down as soon as SOPA passes, except the torrent sites. There's a good chance they won't be affected at all by SOPA. However, this list is interesting because it draws attention to the fact that these huge sites COULD legally vanish without a trace. Although I doubt anyone's going to seriously try to take down Facebook or Amazon using SOPA, it's still scary to imagine.

flyt 15y ago

I would recommend against using these IP addresses for large sites. Most of them (Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc) use geographic load balancing to redirect users to servers as logically close to them as possible. Using this list could result in accessing much slower services via server clusters on the other side of the world.

pavelkaroukin 15y ago

Please, adopt Namecoin. There are already open source DNS servers available I believe. :) Using google document or hosts file do not scale at all, while namecoin now have all hashing power of bitcoin thanks to merged mining.

bgarbiak 15y ago

Facebook (and, probably, some others too) redirects you from IP address to the domain anyway, so...

blhack 15y ago

Okay, first, the chances of youtube.com, or wikipedia (why?) disappearing tomorrow are approximately 0. That said, a lot of these "solutions" that people are coming up with just end up getting closer and closer to what the DNS already accomplishes. The worst case scenario here is just a fragmented DNS, and the US losing control of the .com TLD. The "doomsday" scenario here is that DNS servers stop trusting the root servers, and don't take updates from them. This is a gigantic headache for network and system administrators. It is not the end of the internet. If you guys really really care that much, here: http://www.verisigninc.com/en_US/products-and-services/domain-name-services/grow-your-domain-name-business/analyze/tld-zone-access/index.xhtml?loc=en_US http://www.verisigninc.com/en_US/products-and-services/domai... Apply for access to the .com zone files, download them, and up your own DNS servers. Don't accept any updates from anybody ever and you'll have a much, much, much more complete, much more "you can query this as a daemon" version of these silly lists.

burgerbrain 15y ago
"The worst case scenario here is just a fragmented DNS, and the US losing control of the .com TLD." That is the best case scenario.
- blhack 15y ago
  Please explain your alternate worst-case.
  - burgerbrain 15y ago
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Firewall_of_China\ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Firewall_of_China\ In other words, a reasonably effective implementation that would effect Joe Sixpack. The US is already abusing their alleged jurisdiction over the .com TLD and unfortunately there doesn't yet seem to be a real risk of fragmentation.
    - burgerbrain 15y ago
      Sorry, remove that final char to use the link. Not sure how that got on there.

maximusprime 15y ago

Flagged. Up-voters should be ashamed perpetuating scaremongering propaganda. The sky is not falling. Shame to see the "I need to be outraged by something, regardless of whether it's true or not" spilling over here from Reddit.

abstractbill 15y ago
The people who designed important pieces of its infrastructure (tcp/ip, dns, http, and so on) seem to be very concerned about what SOPA would allow politicians to do to the internet. Do you know something they don't? https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/12/internet-inventors-warn-against-sopa-and-pipa https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/12/internet-inventors-war...
- maximusprime 15y ago
  There's being against proposed legislation, and there's "OH no! soon DNS will not work, we need to quickly collect IP addresses. Lets build an alternate DNS system. Lets overthrow the government!". Do you really think the DNS entry for wikipedia.org will be removed? In the stupidly ridiculously rare event that it did, obviously they'd quickly remedy it, or we'd all just proxy through other countries etc, or it'd get mirrored onto other domains. We had the same "The sky is falling" for the UKs "Digital Economy Bill". It's a ridiculous law, and is now being revised/investigated. ISPs are against it, and it'll never be enforced. People again wasted hours of their lives worrying about it.

nikcub 15y ago

SOPA is definitely having the opposite effect because I just found a couple of great sites that I didn't know about

showdog 15y ago

Don't fix your hosts files, fix your broken political system!

fleitz 15y ago

I think we should stop viewing this as a bad thing and start viewing it as a huge opportunity. Phone your congress person or senator and encourage them to vote for it. As the torrent sites go down they'll come back up as tor hidden services. Once we're on tor or something like it the game changes entirely. As we stop trusting the root DNS, we'll start trusting something like a bitcoin hash chain based DNS system, as we create an anonymized, decentralized internet freedom of expression increases exponentially. No URDP, no SOPA, no unencrypted protocols, security of the person in their effects will be guaranteed by mathematics and not the good will of politicians. With all the monitoring, etc thats already in place it's only a matter of time. We have the opportunity to lay the foundations of a decentralized internet over something as trivial as copyright rather than freedom of speech. We'll stop having to rely on a government to respect our liberties and instead instill them in the design of the system. Decentralized information, decentralized currency, decentralized control over the future of humanity. While it's true that this system created by SOPA will inevitably be abused to curtail civil rights, the important thing to remember is that most people care far more about getting their music than getting their rights. Lets give the people their music, and they'll get their rights as they go along for the ride.

EdSkrillex 15y ago
12212012;11:11 - Imagine.
kiba 15y ago
Why do people wish really bad things happen so that people will do the really right thing? We should be doing the really right thing in the first place, not wait for really bad things to happen.
- fleitz 15y ago
  Because mankind is more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.
  - kingkilr 15y ago

koenigdavidmj 15y ago

It's not the popular websites that will get hit. The public will flip out if their bread and Facebook, er, circuses, go away, and SOPA will not be in effect for very long. The trouble will come when websites get blocked that do not have enough public support to bring them back again. As long as Facebook and Gmail are up, it's only nerds like us who will care.

EGreg 15y ago

If SOPA passes, can lots of people call the financial companies, ad companies and others doing business with the RIAA, MPAA, and so forth, and "allege" that they are "facilitating" copyright and trademark infringement. According to the SOPA law as it is now, they will have to be shut down. At the very least it will tie up the system Or it might actually show these guys what kind of monster they have brought about ... kind of like Sarcozy's household being disconnected from the internet http://torrentfreak.com/french-presidents-residence-busted-for-bittorrent-piracy-111215/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter http://torrentfreak.com/french-presidents-residence-busted-f... http://www.futureofcopyright.com/home/blog-post/2011/10/04/german-politician-violates-own-two-strikes-out-bill.html http://www.futureofcopyright.com/home/blog-post/2011/10/04/g... But it's OK when THEY do it, right? However, if there are only foreign sites (registrar is abroad), then I doubt any major sites are hosted there, besides http://bit.ly http://bit.ly http://t.co http://t.co http://youtu.be http://youtu.be http://goo.gl http://goo.gl Correct me if I'm wrong, but under the current SOPA, only FOREIGN SITES can have their financials cut off, right? I thought the Operation In Our Sites is able to already seize domain names registered locally. So it seems to me that the SOPA simply adds provisions to censor sites registered abroad, in American DNS only, because their registrar is beyond US jurisdiction. For example Russians use vkontakte.ru to listen to any song. What would SOPA do about this? However, YouTube contains lots of uploaded songs and the US government could have seized their domain for a long time already, but didn't. So I think the threat is more to the purity and security of the worldwide DNS system, as well as to the costs of the ISPs, than it is to social networking sites. At least, I hope. Does SOPA override the DMCA for locally-registered sites, or did Operation In Our Sites just give carte blanche to the government to take out sites?

msquared 15y ago
> However, YouTube contains lots of uploaded songs and the US government could have seized their domain for a long time already, but didn't. Correct me if I'm wrong here, but isn't this what the DMCA safe harbor protection is for? They can't just pull their domain if they are responding in a timely manner to reasonable DMCA takedown requests. Or am I missing a point you're making? Entirely possible. It's 4:55. I'm burnt out.

micheljansen 15y ago

I really hope that the internet anthropologists of the future will someday read this thread and have a hearty laugh on our behalf in the knowledge that all our worries were for nothing.

andrewcooke 15y ago

i wrote a small python script that helps handle DNS updates like this. if anyone is interested it's at https://github.com/ghettonet/GhettoNet https://github.com/ghettonet/GhettoNet it allows for dated updates, distributing in web pages, etc, but it's only a command line interface. i hoped someone might add a gui...

evo_9 15y ago

HN's IP, just in case: 174.132.225.106

sed1q 15y ago

<sarcasm> Whatever you do do not use HOSTS file. Do not run your own recursive or authoritative DNS server. Do not use your own cache listening on 127.0.0.1 Do not use IP addresses. Do not create your own aliases for websites instead of using DNS. It will not work. And terrible things will happen. Trust me. I've been doing this for 30 years and I am an expert. You don't know what you're doing. </sarcasm>

randomtyler 15y ago

I'm not sure why this is being up-voted so much. It won't work. SOPA works by not routing specific IPs, not by failing to resolve domains (which is why it fundamentally breaks the internet). Additionally, a single IP won't work for a major site like YouTube or Facebook, which work off multiple data-centers and CDNs (which also complicates how to "block" a site served by 50 IPs that may also be distributing content for another major brand). This is bigger than a hosts file.

sukuriant 15y ago
SOPA works by failing to resolve domain names, it does nothing to stop a user from entering a particular IP address. Like everyone has been saying, it. does. nothing. good.
- randomtyler 15y ago
  I don't think that's true. According to http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-57328045-281/sopas-latest-threat-ip-blocking-privacy-busting-packet-inspection/ http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-57328045-281/sopas-latest-... Cary Sherman, the head of the Recording Industry Association of America, wrote in a guest column for CNET that SOPA could be used to force Internet providers to block by "Internet Protocol [IP] address" and deny "access to only the illegal part of the site." The RIAA, along with the Motion Picture Association of America and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, strongly supports the legislation. [...] An aide to the House Judiciary committee -- chaired by Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Tex.), SOPA's principal sponsor -- did not dispute that IP address blocking and deep packet inspection could be required. It would be up to a judge to determine the nature of the court order that would be needed to block the site, the aide told CNET this afternoon. They are definitely looking to block by IP, not just DNS.

dholowiski 15y ago

Does anyone notice the irony... back when the internet was new, dns was just a bunch of dns/ip mappings in a text file... then we went to a big distributed system... now the US government is going to force us to go back to distributing text files.

TallGuyShort 15y ago

The list saddens me, to be quite honest. Yes, SOPA is morally wrong and technically stupid, and I don't think the government can or should fight piracy like this. But I think it devalues the cause if such a large portion of the "emergency list" is porno and piracy web sites. Seriously? The real reasons this is dangerous is because of civil rights and the damage that's already been caused to legitimate businesses by government incompetence (e.g. erroneously changing the DNS of small businesses to forward to an accusation of child sex crimes because they happened to share infrastructure with the real criminal). The fact remains that piracy is dishonest, and only serves to legitimize the claims of Big Media. Say what you want about DRM, copyright law and ridiculous terms of service, but if you're really someone who believes in free government and the important role of the Internet in preserving it, I hope you join with me in rolling your eyes at people who torrent illegal media and worry about the effect of SOPA on their porn viewing. There are plenty of ways to buy inexpensive, DRM-free music, and plenty of ways to actually support the artists who make the music.