Republican bill would order ISPs, DNS providers, and VPNs to block piracy sites
Ars Technica
Republican bill would order ISPs, DNS providers, and VPNs to block piracy sites
Bill would help rightsholders obtain court orders to block foreign piracy sites.
It’s funny how many rules there’s made by the party who always talk about freedom.
They only want the freedom to be able drain the bank accounts of their cattle constituents into the bank accounts of the oligarchs who own them.
And who’s going to block all the freely available DNS servers, proxies and also TOR? 😆
That’s just another piece of bullshit legislature to enact censorship measures in the name of some seemingly legit reason. You will never actually get rid of piracy sites with local ISP and DNS blocks. But the moment there is a procedure to easily make them happen, they can indeed be used to block the not tech-affine majority of people from news and information they should not see.
The ISPs will do the blocking if ordered and it will catch 99,99% of people. The average person doesn’t know how to use advanced techniques and it’s tricky even for tech savvy people. Using the wrong proxy for example can cause more trouble than it solves. VPNs and custom DNS are also trivial to block. Large-enough corporations can be trivially extempt from peasant blocking.
And I won’t even get into what happens if they criminalize bypassing the blocking and consider it “domestic terrorism”.
It was done in Spain, the right-holders for soccer managed to get themselves in a legal position to tell the ISPs what IPs to block and they issued overly-broad ranges to be blocked. I was in Spain this summer for World Cup and when a match was on you could not reach completely unrelated services in other countries. It’s ridiculous and probably will get reversed in court but it was done, however temporarily, and it works.
Internet censorship is very easy to do, I don’t know why some people tunnel-vision on the fact it’s not perfect. It doesn’t have to be perfect to still be very effective.
That was my actual point. It’s effective for censorship and targeting the broader population. It’s ineffective for preventing piracy as a lot of people there are indeed tech-affine and belonging to the <1% that will go the extra mile to circumvent it.
So implementing provider and dns blocks against piracy is either stupid or an intentional lie. I assume the latter.
I think you’re still missing the finer point. Depending on the punishment (which under an authoritarian regime can be torture in prison or being summarily executed or dissapeared), even a semi-effective block can have a completely chilling effect.
Whether you can or cannot circumvent the block and get your hands on Taylor Swift’s latest album will be the last thing on anybody’s mind. Whether the fascists lie about the efficacy of the block will be irrelevant. They can point at a completely random person and have them shot and say it was because of “piracy”. But you can substitute any word there and it will work the same.
This isn’t a technical problem, it’s a social and political problem.
The finer point is that you are still thinking in terms of authoritarian regimes ruling by force or intimidation. You don’t need to if you can direct the opinion of 90%+ of the population via methods totally unfit to do what they claim they are employed for.
For some very strange reason you seem to be under the impression that I downplay this massive insane censorship measure they try to enact with this bill. I’m not. Quite the contrary I am telling you very plainly that it’s inefficient FOR WHAT THEY CLAIM THE GOAL IS. Because they are lying.
I’m thinking like that because such regimes are always established and maintained through violence. Indimidation is much cheaper, faster and more attainable than convincing 90% of people – which is never going to happen btw, that’s a super high bar. It’s also unnecessary, you can win elections in the US with 28% of the registered votes IIRC.
Let me ask you, does it really matter if people don’t circumvent blocks because they can’t (because the block is effective) or because they won’t (because they fear the consequences)? Either way they’re doing what the regime wants.
I love how the Republicans like to talk shit about China, then turn around and propose their own Great Firewall, cameras on every corner, and so on.
And sure, the Democrats aren’t much better here, but these seem to be pushed more aggressively by the Republicans. Plus, for a party that claims to want less government, it’s very obvious that this goes against their brand.
And non-praising news outlets. But be calm. Not from the start. Eventually. In a year or something…
Finally, I2P’s time to shine.
Yet again they trot out billions in losses for the MPA caused by piracy.
Fuck these assholes, too many idiots in America who choose not to vote or vote for the worst pieces of shit in politics.
Oh it’s more than that.
We gotta start moving stuff to .onion.
Tor has been compromised for a while. Try I2P instead.
malwarebytes.com/…/tor-anonymity-compromised-by-l…
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That law is a bad idea
as opposed to legistlate more important things. the tried this in the 1st term.