Protect IP Act

[OldSchoolDSL]

Originally Posted by setishock

That is so incredibly stupid. The beginnings of a dictatorship in this country.
WAKE UP PEOPLE!!!

Beginning? That ship has sailed my friend. We only have the illusion of a democracy.

[private_ale]

Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) has said that he is going to filibuster the legislation if he needs to.

http://stopcensorship.org/ -- Fill out this form to urge your lawmakers to oppose Internet censorship ? and ask Senator Wyden to read your name during his filibuster.

Maurice,

Last week was amazing. More than 1,000,000 people spoke out against Internet censorship.

But the threat still looms large: We hear that there could be a vote in the Senate right after Thanksgiving.

There's a good chance the legislation will pass, but Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) says he'll do all he can to stop it -- and he wants our help -- visit StopCensorship.org for more details.

Check out this message he just recorded for Demand Progress members:

Wyden says he'll even filibuster the legislation if he needs to. Sometimes filibusters last hours -- or days -- leaving Senators reading out of the dictionary or cookbooks to pass the time. But we've got a much better idea:

What better way to demonstrate our strength than to ask Senator Wyden to read our names into the record during his filibuster? He's agreed to read censorship opponents' names from the floor of the Senate, and to try to enter the rest into the Congressional Record.

Just click here to stand with Senator Wyden and ask him to read your name on the floor of the Senate, as a proud opponent of censorship.

Have a great holiday -- and rest up so we can press forward hard next week.

[final kaoss]

Here's a fresh new video about it from TotalBiscuit. Enjoy!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhwuX...layer_embedded

--------------- Added [DATE]1324233124[/DATE] at [TIME]1324233124[/TIME] ---------------

It seems we already have victims from this act... in the form of Megaupload.

http://inagist.com/CNETNews/147499980037439490/

[OldSchoolDSL]

I am sorry to say, this will pass.

Members of Congress plan on taking a vote on this December 21, 2011 .... 4 days before Christmas, when most of Congress will already be on Holiday Vacation and those who would appose this bill, will not be there.

Famous bills that have been passed days before Christmas include The Central Banking Act / The Federal Reserve Act, which basically founded The Fed (December 23).

[Chris8]

Let's be honest, this is nothing about fighting with piracy, probably 99% of population is against bills like this one but whatever, democracy and freedom are just an illusion, "they" will decide for everyone and no matter what people think or say.

[private_ale]

Originally Posted by Chris8

Let's be honest, this is nothing about fighting with piracy

Of course it's not about fighting piracy or copyright, it's about Internet censorship.

For the most part, everyone is OK today, tomorrow, probably even next week, but what are they going to do when they take away our voice and there's nowhere left to complain? It is very clear that our [the US] government does not want freedom of information flowing to its citizens.

They already control Main Stream Media which dictates what the majority of the [older] citizens view as "trustworthy" news. Between the protests and war on piracy, the United States is rapidly becoming a hybrid of a corpocracy and a police state.

[final kaoss]

More news from Forbes.

Originally Posted by http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2011/12/21/sopa-haters-are-already-finding-easy-ways-to-circumvent-its-censorship/

?The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it,? goes the saying coined by Sun Microsystems coder and EFF founder John Gilmore. Now the Internet?s communities of coders and free speech advocates have interpreted the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) as intolerable digital damage before it has even come to a vote, and are already working on tools anyone can use to route around its roadblocks to foreign, copyright-infringing sites.

While Congress has postponed the second half of its hearing of SOPA until next year, a developer named Tamer Rizk has been busy building an add-on for Firefox called DeSopa, which aims to give any Firefox user access to sites that SOPA?s copyright protection measures has blocked. ?This program is a proof of concept that SOPA will not help prevent piracy,? reads a note including on DeSopa?s download page. ?If SOPA is implemented, thousands of similar and more innovative programs and services will sprout up to provide access to the websites that people frequent. SOPA is a mistake. It does not even technically help solve the underlying problem, as this software illustrates.?

DeSopa takes advantage of an blatant weakness in how SOPA?s controversial filtering mandate would function under the current version of the bill. The new copyright infringement regime would allow editing of the Domain Name System, the registry that converts websites? domains (like Google.com or Yahoo.com) into an Internet Protocol address (like 74.125.157.99 or 98.137.149.56). When you type ?Google.com? into your browser, your computer communicates with DNS servers that convert that name into an IP address. But type the IP address directly into your browser, and it works just as well.

Since SOPA would lead to editing American DNS servers? IP lists to insert errors for sites deemed illegal, DeSopa simply checks with foreign DNS servers to find the correct IP address and navigates directly to whatever blocked site the user enters. To avoid incorrect IP addresses in those foreign servers, the program even checks domains with three DNS servers and grabs whichever IP address has at least two agreeing answers. ?Similar offshore resolution services will eventually maintain their own cache of websites, without blacklisting, in order to meet the demand created by SOPA,? writes Rizk.

For the last two weeks, users on Reddit have been assembling their own lists of IP addresses for key sites that might be blocked under SOPA, what some of them call the ?Emergency List.? Users could simply check the list for the IP address of a blocked site they want to visit and navigate directly to its IP. Or, as the redditors have discussed, they could edit the ?hosts? file on their own machines, a locally-stored list that overrides DNS and tells Web browsers which domains correspond with which IP addresses.

Editing hosts files is far from a perfect solution: Because sites? IP addresses frequently change, users would often find certain sites inaccessible and need to go searching for a more current IP. But as DeSopa illustrates, SOPA?s thin layer of DNS censorship means users are sure to find a way to keep their locally-stored versions of DNS up to date and visit blacklisted sites.

Just because SOPA?s DNS censorship can be defeated, however, doesn?t mean the bill won?t damage the Internet. Engineers have been warning Congress that monkeying with DNS will make it impossible to implement DNSSEC, a new DNS protocol designed to prevent DNS spoofing attacks that hijack users? browsing and take them to untrusted sites even when they enter the domain of a trusted one. Those security concerns are one reason SOPA?s discussion in Congress has been postponed until the new year to allow for more technical research. ?No one in Congress intended to break anything,? says Dan Kaminsky, a leading DNS security researcher who has vocally opposed SOPA?s proposed changes to the system. ?They intended to address a legitimate economic concern. But thanks to the law of unintended consequences, their efforts in DNS filtering run counter to our efforts in DNS authentication.?

The end result of SOPA in its current form, in other words, would be to reinforce the Internet?s fundamental security problems without blocking access to copyright-infringing sites for any user savvy enough to use simple software tools. Vint Cerf, one of the founders of the Internet, said as much in his letter to Congress earlier this month, even listing the exact ways DNS filtering would be circumvented. ?This collateral damage of SOPA would be particularly regrettable because site blocking or redirection mechanisms are unlikely to make a significant dent in the availability of infringing material and counterfeits online, given that DNS manipulation can be defeated by simply choosing an offshore DNS resolution provider, maintaining one?s own local DNS cache or using direct IP address references,? he wrote.

Cerf, after all, helped to design the Internet to be robust above all else, finding its way around physical and digital hurdles to reliably deliver data. Thanks to a few angry geeks, it will likely find its way around any legal hurdles, too.

[socialteenz]

The Bill Has Been Postponed Until January 21st, 2012!
??

[OldSchoolDSL]

Originally Posted by socialteenz

The Bill Has Been Postponed Until January 21st, 2012!
??

No. They're doing a bait and switch.

It was originally setup for this month. Then all the bad press hit the fan and they pushed it back. Sometimes after this, they quietly moved it back to this month without any notice. It is still on the agenda for 2011.

Expect it to be passed before the new year, while most of congress is away on holiday vacation. They did the exact same thing a few other times.... It's how congress sneaks in dirty bills such as this. Do it when most everyone who would turn this down or pay any attention to it... Is away with their family and friends enjoying Christmas Dinner and New Years.

The Fed and Central Bank Act were both passed the same way.

[OldSchoolDSL]

<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9qL29oUjlc&feature=colike" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9qL2...feature=colike</a>