Setting it up to transparently proxy the DNS is something that's ridiculously easy to do. More than that, it'd probably cut out more than 90% of the pirate traffic. Sure, it's not 100%. Blocking out 100% is nearly impossible with the way the 'net is designed. But 90% is better than zero.
The only problem with your theory is that it's not going to take very much time at all for a solution to be worked out. You spent a whole paragraph criticizing my solution for being "hard" to implement, yet completely missed the part where I suggested that it was only a matter of time before OpenDNS & friends come up with an encrypted solution of their own.
and an ISP that doesn't deprioritize encrypted traffic
Even if your ISP does "deprioritize" encrypted traffic, that's not going to make that much of a dent to a encrypted DNS solution. DNS queries don't exactly suck up huge amounts of bandwidth. Unless they decided to start blocking encrypted traffic altogether I really fail to see how they could prevent such a solution from being effective. And how would you "deprioritize" it anyway without harming your VPN users?
Civil Law seems to me to guarantee better jurors (as they are learned judges)
Which kinda defeats the point of the "jury of your peers", doesn't it?
Regardless though, I wish people would at least study the reasoning and history behind the common law, even if they later come to prefer civil law. It's an important part of our history and provides great insight into why we have the rights that we do.
I was on a jury before, and I was actually impressed by my fellow jurors.
I'll go one better. I've been judged by a jury of my peers.
Couple years ago I found myself accused of a felony crime that I didn't commit. I wound up testifying at Grand Jury and they eventually decided not to indict me. When I stood before them the DA asked me a series of questions. Afterwards the Grand Jurors themselves got to question me.
The crime in question was a computer crime. The Grand Jurors actually asked intelligent and thoughtful questions. Most of them didn't understand the underlying issues of the case or the evidence that had been presented -- but they went out of their way to find out when they questioned me and for that I am thankful. It would have been ten times easier for them to just issue a rubber stamp for the DA and go home.
I'm sorry, but all the people around here advocating that we get rid of juries are really missing the point. Go study the history of how the common law came about. Read the Magna Carta. Read our constitution. Study our legal traditions. The State shouldn't get to take away your liberty if it can't convince your fellow citizens of the need to do so. The erosion of the right to a trial by jury should scare the hell out of all of us.
As a swede, and proabably speaking for most of us, we laugh at your "justice system" where Don Joe's and the usual hillbillies are supposed to form a "jury". In our country (and I think most of Europe) we don't have juries. We have a justice system with professionals analysing the case and a judge doing the judgement (hence the name 'judge' I suppose).
Laugh all you want, but those "professionals" work for the state, do they not? In Common Law countries it's tradition that the state doesn't get to put you away without convincing a jury of your peers that you did in fact commit the crime in question.
I run my own caching name server (dnsmasq) that draws from a pool of DNS servers (OpenDNS too)
Why not just use the root servers and run a fully recursive nameserver of your own instead of relying on a list of forwarders that may or may not have an agenda?
The only reason my nameserver (BIND) at home isn't fully recursive is because I have full control over a fully recursive server (at the office) that I can use as a forwarder. If I didn't have that then my server at home would be doing all the legwork for me.
How long before RIAA/MPAA attempts to have said OpenDNS encrypted DNS query service shut down, on the grounds that it facilitates piracy?
Well, I could come back with arguments like "It wouldn't stop piracy, you can do this yourself without OpenDNS", "they'd have no legal basis for that", but such realistic assessments of the situation have never stopped them before.
I guess the best we could hope for is that enough people would become angry enough to donate money to a legal defense fund for OpenDNS. In any case, as long as they are the ones responding to us and not the other way around it's only a matter of time before we win.
That would be very easy to do but it would also be very easy to get around.
I grew tired of Roadrunner's DNS re-direction for failed domains and started running my own DNS server. I configured it use the DNS server at work as a forwarder. It would be a small matter to go one more step and configure an encrypted VPN between my house and the office if my ISP started intercepting my DNS queries and redirecting them to their server.
How long before OpenDNS or equivalent services offer a VPN'ed/encrypted method of getting to their DNS servers? Then all your ISP is going to see is a bunch of connections to IP addresses with no underlying DNS queries.
Trying to block anything using DNS is a complete waste of time unless you intend to whitelist all of your customers traffic and deny anything not in the "approved" list.
It's not unconstitutional just because you don't happen to like it.
If you really think that the DoE is unconstitutional then why don't you put your money where your mouth is and sue the Federal Government over it? I'm sure your arguments will win over the judges in your district court.
A couple of years ago I dropped into Moscow and traveled up north. I am now allowed to travel around in a way that I am no longer allowed to travel around the US. Some irony there.
Um, with respect, maybe you meant to say that it's easier to get INTO Russia now then it is to get INTO the United States? Once you are actually inside of the United States, where did you have problems "traveling around"? There's no restrictions on internal movement in this country. Airports have become a pain in the ass but that ends after the TSA security line.
If any of their employees had asked just one of the guys why he was carrying a knife, he might have started sweating the question enough to raise a flag or two.
Ah, but then we'd be "profiling" Islamic-Americans and the ACLU would be having fits. Instead we just make everyones life miserable, including such threats to liberty as disabled WW2 vets in wheelchairs and six month old babies (Could you take your child's shoes off, please?)
I'm as much of a Liberal as anybody but I think we could learn a few things from the Israeli's here. Ask them how many hijackings they've had in the last decade. And they've never asked me to take my shoes off.....
You talked about putting a gun to his head and blowing his brains out, and did it in such a way that you could later claim it was merely an analogy rather than the threat it certainly looked like to me.
I talked about doing physical harm to him and asked if he would have a problem with the subsequent distribution of a videotape of said physical harm. After all, distributing it isn't exactly the problem, now is it?
If you choose to take it as an implied threat then all the power to you. I'll make an actual threat with no room for misunderstanding if you'd like: If I ever found someone distributing kiddie porn of my children or younger siblings/cousins I'd blow their fucking brains out regardless of whether or not they were involved in the production of said porn. The satisfaction would almost be worth the prison term.
Now, it is possible to argue that having pictures of child abuse in public circulation causes the victim continued shame and pain by reminding him of the event
It's not solely about continued shame. Distributing something primarily intended for pleasure or profit that required the harming of another human being to produce is abhorrent. It serves no legitimate purpose and I'll confess to being extremely annoyed to see someone link kiddie porn to a discussion about free speech.
C'mon, do you SERIOUSLY think that kiddie porn should be legal to distribute on the basis that merely distributing it doesn't directly harm anybody?
drawn or computer-generated child porn harms no one
As sick as I might find such material I would oppose a law that sought to outlaw it. Hell, there's some pretty sick shit out there filmed by consenting adults, rape scenes, pretending to be a child, etc, etc. I'm not going to watch any of that but I don't think it should be outlawed.
Actual kiddie porn though? Your "distribution doesn't harm anyone" argument would rightfully cause outrage in the vast majority of people.
BTW. I admire the way you worked the implied threat of violence into your post while still making it deniable if you're confronted about it.
It was an analogy. Nothing more, nothing less. It was no more offensive then the suggestion that kiddie porn itself is harmless. I find it interesting that you can condemn me for making said analogy but you didn't bother to condemn the GP for his assumption that the distribution of kiddie porn harms no one.
Think about why terrorism has the word terror in it. That might make things clearer.
I think his point was that there are a lot of ways to scare people that don't involve civil aviation. If you can manage to get into this country then there are all manner of vulnerable targets that can be attacked.
Shopping malls, schools, hospitals, movie theaters, churches, stadiums, trains, buses, grocery stores, blah, blah, blah, blah. If two punk teenagers can manage to kill 13 people then what do you suppose a handful of terrorists with the same weapons and basic paramilitary training could accomplish? Expand that out and assume you have multiple cells of terrorists preforming similar attacks all over the country at the same time. How do you defend against that? Take away more civil liberties? Close the borders? Where does it end?
My point is that this culture of fear we have created is more harmful then the terrorist threat itself. There will always be a way for terrorists to harm us. For all that fear though, the terrorists themselves can't destroy our way of life. But we can....
creating a widespread fear of flying would be something that would benefit a terrorist
Creating a widespread fear of going to the movies, riding on trains/buses, visiting shopping malls, sending your kids to school or going to sporting events would also benefit a terrorist.
Should we break out the gestapo and start making people take off their shoes to do any of the above mentioned activities? Where does it end? I'm more afraid of my own Government at this point then I am of any terrorists. The worse thing a terrorist can do to me is take away my life. My own Government seems to be working on taking away my freedom. I'm not yet jaded enough to assume that it's by design but that is the end result of all of this.
Anybody around here remember FDR's four freedoms? One of them is "freedom from fear".
*gets dragged away by men in dark suits and shades*
That's a somewhat ironic joke given your choice of signatures;)
You never see Jack Bauer go to the bathroom. That's because nothing escapes Jack Bauer.
As much as I love a good episode of 24, Jack Bauer is the man in the dark suit and shades, willing to abandon any pretense of following the law in order to "protect" us.
Pushing your 'lack of belief' on others is little better then the Christian fundamentalist trying to push his belief on you.
I'm not accusing you specifically of doing that -- but many Atheists seem to be on a mission to "save" the world from religion and I personally find that to be very offensive. And I'm not even a particularly religious person!
Notice how when we have nut jobs in the US we identify them as a minority of the people. Whacko guy blowing up federal buildings? Minority! Nut job pedophile priest? Minority! Speaking out against flag burning? Minority! White supremacists, racists and KKK? Minority! Jew haters, and perpetrators of hate crimes against homosexuals, Arabs, etc.? Minority!
None of those examples you provided, with the possible exception of the flag burning stuff find anywhere near the level of support that Muslim extremists do. Go ask 100 Americans what they think of any of those actions. Then go find 100 people on the street in Damascus or Gaza and ask them what they thought of the suicide bomber that blew up a pizzeria full of civilians.
Part of that is attributable to the geninue injustice in the middle east. If I was a Muslim youth and grew up in a refugee camp that was periodically raided/bombed by Israel I'd be pretty pissed off too. That said, they would have done a lot better for their cause if they had kept it in the context of a struggle of self-determination/freedom instead of making it into a holy war.
Somehow the United States and India managed to obtain their independence without blowing up women and children in London. Mind telling me what is stopping the Palestinians from trying the approach of Mandela or Gandhi instead of resorting to violence against civilians? It would go a long way towards ending the stereotypical image of the Islamic terrorist and help people to realize that there is actually a legitimate gripe underlying most of this violence.
Atheists see religious faith as inherently dangerous, and I'm sure that Theists see Atheism as dangerous, too.
They can see it however they want. My personal viewpoint is that the only thing that's dangerous about atheism or theism are the adherents of both philosophies that seek to impose their views on other people.
The production of kiddie porn might harm another human being, but the porn itself harms no one. You could make a thousand copies of a picture and distribute it to a thousand people and no one would be harmed.
By that logic I could film myself blowing your head off with my trusty.357 and distribute it around the world without harming anyone.
Care to volunteer? I bet it would be big on Youtube.
Slashdot Mirror
Umm, both America and Europe now. Maybe it's time to refresh the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants?
The only problem with your theory is that it's not going to take very much time at all for a solution to be worked out. You spent a whole paragraph criticizing my solution for being "hard" to implement, yet completely missed the part where I suggested that it was only a matter of time before OpenDNS & friends come up with an encrypted solution of their own.
and an ISP that doesn't deprioritize encrypted trafficEven if your ISP does "deprioritize" encrypted traffic, that's not going to make that much of a dent to a encrypted DNS solution. DNS queries don't exactly suck up huge amounts of bandwidth. Unless they decided to start blocking encrypted traffic altogether I really fail to see how they could prevent such a solution from being effective. And how would you "deprioritize" it anyway without harming your VPN users?
Which kinda defeats the point of the "jury of your peers", doesn't it?
Regardless though, I wish people would at least study the reasoning and history behind the common law, even if they later come to prefer civil law. It's an important part of our history and provides great insight into why we have the rights that we do.
I'll go one better. I've been judged by a jury of my peers.
Couple years ago I found myself accused of a felony crime that I didn't commit. I wound up testifying at Grand Jury and they eventually decided not to indict me. When I stood before them the DA asked me a series of questions. Afterwards the Grand Jurors themselves got to question me.
The crime in question was a computer crime. The Grand Jurors actually asked intelligent and thoughtful questions. Most of them didn't understand the underlying issues of the case or the evidence that had been presented -- but they went out of their way to find out when they questioned me and for that I am thankful. It would have been ten times easier for them to just issue a rubber stamp for the DA and go home.
I'm sorry, but all the people around here advocating that we get rid of juries are really missing the point. Go study the history of how the common law came about. Read the Magna Carta. Read our constitution. Study our legal traditions. The State shouldn't get to take away your liberty if it can't convince your fellow citizens of the need to do so. The erosion of the right to a trial by jury should scare the hell out of all of us.
Laugh all you want, but those "professionals" work for the state, do they not? In Common Law countries it's tradition that the state doesn't get to put you away without convincing a jury of your peers that you did in fact commit the crime in question.
Why not just use the root servers and run a fully recursive nameserver of your own instead of relying on a list of forwarders that may or may not have an agenda?
The only reason my nameserver (BIND) at home isn't fully recursive is because I have full control over a fully recursive server (at the office) that I can use as a forwarder. If I didn't have that then my server at home would be doing all the legwork for me.
I find it highly unlikely.
Well, I could come back with arguments like "It wouldn't stop piracy, you can do this yourself without OpenDNS", "they'd have no legal basis for that", but such realistic assessments of the situation have never stopped them before.
I guess the best we could hope for is that enough people would become angry enough to donate money to a legal defense fund for OpenDNS. In any case, as long as they are the ones responding to us and not the other way around it's only a matter of time before we win.
Nothing worth doing or fighting for is ever easy.
That would be very easy to do but it would also be very easy to get around.
I grew tired of Roadrunner's DNS re-direction for failed domains and started running my own DNS server. I configured it use the DNS server at work as a forwarder. It would be a small matter to go one more step and configure an encrypted VPN between my house and the office if my ISP started intercepting my DNS queries and redirecting them to their server.
How long before OpenDNS or equivalent services offer a VPN'ed/encrypted method of getting to their DNS servers? Then all your ISP is going to see is a bunch of connections to IP addresses with no underlying DNS queries.
Trying to block anything using DNS is a complete waste of time unless you intend to whitelist all of your customers traffic and deny anything not in the "approved" list.
It's not unconstitutional just because you don't happen to like it.
If you really think that the DoE is unconstitutional then why don't you put your money where your mouth is and sue the Federal Government over it? I'm sure your arguments will win over the judges in your district court.
Um, with respect, maybe you meant to say that it's easier to get INTO Russia now then it is to get INTO the United States? Once you are actually inside of the United States, where did you have problems "traveling around"? There's no restrictions on internal movement in this country. Airports have become a pain in the ass but that ends after the TSA security line.
Ah, but then we'd be "profiling" Islamic-Americans and the ACLU would be having fits. Instead we just make everyones life miserable, including such threats to liberty as disabled WW2 vets in wheelchairs and six month old babies (Could you take your child's shoes off, please?)
I'm as much of a Liberal as anybody but I think we could learn a few things from the Israeli's here. Ask them how many hijackings they've had in the last decade. And they've never asked me to take my shoes off.....
Ya know, you make it harder for us to be taken seriously when you make statements like that, right?
Things are pretty bad right now, but they've been worse in the past. They will get better soon.
You might try reading the constitution before you make such pronouncements. Ever heard of the 'General Welfare' clause?
Put all of your data in plain text "configuration" files encoded into base64 and accessed via php scripts ;)
C'mon, they are just trying to help you to be more efficient on CPU and RAM resources.
I talked about doing physical harm to him and asked if he would have a problem with the subsequent distribution of a videotape of said physical harm. After all, distributing it isn't exactly the problem, now is it?
If you choose to take it as an implied threat then all the power to you. I'll make an actual threat with no room for misunderstanding if you'd like: If I ever found someone distributing kiddie porn of my children or younger siblings/cousins I'd blow their fucking brains out regardless of whether or not they were involved in the production of said porn. The satisfaction would almost be worth the prison term.
It's not solely about continued shame. Distributing something primarily intended for pleasure or profit that required the harming of another human being to produce is abhorrent. It serves no legitimate purpose and I'll confess to being extremely annoyed to see someone link kiddie porn to a discussion about free speech.
C'mon, do you SERIOUSLY think that kiddie porn should be legal to distribute on the basis that merely distributing it doesn't directly harm anybody?
drawn or computer-generated child porn harms no oneAs sick as I might find such material I would oppose a law that sought to outlaw it. Hell, there's some pretty sick shit out there filmed by consenting adults, rape scenes, pretending to be a child, etc, etc. I'm not going to watch any of that but I don't think it should be outlawed.
Actual kiddie porn though? Your "distribution doesn't harm anyone" argument would rightfully cause outrage in the vast majority of people.
BTW. I admire the way you worked the implied threat of violence into your post while still making it deniable if you're confronted about it.It was an analogy. Nothing more, nothing less. It was no more offensive then the suggestion that kiddie porn itself is harmless. I find it interesting that you can condemn me for making said analogy but you didn't bother to condemn the GP for his assumption that the distribution of kiddie porn harms no one.
I think his point was that there are a lot of ways to scare people that don't involve civil aviation. If you can manage to get into this country then there are all manner of vulnerable targets that can be attacked.
Shopping malls, schools, hospitals, movie theaters, churches, stadiums, trains, buses, grocery stores, blah, blah, blah, blah. If two punk teenagers can manage to kill 13 people then what do you suppose a handful of terrorists with the same weapons and basic paramilitary training could accomplish? Expand that out and assume you have multiple cells of terrorists preforming similar attacks all over the country at the same time. How do you defend against that? Take away more civil liberties? Close the borders? Where does it end?
My point is that this culture of fear we have created is more harmful then the terrorist threat itself. There will always be a way for terrorists to harm us. For all that fear though, the terrorists themselves can't destroy our way of life. But we can....
Creating a widespread fear of going to the movies, riding on trains/buses, visiting shopping malls, sending your kids to school or going to sporting events would also benefit a terrorist.
Should we break out the gestapo and start making people take off their shoes to do any of the above mentioned activities? Where does it end? I'm more afraid of my own Government at this point then I am of any terrorists. The worse thing a terrorist can do to me is take away my life. My own Government seems to be working on taking away my freedom. I'm not yet jaded enough to assume that it's by design but that is the end result of all of this.
Anybody around here remember FDR's four freedoms? One of them is "freedom from fear".
That's a somewhat ironic joke given your choice of signatures ;)
You never see Jack Bauer go to the bathroom. That's because nothing escapes Jack Bauer.As much as I love a good episode of 24, Jack Bauer is the man in the dark suit and shades, willing to abandon any pretense of following the law in order to "protect" us.
You've completely missed my point.
Pushing your 'lack of belief' on others is little better then the Christian fundamentalist trying to push his belief on you.
I'm not accusing you specifically of doing that -- but many Atheists seem to be on a mission to "save" the world from religion and I personally find that to be very offensive. And I'm not even a particularly religious person!
I don't remember saying that you were were part of the vocal minority that I was referring to.
None of those examples you provided, with the possible exception of the flag burning stuff find anywhere near the level of support that Muslim extremists do. Go ask 100 Americans what they think of any of those actions. Then go find 100 people on the street in Damascus or Gaza and ask them what they thought of the suicide bomber that blew up a pizzeria full of civilians.
Part of that is attributable to the geninue injustice in the middle east. If I was a Muslim youth and grew up in a refugee camp that was periodically raided/bombed by Israel I'd be pretty pissed off too. That said, they would have done a lot better for their cause if they had kept it in the context of a struggle of self-determination/freedom instead of making it into a holy war.
Somehow the United States and India managed to obtain their independence without blowing up women and children in London. Mind telling me what is stopping the Palestinians from trying the approach of Mandela or Gandhi instead of resorting to violence against civilians? It would go a long way towards ending the stereotypical image of the Islamic terrorist and help people to realize that there is actually a legitimate gripe underlying most of this violence.
They can see it however they want. My personal viewpoint is that the only thing that's dangerous about atheism or theism are the adherents of both philosophies that seek to impose their views on other people.
By that logic I could film myself blowing your head off with my trusty .357 and distribute it around the world without harming anyone.
Care to volunteer? I bet it would be big on Youtube.