Break In Case Of Censorship

What Are Our Free Speech Fail-safes If SOPA Passes?

by Joshua_Kopstein - motherboard.vice.com

As I’m writing this, Congress is getting ready to vote on the single most destructive piece of legislation that the internet has ever faced. SOPA, penned by a team of corporate shills who now have swell lobbyist jobs to show for it, is a bill aimed at combating online piracy in the worst conceivable way possible: By giving copyright holders and the government overreaching, due process-circumventing powers to shut down entire websites based on the mere suspicion that they might contain infringing material.

Worst of all, it’s already happening. Even before the bill has come to vote, censorship shenanigans have already been demonstrated by Universal, who fraudulently removed a music video by Will.i.am that voiced opposition to SOPA. Now, imagine what will happen when SOPA is in full-swing and all of YouTube is held liable for bogus copyright claims … or Etsy, or Flickr.

Of course that says nothing of the countless technologists who have warned SOPA’s China-style DNS blocking will seriously fuck up the internet in general, so it’s really not hyperbolic to say that this is the worst nightmare of a democratic and stable internet.

So the question on everyone’s mind right now is what kind of free speech fail-safes exist if and when SOPA (and its twin in the Senate, PROTECT-IP) passes? Although we can’t guarantee that they will be 100 percent legal, here are a couple of them:


THE IP ADDRESS TRICK (THE DIRTY WAY)

The first is an extremely simple and dirty hack: Because SOPA’s provisions call for the re-routing of DNS (the web’s addressing system that links browsers with the computer hosting a site), the websites will still be there — you just won’t be able to get to them via the usual “www dot com” method. If a site gets blocked, typing the IP address of the host directly (eg: 192.168.1.1) would connect you to that site. The downside: This creates a lot of security risks for the site in question. The fact that DNS exists in part to mask these addresses from the average user should tell you something.

THE WORLD TOR

Tor is what some would call a “darknet,” a network that runs under the radar of the normal internet and can only be accessed using special client software. By connecting to the Tor network, you are anonymizing and encrypting your browsing activity by making your IP address appear as that of a random node somewhere else on the network. And since that random node will typically be outside of the United States, you won’t be getting routed away from sites the copyright elite have deemed “infringing.”

It’s scary to think that Tor might become an option for some Americans, seeing as how it’s been previously used to subvert censorship in places like China and Syria. But even with web traffic fully anonymized and virtually untraceable, it’s not merely a “censorship off” button and there are risks involved if you don’t know what you’re doing. Additionally, securing the means of connecting to (and obtaining information about) the Tor network could become a lot more difficult for newcomers if Tor’s website gets blocked. And moreover, doing so would likely be illegal under SOPA on grounds that it is exists to subvert the filtering system being put in place.

The Bitcoin “Dimnet”

Dot.Bit is another hidden network similar to Tor but operating off a system of encrypted “tokens,” acquired in a way very much like Bitcoins, the decentralized digital currency system . Potentially a boon for sites that want to run outside the reach of the censor, Dot.Bit allows these tokens to be used in order to anonymously register domains under its network, which are accessed under the Top-level Domain (TLD) .bit

This seems like a great idea, but even .bit domains run the risk of being targeted under SOPA. If the law requires ISPs to block access, it would be a simple matter of cutting off the ports that those domains run on. And if those domains are involved in shady black market dealings like the rest of the Bitcoin network, they’ll have ample reason to do so.

All in all, the options are either incredibly obtuse, risky or likely to become illegal anyway. But one thing is for certain: SOPA and PROTECT-IP’s ‘killing spiders with a sledgehammer’ strategy isn’t going to smash piracy — it’s just going to make the internet a lot messier.

Internet revolution dawns with .yournamehere domains

ICANN to expand top level Internet domains despite critics
By Georgina Prodhan
LONDON | Thu Jan 12, 2012

(Reuters) - A quiet Internet revolution begins on Thursday. Organizations can begin applying to name and run their own domains instead of entrusting them to the operators of .com, .org, .gov and others.

Up to 2,000 applications are expected to be made to ICANN, the body that oversees the Internet's naming system for so-called "top-level" international domains. The window to grab some virtual real estate will close in three months' time, probably for years.

The most radical move in U.S.-based ICANN's 13-year history is designed to foster competition and innovation, allowing the new domain owners to build new communities, strengthen ties with customers and give consumers more power.

"It's a fascinating new chapter in the Internet's history," says Jonathan Robinson, non-executive director of Afilias, which is helping with applications and already provides key infrastructure for .org, .info and .mobi.

"It's opening up new fronts of Internet real estate and that brings opportunity and threat."

Most of the first wave of applications is expected to come from leading brand owners who see an opportunity to boost their visibility online, or simply fear that others will grab "their" space if they do not do so themselves.

At $185,000 per application, estimated start-up costs of $500,000 and annual running costs of about $100,000, a .yournamehere domain will be out of reach of the smallest companies and Organizations.

But applications are expected from cities or regions with strong identities, such as .london and .mumbai, from companies aiming to build a business based on new domains, and from community identifiers like .eco or .gay.

Melbourne IT, a leading consultancy firm that is preparing about 100 applications for customers, says most interest has come from the financial services and consumer goods sectors.

"They're looking at it as something they can use as an additional weapon." says the firm's European sales director Stuart Durham.

"Banks are looking at it for online authentication, to prevent fraud and build trust, while consumer goods makers believe they can use this to become more effective in their online marketing and consumer engagement," he says.

For example, a customer on a site ending .hsbc could be certain it was genuinely operated by the bank, or a consumer goods maker like Canon might give each customer their own .canon domain to keep details of their purchases and for communication.

SECRECY
Camera maker Canon is one of just a handful of companies to have acknowledged they are applying to operate their own brand domains -- Deloitte and Hitachi are others. Others are more secretive, fearing unwanted competition, and ICANN will publish details of applicants only after the window closes in April.

In cases where more than one applicant has a legitimate claim to operate a domain - for example, .apple could be contested by the iPod maker and the record label -- ICANN will hold an auction.

The trademark lobby in the United States has some issues with this process. It argues that brand owners will be forced to mount expensive and unnecessary bids to protect their brands online, and has mounted a last-minute offensive to change the rules.

But ICANN says strict criteria are already in place to protect interests.

Applicants have to demonstrate that they have relevant intellectual property rights, and detail how they will operate the domain. The aim here is to prevent cybersquatters from buying up valuable ones and then leaving them inactive while they negotiate a profitable sale to a more legitimate claimant.

The $185,000 application fee is a far cry from the $10 or so needed to register a .com site. Applicants have to fill in a lengthy and complex application form, around which a whole consultancy industry has sprung up.

"It's not something you can just complete in five minutes online using a credit card, like you can for a .com domain name today," says Melbourne IT's Durham.

Jeff Ernst, principal analyst at technology analysis firm Forrester, says he is advising customers against a knee-jerk application.

"I'm not an evangelist for the program myself. I've talked to about 50 companies now in the last six months. There were only about five or six that we found had reason to apply," he says. I'm advising against just doing a defensive registration."

ARTIFICIAL SCARCITY
Beyond the big brands, the revolution in Internet naming could give smaller businesses the chance to increase their visibility online.

With the introduction of geographical top-level domains, a bicycles firm, for example, might boost its profile by winning bicycles.london or bicycles.mumbai, whereas bicycles.com could be prohibitively expensive to acquire from the owner.

"There's tremendous artificial scarcity that's been caused by the delay in the development of these new domains," says Jacob Malthouse, co-founder of Big Room, a Canadian company which is applying to run the new top-level domain .eco.

Malthouse believes the changes mean global communities such as the environmental movement will be better able to unite and work together in future. His organization is backed by some of the world's biggest environmental groups, including Greenpeace, WWF International and the Green Cross.

Malthouse argues that with such backers, .eco would have the authority to certify genuine environmental Organizations and individuals, allowing only them to register a .eco address, and screening out much of the "greenwash" that exists.

"The environmental community has never had a home on the Internet before," he says.

"We see .eco as an opportunity for smaller Organizations or smaller businesses. Maybe a .org doesn't really communicate what they do, or .com doesn't communicate it."

Malthouse says he has been open about his bid to gather the most broad-based and authoritative support possible, to prevent commercial interests from grabbing the domain.

"I think there's a real risk that private groups will try to force .eco to auction. The way we manage that is by demonstrating environmental community support. That's why we've been so public about the bid," he says.

CANDY FLOSS

A handful of potential new domains such as .eco seem likely to succeed but many may turn out to be little used, as was the experience for .jobs, .museum .travel and others in previous, experimental rounds of liberalization.

The .com domain remains dominant for companies, Tim Freeborn, technology and media analyst at London-based brokerage Xcap points out.

"The .mobis were a bit of a washout even though people made money selling addresses," he said. "There may be lots of addresses but they just may not catch anyone's imagination."

Freeborn follows Top Level Domain Holdings, a London-listed company set up to exploit the possibilities of the program, and which is applying for 20 domains on behalf of customers and 30-50 for itself.

Peter Dengate Thrush, TLDH's executive chairman and a former chairman of ICANN, says the process has been protracted -- six years in the planning -- and skepticism widespread, but interest is belatedly gathering momentum.

"A lot of people are waking up to domain names in general. The availability of .xxx (for pornographic sites) has alerted a lot of people," says Thrush.

Some investors are buying TLDH shares as a pure-play bet on the value of the new domains. Its share price has risen 41 percent since the end of November, as fears that the U.S. trademark lobby might derail ICANN's plans have faded.

Still, the model has yet to be proven. ICANN is likely to take until the end of 2012 to award the first new top-level domains, and in the case of hotly contested ones it may be years before they come online.

"The main risk is that people and companies will still gravitate towards .com, and the second risk is that the process of sorting out some of the major generics will be protracted," says Mike Jeremy, analyst at London brokerage Daniel Stewart, who also covers TLDH.

Xcap's Freeborn says: "It feels like candy floss. It's very hard to get a grip on it at the moment. A year from now it should be a lot clearer."

Go Away, Daddy!

Bob Parsons and His Toxic Internet Empire
If unbridled capitalism is the plague, Go Daddy Founder Bob Parsons and his company are the infected boils on the body politic. 

By Lynn Parramore, AlterNet
Posted on January 3, 2012

In late December, domain registrar Go Daddy spat on the notion of the open society by announcing support for the evil Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). Technology firms and human rights activists quickly cried foul, revealing that the “copyright-enforcing” bill, with its overly broad definitions, was less about stopping piracy and more about restricting the flow of information to citizens. The firm caved to public pressure and withdrew support for the bill, which the US House Judiciary Committee will be voting on soon. The furor caused many Web sites (including AlterNet) to decide to pull their registrations from Go Daddy. And it shined a light on the notorious Go Daddy founder, cheekily and rather fondly profiled just days ago in the New York Times Magazine.

I refer to the Big Daddy himself, Bob Parsons.

Recently, Parsons sold 65 percent of Go Daddy to a private group led by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts (well-known GOP supporters) for $2.25 billion – a move that will expand Go Daddy’s resources, products and global growth. Parsons will now step down as CEO, but states that his job "will pretty much continue as it has been" with a focus on the company's marketing strategy.

Parsons is one part P.T. Barnum and one part Howard Stern, so vulgar he makes Donald Trump seem refined by comparison. He first achieved notoriety with his Hooters approach to the erstwhile boring business of selling domain names. He threw taste to the wind and hired a porn actress as the first “Go Daddy Girl,” running ads featuring her "wardrobe malfunction" during the Super Bowl. Feminists howled; Parsons crowed. His business went gangbusters.

An ex-Marine and self-taught computer programmer, Parsons grew up in Baltimore and went from rags to riches to what he is now – radioactive. He is the toxic triple-distilled product of the current moral and cultural climate of American business -- a no-regrets narcissist in love with his own sick media image. He likes to tool around in an armored jeep named Mad Max. He throws “God Bless America”-themed parties for employees in stadiums in which bald eagles are made to soar. A diamond the size of a gumdrop glitters from his ear. Plowing through any remaining boundaries of decency, he videotaped himself grinning over the corpse of an elephant he shot and killed in Zimbabwe to the tune of AC/DC’s “Hells Bells” (he later re-edited the video to remove the most offensive portions and the soundtrack).

Parsons is the kind of businessman who figures out what gets people’s attention—like women's breasts, for example -- and determines what can be done with it without breaking the law. This is known as “marketing brilliance.”

Pursuing his own self-aggrandizement without any notion of public responsibility, Parsons works the gray areas of the law and uses the media (he has his own radio show) to influence his industry. He claims to love his customers, but peruse his personal Web site and you will see that he adores nothing so much as Bob Parsons, followed by large-breasted women wearing hotpants.

Delighted by the reactions his buffoonery produces, he is having the time of his life, like a canine wallowing joyfully in his own crap. One of his four principles of entrepreneurial success is to “enjoy the ride.” “We’re not here for a long time," he burbles. "We’re here for a good time."

Not to put too fine a point on it, Parsons is a sociopath.

His political views demonstrate Parsons' marked lack of feeling for fellow creatures and his disregard for those irritating encumbrances known as "laws." He has supported abusive interrogation methods at Guantanamo Bay on his blog (later redacted) and believes the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is a new wing of the nanny state. On Fox Business, he explained his view that laws are anathema to justice (quoting Cicero, no less).

Parsons' objection to protecting consumers is a cherished value. As Dan Mitchell reported, Go Daddy has been guilty of arbitrarily yanking sites without notice from the web and has made it technically difficult for people to move their domain names.

Full disclosure, I had a terrible run-in with his company a few years ago. Someone used my credit card information to hijack a Web site that I owned and had registered through Go Daddy, which also hosted the site. When I tried to address the issue, customer service basically told me: "tough sh*t, you'll have to sue the party." They refused to do anything at all to resolve the situation, and refused to take any responsibility for not protecting my Web site. The arrogance and dismissive attitude were utterly breathtaking. My ability to make a living was severely threatened by this failure, and I spent countless hours addressing it through legal channels. I now use Register.com (there's debate over which registrar is the best alternative, but many agree that anyone but Go Daddy is a vast improvement).

Since Parsons announced the new private equity venture on July 1, 2011, Go Daddy surpassed the 50 million domain name mark. True, over 37,000 have moved their domain names since the Reddit-driven transfer day on December 29, but that's just a drop in Big Daddy's Bucket.

As his predecessor P.T. Barnum once put it, there's a sucker born every minute.

Talks on anti-piracy bill adjourn until 2012

By Stephen C. Webster - RAW News
Friday, December 16, 2011

Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX), the Republican behind a controversial piece of legislation that would shut down any website accused of copyright infringement, abruptly adjourned a marathon session of the House Judiciary Committee on Friday as it was considering marking up the bill.

After roughly 14 hours of debate spanning two days, Smith accepted the proposal of Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT), an opponent of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), who asked the chairman for more time and at least two more hearings so the committee could better understand some of the more technical aspects of the legislation.

The deal came after Chaffetz attempted to amend the bill to delay a provision that would strike websites from the Internet’s central domain naming system (DNS) — a proposal that critics have specifically targeted for fundamentally breaking the structure of the Internet.

When Chaffetz offered to set his amendment aside if Smith would agree to hold hearings on how the rule would affect classified and civilian cyber-security, the chairman agreed.

Although it’s not exactly a victory for opponents of SOPA, it does buy them a little extra time to lobby members of Congress. The next House Judiciary Committee hearing on the anti-piracy legislation will not take place until sometime early next year.