It is vitally important to America if by "America" he means a couple of media companies, their lobbyists and handful of senators who are on their payroll.
Also I like how instead of you telling him what is important for America he lectures you what is important.
How much does it take to bribe a senator? What are they paying him I wonder?
How can we decry repressive censorship regimes in other countries when we reserve the right to blackhole sites that we disapprove of on whatever grounds?
I run my own DNS resolver. Guess what the config will be when this law passes? Step 1, try real DNS. Step 2, try open DNS. Anyone behind my firewall will have no idea that this law even exists.
Also, how does DNS affect bittorrent? I'll tell you how -- not at all.
You can't censor the Internet. Any attempt to try is just hilarious. (Remember when drugs were illegal and nobody could use them? Oh wait...)
You can easily bypass the Great Chinese Firewall with iptables:
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/06/ignoring_the_g...
tl;dr: iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --tcp-flags RST RST -j DROP
You just need one guy committing the abuses, another guy talking down to other nations about doing the same thing, and a lawyer to invent complicated explanations as to why whatever you're doing is slightly different than whatever their doing, or how it's not torture until it feels like organ failure. And if the abuse gets too egregious just find some low ranking grunt and blame her for the whole thing, and now it won't happen again. wink wink nudge nudge
Oh, and it helps if you get to appoint the people who will be judging you, like maybe one of the lawyers who helped you out of a sticky hypocritical situation 20 years ago. It's kind of like explaining the differences between mob protection money and income tax. Most people are on board with the gov't reasoning on that one, and the rest don't matter.
Will bit.ly have to start breaking every previously shortened URL that redirects to the IP address of an offending site? Or more likely, any shortened URL that redirects to an IP address directly at all?
"After a flurry of last-minute lobbying from representatives of content providers including the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA)..."
Well, I am glad they listened to so many diverse groups. I mean, the MPAA and the RIAA? That ensures the legislators heard every possible viewpoint on this issue.
The text in the bill says:
`(i) a service provider, as that term is defined in section 512(k)(1) of title 17, United States Code, or other operator of a domain name system server shall take reasonable steps that will prevent a domain name from resolving to that domain name's Internet protocol address;
...and the definition of "service provider" as referenced is:
(1) Service provider. — (A) As used in subsection (a), the term “service provider” means an entity offering the transmission, routing, or providing of connections for digital online communications, between or among points specified by a user, of material of the user's choosing, without modification to the content of the material as sent or received.
(B) As used in this section, other than subsection (a), the term “service provider” means a provider of online services or network access, or the operator of facilities therefor, and includes an entity described in subparagraph (A).
It looks like Google would probably fall under (B) there, so if they received a court order, they couldn't specifically do DNS routing; it's probably questionable whether returning a link as the first result to the IP address that the domain name would resolve to if it wasn't blocked counts as resolving a domain name, I'd imagine the government would make an argument that it does.
But there's still a gaping loophole here: the bill says that a service provider must "prevent a domain name from resolving to that domain name's Internet protocol address", so fine, maybe Google couldn't return a link to 194.71.107.15 in response to "thepiratebay.org", but there's absolutely nothing in the bill that says they couldn't return a link to 194.71.107.15 in response to "Pirate Bay", "piratebay", "thepiratebay", etc. There's also nothing in the bill that prohibits them from responding to a "thepiratebay.org" query with a message telling the user that the link they were looking for was filtered out, and suggesting that they strip the suffix off of the search term to get around the domain name resolution restriction.
I realize this doesn't solve the problems of broken links on the net or anything like that, but it's an indication of the fact that this bill, horrible as it is, will likely just be routed around like many other problems on the Internet, with a lot of effort wasted in order to do so.
Dead easy and I suppose somebody will put out a simple copy of bind for windows that you can run locally.
Dinosaur politicians and corporate lobbying will always be behind the times, nothing we can do about that except do what we do best: hack. Do the "illicit" stuff under the radar and keep your shit to yourself.
Contact your senators and tell them to just say no to S. 3804:
http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=s111-3804
http://www.senate.gov/reference/common/faq/How_to_contact_se...
No good can come of the gov't trying to control what domains can be accessed, and it won't stop those that wish to do us harm or take advantage of us, because they'll just use another domain.
Basically, I pointed out that things have been just fine with the free uncensored net we've had so far, that this would limit that freedom by attempting to restrict what we could visit, and that those with malicious intent could easily thwart such attempts.
I think that part of the reason they are doing this is to attempt to have access to block off our country's network in case of "cyberwar", etc., so it is probably a defensive measure, rather than what they claim it to be. They probably can't just do this type of blocking at the periphery, since satellite, etc. connections within the U.S. could just as easily be a danger, not just the big trunks coming out of the ocean.
I don't want our country to be at risk, but I think that a simple blacklist is not the way to do it. Now, if they installed devices at each ISP that all traffic had to run through- then you might have a greater defense. But, basically, in cyberwar, we're all screwed. Things like this are chump change compared to EMPs, viruses, state-controlled botnets, etc. Cyberwar would be almost purely offensive, similar to nuclear war.
Can we volunteer to go first? I'm sure I can find a snippet of a Disney movie to post under the grounds of fair use.
The law requires ISPs to filter their DNS servers, not DNS traffic on their network. If they eventually add the latter to the law, then we can start talking about using Tor to tunnel DNS traffic past the firewall.
The irony at that point will be that Tor was initially developed on a research grant from the US Navy :P
In addition, these programs need only be written once, then they can be distributed forever.