Comment on Republican bill would order ISPs, DNS providers, and VPNs to block piracy sites

Ooops@feddit.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

• lemmyvore@feddit.nl ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  And who’s going to block all the freely available DNS servers, proxies and also TOR?

  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.

  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.

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  • Ooops@feddit.org ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    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.

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    • lemmyvore@feddit.nl ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      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.

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