Coders Develop Ways To Defeat SOPA Censorship 449
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."
IP-level blocks (Score:5, Interesting)
Now the race begins (Score:4, Interesting)
Or maybe now we'll see the race to buy "easy" IP addresses. "Visit us at 12.34.56.78".
Now, thinking again, that could actually halt the long-awaited migration to IPv6. Who'd like to see an ad like "find our products at http://200147023aef0/ [200147023aef0]. Please remember the square brackets or you won't reach our website. And the double colon between 470 and 23. Unless you want to fill the omitted zeroes."
Re:IP-level blocks (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't know why sites threatened by this legislation don't already have a darknet presence, what are they waiting for? They should have .i2p and .onion sites online by now.
Re:Congress vs the world's 10-million geek army... (Score:5, Interesting)
Congress. Because they have more resources and weapons at their disposal than all the geeks in the world combined.
Here, let me give you another example. Do you know why the Berlin Wall fell? No, it wasn't because Reagan gave a speech at the Brandenburger Gate. Or because he managed to fool the USSR into bankrupting itself. It was because when push came to shove, Honecker and Krenz refused to shoot their own people on a scale similar to what China, North Korea or Syria did.
Oppressive regimes only fall if they're forcibly removed from power, or if they decide that there's a threshold of violence they won't cross.
Re:Firefox Plugin (Score:3, Interesting)
Switching browser due to an extension which hackishly has a static hosts file seems kinda odd for a tech site.
Re:Who didn't see this coming? (Score:4, Interesting)
Point is not to prevent every single person. Just enough of them to kill momentum.
Point is to make it too bothersome for average person. Which this particular countermeasure is - it is hard enough explain how to torrents downloaded in ideal conditions.
The fact is that it can very easily switch even geeks. I seriously do not want to waste time researching latest blocking techniques and some more time geting around them.
If stuff behind lock was something i would not really want to spend money on, i do not bother getting it for "free" anymore anyway. If it is something that matters, actually buying it sounds much more economic.
Also, it helps to realize that world does not owe you free shit.
Shattered Net (Score:5, Interesting)
I suspected someone would do this since they were basing blocking on domain. essentially SOPA will kill DNS.
people will begin passing raw addresses/ports to each other and you will end up with another dark-net, one where there are no domain names or to access it you have to get a hold of a domain file for a plug in.
soon there will be sites dedicated to the pirate DNS then there will be assholes who distribute bad DNS files leading to pages with drive by attacks. peges will be fighting over their old domain names since there will be no registrar for this dark net.
this security issue will likely push the P2P DNS efforts already in place.
Re:How Is This an Add-On? (Score:4, Interesting)
Heh... I was actually musing about how to do this with music. After all, there are only so many combinations of notes - why not have computer programs just generating all possible single measures, then all possible combinations of those measures, and publishing them all online with a claimed copyright? (In the US at least, you don't have to spend money to register a work to obtain a copyright - you actually inherently have the copyright. Registering does have benefits though - but it's not required.)
Essentially, beat them at their own game. (And at the same time prove the silliness of it all. You could probably do the same with works of text as well by using a grammar generator to get legitimate sentences.)
Re:Yeah, because that worked so well in China. (Score:5, Interesting)
You misunderstand. I wasn't saying that generic Internet access is impossible in those countries. Even porn in countries like Iran isn't something that's hard to get. What is really, really hard to get is an Internet connection that won't prompt the visits of various burly men in street clothes if you decide to talk about how much better the country would be under a new political system.
VPN proxies are nice, but are the first things to be stopped when things get hairy (and yes, I also have friends in the countries I listed - except NK).
Finally, you are also operating under the assumption that countries won't be able to cooperate on these matters. Look at the US: it's implementing the same technologies that the most repressive countries are implementing. Yes, the goals are still somewhat different, but I can guarantee you that once these legal structures are available in all countries, the Internet will not be able to route around damage, because the damage will be applied to the entire Internet.
Read Lessig's book Code is Law. It makes the interesting observation that code is law - and that consequently, law is code.
The only alternatives will be encrypted darknets, private nets and other things, but those are not the Internet anymore.
Re:Good old hosts.txt (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Who didn't see this coming? (Score:5, Interesting)
That was the second goal of copyright when it was written. After a fixed period of time, art goes into the public domain.
Re:How Is This an Add-On? (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, but only so many of those combinations "sound good" - you can probably algorithmically eliminate ones that would make no sense. After all, the goal would be to "protect" the good music, not the "noise."
Rules of music theory are simple enough to dramatically reduce the number of combinations.
(I never said such a thing would be practical, just that it would be theoretically possible. I actually got the idea from the little short story about "society that never forgets" and the unintended consequences of indefinite copyright.)
Re:Good move (Score:5, Interesting)
Back in 2003 I started designing a Gnutella-like network aimed at being HTTP over P2P, effectively. Centralized server, CGI, distributed caching, end-to-end encryption, the works. It was based in domain resolution via named domain registries, with trust by digital signatures (PKI/PGP)--in other words, my idea of "DNS" was "I want the FOO DNS service and the BAR DNS service," and when I put in www.microsoft.com it would find records signed by FOO and BAR (no matter on who has it). These records may differ, so you would be able to use different "networks" (or really, name spaces). A DNS record would more be a digital ID than anything, too: microsoft.com carries with it a digital signature and certificate, and that is used to identify information from them on the network. It's possible to ask that a certain node verify time/datestamp and signature, so you could send out asking for a thing and have a copy coming down from a random node, which is also asking if it's up to date from the main server, as you ask as well--if not, the client drops that out-of-date page and grabs the new one directly, and the cached copy out on the network is dropped.
Maybe it's time I stand up and lead...