On 20/01/2012 04:44 AM, Patrick Elliott wrote:
> On 1/19/2012 8:56 AM, Invisible wrote:
>> All US
>> financial institutions are barred from interacting with it (most
>> specifically payment processing and advertising services).
>
> This part I didn't know, and is even more fucked up.

Yeah, the idea is that if some illegal site operates off-shore, you 
can't sue them, but you can still financially strangle them into 
shutting down. I mean, assuming they make any significant money from the 
US market in the first place...

> Second, as
> long as some DNS, some place, provides the IP data to get to a site, all
> you need to do is have your machine look at *that* DNS site for the
> data, instead of the closest one.

I don't care whether you delete the DNS record or block that IP address. 
Sophisticated pirates can trivially circumvent such restrictions. If a 
"web site" is hosting illegal stuff, you might plausibly be able to 
block access to it. (Until somebody connects to a proxy outside America 
- oops!) But if illegal stuff is on a peer to peer network, and all you 
need is the IP address of any peer in the network in order to access all 
the stuff... So, what, you're going to blacklist every peer in the 
swarm? Good luck with that.

This isn't going to stop technical experts from pirating stuff. It /is/ 
going to stop the average, non-technical American from looking at stuff 
that industry and government don't want them to look at. All that 
scientific evidence about global warming... wouldn't it be convenient if 
all that just quietly "disappeared"? Wouldn't that be nice?

> The level of complete stupidity in
> the bill is astounding, even if you ignore the fact that the morons in
> Congress and the Senate that originally backed it, where claiming,
> probably due to not knowing any better, that it was, "bringing online
> law into parity with the regular laws"

I do not know much about how US law works. (Hell, I don't know much 
about how UK law works!) But I do wonder if the people behind this 
*actually* believe it will work, or whether they know damned will this 
will have no effect on piracy, and that's just a smokescreen in the 
first place... Perhaps I have become too cynical?

> Last I checked, the non-online laws requires the people, once they find
> out about it, to a) inform the cops, and/or b) kick the bastards out of
> their building, not serve jail time for having accidentally allowed them
> on their property, or, even stupider, allowing them to post the address
> of their illegal business on the public advertisement board, in the
> hallway. Parity my ass...

Yeah, well, to some extent it comes from people's frustration that 
foreign servers are helping piracy, and Americans can't sue them out of 
existence. If you can't shut them down, censor them. There aren't too 
many equivalents of that in the physical world.

> And its only funnier that one of the idiots supporting this thing was
> found to have illegally used a copyrighted image on his own government
> web page over the last 24 hours.

I can't comment on that...

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