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by olefoo 5688 days ago
Once again Americans are or should be embarrassed by their legislators. This puts us in the same boat as China in that we are attempting to block bad knowledge by fiat rather than with education.

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?
2 comments
jrockway 5688 days ago
No, not really. Unlike China, our government is too dumb to even do it correctly.

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...)

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gasull 5688 days ago
No, not really. Unlike China, our government is too dumb to even do it correctly.

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

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fleitz 5688 days ago
It's easy, it's similar to how they decry human rights abuses while abusing human rights at Gitmo.

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.

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