News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on DeSopa Circumvents SOPA — Despite its Anti-Circumvention Measures.

Re:DeSopa Circumvents SOPA — Despite its Anti-Circumvention ... by gvb on Saturday December 31, 2011 @12:03PM (#3411248)
He's working too hard (but it is good for publicity). Per the writeup, DeSopa uses a foreign DNS service (which would not be under SOPA jurisdiction) to look up IP addresses. My off-the-shelf firewall/router (Buffalo/DD-WRT) can set a fixed DNS IP address. The simple and transparent way to implement DeSopa is to set that to a foreign DNS service.

Real hackers run their own caching DNS servers, of course, and thus have many more options for bypassing SOPA. ;-)

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:DeSopa Circumvents SOPA — Despite its Anti-Circumvention ... by delimitted on Saturday December 31, 2011 @12:41PM (#3411355)
True, but not everyone who will be affected by SOPA is a hacker. After (and if) SOPA is passed, releasing this sort of program will be illegal. The point was to illustrate to congress that SOPA is ineffective, and hopefully turn the conversation to something more workable.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:DeSopa Circumvents SOPA — Despite its Anti-Circumvention ... by gvb on Saturday December 31, 2011 @02:35PM (#3411619)
Ahh, but my main point is that the capability is baked into every firewall/router and it does not take a hacker to configure it to bypass SOPA. It would be easy to make instructions that "anybody's mother" could follow to configure to point to a non-SOPAed DNS server.

If SOPA is passed, it would make firewall/routers illegal unless the manufacturers removed the ability to set the DNS server, which is clearly nonsense and unenforceable.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:DeSopa Circumvents SOPA — Despite its Anti-Circumvention ... by delimitted on Saturday December 31, 2011 @02:53PM (#3411674)
You may be surprised about how challenging it may be for "anybody's mother". Anyway, DeSopa was a quick way to prove a point. I expect that if SOPA passes offshore DNS services will advertise their IPs for manual setup (resolv.conf, TCP/IP windows settings etc), and local applications will be developed that circumvent SOPA in this and other ways.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:DeSopa Circumvents SOPA — Despite its Anti-Circumvention ... by seanp2k2 on Saturday December 31, 2011 @04:01PM (#3411830)
Yup, and this is exactly why MAFIAAFire got a takedown notice, even though you could "explain to your mom" how to implement a HOSTS file.
[ Parent | on HN ]