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Coders Develop Ways To Defeat SOPA Censorship
Hugh Pickens writes "The Atlantic reports that one developer who doesn't have much faith in Congress making the right decision on anti-piracy legislation has already built a workaround for the impending censorship measures being considered, and called it DeSOPA. Since SOPA would block specific domain names (e.g. www.thepiratebay.com) of allegedly infringing sites, T Rizk's Firefox add-on allows you to revert to the bare internet protocol (IP) address (e.g. 194.71.107.15) which takes you to the same place. 'It could be that a few members of Congress are just not tech savvy and don't understand that it is technically not going to work, at all,' says T Rizk. 'So here's some proof that I hope will help them err on the side of reason and vote SOPA down.' Another group called 'MAFIAAFire' decided to respond when Homeland Security's ICE unit started seizing domain names, by coding a browser add-on to redirect the affected websites to their new domains. More than 200,000 people have already installed the add-on. ICE wasn't happy, and asked Mozilla to pull the add-on from their site. Mozilla denied the request, arguing that this type of censorship may threaten the open Internet."
So it's like MafiaaFire/FireIce for SOPA, just like a little custom HOSTS file in the form of a browser addon.
Technically not brilliant but a good political move, to demonstrate the futility of this legislation.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Honestly, there really is no way to stop people from getting around every roadblock you put down. Walls can only stretch so far. The only way to prevent them from doing what they want is to either destroy the internet or kill everyone in the country. The first could even be worked around with possibly WiFi meshes or usb drop locations.
If the government decides to do the second, well, can't exactly get around that when you're dead.
"So here's some proof that I hope will help them err on the side of reason and vote SOPA down"
Eh... no. If the war against drugs/piracy/terrorism has taught us anything, it is that if the law makers were made to understand that it won't work, they would just try more draconian measures.
By all means, petition them in terms of freedom of speech, cost or restricting innovation, arguing that "The more you tighten your grip, the more star systems will slip through" will simply make them tighten their grip further.
Nothing prevents a plugin from sending additional HTTP headers (e.g. the Host: header) once the TCP connection has been established to the IP address. No DNS intervention is needed for this.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
The lawyers.
Congress has more resources, but when it comes down to it, who ends up doing all the technical work? The geeks.
I hope it doesn't come down to it, but let the geeks implement exactly what the law requires/dictates. As the summary already indicates, the whole intent of the law has been circumvented with trivial workarounds. Pirates end up essentially unaffected and go on pirating, but the internet in general ends up dealing with the consequences when YouTube, Facebook, et al end up blocked/banned/hijacked.
Yes it is possible to get around these countermeasures, but it will not be easy and probably result in a significant decrease in transmission speeds (sending and receiving). And when these techniques become widely known, they will be blocked in turn.
In short, this legislation will break the Internet. Laughing at the dumb politicians who don't understand technology is a dangerous thing to do because there are no simple workarounds that will keep the Internet working the way we know it if this passes.
This legislation, combined with the recent domain seizures by ICS, highlights a weakness in the current DNS system: it's far too centralized and way too subject to censorship by governments. Rather than individual, browser-based workarounds, we need a completely new DNS system that is based on some form of distributed computing and lacks a central point of failure. Given the presence of existing protocols like BitTorrent, Tor, and Bitcoin, this should be possible to do.
After all, there are only so many combinations of notes
Yeah, have you worked out just how many? Assuming 4 bars of quarter notes and using one chromatic octave (12 notes) and rests: 665,416,609,183,179,841 permutations. And that's only tiny proportion of all realistic possibilities.
Brain surgery - it's not rocket science!
How can they make a DNS server illegal?
By passing a law? That's how anything becomes illegal.
Every site on the internet is threatened by this legislation.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Soon it will be illegal to own a computer.
... or use a tool which hardcodes it in the 's hosts ....
That "tool" would be called a text editor, or Notepad, for those of you not computer literate.
--- Keep the choice with the user..