The Daily WTF goes white to "support" SOPA

by anthuswilliams • 15 years ago

324 47 15 years ago

sp3322• 15 years ago

Then write down the IPs, take a photo of the page on a wooden table, and share the photo on 68.142.214.24 (flickr.com)!

randomdata2• 15 years ago

Being a non-American, maybe I'm just a little out of the loop, but what is blocking domains supposed to solve, exactly? Pirates will just jump on an alternate name resolution services in minutes, as will the rest of the people in time, as word spreads.

It's like applying a bandaid to a severed head and then suing Band-Aid brand because their product didn't save the life.

sjmulder• 15 years ago

When the Pirate Bay was blocked in the Netherlands, ISPs had to blacklist not only a list of domain names but also IP addresses.

runevault• 15 years ago

They also expect search engines to deindex the sites, which makes them harder to find/use if you can't keep up with where they are any given day due to knocking it out. Still idiotic, but it does increase the effectiveness of the whole insanity.

rmc2• 15 years ago

what is blocking domains supposed to solve, exactly?

Makes it harder for the average person (who doesn't know the difference between a domain name and what you type into the google search bar) to get to pirate sites.

sp3322• 15 years ago

DNS filtering is only one of the ways that sites could be blocked under SOPA. It's just the one that gets trotted out to demonstrate that the bill's authors don't understand how the internet works.

nextparadigms• 15 years ago

It's worse than that. Under SOPA they can only go after .com, .org and .net sites. So ALL those foreign "rogue" websites that use other domains and aren't hosted in US will be able to work merrily and be unaffected by SOPA, at least according to the bill itself. Plus, if it does pass, all those rogue sites will be redirecting immediately to a new domain name, and make sure all of their users remember the new domain name by the time SOPA gets enforced against them.

That's how much of a joke this bill is, which implies that the bill creators are either this clueless, or SOPA is really just "Anti-piracy Bill v0.1" to make people accept it, with more "improvements" planned for later.

The only people it will actually affect, are actual American sites and companies that will have to enforce this bill, like the search engines, the ISP's, and the financial services. So the "bad actors" will be almost unaffected by it, while in the same time it will put many burdens on the American companies.

nitrogen• 15 years ago

IIRC at one point SOPA also made changing your DNS servers illegal (the wording was something like "technical measures to evade DNS blocking").

sdoering• 15 years ago

I love great satire. This just made my day.

phalasz• 15 years ago

Really good. They just take the piss out of this whole thing.

Nicely done :)

jameskilton• 15 years ago

BRILLANT!

resnamen• 15 years ago

Paula Bean approves of this post.

detay• 15 years ago

LOL bringing back the Gopher... Brilliant protest.

milurally• 15 years ago

I am happy to see that most of the giants of the web protest to this censors

chernevik• 15 years ago

I bet a bill to this effect would get more than a few sponsors in Congress, and probably an MPAA endorsement.

kruhft2• 15 years ago

I started filling out my hosts file with my most common sites a while ago...just in case.

beaumartinez• 15 years ago

It's good to keep a log of sites IP addresses, but hardcoding them in the hosts file is a pretty bad practise. What if a site decides to change its IP address?

laumars• 15 years ago

Well then the IP address you have for them will be wrong regardless of whatever method you use to store them.

Personally I think it's only a matter of time until there's a "hacker" DNS servers for people to completely bypass all this shit.

dpcan• 15 years ago

Why?

If it does happen where everything is based on an IP, the web, ecommerce, all of it, will die. You can't advertise a business as an IP address. In a couple days millions won't be able to find any websites anywhere.

Ad revenue will be GONE, nobody will be paying for ANYTHING online and every one of the sites you've written down will surely close their doors because there is no way for them to stay in business.

Small businesses everywhere will fail. Websites like Reddit, HN, Digg, etc, will not be able to survive.

Google will become useless. Since their search results can only return a handful of sites, you might as well go right to them, bypass Google.

Hosting companies will fail left and right as their sites are slowly shut down and their customers leave. There won't even be anywhere to keep websites online anymore, IP or not.

And so on.

kmm• 15 years ago

Mine contains 194.71.107.15 (thepiratebay.org) because a judge had it blocked here in Belgium. I could just as well use depiraatbaai.be but it's a matter of principle, I like my world wide web to be "complete".

I think the people of the USA should be happy there needs to be a law around it at least. Here it was blocked with no legislative backing, only because a judge deemed it illegal. It's interesting to see you at least have a semblance of democratic process.

kruhft2• 15 years ago

Why? Just in case, like I said. I thought I would keep record of some of the most frequent sites I visit, plus, given that my host file is pretty small nonetheless, then I would assume that DNS lookups would be faster since there will no network round trip (but I might be wrong on that one and I'm sure people will point out that it's slower, for some reason).

mmmooo• 15 years ago

tsk-tsk for using the host header value to calculate links in the left side bar to the forums..

e.g. http://forums.110.120/forums/thread/277238.aspx

vlasta2• 15 years ago

Actually, part of me wishes that SOPA or another similar bill gets approved. That may be the push I need to actually join and contribute to one of the movements that aim to make the internet less controllable, like freenet...

bdg• 15 years ago

Still waiting for one site to go to plaid.

wisty• 15 years ago

Note, if you just go to their IP, you don't get the white-out.

sukuriant• 15 years ago

... that's suddenly so much more brilliant. Thanks for sharing :D

chimeracoder• 15 years ago

Given how easy it would be to bypass the proposed DNS block in SOPA in this exact way, this is just too perfect.

rickyconnolly• 15 years ago

Not sure if troll...

siculars• 15 years ago

They should have linked to gopher...

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1436.txt

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_%28protocol%29

mkopinsky• 15 years ago

Wikipedia link doesn't work today... those crazy hackers who opposed SOPA have already taken it down. ;-)

inexplicable• 15 years ago

To thats more of a reason to link to have more and more people go to Wikipedia today. Wouldn't change anything by linking here though as most of HN traffic is already aware of this.

catfish• 15 years ago

Wildcat BBS - I ran 8, 1200 baud modems - 9 phone lines - Earth Station 1 BBS...

Simpler days indeed. Anyone else attend the 1BBSConn in Denver hosted by Boardwatch magazine? Those were the days, oh yeah baby!

And of course I did this on a 40mb ST251- RLL encoded seagate hard drive, on 2 Tandy 286's running 1 full mb of memory using QEMM to get that pesky extra 384k of memory to load instances of Wildcat.

Brings a tear to my eye just thinking about it. Thank you DWTF for a lovely memory lane flashback!

The Daily WTF goes white to "support" SOPA

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