DNS Providers as Piracy Fighters?

https://torrentfreak.com/dns-providers-as-piracy-fighters-enforcement-groups-weigh-options-221001/

101 94 4 years ago

BitPirate• 4 years ago

It's obvious why the content industry is cracking down on DNS providers. If they succeed, the most likely outcome is overblocking with platforms like Netflix, Disney & Co on a curated whitelist.

bitwize• 4 years ago

Again, a politically neutral network is a dream of the 90s that isn't even alive in Portland. The network will enforce the will of whomever puts enough political pressure on it.

Test0129• 4 years ago

Same thing happens with firearms yet no one seems to care, or actively promotes, the methods "policy groups" use to strip rights away from citizens. Now, the same tactics are being used here. I suspect many commenters will suggest these cannot be compared but I suggest generalizing a little:

The government and people interested in stopping this sort of thing realize there's no legal easy-button they can press to make it all go away. Firearms won't go away, neither will piracy. But, they can do the next best thing. Inundate the companies in the middle with lawsuits, mostly frivolous in nature, in order to tie up and burn capital and (they hope) bring the demise the companies allegedly "involved" in the "crime". This doubles as something that has a tremendous chilling effect on other related services. It starts with DNS, goes to VPNs, etc. It's so effective the government does not even need to enforce laws to make it happen. All it takes is a little encouragement of the right groups of people and the lawsuits take care of the rest. It is de-facto illegal to do something because the alternative is to be mired in billions of dollars worth of lawsuits for any perceived mistake.

This is why it's so important to support all forms of freedom. The tactic used to bring one to it's knees will be used to stifle other freedoms as well. In this case, they're now coming after information. Use your imagination to figure out what is next.

Roark66• 4 years ago

One could argue this is a fault of the juidicial systems involved. Laws should be written clearly enough for any judge on whose desk such lawsuit lands to throw it out or face ridicule from their peers.

Gordonjcp6• 4 years ago

This is why it's so important to support all forms of freedom.

So you agree we should stop people from having free and easy access to guns?

Because I'm all about the freedom to send my children to school without worrying they're going to get shot.

hnov• 4 years ago

I don’t think children get shot at school often enough for that to be a realistic worry

throwaway0x7E62• 4 years ago

if you agree to my state seceding from the union, sure.

collegeburner6• 4 years ago

you should be more worried about your kid walking by a busy street to and from school.

people have wanted to take our guns for a long time and this is just the latest cause to hang it on. ronald reagan tried it with racism. roosevelt and company tried it with mob violence. this is just the latest excuse.

the_gipsy7• 4 years ago

Nonsense. There is no equivalent of MPAA etc interested in taking away guns - on the contrary, firearms is a billion dollar industry with more than enough lobby power to convince everybody to stock up on guns.

Nice conversation derailer, though.

hoseja2• 4 years ago

Hahaha, totally, People's Republic of Caliphornia totally isn't interested in taking away your guns.

cle2• 4 years ago

I'm not sure what you mean by "equivalent of MPAA", but there are plenty of well-funded anti-gun lobbying groups who fund lawsuits against the gun industry. Brady, Giffords Law Center, and Everytown for Gun Safety are some major ones. But OP was talking broadly about lawsuits, not lobbying groups specifically.

Example: California recently enacted a law to "create a powerful incentive for the firearm industry" by allowing citizens to sue them for "failured to implement 'reasonable' controls", by using a similar mechanism as Texas' bill that enables people to sue doctors who perform abortions.

Senator Portantino: "If Texas can outrageously use this type of law to attack a woman’s reproductive freedom, we can do the same thing in California to hold gun dealers accountable for their actions."

OP said:

The tactic used to bring one to it's knees will be used to stifle other freedoms as well.

Which seems to be exactly what was done in California with its lawsuit legislation that was modeled after Texas'.

I can't help but agree with OP that this is a similar tactic of using lawsuits to bully people into compliance by draining their resources. It's an old tactic, but it's still unjust, regardless of the particular legal issue.

_joel• 4 years ago

Strange.

Sometimes I'm glad I live in the UK (not often, mind)

stockerta• 4 years ago

Yes, looking over to the US the gun fetishism over there is creeping me out. I'm glad we have strict gun ownership. The small number of accidental shootings while hunting is more than enough.

hsbauauvhabzb4• 4 years ago

I would happily trade my dns freedom and piracy for the prevention of school shootings and I don’t even live in America.

hoseja2• 4 years ago

See, I would rather dismantle the school/social system that produces them.

nix234• 4 years ago

I would happily trade my dns freedom and piracy for the prevention of school shootings and I don’t even live in America.

That has nothing to-do with each other.

It's like saying i would happily trade the idea of country's to prevent wars.

For the simpletons it makes sense, for everyone else not.

mistrial92• 4 years ago

this is a stretch but let's assume the post is in good faith, and that the post-writer does care deeply about their issue. The tactics described here do make some sense. It may be that proponents in political-marketing and policy-activism do in fact, plan and execute this kind of thing. But let's be more specific. It is a sophisticated legal action, takes patience to implement in steps over months and years, requires valuable know-how to execute the lawsuits, and for all of those reasons requires funding over time and planning. Let's notice that groups of lawyers are needed for this.. and that groups of lawyers seek paying work. Average active citizens and wage-workers, people with young families, peoples with chronic distress, primary caregivers, lots of others .. can't think of and execute these plans.

This is specialists work and there are a finite number of specialists in even large society. I propose that daylight rules, disclosure of funding and declaration of activity, would do quite a bit to take the threatening nature of this kind of thing away. Let groups work toward their political goals, yes. But in the open.

wing-_-nuts• 4 years ago

The right to bear arms is absolutely not under threat. Gun rights are the strongest they've been in decades, and that will not change until the supreme court drastically changes. Changes to the 2a would take groundswell of political support (super majority in congress or 2/3rds of states ratifying an amendment? but I forget the specifics). Given the political divide in the country, I do not ever expect to see the day. If this law has any teeth I fully expect it to be defanged as soon as they 'break the skin'.

I don't like this; I grew up with guns, but even I find the rabid fetishization of guns to be a sad reflection on our society, but I have precisely zero allusions of any change, any time soon.

collegeburner6• 4 years ago

there's absolutely people pushing for stricter gun laws especially at a state level. things are getting better but have a long way to go, we still have the FOPA, NFA, GCA and tons of other awful laws on the books.

roenxi• 4 years ago

A movie can be several gigabytes of data, an IP is several bytes. I don't like their odds of taking on the DNS system if they can't handle piracy directly. Steganography is a lot easier than learning how to use a torrent client.

witrak• 4 years ago

Next example of spreading costs of defense of interests of a small number of benefactors trying to enforce a business model they prefer over all parties involved in the support of infrastructure used by exactly these benefactors.

avidiax• 4 years ago

There's a pro and con to this.

Pro is, if the rights holders win, it may fan the flames of decentralized naming schemes and alternate roots, and start crystallizing the need for a free internet in people's minds.

Con, of course, is that this is not going to be enough, and the next target is going to be the routers themselves. Your ISP will need to do deep packet inspection like what occurs in India and other countries.

Then that won't be enough, and you'll have to give a root of trust to your ISP, so they can read and censor your encrypted streams.

And all the while, trusted computing will be spreading in the background, stamping out anything not aligned with corporate and government interests.

stingraycharles• 4 years ago

Pro is, if the rights holders win, it may fan the flames of decentralized naming schemes and alternate roots, and start crystallizing the need for a free internet in people's minds.

Hasn’t the main trend of the past few decades been that, despite limiting our freedoms, everything gets more and more centralized, mainly because it’s more reliable / convenient / cheaper ?

I’m doubtful in DNS ever being replaced with an even more decentralized version. It’s already one of the most decentralized protocols widely in use right now, and the trend has clearly been more centralization of DNS, not less.

dividedbyzero• 4 years ago

I guess it would be both, like with Linux on phones and desktops as a reaction to proprietary OSes becoming more restrictive – it fans the flames for LibreDNS and Stallmann-approved Gnu-DNS in some circles like the privacy-conscious subset of HN, and some of those actually use it where possible, but overall they are an inconsequential rounding error, and everyone else gets centralized and non-overridable SecureDNS™.

causi• 4 years ago

mainly because it’s more reliable / convenient / cheaper ?

And as a consequence the user population on average becomes more ignorant, less likely to care, and less technically capable. It's one thing to crush internet freedom when half your users are programmers. It's entirely different when half your users don't know what a "file extension" is.

1vuio0pswjnm7• 4 years ago

No need for decentralised naming schemes, alternate roots or targeting routers with DPI. This article describes only orders against third party DNS providers, not authoritative DNS servers. Perhaps the censors are interested in restricting resolution of certain names by third party DoH providers.

Regardless, failure to remove the names from the applicable registries will mean the names can still be looked up, using nonrecursive queries.

tenebrisalietum• 4 years ago

Welp, UUCP still works.

Asooka2• 4 years ago

What I imagine will happen is that kids will share hosts files over discord with the IPs of banned sites.

tjpnz• 4 years ago

Why not just make content available to everyone for a reasonable fee? If I have to subscribe to half a dozen streaming services in order to watch what I want to watch I'm going to pirate it instead.

michaelt• 4 years ago

Content makers know that some people in the US will pay $200/month for cable. So the price of Netflix, at $15/month, is less than some people will pay.

If every American could access everything for $15/month, they would have to forego the $185/month some Americans are willing to pay. Corporations hate this.

Mindwipe• 4 years ago

Why not just make content available to everyone for a reasonable fee?

Because your definition of "reasonable fee" isn't.

josteink2• 4 years ago

Why not just make content available to everyone for a reasonable fee? If I have to subscribe to half a dozen streaming services in order to watch what I want to watch I'm going to pirate it instead.

Because the economy of it doesn't scale?

When Spotify was new, I was amazed by it. A simple monthly fee and I could instantly access all the music(tm)? Who wouldn't sign up for that?

As time went by I definitely wanted a similar service for video. Basically, the same recipe: A reasonable monthly fee, and I'd like to watch all the video(tm) please.

But that's not what we got, because they are different markets, offering different goods, which has a different cost and which is used differently.

It probably costs more to make a single episode of a popular TV-show than it costs to make 100 albums of music. And unlike music, where people typically have favourites, which they will listen to again and again, most TV-series are watch-once, be-done type of entertainment.

That means that I'll keep my music streaming service forever because I want to be able to keep listening to the music I love, but I will cancel a video-streaming service the instant I've seen the series I signed up for.

So what is a reasonable fee? I agree it's annoying to have to deal with multiple video-streaming providers, but if they were to follow the music-stream model (all providers have all the content), then the price you would have to pay per provider with probably be 10x what it is now. And nobody is going to pay that.

Isn't it more reasonable to pay for what you use, when you use it, and then pay nothing when you're not using it (something which really isn't a realistic option for music-streaming)?

Galaxeblaffer2• 4 years ago

You're missing an important detail, video is arguably a different market but it's still a digital good and it basically costs a company 0 to stream it to a new user. If i had one provider where i could get everything i'd gladly pay allot more than 15$ and i'd probably keep my subscription as everything new would be released on said platform. You could even combine this with a pay as you go model to only pay to stream a certain show without subscribing. My logic is that if you could get enough subscribers 30-50$ a month could be good business.

robertlagrant2• 4 years ago

It is available for a reasonable fee. It's delivered to your TV, or your phone or laptop, any time you like, for a few dollars a month.

kuschku• 4 years ago

Even with a subscription to Amazon Prime, Netflix, Disney+, Crunchyroll, Nebula, CuriosityStream, I still can't watch everything, and in fact, I've got less choice than even the local library offers in physical media.

And while I'd like to watch Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, it's currently not available at all in Germany, not even if I wanted to pay money. Paramount removed most Star Trek content from other streaming services, but their own service does not launch in Germany until 2023, and even then only as part of a very expensive bundle with Sky's football and other properties.

Additionally, when watching TV via DVB-T, only public broadcasters can be watched, as none of the private channels broadcast via DVB-T anymore.

jobs_throwaway2• 4 years ago

And its also available for free if you're willing to do a little extra work!

Asooka2• 4 years ago

A reasonable fee in one country might be completely unreasonable in another. Or between two people. Internet is basically free to provide, the cost per month is entirely dependent on the average salary of a system administrator in the region. Entry level PCs are also not very expensive. This all means you can get Internet access for a reasonable price wherever you live.

There is also the fact that file sharing is just better than buying. If I torrent a movie, I get the best version, with no region locking, no drm, which I can copy to any device. If the service goes away, or the Internet is down, I can still watch my movie just fine. For practical purposes, I actually own files I download, but don't own files I pay for.

nix234• 4 years ago

Let's change to Yggdrasil ;)

https://yggdrasil-network.github.io/

Ajedi32• 4 years ago

I personally think something like Handshake[1] would be ideal.

However, a major problem with most of these decentralized "internet alternatives" (including Handshake) is that they aren't designed to be compatible with the existing internet, which creates a chicken-egg problem where site operators don't want to bother supporting your system because it has no users, and users don't want to bother using your system because it has no (or few) sites.

If someone really wants to replace DNS with a decentralized system, what they need to do is:

1. Develop a well designed decentralized naming system (many have already done this)

2. Buy a TLD on the existing DNS and point it at a proxy server that allows incompatible clients access to your decentralized network through a centralized proxy

3. Work to get support for accessing that TLD through the decentralized protocol baked into browsers, first through extensions and eventually natively supported.

[1] https://handshake.org/

belorn• 4 years ago

There is a funny aspect to this. Registry and registrars already has a tradition to sell dns blocking registrations for a fee, and when copyright rights holder (or even the police/government) want to block something, that fee is still required and it need to be paid each year. As an example, when it came to piratebay.se the Swedish police budget has been paying it every year since the court made the decision to take it. It not much for a single domain but it does not scale and the police really do not want more of them.

It is for this reason I suspect that rights holders targets ISPs. Supporting a block list is in comparison free and ISP has yet to start to take a yearly fee each time they add a new domain to the list.

ultra_nick• 4 years ago

P2P networks sure are taking a long time to spread awareness. Maybe I can help.

Here's a p2p network layer: https://reticulum.network/

Here's a p2p dns layer: https://docs.ipfs.tech/concepts/ipns/#mutability-in-ipfs

Here's a p2p http layer: https://ipfs.io/

goodpoint• 4 years ago

That's not very helpful.

_chu1• 4 years ago

They're pretty good for piracy, just got As Daylight Dies by Killswitch Engage and The Equalizer (2014) over BitTorrent not too long ago

eteos• 4 years ago

Correct me if I'm wrong, but using all of this will still leave the option open for enforcers to go after the registrar or the cdn or host of the endpoint. So there is always a 'secondary infringer' to find, that is capable of removing (the endpoint of) the content.

ok123456• 4 years ago

The DNS providers who don't do this sort of filtering will become the defacto standard.

jobs_throwaway2• 4 years ago

So much ink spilled and so many lives wasted trying to fight a thing that's actually good for the industry. Sometimes you just have to laugh at the sheer absurdity of it.

_23sd2• 4 years ago

Targeting DNS providers is only worth it because of the growing power of resolvers like Quad9 and 1.1.1.1. Otherwise they would have to go back to getting orders against every ISP in a jurisdiction, which should be near-impossible in a free country but admittedly European countries have disappointed on this issue. Web browser vendors and Cloudflare decided for some reason that everyone needs to use DoH, and while I'm still waiting for news of an actual attack happening to someone that DoH would have foiled, Hollywood isn't waiting to use this increasing centralization for their attacks on web users.

charcircuit• 4 years ago

I'm still waiting for news of an actual attack happening to someone that DoH would have foiled

There exist ISPs who currently MitM attack any DNS requests to block them / replace them with ads if it doesn't exist.

3rd party DNS over UDP doesn't help, but over HTTPS does.

_23sd2• 4 years ago

True, though in my opinion that's not nearly widespread or impactful enough that people needed to be opted in to DoH by default as in Firefox, or sold DoH as a "safer" option like Cloudflare does.

IndigoIncognito• 4 years ago

I think a total of 2 (two) people are affected by blocking via DNS

DNS Providers as Piracy Fighters?

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