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Web Censorship Bill Sails Through Senate Committee
11-20-2010, 12:00 AM
This is NOT good.
Quote:On Thursday, the Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously approved a bill that would give the Attorney General the right to shut down websites with a court order if copyright infringement is deemed “central to the activity” of the site — regardless if the website has actually committed a crime. The Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA) is among the most draconian laws ever considered to combat digital piracy, and contains what some have called the “nuclear option,” which would essentially allow the Attorney General to turn suspected websites “off.”
Most pertinent and to the point comment at the site above:
Quote:” if copyright infringement is deemed “central to the activity” of the site ”
Deemed by WHO?
This thing needs to be killed dead, Dead, DEAD! And quick.
Of course it won't be...
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Watch more and more hosts have an 'out of the USA' hosting option.
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Wait what? Even websites operating outside the US?
This is just going to be abused like hell, the same as the original DMCA. I'm not even talking about MPAA/RIAA... There're plenty of organisations who won't hesitate to use this to shut websites who criticise them down , with the flimsiest of reasonings behind their copyright claims.
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And looks like it won't be voted on until the new session of Congress. Joy.
''We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat
them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.''
-- James Nicoll
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Foxboy, that just gives us all the more time to drum up public opposition to this malarky. Besides, do you think that Obama would honestly sign this pile of crap into law? I know he's supportive of big business, but this is pushing things too far.
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Good point. Do we have an actual bill number so that letter writing campaigns can be used to good effect? I. E., my Senator, Congressthing, and The Prez, etc.
''We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat
them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.''
-- James Nicoll
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Re:Censorship bill
11-20-2010, 10:35 PM
[table]
S. 3804:
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Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act
| [/table]
And do you seriously believe the President would not sign it? If the interested parties wave the right 'bipartisanship' carrots at him, he would cave in faster than Sunnydale after they blew up the Hellmouth.
ETA: missing '?'
“We can never undo what we have done. We can never go back in time. We write history with our decisions and our actions. But we also write history with our responses to those actions. We can leave the pain and the damage in our wake, unattended, or we can do the work of acknowledging and fixing, to whatever extent possible, the harm that we have caused.”
— On Repentance and Repair: Making Amends in an Unapologetic World by Danya Ruttenberg
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Bipartisanship?
Wave enough campaign donations in front of any Senator/Congressman/Whatever and they'll vote for it.
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And given the percentage of our legislative critters that happen to be lawyers do you expect them to not approve something that will give their fellows assured employment and wll garner them donations from big media...
--Werehawk--
My mom's brief take on upcoming Guatemalan Elections "In last throes of preelection activities. Much loudspeaker vote pleading."
what worries me is that if it was to pass, how long till the rest of the world hose "hey, why didn't we think of that?"
CattyNebulart
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I'm sure Obama would sign it in a heart beat, vice president biden is way to cozy with the RIAA. at least one oregon senator put a hold on it for a little while.
E: "Did they... did they just endorse the combination of the JSDF and US Army by showing them as two lesbian lolicons moving in together and holding hands and talking about how 'intimate' they were?"
B: "Have you forgotten so soon? They're phasing out Don't Ask, Don't Tell."
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Whulp, guess it's up to us, the members of John Q. Public. Together, we are Legion!
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Looks like at least -ONE- senator does get it, and has taken steps: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/11/oreg ... ship-bill/
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Now that is good news!
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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Apparently, they don't need COICA to seize a domain:
http://torrentfreak.com/u...-domain-and-more-101126/
http://www.osnews.com/sto...ment_Censors_70_Websites
It seems the blocks are through ICANN, and work outside the United States aswell.
http://www.torrent-finder.com/
Shows me the same seizure result
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Hmmm. It looks like this particular action makes the domain name not work, but the site itself is still there and functions normally if accessed from another direction.
If anyone thinks that will be more than a minor annoyance to the serious, I've got a forest in Gensokyo I'd like to sell them...
-Morgan.
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For those of us (me, at least) who are not quite savvy enough to know how to do that, could you post an explanation? Please?
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Stand between the Silver Crystal and the Golden Sea.
"Youngsters these days just have no appreciation for the magnificence of the legendary cucumber." --Krityan Elder, Tales of Vesperia.
CattyNebulart
Unregistered
First a quick explanation of what is happening. The DNS system is basically like a telephone directory, where it looks up a human friendly name like google.com and translates it into the ip adress the computer actually needs, in this example 72.14.204.147.
What they have done is replaced that entry with an ip address belonging to a different computer, that is displaying that unfriendly message.
So to circumvent it you just need to inform your computer that there is a bad entry in the directory and that it should be ignored or to start pulling from a different directory.
Ok enough theory how does this work in practice? A quick fix would be to add the ip along with the hostname to your local 'hosts' file, which is a file that your computer consults first before going to your registered DNS provider (you have one, probably from our ISP whom in turn gets it from.... and so forth).
under linux this would be the "/etc/hosts" file.
under windows this would be the Windows directory"/system32/drivers/etc/hosts" file.
There you would then add the entry of interest, in the case of the google example above something like;
Code: 72.14.204.147 google.com
For more info see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hosts_%28file%29
I have lots of entries in my host file, to avoid such things as the doubleclick domain, and to redirect some connections to my local machine instead of over the network to a machine I can't reach because of intervening firewalls.
E: "Did they... did they just endorse the combination of the JSDF and US Army by showing them as two lesbian lolicons moving in together and holding hands and talking about how 'intimate' they were?"
B: "Have you forgotten so soon? They're phasing out Don't Ask, Don't Tell."
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Ok, I think I get it. What the government would be doing is removing the code from the 'phone book', and Ginger around it you need to find the code and write it into your 'personal contacts' list. The website isnt actually being removed, it's just made to be impossible to find. Right?
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Stand between the Silver Crystal and the Golden Sea.
"Youngsters these days just have no appreciation for the magnificence of the legendary cucumber." --Krityan Elder, Tales of Vesperia.
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Um ya editing hosts to circumvent this type of thing is a good idea presuming you can get the ip address of where you want to go, it's not a dynamic address and you can actually edit the hosts file. Win7 is currently of the opinion that I don't have any right to change the existing file. So anyone got nice copy of hosts that they're willing to share, presuming that it won't get DMCA'd.
CattyNebulart
Unregistered
Jorlem Wrote:Ok, I think I get it. What the government would be doing is removing the code from the 'phone book', and Ginger around it you need to find the code and write it into your 'personal contacts' list. The website isn't actually being removed, it's just made to be impossible to find. Right?
Yup that's pretty much how it works. They are not even just removing the code, but replacing it with their own.
Quote:Um ya editing hosts to circumvent this type of thing is a good idea presuming you can get the ip address of where you want to go, it's not a dynamic address and you can actually edit the hosts file.
Yes all of the above are true.
You need administrator privileges to modify the file, I'm not up to speed with current versions of windows but a quick google gives me:
from; http://www.windowsreference.com/windows ... ows-vista/
Quote:To edit the host file,
Click Start – search for “Notepad“, right-click and select “Run as Administrator“. This should launch notepad with elevated privileges. Now, open the host file from the File menu, edit and save.
As usual keep a backup copy in case you mess up and all of that.
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E: "Did they... did they just endorse the combination of the JSDF and US Army by showing them as two lesbian lolicons moving in together and holding hands and talking about how 'intimate' they were?"
B: "Have you forgotten so soon? They're phasing out Don't Ask, Don't Tell."
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CattyNebulart Wrote:Jorlem Wrote:Ok, I think I get it. What the government would be doing is removing the code from the 'phone book', and Ginger around it you need to find the code and write it into your 'personal contacts' list. The website isn't actually being removed, it's just made to be impossible to find. Right?
Yup that's pretty much how it works. They are not even just removing the code, but replacing it with their own. Ah, ok. Thanks.
(I wonder what my ipod's autocorrect turned into 'Ginger'. That's rather odd.)
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Stand between the Silver Crystal and the Golden Sea.
"Youngsters these days just have no appreciation for the magnificence of the legendary cucumber." --Krityan Elder, Tales of Vesperia.
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maybe because the code has gone on a "3 hour tour"?
Hear that thunder rolling till it seems to split the sky?
That's every ship in Grayson's Navy taking up the cry-
NO QUARTER!!!
-- "No Quarter", by Echo's Children
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11-30-2010, 12:29 AM
(This post was last modified: 10-13-2017, 07:11 PM by Bob Schroeck.)
Some more good news at least: Senator Wyden pledges to delay and undermine the COICA for as long as possible.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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This is the CDA all over again (or rather, if it gets through it will be rapidly expanded until it's the CDA all over again).
Quote:Have you heard of Black Thursday, that terrible day
When the Telecomm Bill stole our freedom away?
The right to free speech in the land of the brave,
It was sent by that bill to an untimely grave.
Tell your friends. If this bill goes through, we'll turn the Web black.
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