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8 Ways To Circumvent the PROTECT-IP Act
Dangerous_Minds writes "One of the things that the PROTECT-IP act is said to do is make DNS servers censor websites that have been accused of copyright infringement. Drew Wilson of ZeroPaid decided to look in to how many ways he could come up with that would circumvent such censorship. He found 8 ways to circumvent such censorship. The article includes pros and cons and links to guides on how to carry out these methods. The methods are: using a VPN service, using your HOSTs file, using TOR, using freely available DNS lookup tools, changing your DNS server to a non-US server, using command prompt, using Foxy Proxy, and using MAFIAAFire. If anything, the list raises serious doubts that the PROTECT IP Act will even put a dent on copyright infringement online."
"One of the things that the PROTECT-IP act is said to do is make DNS servers censor websites that have been accused of copyright infringement. Drew Wilson ... found 8 ways to circumvent such censorship. ... If anything, the list raises serious doubts that the PROTECT IP Act will even put a dent on copyright infringement online."
Think of our legislators as black hats, poking holes in our network infrastructure because they are malicious pricks, or getting paid, or both, but the end result is that we learn how to make the network resistant to their attacks. In a way, they perform an important function. Sure, we all prefer white hats, but the black hats are out there, in congress, running major corporations, and even in the White House. Nothing is going to change that, so we must secure our network from the threat they represent.
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Run your own recursive DNS resolver with DNSSEC validation. I recommend Unbound, because it's easy to set up and it runs on Windows and Linux.
Granted, it is technically still possible to censor your results by intercepting your DNS packets, but if implementations of DNS censorship in other countries are any indication, running your own resolver works nicely.
Progress: It's gonna happen, whether Uncle Sam wants it or not
Uncle Sam ain't the one holding progress, it's corporate America and its shills who do, and it's nothing new either...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Excuse me? Don't be so quick to tie workarounds to illegal behavior. Even if you never visit a censored web site, you should change your setup to render DNS censorship ineffective. It is important to keep the tools of censorship dull, or we'll see the day when they're used against our freedom!
Legislation, even in a more dictatorial environment like China's is invariably slow and misinformed regarding technology. The delusion of those who think themselves in power can be stated in one sentence, "We think the internet is controllable."
And it is, sometimes, for a while.
More so in China where fewer wish to rock the boat (for the moment), but censorship is a complete fail in countries like the USA and Russia or the former Eastern Bloc countries. Too many unhappy, unemployed, poor engineers. Articles like this one point out just how futile and absurd such efforts are.
Information may not want to be free, but *people* sure are nosy bastards. You can bet they'll work around anything throw in their path, even if means going back to exchanging CDs, tapes or paper.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
In Denmark all the ISPs block The Pirate Bay. I've tried to get around it, turns out it's implemented using DNS, which a retarded chimpanse could circumvent.
The problem is it sounds good on paper. Blocking access to the sites like that gets most of the n00b people away to alternatives, but if you have any technical skill you can get around it. The alternative is some form of deep packet inspection, and no ISP wants that.
I can't see how the blocking makes any sense. It is not impacting piracy whatsoever. Every blocked site has alternatives, and they too will need to be blocked. At some point they will be, but only to give birth to even more alternatives. One buys an internet connection, and that should come without restrictions. It's like selling a car and trying to prevent the driver visiting some foobar number of places.
"If anything, the list raises serious doubts that the PROTECT IP Act will even put a dent on copyright infringement online"
Let's be honest here... I doubt even the asshats who wrote the legislation thought it would do that. At best its real purpose is to create a mechanism the government can use to shut down websites.
=Smidge=
And all this just for the sake of the likes of Justin Bieber and Shakira and Hollywood so they can profit for the crap they do.
If you want to fight censorship you have to go directly to your " "artists" " and ask them why they work for a MAFIAA thats trying to fuck our internet. An active, longlasting and noisy boycott targetted to the "artist" him/herself is all You need.
But no! lets all fiddle with proxies and Tor so we can have our tunez and have the mental-fap that we 0wned the censorz and we can has "teh 1337est freedom"
Engineers think in solutions for engineers.. this is a problem that have root in society and how they consume media. Here we have 8 solutions the don't solve the inherent problem that is: Media industry have failed (You know it, they know it) and it's going down fucking everything in the way, because they can.
They are testing the waters and those 8 "solutions" are what they want to see, not the general public realization of the absurdity this is.
Honestly, all the "censorship" talk about copyright makes me imagine a spamlord complaining that he's being censored because he can't get his mass mailings out to everybody.
"But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought."
--- George Orwell (1984)
Two thoughts:
1. There is an immediate First amendment freedom of speech issue here, as speech will be silenced without due process. The abrogation of the right to speech is inherent in the abrogation of the ability to be heard in a public forum. If you tear gas the audience of the guy on the soapbox, you are still stifling speech. This silences speech, without any legal determination whether the speech is protected. Historical evidence has shown that laws of this sort will be abused to silence appropriate and protected speech. It will not fail to do this, because there is no process in place other than the will to power. We can bank on that. This aspect of the law should be struck down on basic Constitutional grounds (and it will be severable so it won't affect the rest of it, unfortunately.)
2. We are on our way to the Great Firewall. This is the exact same thing China does to websites that it thinks are against political interests. It's just that our political interests are based in the distorted idea that we can build an economy on censorship and artificial scarcity of information, in an age of unprecedented freedom and speed of communication which enabled that dream in the first place! It's a circular firing squad we're setting up here. We are on the wrong side of history if we let this pass or remain unchallenged. We are just absolutely brain-dead to shoot the nascent information economy in the face with the uncertainties this process will cause.
This provision is a myopic, special interest concern that fails to see that you can't have the good without some measure of bad. We should take the good and mitigate the bad. This is disrupting the whole damned thing, like a player who "wins" a chess game by throwing the board into the air. Write your congressperson a letter on letterhead. Call them. Visit them. March on Washington, if you are able.
For God's sake, we cannot let them do this. We're going for a triple-dip recession if we do.
I didn't read any of this as an attempt to equate copyright enforcement with censorship. The problem is that the government will have the authority and the means to shut down entire websites simply because someone complains that a copyright has been enfringed. That is, there is no requirement (or even mechanism) for judicial review before an entire site is muzzled. That opens the door to Censorship with a capital-C.
It's getting harder for the foreigners to tell the difference.
The countermeasures look like they've been written by a script-kiddie. They are not 100% effective. Everybody has been concentrating on DNS servers. Guess what...
1) There are already some greedy asshat ISPs intercepting port 53 and replacing results with their own. Right now, they get a lot of complaints when they're caught. But if the government orders it, all ISPs will have to do it.That'll stop *ALL* regular DNS queries to foreign servers (including roots), unless you VPN, or ssh-tunnel, or use non-standard ports.
2) "Undesirable sites" can be null-routed. Remember when Pakistan accidentally knocked Youtube off the net for the entire planet? http://slashdot.org/story/08/02/25/1322252/Pakistan-YouTube-Block-Breaks-the-World Even knowing the correct IP address doesn't work then. Only VPN or ssh-tunneling will get you the content if the IP address itself is blocked. Of course if the US managed to knock foreign "infringing" servers off the net, the MAFIAA wouldn't exactly cry about it.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
They're already being used against our freedom.
That's the whole point of the law.
All it takes under Protect IP is an accusation.
If you run a website, you can be filtered with little recourse, and be forced to prove your innocence. Might not sound like much, but let me ask you this: how many sites these days use images they found on Google? Thousands, tens of thousands? Every single one of those sites could potentially have a complaint filed, and be labeled as a "pirate" site without the business owner even knowing what happened.
It's unfair.
It stifles speech, and it can easily be used by competitors to hurt the free market.
There's more than just pirated movies here.
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