Google, Cloudflare & Cisco Will Poison DNS to Stop Piracy Block Circumvention * TorrentFreak
Google, Cloudflare, and Cisco must poison their DNS resolvers to prevent access to around 117 domains used by pirate sport streaming sites.
Want to know what I used to pirate, but don't anymore? Video games. Steam makes tons of money off of me and everybody else and has reasonable DRM with an easy to use store.
Piracy is a delivery problem. Make content easier to get for reasonable prices and you'll make money. Don't do that? OK. Piracy it is.
Worse, the harder they try to stop it, the shittier the experience gets for their paying customers, but not for the pirates really. At that point, why would anyone want to pay for a crappy experience being treated like a thief when you can save your money and actually be a "thief" (at least in their eyes) while being treated like a paying customer?
+1 for steam
I used to pirate my games on linux, but it's harder than on Windows. Steam's gaming on linux experience is perfect, just download the game and hit Play.
I agree, but most games also have a higher ratio of value to cost. If I buy a game for 50 bucks, I'll play it for many hours, let's say 50. So that will be 1 per hour, pretty good. If I buy a new movie, that isn't available for subscription streaming, that ratio is easily double. If I have a subscription and need another now, that also lowers it's value. It also comes with lower comfort and ease of consumption, as you mentioned.
Another great example is YouTube premium. I'll gladly pay 5 or 7 bucks for adfree content, not 14 though. I don't need YouTube music. So I block ads where I can and donate to creators, if I can afford it. They could have had my money, but they are, simply, greedy.
I also hate it, when deals are altered without my consent. It makes me feel like a sucker, and therefore makes it less likely for me to keep investing.
My story but with anime. Japan has some really annoying laws requiring their shows to be blurred and dimmed during fast-paced scenes and it absolutely butchers the height of good animations.
The Blu-ray releases don't have this issue, but guess what releases aren't available for purchase/streaming for English audiences. 🫠 I want to give them money so bad, but 🤷♀️
I still keep the pirated have DRMless copies of games I bought on Steam though - just for ownership.
Oh no! The poor multi-billion dollar football leagues are losing out on pennies from people who cant afford extortionate subscription services! Quick, take legal action!
Piracy is a service problem.
Piracy is a service problem.
Yes but also it is increasingly becoming a price problem
That’s still service.
I wanted to watch World Cup, so I got Peacock for a month for $5. I considered piraxy, but the cost was less than the hassle to figure out how to do it. It was in Spanish, but that was fine by me.
I didn't keep that subscription though because the value wasn't there. But Peacock got $5 from me that they wouldn't have otherwise gotten.
I'm currently in the process of ripping my DVDs and am planning to get a Blu-ray player to rip even more, because I'm fed up with paying more and getting less from various streaming services. I hadn't bought a DVD or Blu-Ray for years until Netflix started dropping shows and raising prices.
I make a good salary, but I'm not going to throw it away on low value services. I spend a ton at Steam and have spent a lot at Netflix and Disney+ in the past, but that's changing now that prices are going up, ads are increasing, and content is shrinking.
wow lets poison DNS, surely no one will start linking these piracy sites via ip addresses or create alternative domain names. wcgw.
It isn’t like I’m not willing to pay. My NAS setup wasn’t exactly cheap. But the user experience is just incredible. I had Netflix for ten years, and several others for some time. The experience is just better. Watching whatever I want synchronized with my wife across devices of any type is superb. Who else offers that?
Netflix did, but now online streaming is fragmented and it's worse again.
I can download a torrent faster than I can even figure out which service the content is on... assuming it's even available on one of them.
This is a dumb game of whackamole that they’ll never win.
If you’re affected just switch your dns to Quad9 or something.
Let's Play Wack-A-Mole! Select Game:
Or run your own DNS with Unbound. Just takes a raspberry pi and/or other cheap low power PC.
Yep. Only reason I recommend not to is if you're concerned about your ISP seeing your DNS queries. I use internally hosted DNS with forwarders to Quad9 using secure DNS so that my DNS queries are segregated and hidden from my ISP.
Quad9 is a great thing to learn about right about now.
Funks your brother check it out now.
And OpenDNS.
Try afraid.org instead of a cisco product.
And NextDNS too!!
This is such a stupid non solution to their problem.
I feel like anyone who already had a know-how to change their DNS will just change to one of the other hundreds of free servers and the people who couldn't be bothered to switch to google DNS will already have been "blocked". Or they are using a VPN already..
Or run your own recursive DNS which can be done in a docker container. Most people I know sailing the seven seas are quite adept at technology. Well most people I know are in IT in the first place so that likely doesn’t mean much.
use your powers for good and poison dns to stop russian disinformation
So they'll just change their DNS server again? What will this achieve?
Nothing for people who know what DNS is. They're targeting the people who don't.
They already got the ISP DNS resolvers.
This particular step, that this article is about, is targeting people who knew enough to switch from their ISP's DNS resolver to one of these ISP-agnostic DNS providers. So they're targeting the people who do, and probably not going to be particularly effective at it.
Is there such a thing as federated dns servers, self hosted or otherwise? I don't particularly care about piracy but I can see this dominoing into abortion, lgtq+ ect...ect...
As long as you’re not using DNSSEC, you can easily run your own. I’ve been running a PiHole for years now, it can pull in block lists and such from various sources, it’d be fairly easy to add a list to pull in automatically that include extra records. Those could be served from anywhere. Torrents, git repos, http calls, etc.
Note that with just pihole you would still be affected by this, since pihole needs an upstream dns server to get it's data from.
But if you set up pihole with unbound you will be OK, since unbound then will do the job of getting data from the root servers without another upstream dns.
I my experience it is also faster.
I believe you can use DNSSEC directly with root servers.
unbound is a validating, recursive, caching, self-hosted DNS resolver.
There's the completely decentralized ENS name system that would bypass this censorship entirely.
But unfortunately it's got the scarlet letters "NFT" hanging around its neck, and so good luck trying to discuss its actual merits or try to implement support for it anywhere.
I don't think this question really makes sense.
DNS is centralized in that there is a root zone that determines who is the canonical authority for each top level domain like .com or .world (and the registrar for each top level domain controls who controls each domain under them). But it's also decentralized in the sense that everyone who controls a domain can assign any subdomains below that, and that anyone can choose to override the name resolving with their own local DNS server (or even a hosts file saved on the device).
The court case here is trying to override the official domain ownership records at specific DNS providers. The problem is that the intermediaries are being ordered by the courts not to follow the central authority.
Federation wouldn't fit this model: we still want DNS to be canonical where everyone in the world agrees which domain resolves to which IP addresses.
Yes, it's called unbound
DNS is to a degree, by design federated to begin with. What you need to participate is a recursive DNS server, like Unbound as some of your other replies have mentioned. You can run it on the same machine as something like Pihole if you’re already running that.
How about just firewall France and discover if legislators find cause to pass new laws.
Win win! No more France, new legislation!
How is that even legal?
It is legal just only because they can restrict the access to any of the services they want, in fact they don't oblige you to use their DNS...
How would it be illegal? It's their service, they can set whatever rules they want on it. If you don't like it, pick another DNS provider.
Around 800 Frenchies affected. Imagine the money both companies wasted on lawyers on this and how many of those 800 will be forced to pay now instead of finding another dns server...
Talk about an impotent response. Pretty simple way around that.
Even the most casual of internet users will see the guide on how to change their DNS server bruh.
Next they'll do DNS injection even though DoT and DNS over HTTPS is a thing.
seems to be only in france rn?