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Records Labels Prepare Massive 'Pirate Site' Domain Blocking Blitz
An anonymous reader writes "In their ongoing battle against websites said to infringe music copyrights, record labels have initiated a fresh wave of actions aimed at forcing UK ISPs to carry out domain blocking. This third wave is set to be the biggest so far, affecting as many as 25 domains and including some of the world's largest torrent sites and file-hosting search engines. Furthermore, the BPI – the entity coordinating the action – will ask courts to block U.S.-based music streaming operation, Grooveshark."
Domain blocking has been so successful already. No one will figure out how to use alternative DNS servers, or simply type in the IP address manually.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
The tighter they grasp, the more slips through their fingers
While I hope the labels and all their executive die horrible deaths, copyright is rather international. So it's not just "American" companies with a stake in the game.
My wallet is going on a record label blocking blitz
Life sure is funny sometimes.
crazy dynamite monkey
That's where the easy downloading comes from.
http://www.amazon.com/Pirate-Cinema-Cory-Doctorow/dp/0765329093
Interestingly enough, it also happens in UK...
morcego
Yeah, I know implementing an alternate DNS root isn't easy or it would have been done by now. Still, it's a week point that is vulnerable corrupt legal systems that are influenced by money.
Perhaps you could create a scheme that serves up websites based the browser request (Sort of like how you can have multiple domains point to one IP with HTTP 1.1) Some sort of service could then pass the request to a rootless, peer to peer distributed name service with no central authority. Yeah, that sounds messy, but perhaps claiming a name could revolve around some sort of bitcoin style "mining" service. That would help prevent mass registration and squatting (At least to an extent)
It's not a complete idea, but if thought out properly you might be able to create a sort of name root that would work without any modification to existing DNS clients.)(Though would probably require some clever DNS trickery/standard abuse)
Ya... I'd hate you too, considering the summary clearly states that this is in the UK and the states don't block any domains as far as I know (we take them down).
Once again SUCKMERICAN Companies forcing there rules and ways upon everyone else, kinda like abortion rights, copyrights, nuclear power/weapons. And yet we wonder why the world hates SUCKMERICA and attacks us at every chance. When you force your will upon someone that doesn't want or need it then you create enemies and people that hate us.
Surprisingly, this isn't the RIAA or MPAA this time. Read the article to find out what the "B" in "BPI" stands for. :)
implying piracy isn't news for nerds
This is yet another ridiculous situation, stupid enough that it makes me wonder why such situations exist.
If a website is illegal (for any definition of illegal, including terrorism, pornography, and IP violations), then it should be judged illegal by a court in country with reference to the specific law that the site violates. That country can then mandate that ISPs in that country block that specific website, the government can ask the government of the registrar or hosting company to take action, the government can identify people who access the site and charge them with a crime.
Illegal is illegal, but this thing about "anyone can take action if they think something is illegal" is ludicrous. Letting business advocacy groups, unelected government bureaucrats, and random government departments to suddenly state "we're the governing authority, this is illegal, we're pulling your plug" is complete bullshit. Government departments can certainly make such pronouncements, but should be required to act only with court approval. For instance, if the State Department wants Defense Distributed to take their plans offline, it should get a court order.
The courts exist to protect our rights. Taking action without judicial process is an end-run around those rights, and shouldn't be allowed.
Bullshit?
That's such a good idea that I bet someone else already thought of it.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
There aren't enough of you for a boycott to make any difference.
Besides, they've already presumed that if you're not buying, it is because you're infringing.
I'd be happy with just summaries that English.
For now.
But eventually they will do what they always do. They will think 'lets raise the price'. Suddenly people find they can live without it. For the first time in 30+ years of cable TV their viewership went down. That is for 3 years straight now.
They will find the gp and say hey what do you watch/read/listen to you have been doing this awhile. He will have a long list of stuff.
Went to the movies a few weeks ago on a lark (first time in nearly 5 years). 45 bucks for a bucket of popcorn 2 pops and 2 tickets and 30 mins of commercials before it started. That is not cheap. The theater was un-surprisingly nearly empty. People are really voting with their wallets. But only because the cost is high. Same with CD sales 10 years ago (oh look 18 bucks for 1 cd, cheaper now). Same with cable TV. These guys are over pricing themselves for the value they return.
The worst problem with the central server approach is not squatting, that is a minor annoyance to some people's vanity. The worst problem with the central server is that it is a central server, and thus is vulnerable to whomever has juristiction over the physical location it resides in. However, a peer-to-peer solution (as they look right now) is much worse. There are two major problems with a P2P approach to DNS, that you don't have with the central server.
1) Privacy: when requesting a lookup, you're telling an arbitrary number of strangers which site you would like to visit next. With the server, you're only telling the server, but this is a trust issue and can be resolved. The P2P approach by it's nature cannot be trusted.
2) Poisoning: all you'd have to do to poison a swarm is join it, and start pushing bogus replies to requests. There is no barrier like with a central DNS server, which you'd have to hack into in order to poison.
An approach like you suggest is a central DNS server in disguise and not really a solution to any problem, since you get the worst of both worlds.
... whatever
its those who buy their shit. Stop buying it and in 5 years they`ll all fold.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
The problem with that is that they can "presume" all they want, but they still have less money coming in. Granted, it doesn't address the aforementioned issue of needing a critical mass of participants for the boycott to be successful, but the mere act of assuming a given cause for a reduced revenue stream doesn't magically restore the revenue stream to previous levels.
Help protect civil rights from abuse by the TSA - visit TSA News Blog.
http://www.tsanewsblog.com
So long as even a single search engine exists, these labels are just wasting everyone's time.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
I think they will have a hell of a time domain-blocking YouTube. It's trivial to grab all kinds of stuff there.
"He's lost in a 'floyd hole"
Like you can't get a perfectly usable VPS in Russia, Hong Kong, The Netherlands or lots of other places for around €10 a month or less
The way the record industry is trying to eliminate piracy, is a lot like trying to eliminate a roach problem by squishing each of them individually. They need to eliminate the food source... If they just find a way to turn off the internet, they can fulfill their lifelong goal of providing CD's again for consumers to enjoy...
BPI = UK mouthpiece for RIAA global agendas
Alternate DNS servers? I live in Belgium where they block (among others) TPB, so I just run my own.
OK, I am able to configure my own named server. What is needed for others is an idiot proof DNS server that people can run on their local machine (so no remote connections allowed).
And I talk about so easy, your grandma can install it and it runs by just double clicking. Something that is made for just local usage with as little configuration as possible. No need to be able to make any local domains. Just something so you do not need an external DNS server.
Perhaps that already exists and it is just not commonly known.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
I stopped pirating music years ago. I use rdio now... $10/month for (almost) all the music I want.
I figured pirating music would have more-or-less disappeared by now.
1) Privacy: when requesting a lookup, you're telling an arbitrary number of strangers which site you would like to visit next. With the server, you're only telling the server, but this is a trust issue and can be resolved. The P2P approach by it's nature cannot be trusted.
This can be solved easily, in exchange for some extra latency, by using onion routing, like Tor, Freenet, or I2P. Requests are encrypted end-to-end and routed through intermediate nodes. No single node (apart from the requester) is aware of both the origin and the content of the request at the same time.
2) Poisoning: all you'd have to do to poison a swarm is join it, and start pushing bogus replies to requests. There is no barrier like with a central DNS server, which you'd have to hack into in order to poison.
Namecoin solves this by associating each domain with a public key. You have to have the corresponding private key to create a reply anyone will accept, or to transfer the domain to someone else's key.
Namecoin doesn't include onion routing natively, but you can run the client over Tor or I2P to get the best of both worlds.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
To protect their copyrights, they think they have the right to infringe on Constitutional rights of free speech.
The corporations have partnered with government (Definition of Fascism). Those elected officials ignore their oath of office to support and defend the Constitution of the United States. Adding insult to injury, the courts provided those corporations the same rights that were intended for individuals, and provided those corporations immunity from civil and legal actions in many cases.
The people, having no other legal recourse, are likely to start responding with military force.
They can't stop the internet without hurting themselves and a lot of other legitimate business. And continuing to sue customers? Is it really working out for them? Perhaps all the settlements which never reach the news does make it all worthwhile.
What little [music downloading/sharing] there is going on now can't really be worth the effort in my opinion. There are lots and lots of paying customers out there. I seriously doubt the "bad guys" even come close to the numbers of legitimate customers. They should be paying marketers to improve the number of customers instead of lawyers to leech off of people who don't have money to spend.
A toast to the ghost who can boast the most HOSTS.
Of course not, but they'll just put it on the powerpoint they present to lawmakers about how piracy is hitting their bottom line.
I don't think they should die horrible deaths I think they should probably just stop being assholes. I used to pirate like a mother fucker I had TBs of movies, comics, and music on my drive. At one point I think I had 300gigs of comics. But I liked owning them so slowly all of that content was bought over time. I honestly don't think I would have got back into comics so hard if it hadn't been for piracy. My music collection would be half of what it is now too. I pretty much stopped watching movies besides going to the theater for that experiance.
Piracy has led me to be one of the biggest content purchases of people i know... who weren't themselves pirates at one time. It gets to a point when you get older that you realize you have the income that you just can't justify downloading it anymore and would prefer to have the vinyl or CD with the inserts laying around. I like holding and posting my comics on the wall in my study.
I get why they want to stop the hemorrhaging of pirated content and to be honest going after the websites to me makes much more sense than attacking content users. I just think there has to be a better way to get users to come download/stream legal content. So I can sympathize with these assholes in some respects but I don't think they understand why people think they are dicks. They go about this totally the wrong way. If this was all that the RIAA and their international equivalent oragnizations had done then I wouldn't be upset but it isn't. It's their total disregard for potential customers. They don't seem to care what we want. They don't seem to understand that maybe we would buy more if we weren't so mad at the industry. How upsetting it is that organization like this want to DRM everything to the point that used material is no longer legal.
It's sickening and disgusting but I don't think they should die.
All you movie and recording companies are obsolete and utterly worthless relics of a dead era. Just shut up, you thieving scum. You have nothing to say worth listening to. Nobody wants you. Nobody needs you. Just go away.
JUST SHUT UP AND DROP DEAD.
It's not only about the copyrighted information. It's also about public domain, and GNU like, or MIT like licenses. It's about the free flow of information. Copyright is just convenient for them to attack means of distributing information freely.
The best way I can prop up this argument is to point out VCRs. VCRs were hardly used on the scale that torrents are to commit mass copyright infringement.
Yet VCRs, 8 tracks, casettes where all targeted. Libaries were targeted. And with libraries, the works were being payed for and not distributed "freely" to anyone.
1) Tor is not a peer-to-peer approach. It does not remove the central server, it only makes the routers individually unaware of the contents of a package. You still have to serve replies from a central server subject to a jurisdiction (the problem we were pretending we could solve). Tor works if you wish to obscure who wants what, but it is still an overlay to the client-server paradigm.
2) Assuming we buy the premise that BitCoins are a good idea and we'd want to use those for our domains in the future, there are a couple of issues with this approach aswell. For starters, it still does not get rid of the server, it just verifies that the reply is correct for a domain. There are a number of other solutions that will do this without getting the convoluted Bitcoin philosophy involved.
... whatever
YouTube has licensing. The vast majority of songs, especially new ones, are released onto YouTube by the record labels themselves, free for everyone to enjoy unless you happen to live in a country with its own brand of insanity (GEMA in German, for example) or they have a branch in your country and they agreed that that branch would have to upload it instead. Keep in mind that record labels have flooded YouTube with DMCA requests before after negotiations broke down and they removed their videos;
http://news.slashdot.org/story/08/12/21/1710249/warner-music-pulls-videos-off-youtube
Perhaps a bit more timely, remember the story of a Windows Phone app, by Microsoft, which allowed users to download the videos, strips ads, and allows users to view videos on devices that the uploader has specified they shouldn't be viewable on?
http://mobile.slashdot.org/story/13/05/11/0041224/microsoft-youtube-app-strips-ads-adds-download
Well, Google wants that app yanked right the beep now.
http://www.theverge.com/2013/5/15/4334030/google-demands-microsoft-remove-youtube-windows-phone-app
YouTube themselves aren't fond of people 'grabbing' things, and their legal department could probably do without the legitimate DMCA takedown requests in addition to the not-so-legitimate ones if for whatever reason the record labels didn't renew any agreements and went back to filing those instead. The current audio recognition stuff would probably be bumped up to just keep even more of the record labels' material from being uploaded in the first place, and there'd be little reason to having to block YouTube.
As it is, though, most people I know don't even 'grab' things from YouTube, let alone trying to find them on a 'pirate' website (even though it's not that hard) - they just look up the song on their phone and listen to it streaming from YouTube directly.. and that's just the ones who haven't gone with Spotify yet / buy the tracks on iTunes or Amazon or 7digital or, etc.
Thanks for wonderful list of torrent sites.
work in progress
1) Tor is not a peer-to-peer approach. It does not remove the central server, it only makes the routers individually unaware of the contents of a package. You still have to serve replies from a central server subject to a jurisdiction (the problem we were pretending we could solve). Tor works if you wish to obscure who wants what, but it is still an overlay to the client-server paradigm.
Yes, but good luck finding out what that jurisdiction is, at least they don't seem to have much luck in locating and shutting down hidden services. If you only really need a DNS name that'll stay constant and that doesn't need to be "easy" then the onion system would be just fine, you own them by virtue of owning the private key and they all look like ebiueabv35rwas.onion. Unlike an IP you can move the key around and run your site from any box you want, which is the most essential part of DNS. You probably won't type it up but if you find it on some web page somewhere and bookmark it you'll have it.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
1) Tor is not the only option for onion routing. I2P implements the same general idea and supports peer-to-peer protocols (including BitTorrent, Gnutella, and a P2P e-mail system known as I2P-Bote). Tor would work in a technical sense, but each user would have to manually configure up a hidden (.onion) service for other users to connect to, which may be a bit much to expect. With I2P this is the default configuration. Also, Namecoin already has working I2P integration.
2) The Namecoin approach is just one way to solve the poisoning problem. If you know of another way to assign meaningful names to specific users which doesn't involve some central authority choosing who gets which name, feel free to share it. So far as I know, Namecoin is the only truly peer-to-peer domain name system in active use. Note that Namecoin is not Bitcoin, despite being based on a similar low-level protocol, and there is certainly no "philosophy" involved beyond the desire for a free, open, secure, and peer-to-peer system for associating data with domain names.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
This should be enough to get some decent anti-BPI-censorship sites up which can list the blocked sites, list all known proxies with user ratings, provide information on how to circumvent the blocks, and possibly accept donations (hopefully with a Bitcoin option).
Right now the BPI have blocked 4 or 5 sites (I think) and I find myself searching for mirrors for the blocked sites as I need them by hand.
Oh, and an easy way of linking to decent mirrors rather than blocked sites automatically (making Google searches for torrents more effective) would be great.
Fighting file-sharing is kind of like "sand proofing" a house in a desert.
"SO we bide our time, waiting for a purer kick to bloom and the future is still bleak, uncertain and beautiful" -GSYBE
Let's see you try to stop THAT, you parasitic Jews.
Won't happen. Can't happen. You'd have to somehow change the mindset of millions of people who like and buy the stuff they sell (giving them more money and influence in the process). The actions of these companies are not widely known except for tech sites, so again, nothing will happen. They've been behaving like dicks for YEARS, and are still hugely profitable.
I2P certainly will not solve the problem, because onion routing was never an answer to the question asked. Onion routing helps protect privacy, and I2P does so by erecting a network within the network. In order to go "outside" you need an outproxy (and it is explicitly stated that you would need to put a great deal of trust in this proxy). Once you're at the outproxy, everything functions as normal - meaning the problem is still there, all you've done is add a layer of complexity for a part of the route from the client to the server.
The bitcoin philosophy I'm referring to is the one that has you expend CPU cycles to store "coins" in order to spend these "coins" on actions within the protocol. That is how Namecoin works, you save up coins and spend them on registering your domain, updating or transfering. Or did you not read past the hype when you googled it? But no, I don't know of a way to make P2P DNS work, that was the whole point. There really is none, and with that I'm fully aware that I'm discounting Namecoin as an option, because well, it's ridiculous.
... whatever
and in 5 years they'll all have paid for a law to allow them to deduct 'compensation' directly from your salary.
FTFY
and in 5 years they'll all have paid for a law to allow them to deduct 'compensation' directly from your salary.
FTFY
..but they have already won that right.
in my country we have a public broadcasting company. that is now paid from money taxed from everyone directly. that broadcasting company plays music from RIAA(and local equivalent) members and pays them for broadcasting.
of course then there's the bullshit storage media fees etc, but I could avoid storage that is under those.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
they're trying to ban grooveshark which operates directly like youtube technically.
thus, they should block youtube as well..
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
I'm listening to it too.
Taylor Swift Goat Edition
I2P certainly will not solve the problem, because onion routing was never an answer to the question asked. Onion routing helps protect privacy, and I2P does so by erecting a network within the network. In order to go "outside" you need an outproxy (and it is explicitly stated that you would need to put a great deal of trust in this proxy).
I2P works fine without outproxies; you don't need to communicate outside the I2P network for the scheme to work. While there are a limited number of I2P outproxies for certain protocols (e.g. HTTP), that is not the way it is designed to be used (unlike Tor, where internal .onion sites are the exception).
The bitcoin philosophy I'm referring to is the one that has you expend CPU cycles to store "coins" in order to spend these "coins" on actions within the protocol. That is how Namecoin works, you save up coins and spend them on registering your domain, updating or transfering.
Yes, that is how the system works. Calling it a "philosophy" is a bit ridiculous; it's an engineering solution to the problem of ensuring a consistent linear history of updates to a database shared among a large group of anonymous individual who don't trust each other, which is exactly what you need for a peer-to-peer domain name system. It may not be ideal, but so far it's the only solution anyone's managed to propose which actually works.
But no, I don't know of a way to make P2P DNS work, that was the whole point. There really is none, and with that I'm fully aware that I'm discounting Namecoin as an option, because well, it's ridiculous.
Your personal bias against Bitcoin-like protocols doesn't change the facts: Namecoin is obviously one way to make P2P DNS work. It functions as well as any alternative DNS root system, and is fully peer-to-peer.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
Yeah, I know implementing an alternate DNS root isn't easy or it would have been done by now.
Technically it's quite simple to set up, the trick is to get enough people to co-operate in maintaining the structure without egos and the usual other perils getting in the way. With enough people playing this game, They might get eventually tired of playing whack-a-mole, though that might be wishful thinking on my part.
When i want to have a new domain and dont want anyone to know about it i am using proxy domain registraror like : This domain registrar.