Records Labels Prepare Massive 'Pirate Site' Domain Blocking Blitz 110
An anonymous reader writes "In their ongoing battle against websites said to infringe music copyrights, record labels have initiated a fresh wave of actions aimed at forcing UK ISPs to carry out domain blocking. This third wave is set to be the biggest so far, affecting as many as 25 domains and including some of the world's largest torrent sites and file-hosting search engines. Furthermore, the BPI – the entity coordinating the action – will ask courts to block U.S.-based music streaming operation, Grooveshark."
Re:Good luck with that (Score:4, Interesting)
Domain blocking has been so successful already. No one will figure out how to use alternative DNS servers, or simply type in the IP address manually.
I already compile a list of IPs for sites I like to frequent - white hat, black hat, or otherwise.
Re:Cory Doctorow much? (Score:2, Interesting)
Cory lives in the UK, he became a naturalized British citizen in 2011 iirc.
Re:Good luck with that (Score:4, Interesting)
That they are targetting grooveshark (and so warning players of the same league) gives a hint of what is their target, that the majority of people get free/pretty cheap alternatives to their offering, be legal or not.
If the people behind the idea of the flat earth had their kind of power back in their days to push their views on the masses we would be living in a pretty interesting (but weird) world by now.
Re:Time to consider an alternate/supliment DNS roo (Score:5, Interesting)
The worst problem with the central server approach is not squatting, that is a minor annoyance to some people's vanity. The worst problem with the central server is that it is a central server, and thus is vulnerable to whomever has juristiction over the physical location it resides in. However, a peer-to-peer solution (as they look right now) is much worse. There are two major problems with a P2P approach to DNS, that you don't have with the central server.
1) Privacy: when requesting a lookup, you're telling an arbitrary number of strangers which site you would like to visit next. With the server, you're only telling the server, but this is a trust issue and can be resolved. The P2P approach by it's nature cannot be trusted.
2) Poisoning: all you'd have to do to poison a swarm is join it, and start pushing bogus replies to requests. There is no barrier like with a central DNS server, which you'd have to hack into in order to poison.
An approach like you suggest is a central DNS server in disguise and not really a solution to any problem, since you get the worst of both worlds.
Re:They don't care. (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem with that is that they can "presume" all they want, but they still have less money coming in. Granted, it doesn't address the aforementioned issue of needing a critical mass of participants for the boycott to be successful, but the mere act of assuming a given cause for a reduced revenue stream doesn't magically restore the revenue stream to previous levels.