(context: I'm the CTO of Quad9 and am one of the people dealing with the lawyers)
There is an understandable focus on "how are you going to block French users" when we have also claimed that geoIP blocking is insufficient for selectively denying resolution for certain names - we understand this conflict, but we think it is energy spent in the wrong place.
It is probable that we will use geoIP filters to block French users from our services after November 24. We could apply this same geoIP filter list now to selectively block French users from reaching the sites that we've been told to make unavailable. But this would corrupt our core premise, which is that the DNS is not the right place for this to happen, and if we comply within France to meet the requirement then we accept the worst eventual outcome for users and we still do not have legally perfect coverage. We wish to first remain consistent with our core mission, and secondarily we must remain as close to compliance as we can to the legal constraints put upon us. By accepting the demands for blocking, we would admit that such demands are permissible within our mission - that we will act on behalf of companies (or others) to create ineffective and mis-directed regimes of content constraint.
We would be admitting that we think this solves the problem - it does not. We would be admitting that we will do this for an ever-increasing number of names - we will not. We would be permitting these methods to be applied for more areas of filtering such as moral, religious, social, or political reasons - we must not.
So we accept that there is the possibility that we will have errors in our blockade, but in this case (blocking French users) we maintain consistency with our stated mission of integrity of the DNS. We would rather there be a clear distinction made for users of our services: you get the DNS as you (the user) expects, or if Quad9 is forced to pollute the service with unexpected and arbitrary number of fragmentation demands, then we will not offer the services at all.
The underlying issue is not ONLY that geoIP blocking is ineffective, but that the entire premise of any of these demands is inappropriately applied to DNS recursive resolution providers. We would hope that this discussion continues to be on the most fundamental of the disagreement we have with the outcome in this court case, not on the details of the technical implementation which have yet to be entirely decided and which can be tuned over time.
I wonder how much longer the internet will manage to hold out. Governments will continue trying to impose their laws on it, causing the international network to degenerate to numerous national networks with heavy filtering at the borders. It's really sad to watch...
It's hard to monger WWIII when people from all over the world talk to each other and know for a fact that it's not the guy to this or that side of a border who's the enemy, but their own governments are (working to the same squid endgame).
Everyone should own their entire chain to the wider internet, and everyone should have access to a chain that is horrifically hard or expensive to detect by governments (VLESS/Hysteria2/etc), and not be financially dependent on a provider in order to do it.
If they want to fuck with us, it's time to start fucking back.
On the plus side the internet is designed to be quite hard to block at the borders and you can still access most stuff most places with a little effort. Governments have been trying for years to block stuff and had limited results.
I think most haven't put in the effort yet, but it is rather possible to make it extremely inconvenient where even if you get around the blocks, the experience will be extremely slow, random disconnects, non existent upload bandwidth so you could consume but not publish much etc.
I've been to a lot of countries and it was mostly trivial. China was tricky although I see on the web now you get round the great firewall just by using a foreign esim. I think places like China put in a lot of effort.
> I see on the web now you get round the great firewall just by using a foreign esim
Yes, but that's not circumventing anything. That's an essentially approved method for foreigners specifically because they don't care about keeping foreigners within the GFW.
Once that foreign esim is behind a GFW equivalent of whichever country it is from, what then?
> I think places like China put in a lot of effort
Conceptually, it represents the same as any other illegalization:
1. A government has authority for a geographical "box".
2. The government succeeds if it can plug all the "holes".
3. Rogue anti-government behavior punches new holes all the time, which is an endless battle.
In the case of the internetwork, we're two underwater cable cuts away from severing the planet asunder and effectively patching most of the "holes", but that would also destroy most of the economy, so no government really wants to do it.
I guess my political statement/point is that as long as there's too much to track, we're all safe, so making more things across more domains makes everyone safer.
Necessity is the mother of invention. Fortunately what's needed is already invented, but the motivation to push 'normal' people there hasn't. In particularly decentralized techs, TOR, and other technologies are fully robust against these actions.
Our inability to push "normal" people onto these things is precisely what will kill us. Tor needs a massive anonymity set to work properly. If people don't use it, we are all weakened. It also gives the corporations economic leverage: they can just ban Tor exit nodes and take the small loss instead of being forced to connect.
For most practical cases a vpn is enough. I use the free service with VeePN's Chrome extension and that does most things. They nag you to upgrade to paid every now and then. I think there's also a free one in Firefox now.
There is a dichotomy to this thread. One side is free internet from government grasp, but I bet that the same people are the government gib me stuff people that want the government to care for them and intervene from cradle to grave.
We have no clue whether they're their assumptions. They claim 100% that they are theirs, but we can't know that. Especially in similar situations, when politics is mentioned and usually too many people have the same assumptions shouted by some "news" sources.
As some other comments on this post have mentioned, there is a a treaty known as the "Lugano Convention", whose parties are the EU (as a whole), Denmark [0], Iceland, Norway and Switzerland; post-Brexit, the UK wanted to join in its own right, but the EU refused. Under the Lugano Convention, if you get a judgement in a French court, you can then apply under the convention to have a Swiss court enforce it; however, there are exceptions which the Swiss court could rely on to refuse to do so – but I have no idea what are the odds that a Swiss court would decide any of those exceptions apply.
[0] Denmark has an opt-out from this area of EU law, which is why it is the only EU member state which needs to be directly party to the treaty; it applies to the others indirectly through the EU as a whole being a party to it
Well, one option Quad9 could consider, is moving to Liechtenstein - it is part of the EEA (unlike Switzerland which isn’t, although its bilateral agreements with the EU/EFTA partially approximate EEA membership), but unlike Switzerland, it isn’t party to the Lugano Convention
However, I don’t know whether the other aspects of Liechtenstein’s legal and political system would make that viable or not.
Thank you for the explanation! I couldn't agree more with your stance, and I appreciate deeply you fighting to maintain your (correct) principles. You've gained at least one fan and new user today.
Quick question: what would happen if you decided to simply shield yourself from France’s action without applying any change to your dns? Or is blocking french users considered a compliant answer by French courts?
I don’t get why you would still need to block french users if you also need to exit the jurisdiction.
Because continuing to provide the service to French users would mean they have not exited the jurisdiction. You cant provide services in a jurisdiction and at the same time expect not be subject to that jurisdiction. That's just not how any country treats legal jurisdiction.
As a side project I help out with some technical stuff at a hosting company that provides services to a political group that is strongly anti Erdogan. The infrastructure is in the USA.
We do not block IP traffic from known Turkish ISP ranges. The customer (the political group) receives all sorts of dire legal warnings and threats that what they publish is contrary to Turkish law.
None of our other hosting platforms are configured to block any traffic to/from Turkish IP ranges. We have no business presence or financial involvement with anything domestically in Turkey. Am I subject to Turkish jurisdiction? I don't think so.
But by what you wrote, I am providing services in Turkey.
If you go to Turkey you might find yourself in a prison until you abruptly close this website. This is what happened to Pavel Durov (Telegram creator) in France. Telegram now complies with French law, because otherwise Pavel Durov would still be in French prison.
That's certainly a valid risk, if I were to put myself physically at the mercy of Turkish armed law enforcement inside their borders. In my particular case there's no public information that links my real name to the hosting company, as my work is behind the scenes.
Could Turkish intelligence link me to the company if they spent significant resources researching the hosting company that provides services to their political enemies? Probably. Do I have any personal plans to take a vacation in Turkey any time soon, or a pressing need to visit Turkey? No.
I am pretty sure we also have someone, somewhere hosting something that insults the King of Thailand, so I suppose that's a risk too.
This is a Swiss company offering services to French users. Although Switzerland is not an EU member, it is a party to the European Free Trade Area (EFTA) and through this, the Swiss government would likely be required to help enforce French rulings against their companies.
> This is a Swiss company offering services to French users.
If I operate a bookstore physically in switzerland and a few of the books I sell are illegal in france I'm not required to check passports or whatever, am I? I can just sell books to whoever (subject to swiss law) and if a french national illegally imports one to france that's a problem for customs or the local police or whoever (analogously the french ISPs) to deal with. Not me, the swiss bookstore operator.
Now consider if I were handing out pamphlets for free rather than selling anything. At that point I'm arguably not even doing business because no money has changed hands.
I realize that the current legal reality might be that quad9 needs to block french users in practice but the entire thing is a farce if you stop and think about it.
What about countries friendly with Turkey? I can easily imagine you being arrested in half of the world and extradited to Turkey because you are being criminally prosecuted in Turkey.
It sounds like your point is that (1) you think Türkiye is unlikely to unmask any individuals associated with your company and also (2) you have little interest in ever visiting that country anyway.
In the Quad9 people’s case, defying French law and still doing operating the services under French jurisdiction might work out just fine for as long as (1) holds true, but it doesn’t take a consorted effort of research to change that. It could just be that some leaked piece of information eventually surfaces. It could be a tweet posted by someone else. And I don’t know how many people work for that organization, or might do so in the future, but it seems like a bad move to make a decision on their behalf to paint a target on all their backs.
Also, France being part of the EU makes being an enemy of the state there seem even more unwise for anyone who might want to have associations in any other EU country.
I personally would do exactly what they are doing: if French people want a government that respects free speech, they had better elect one themselves. I wouldn’t become a martyr to that cause - it wouldn’t help anyway.
Let's say you are a software company based in country C (company) and offer services to users in country U (users), only over the internet, and having no physical assets in country U. You could imagine Microsoft offering Office 365 to customers in Liechtenstein, for example.
GP's point is that whenever you sell or offer something to users in U, you have to abide by U's laws in doing so - no matter whether you did that all while sitting at your desk in country C.
Whether or not enforcement or liability is realistic is up to the relationship between U and C I guess - my guess is France and Switzerland are on pretty good terms.
I understand that's probably how the law works, but it is kind of nonsensical to me that it passively allowing visitors from a country would pull you into their jurisdiction. Requiring you to be responsible for blocking any users to your service from U ensures seems analogous to an author of a book that is illegal/censored in U being required to make sure that no one from U buys the book and takes it back to their country.
This is not exactly your focus, but this means that it can be possible for there to be a set of laws in U, such that an action is required and illegal if not present, but that this same action is illegal in C...
I.e., the predication is both meaningless and pointless, unless the supposition is that the laws of U don't hold - if C extradites a citizen of U over said action, is then U's law not supreme?
The problem is that, technically, an IP address doesn't have a country. GeoIP is at best a suggestion, and it is trivial to route your traffic through a "foreign" IP.
It is about as enforceable as "don't read letters written by redheaded people": it'll never be airtight, and it'll always have a huge amount of false positives.
The only possible "solution" is to ban all open devices from the internet, mandate a DRM-style "trust zone", have the device do mTLS, and embed a realtime DNA sequencer in every device.
Don't give them ideas... That's the wet dream they all salvate at... complete control of what's allowed to be published with a instant way of banning content and people.
They wouldn't be providing services in France, they'd be providing service in Switzerland to people from France. No different than if someone from France traveled to a bagel shop in Switzerland for a bite to eat. If France wants to make it illegal for French citizens to communicate with a foreign business in Switzerland, I don't see how it's the business's responsibility to enforce that.
If someone put a bagel shop on the Swiss/French border and sold bagels across it (using, I don’t know, a long pole or something) I guess there would be some questions.
Realistically, Switzerland and France have a relationship; treaties, etc. Quad9 has to comply with Swiss law, and they probably hope that making reasonable good-faith moves to block French users will cause Swiss courts (if it comes down to that) to see them as the more sympathetic party.
Nothing's crossing the border in this case other than information. It's more like a guy on the French side of the border shouting over to a guy on the Swiss side, and the French government trying to regulate what the guy on the Swiss side is allowed to say in reply.
Regardless of what analogy you use, the point is that the company isn't in France, it's in Switzerland. It doesn't make sense for it to have to do anything to comply with French law, even if it's interacting with someone who happens to be in France.
None of these analogies work very well because providing services across the border without crossing it doesn’t scale very well in-person. I should have just said that directly, but the image of cross-border bagel service was too funny to pass up.
WRT your second paragraph, I think I addressed it already in my second paragraph.
Hence the “shield” part. I guess it’s easier said than done when you’re a Swiss non-profit and not an anonymous sysadmin in Iraq (or whatever jurisdiction would work for this example, idk).
Well, they might be able to go against the domain registrars and possibly cloud providers that also operate in the french market. But those companies probably have a bigger expensive legal team, while quadnine is just a little non-profit.
If france wants to institute their own great firewall then they should just do that rather than engaging in twisted extra-national half measures that make liability confusing for everyone.
There was a rumour years ago that Quad9 was connected to UK intelligence, or something like that. I haven't heard anyone discuss there for a long time, but wondering if you (or anyone reading this) can comment on the source of the rumours and whether there is any veracity to them.
https://quad9.net/ lists as being founded by Global Cyber Alliance, which was founded by City of London police, Manhattan District Attorney’s Office and Center for Internet Security.
City of London and Manhattan District Attorney’s Office suggests finance is a factor, so I'll hazard a guess that Quad9's telemetry is useful for protecting the interest of finance: e.g. learning of new/popular domains that might be tricking users/businesses into fraudulent activity.
Quad9 meanwhile have the remit to provide the best public resolver, including fighting cases as they do.
The thing about DNS is that you can do your own investigations, rather than rely on rumour and innuendo. You can query their DNS and anyone else you can get at and compare results. You can use a VPN to appear to come from somewhere else or ask a friend to perform a query on your behalf.
You can literally [sigh] be your own journalist in this regard. All you need is a DNS query tool. I recommend dig but you might only have nslookup available out of the box.
Now, this UK intelligence thing. Even if James Bond Q's mates were actually running a DNS system you can still query it and compare it to someone else's view of the internet, say 1.1.1.1 or 8.8.8.8 or whatever.
You can also go to the source, ie root: . and work your own way down to decide on what is what.
Let's have a go at an analogy: DNS is (not really) a bit like a topographical map. You could buy your maps from DodgyRussianMaps'R'us and be surprised that Ukraine has somehow been subsumed by a bunch of murderous wankers. On the other hand you might buy your maps from HonestJonOffOfFaceb00c and note that it isn't. You can, of course, ask for a few other opinions and make up your own mind.
My real point is that DNS is actually quite hard to tamper with, without breaking so many things that everyone can know it is being messed with. When an org resorts to fiddling with DNS they've already lost whatever argument is to be had.
I think you fundamentally misunderstood the potential issue.
Sure, on a reply based approach you can audit a DNS service.
But that doesn't tell you about other things like "is my DNS provider also providing intelligence agencies with my entire DNS query history?". The issue isn't "oh no the MI6 can redirect my PornHub link to anothe site", but "oh no the MI6 knows every single webpage I visited". Which is a valid worry given the current British political climate.
DNS is simply a look up service and yes, you do have to be sure of your sources. You can avoid the (sic) MI6 by using DTLS. Not sure why you'd bother though for everyday use.
That's not for the average punter but where there is a will there is a way.
I don't think that you live within the "current British political climate" nor do I think you know too much about it. Please feel free to educate us about your ideology and then we can usefully engage.
It’s like buying a dodgy map, except the map pulls updates every time you use it. You could very well provide DNS for free and get everyone to use it and then suddenly serve tampered responses at some specific time and use that until everyone affected notices and switches.
And also you can just serve DNS normally and get the intelligence.
I’m sorry for being so dense, so what do you plan to do?
It sounds like selectivd site blocking is against your mission, so will you then just not offer Quad9 to any person in France instead (total blackout across all sites)?
Sorry if I’m missing the obvious or your stated solution.
Respect. I'm not a big fan of politics, but have you ever tried to explain your mission to EU legislators and try to make them understand your viewpoint? There seem to be some quite strong-handed tactics to make content disappear from the internet, and having some of those in charge understand that this is not the way forward might turn out to be very important to all of us in the future.
Thank you for bringing your cause to light, with the very well thought and written write-ups on the blog post and further here on HackerNews.
Despite going against you stand for, why not consider implementing a service fee of 100,000 euros per domain name that is requested to be blocked?
I wish I was /s on this but this be a way for you to say that you comply, with no sane company would go about requesting tens or hundreds of domains to be blocked, endlessly, for the rest of eternity (as the courts currently are asking your company to do, forever, at your own cost).
Technically, there is GeoIP filtering going into place after the 24th so why not put that to good use for a while until you get some orders for this new service (or a drop in interest from the suitors) ?:)
Good to see leaders stand up for what they believe in. Soemtimes I simply do not understand this obsession with controlling the internet by European countries. So ridiculous.
I asked his elsewhere but aren't there like a prepondeance of existing case law or amicus-briefs that would speak to the logical and historical stupidity of arguments by the plaintiffs?
So, basically, you admit you will comply exiting all countries that ask for it; Pushing users to allegedly less safe resolvers in the name of security and integrity; And eventually ending the service in a couple of years because no one will be able to use your service since you'll be blocking most parts of the world and won't work without VPN exit in specific places.
The decision is understandable, this really is a dillema I wouldn't want to take part in.
You'll die by a thousand cuts of authoritarianism.
It's strange that Quad9 openly does malicious domain filtering [1] using what it terms "threat intelligence feeds", but apparently filtering piracy domains is technically impossible and not the right place for this to happen. I think courts rightly are suspicious of this kind of doublespeak from DNS companies. If DNS filtering is effective for protection against malware and ransomware, it will be at least somewhat effective for piracy filtering too.
(context: I am the CTO of Quad9) Using those threat intelligence feeds is optional, as the blog post indicates. 9.9.9.10 & secondaries have no filtering.
The threat feeds we offer are in alignment with what the user expects and intends. Mandatory restriction of DNS resolution by a third party (not the user, not Quad9) is expressly what users do NOT want, regardless of the outcome. Once such restrictions are enacted and treated as normal, the channel for making demands will fill with a flood of "objectionable" names from every corner for every reason. Quad9 has already received demands from the French regulator to block sites which deliver adult content found to be objectionable to minors. We see an extremely slippery slope which has already moved out of piracy as the scoped intent which is this case in particular.
More to the point: prohibiting content via the DNS is a useless exercise when it is done out of alignment with the end users' goals - they will simply use some other recursive resolver (or their own) probably without the benefits of being oriented towards security and privacy. We have no monopoly on DNS resolution - there are thousands of others open to public use, and anyone can set up their own, for free, with no mandatory requirements by governments or regulators. This case (and any others like it) only drives out law-abiding organizations who are trying to promote better cyber hygiene and who want to keep the DNS as a single, un-splintered high-integrity pointer system.
> Using those threat intelligence feeds is optional, as the blog post indicates. 9.9.9.10 & secondaries have no filtering.
TIL that filtering is on by default on the standard resolver (9.9.9.9). That’s certainly a surprise to me; I would have expected the standard resolver to provide “honest” DNS responses and a secondary to provide filtering, rather than the reverse (which is what I think Cloudflare does).
While I think that the ruling is both morally and legally questionable, I do agree with GP that this weakens your original argument quite a bit.
Yeah, it's not the right place for it to happen. One's a service to protect the consumer, and the other is a corporate profit preserving concern. Why should a free DNS service be doing their work for them?
Because a court interpreted the law and ordered them to. And protecting companies from unlawful piracy is just as much a moral good as protecting the consumer from ransomware and threat actors. And if the DNS company can do the one, they can do the other.
It is not obvious that any specific unauthorized act of copying is "piracy," there is always a fair use argument and at the end of the day it is up to the courts to determine whether or not fair use applies.
Pretty inconvenient with the Internet being a thing.
"The plaintiff (Sony Music Entertainment GmbH) then used a VPN to access the blocked content from Germany in circumvention of the geoIP blocking. The court agreed with Sony in their assertions of noncompliance, and we were fined for contempt of court."
Imagine doing everything possible to stop something. They then circumvent your protections with yet another service, and you get fined.
I wish I could even suggest what someone could do against these trolls.
This is like saying "we put a lock requested by court and where found guilty because plantif hacked us after"
The article rightfully mentions the Sony case, but the article is actually mainly about another company:
> beIN, a Qatari company with offices in France, previously sought to force Quad9 to block resolution for a set of domain names they assert are participating in copyright infringement of its audiovisual rights on sports event broadcasts.
...I'm dumbfounded at the idea of using real-life courts to enforce real-life sporting events' streaming rights by getting rapid injunctions against DNS providers as the means of striking at a multiply-redundant head of a piracy hydra when DNS TTLs are often longer than the actual sporting event being infringed upon.
...it's like going after the independent printshop who printed your local telephone directory book to redact known ne'er-do-wells from the directory because a local weed drug deal took place 5 minutes ago but the next telephone directory print isn't scheduled for another 6 months.
> I'm dumbfounded at the idea of using real-life courts to enforce real-life sporting events' streaming rights by getting rapid injunctions against DNS providers
It could always be worse, like here in Spain, where they got one court order a few years back, and just arbitrarily block half the internet (i.e. all of Cloudflare) whenever the futbol is on...
> ...I'm dumbfounded at the idea of using real-life courts to enforce real-life sporting events' streaming rights by getting rapid injunctions against DNS providers as the means of striking at a multiply-redundant head of a piracy hydra when DNS TTLs are often longer than the actual sporting event being infringed upon.
There's a youtuber who breaks down samples in songs by hip hop artists, and he gets striked or all his earnings taken by someone who stalks his videos, he used to cut samples to below 15 seconds, and still gets striked. You can't even defend yourself, and arguably he is within FAIR USE of the content.
Someone, somewhere is going out of their way to strike their videos. It's ridiculous, do they strike news channels when copyrighted music plays in the background without their control too?
> do they strike news channels when copyrighted music plays in the background without their control too?
Yes, they do. In Brazil, to avoid some news reports about stores selling contraband items, the store owners started playing Disney songs in the background, meaning they weren't able to publish the videos or broadcast them.
Maybe I haven't considered this enough but couldn't they just remove the audio and put subtitles up with what was said? Just preface this segment segment with the information that the owners of the store are playing copyrighted Disney music in an attempt to prevent them from recording them. Maybe have a voiceover explaining the situation if dead air is unacceptable for some reason.
That seems much more sensible than what is being discussed. Sure fair use offers some protections, but youtube the platform is not required to protect individual youtuber revenues for fair use. Fair use effectivly entails an exception to the normal rules, and as such, requires actual judgement on a case by case basis instead of being something that can be scaled like content id. If you actually got sued, you could use Fair Use as a defense in court, and the judge would decide if you are right or not. In the case you are discussing, no-one got sued because youtube handled it without a court, so fair use never really comes into play.
What is being discussed would be more like if a court tried to get Google to take down individual spam bot youtube accounts that had popped up that same morning. Its rediculous because the legal system doesn't move that fast (nor does DNS), so things that require that level of heavy-handedness are typically much slower processes taking months or years.
As per usual, the answer is no. DNSSEC prevents resolver cache poisoning for trusted resolvers which validate DNSSEC. That is literally it. It provides no security against the vast majority of attacks against DNS.
Also limited protection against MitM upstream of the resolver, spoofing is prevented but denial of service is still possible.
> Imagine doing everything possible to stop something. They then circumvent your protections with yet another service, and you get fined.
Isnt this what gets all tech companies into trouble all the time. Something objectionable happens (ChatGPT helping someone bulid a bomb for instance) and we go like "Do better".
I think, usually, in those cases it's that people believe the company did not really do anywhere near everything it could - it did the bare minimum it thought it could get away with then seemed shocked it wasn't enough to matter.
Here, if any pair of countries have conflicting rules then you simply can't expose your service to both because it's plain impossible for you to block all means of VPN/proxy regardless of how perfect your service tries to detect it. There's no payment, there's no account, there's no anything - you're just serving DNS to an IP that reports to be out of Germany according to German law. At some point it stops being a mistake/malintent of the company and one of the user. Where that transitions probably depends on the person though.
> if any pair of countries have conflicting rules then you simply can't expose your service to both
Yes. This is also how physical products work. The internet makes it easy and the default to offer a service worldwide, hence also making it easy to get in conflict with the law worldwide. You have to pick and choose which laws to break, which laws to comply with by minimizing exposure, and which laws to comply with by making a tailor-made version for a specific market.
You say this confidently, but this is merely one theory about how things should work.
If I make a product in my country, where it’s legal, and a buyer purchases it from me and then brings it to you overseas where it’s illegal, and someone in your county tries to sue me for it, they are typically going to have a hard time. (Unless your country is powerful enough to violate the sovereignty of my nation.)
In most cases, you accessing my website is more like this scenario. Intermediaries (ISPs) brought you the product. I simply offered it to anyone who came to my “store” (server). I admit that this dynamic changes if you directly pay me for something.
Your framework implies that every social website needs to make a decision on whether or not users are allowed to insult the Thai monarch[0], and then must block access to Thais if they decide it’s allowed. In reality nobody does this, although they may choose not to put a server in Thailand if they are worried about it.
> If I make a product in my country, where it’s legal, and a buyer purchases it from me and then brings it to you overseas where it’s illegal, and someone in your county tries to sue me for it, they are typically going to have a hard time.
Except the analogue to your ISP for your example is UPS and they are far less (if at all?) responsible for the content of packages they deliver.
It’s just a metaphor and it breaks down if you dig into the specifics too deeply, as with all metaphors. But if you insist, I as the seller am not responsible either. If I’m a bookseller and I send a banned book to you via UPS, after you paid me in person in cash, and your customs seizes it, you don’t get your package and nothing happens to me. YOU might get in trouble though.
Now if I keep sending banned materials to your country, it might be a bad idea for me to travel there. But nothing else is going to happen, unless you’re a global power and you drone me or compel my government to extradite me. (Or if my own country was foolish enough to make mutual extradition agreements for such things.)
(Note, I specified in person in cash above because as I mentioned before, electronic payments make things messy. But most websites are “free”.)
UPS is partially liable for incorrect declarations of international packages and for attempting to deliver packages they should have known were illegal...
> In most cases, you accessing my website is more like this scenario. Intermediaries (ISPs) brought you the product.
Offering a website to a certain country is not something ISP decided for you, but you actively did that yourself. I cant create a gambling website and host it in Monaco and then serve it to someone in CA and say that, it isnt on me, but on Comcast.
How do you "actively" offer a website to a country?
Websites aren't broadcasting, they are waiting there and responding to requests. Why should it be on every server in the world to have to figure out whether they're allowed to respond to a given request based on the client's country?
Why is it not the user's responsibility to not send requests? Why isn't it the ISP's responsibility to not route the requests? And every single router in between?
FWIW, this theory was attempted in court with a bittorrent case in Hong Kong. [1]
Defendant's lawyer argued that seeding a copyrighted movie was not (active) distribution but merely "making it available" (which was not associated with a criminal offense in HK law as opposed to "distributing infringing copies").
This is someone in HK judged under HK jurisdiction. That's fine.
My point is it's weird to expect website operators to be aware of every jurisdiction on the planet and take steps to comply with each of them.
If that expectation becomes common, the obvious way to go isn't to block the countries you aren't allowed to serve. It's to only allow the ones you know you are allowed.
Imagine how the internet would be if you were default blocked from accessing any website hosted in a different country.
> Imagine how the internet would be if you were default blocked from accessing any website hosted in a different country.
It's a difficult issue for sure. It's almost a geopolitical problem -- the larger economic blocs (eg. EU, China, USA) can basically dictate terms and expect general compliance (eg. GDPR) because most companies can't avoid operating in those areas, while smaller countries can't really do much unless they're part of a bigger economic bloc.
False. Making a website accessible from the internet is not “offering” it to anyone. You might have a claim if I were paying to advertise in that country, maybe.
And actually you can just make a gambling website overseas, people have done that since forever. You might have trouble with accepting payments, though.
See also the UK's Online Safety Act and the UK's regulator Ofcom, which stated:
'Ofcom told the BBC: "We are aware of this lawsuit. Under the Online Safety Act, any service that has links with the UK now has duties to protect UK users, no matter where in the world it is based."
A service doesn't have to be based in the UK to be subject to the act, and therefore face action from Ofcom.'
The US-based lawyers for the services in question take a very different view....
> I think, usually, in those cases it's that people believe the company did not really do anywhere near everything it could - it did the bare minimum it thought it could get away with then seemed shocked it wasn't enough to matter.
Yes, and Quad9 could have done better in the German court case. At a minimum they could have asked users to register and provide proof of residency, and then could have ensured that their DNS service is offered only to registered users.
> At a minimum they could have asked users to register and provide proof of residency
This would have been a massive burden to them, and (as we have seen from the ongoing data leaks) a gigantic privacy risk to its users. It would have also been a big overreach, as the German ruling would have mostly impacted non-German users.
Let's take this level of user tracking for DNS would be accepted & fine by Germany as well as what folks were thinking was feasible for the company to do as a given, how does it prove the user+ip who registered is the user+ip who submitted the request instead of the place it got proxied? Or malware enabling the same?
If you can solve this for me it would actually help a lot at work :D
A recursive DNS resolver is identified just by an IP address for your system level DNS resolver to use (eg. in /etc/resolv.conf). Even if you assigned a random, secret IPv6 address for every individual user, they could simply share that with anyone else too. In IPv4, pretty much impossible.
I’m not defending it and hate it too, but it’s worth remembering that from the perspective of many governments and regulators, the internet is a legally broken Wild West that the law needs to catch up with. Viewed through the lens of legal precedent that balanced privacy/safety/liberty before telecommunications networks, that is true: surveillance was permitted within a very broad set of parameters (by default, even: that’s why we talk about e.g. private residences being protected exceptions to no-privacy-by-default).
Again, I don’t endorse that framing. But that’s where a lot of lawmakers are at. They’re not corrupt or fascists or hysterical about porn or whatever (well, plenty are, but not most). They’re trying to correct what they identify as a dangerously uncontrolled area.
As we should. These corporations are rent seeking monopolists. Like many Japanese companies, Sony is an intellectual property absolutist. PlayStation creator Ken Kutaragi called our objections to the "you'll own nothing" future a "mentality issue".
I have sympathy for my fellow man. There isn't enough liability in the world for these corporations.
> These corporations are rent seeking monopolists. Like many Japanese companies, Sony is an intellectual property absolutist.
The whole intellectual property space is pure rent seeking. Everybody wants name recognition and/or money whenever some text, code, image, or video they produced is used or remixed. It is pure rent seeking, from FSF to Sony to Metallica.
> The whole intellectual property space is pure rent seeking. Everybody wants name recognition and/or money whenever some text, code, image, or video they produced is used or remixed. It is pure rent seeking, from FSF to Sony to Metallica.
If that's true, so is the private property space in general.
But what you say isn't true. The "intellectual property space" is not pure rent seeking. If someone labors to write a novel, they're no less justified to get economic benefit from it than someone who labored to build an apartment building.
Intellectual property critics have a tendency to throw the baby out with the bathwater. There are problems with IP, but those specific should be fixed through reform.
Copyright has never existed for the benefit of authors, and anyone who authors a scientific paper knows this. Copyright has always benefited the publishing industry and was established at the request of publishers in the first place, after they lost the monopoly they had under the previous censorship regime (the "star chamber"). Authors receive at best a small fraction of the sales of their work and most authors never receive enough compensation to actually live on, hence the expression "don't quit your day job."
At this point copyright is an obsolete system. It was set up at a time when large-scale copying required an industrial operation, and that is simply not the reality of the world anymore. We do not need to "reform" copyright, we need to build a brand new system that is more reflective of modern technology. Maybe that new system will actually focus on compensating authors as there is no need for a publishing industry, or maybe we will just accept that authors are not guaranteed any payment for their work and will have to make money some other way.
> Copyright has never existed for the benefit of authors, and anyone who authors a scientific paper knows this.
That's some bizarre logic: copyright predates the existence of scientific papers [edit: published as a for-profit activity dependent on copyright]. Why would the 20/21st century experience of publishing a scientific paper have any bearing on what it's always been?
Scientific publishing is messed up because, unlike most other creative work, it has a different funding model (basically state patronage), which basically makes the publishers very profitable parasites. That should be addressed directly instead of abolishing copyright for all works.
> Authors receive at best a small fraction of the sales of their work and most authors never receive enough compensation to actually live on, hence the expression "don't quit your day job." ... or maybe we will just accept that authors are not guaranteed any payment for their work and will have to make money some other way.
That's more bizarre logic: "Authors don't get paid enough, so lets take away their rights so they get paid less."
> At this point copyright is an obsolete system. It was set up at a time when large-scale copying required an industrial operation, and that is simply not the reality of the world anymore.
Copyright was setup before the industrial revolution, so your statement doesn't make sense. Also, at least in some countries, its foundation is the moral rights of the author, not some argument about production.
> We do not need to "reform" copyright, we need to build a brand new system that is more reflective of modern technology. Maybe that new system will actually focus on compensating authors as there is no need for a publishing industry, or maybe we will just accept that authors are not guaranteed any payment for their work and will have to make money some other way.
You're throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It seems like you have gripes coming from a particular problem area (scientific publishing?) and are too narrowly focused on that. "I have this gripe, lets decommission this important legacy system, and then rewrite it completely from scratch!" is usually not a good plan.
> That's some bizarre logic: copyright predates the existence of scientific papers
Firstly, this isn’t true, but more importantly it doesn’t matter because the parent’s claim doesn’t depend on scientific papers predating copyright.
The first scientific paper was Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, published in London on March 6, 1665 (or you can go back as far as Aristotle if you prefer). The first copyright law is England’s Statute of Anne (1710).
> copyright predates the existence of scientific papers
[citation needed] /s
"Philosophical Transactions is the world’s first and longest-running scientific journal. It was launched in March 1665 by Henry Oldenburg (c.1619-1677), the Society’s first Secretary, who acted as publisher and editor. "
> "Philosophical Transactions is the world’s first and longest-running scientific journal. It was launched in March 1665 by Henry Oldenburg (c.1619-1677), the Society’s first Secretary, who acted as publisher and editor. "
My bad. I edited out a "probably" I shouldn't have, and was writing based on the intuition that there were people working as authors writing plays and the like before you had people working as scientists.
> there were people working as authors writing plays and the like before you had people working as scientists
Indeed, the entire history of humanity is that of creation and sharing and teaching - of ideas, stories, songs, poems. Copyright is a mere three centuries old. And somehow people have come to believe that without it, creation will cease. Even while simultaneously correctly understanding that virtually every person who writes, sings, raps, dances, etc will never be able earn anything but trival sums from doing so even under the current legal regime.
It's worth going to read Macaulay's speeches from the early nineteenth century to see how little what copyright supporters claim as the intent of copyright was seen as such at the time these ideas were being rendered into law.
> Indeed, the entire history of humanity is that of creation and sharing and teaching - of ideas, stories, songs, poems. Copyright is a mere three centuries old.
Yeah, and a lot of that was either amateurish or in the thrall of some wealthy elite (either the creator was an elite themselves, or directly dependent on them).
> And somehow people have come to believe that without it, creation will cease.
Come on, you're being black and white about it? Without copyright, will it stop? No. Will it change, for the worse? Probably. More paid for and catering to the whims of the wealthy, far less "middle class" creation, and almost no "middle class" professional creation, etc.
This discussion probably doesn’t fit in HN comment boxes, but how would you a) motivate people to create without any form of compensation or b) create the artificial scarcity needed to force compensation for goods with essentially infinite supply?
- Pay for early access that other people don't have. (Yes, in the absence of copyright, people could take the early-access version and share it with others. People already do this today, and that doesn't stop folks from continuing to be patrons anyway.)
- Accept that the 0.0..01% case of absurdly popular works will end up making less money than they otherwise might have. Small price to pay for having a rich and vibrant ecosystem of people sharing things and modifying things.
> Accept that the 0.0..01% case of absurdly popular works will end up making less money
For books and music maybe the difference is not quite that big, but for games and movies these 0.0..01% cost so much more to make that they would definitely not get made if they made significantly less money.
Nobody is stopping you from monetizing your own creative work via the methods you described without a publisher involved today. If those ways of getting paid would create a “rich and vibrant ecosystem of people sharing things”, why doesn’t it already exist?
Because the incentives are not aligned. In a capitalist society societal consciousness is necessarily imprinted with capitalist (value extracting) logic.
If most of the people around you believe that making money is the logical way to survive then making money will become the goal of many to most human interactions. People will choose big publishers because big publishers guarantee them some amount of money (and services around publishing) in exchange for the ownership and monetisation rights (and then the right to sue somebody into oblivion when they break copyright law).
So the rich and vibrant ecosystem can be reality, just not within current society.
They do already exist, in multiple forms. The reason why they're not the norm, and copyright law still exists, is because the publishers with the most money won't make as much money that way.
How are the publishers forcing creators to engage with copyright law? Anyone who creates a work can decide to waive their rights under copyright law today, no need to wait for it to be abolished. Why do so few of them do it?
You don't need to motivate people to create. That's a spontaneous move of human beings. Humans were making music and were paintings on walls far before any obsession of legal owning started to haunt their mind.
The cited drawbacks are valid: creators are beholden to the elites who fund their work, and their influence in their creative process is felt to this day.
With modern technology, however, funding is diffused through large groups of people which minimizes this impact through diversification.
The ideal model is one where lots of people pitch in to fund a creator for the full cost of creating something, then the resulting work is released directly to the public domain.
It's called copyright as things change when works are easy and cheap to copy.
Replicating work of an electrician or builder is very similar effort to their original work.
Making a copy of a novel or software program or art today is practically free.
In case of work for hire, things pretty much work the same way already — company owns the copyright, except in some jurisdictions where actual humans keep "moral rights" and reserve the right to renegotiate the fee if the work produces disproportionate earnings (one cannot even transfer these rights away).
But if you did the work out of pocket, how should it work? Any recipient could trivially and cheaply produce a copy and distribute it. If you do not get any exclusivity at all, others would profit a lot more and you'd get nothing at all.
So in general, there are multiple things:
* exclusivity lasts too long (I understand some motivation like supporting your children off it, especially if work only became profitable late in your life or in death, but you could have different mechanisms too — akin to moral rights, exclusivity could run from the moment it turns a significant profit like an average annual salary, and for a fixed, much shorter period after)
* types of works which are utilitarian (like software tools) should have entirely different treatment
* it should ensure both transferability and perpetuity of use (no licensing bullshit and your games/music are gone because our service does not offer them anymore)
Toll roads exist because sometimes that's the best way to make the money to construct a road. But they are the exception, not the rule, and they don't last forever either.
Copyright is a monopoly granted by the government on what's essentially numbers. It's a lot like democracy: utterly terrible, yet somehow the least bad way to accomplish some goal, in this case compensating creators for their labor.
In its current form, it is absolutely rent seeking. We will be dead and buried long before our culture enters the public domain. The so called "stakeholders" have systematically robbed us of our public domain rights.
Limit copyright duration to at most 20 years and it will still be a disgusting monopoly on numbers, but at least it won't be intolerable. We might actually forget that we can use technology to trivially copy stuff at negligible costs.
They are the same yes, except we don't have yet a technology to instantly copy whatever macrosized object ad nauseam like we can with intellectual work in digital era.
If anyone could duplicate the whole universe at will, of course current human laws would all seem as silly as those covering random virtual monopoly on cognitive experience possibilities.
Exactly. Digital IP can be transferred infinitely and cheaply (by copying it) without loss of use. Physical items cannot (yet!?) be transferred infinitely and cheaply without loss of use. Once the item is transferred, the previous holder of the physical item loses use of it.
> If someone labors to write a novel, they're no less justified to get economic benefit from it than someone who labored to build an apartment building.
They absolutely are, because an apartment building is a _rival_ good, as are all physical goods, meaning that you and somebody else cannot both own and use it at the same time. Intellectual property is a non-rival good, meaning if somebody else copies your song or story, you still have that song/story! It's a very different moral claim; the apartment is "I built it, so nobody should be able to take it away from me without paying", while the IP is "I built it, so nobody else should be able to copy it without paying".
> They absolutely are, because an apartment building is a _rival_ good, as are all physical goods, meaning that you and somebody else cannot both own and use it at the same time.
I don't think that distinction is as important as you make it out to be. Private property law allows individuals to own far, far more physical goods than they can personally use.
If were going to talk about abolishing intellectual property, how about lets talk about abolishing private property too? Maybe replace it with some kind of active-use right.
Anyway, lets destroy it first and work the details out later. /s
There is nothing 'dumb' about DNS. It is a 'sophisticated software to translate human readable addresses to machine-understandable and infinitely routable identifiers'.
Anything can be reduced down to 'dumb' if you try hard enough. Officer, these are just chemicals in a specific quantity and just goes boom when mixed together.
You missed the point spectacularly. “Dumb pipes” doesn’t denigrate DNS, it means that DNS doesn’t make judgment calls, there is no intelligence making decisions about where and whether to route things.
My question as well. I suspect they will update their terms of service to forbid use within France. Then anyone who uses their services from France will be in violation of the terms, which opens them up to legal penalties themselves.
Or perhaps they are just planning to physically withdraw any operating presence in France, so as to not have any facilities, equipment, or employees who are located in French jurisdiction.
But it wasn't clear from the article, unless I missed it.
I had the same question and read through it to get an answer but it is indeed not there :)
My guess is that they brought Germany example of doing GeoIP as the model they'll use but mostly noted as a fun quirk that even that solution received a weird challenge which they managed to fight off (at cost, though).
Obviously, it'd be nice to get a direct response from them as it is unclear.
> I wish I could even suggest what someone could do against these trolls.
While trolls are awful, something like trolls can always exist in a free society. The root problem here is the French courts enabling the trolls with unworkable rulings. Both the French and Italian justice systems have a history of making some clueless and even incoherent rulings which are never corrected.
>Imagine doing everything possible to stop something. They then circumvent your protections with yet another service, and you get fined.
The point is that they want to use these cases to get global blocks in place. Geoblocking a single country from accessing content that country wants blocked is not doing everything that could be done. They could remove access to that content for all users everywhere, then the block could not be circumvented
I'm not saying that is what they should have done or should do or that they should give in to any of these situations, but that is the end goal of someone like Sony in these cases. They want to block it in the territory in question, yes, but truly the purpose of these laws is to apply those rules and controls globally
In the last year, I have started to think that the internet was a mistake.
My theory was 'the death of the internet'. Once everyone has been scammed, once everyone has been hacked and stripped naked in public, when there are more lies than truths, when you are the tool and the computer uses you, when everything has been sold and you have nothing: then you would say, this was a mistake.
Actually, I don't know much about the history of the internet. The Sony stuff is before my time. Now you mention this, perhaps the idea that the internet was designed to be beneficial was actually a total lie.
The Internet was a project to build resilient military communications during the Cold War. It was designed so that in case Russia would nuke the USA, the USA would still be able to nuke Russia, and all its other targets. This was not going to help people.
You're right. The people working there now have had plenty of time to learn about these egregious crimes and implement better policy so that they don't repeat the crimes of their predecessors... Right?
Japanese companies have always been heavy enforcers of IP, at least since the 1980s. For example, IIRC, they're one of the top filers of patents. Sanrio makes more money globally on their characters than Disney does. And Japan pushes for stronger international IP enforcement systems than even the US.
Japan is just quiet about it. Sony is no aberration.
I wait for Netflix (and other streaming services) to be fined due to their users accessing content that shouldn't be available in a certain territory via a VPN.
isn't that precisely why they block most VPNs now? I worked for one, and all of our content licensing agreements stipulated that we had to block VPNs, and which vendors were allowed to give us the list of VPN addresses to block. (it's Digital Element, by the way.)
Of course, we weren't liable for failing to block any VPN address not on the list, but we also weren't allowed to not block an address that was on the list, which resulted in customer complaints.
And for contempt of court nonetheless. That's meant for when you blatantly don't do the thing the court told you to do, not when you did it but it didn't work how the court wanted.
Seems they're following Cisco similar move 2y ago of exiting the market
> Canal+ has been busy getting web-blocking injunctions in France against sports piracy sites which stream sporting events for which it has the exclusive broadcast rights within the French market. It previously targeted DNS resolvers operated by Google, Cloudflare and Cisco.
> All three unsuccessfully opposed the web-blocking orders. Google and Cloudflare, therefore, have been forced to instigate them. However, Cisco just pulled its OpenDNS service out of the French market entirely.
Same reason copyright abusers threaten people that help remove the DRM from their Amazon-bought e-book so it can be read on their non-Amazon bought e-reader with a $250,000 fine and five years in prison for circumventing a digital lock using DMCA, because it's what the legal API allows them to achieve their end goal.
It's not about if it makes sense from a moral point of view.
The same method is used to block sites that don't respect the decisions the French people have made regarding the limits of the freedom of speech (no hate speech, no terrorist proselytism, no pedo, etc.).
Granted, that's the theory.
When the demands come from a company on the basis of copyright/intellectual property (that is, exclusive broadcasting rights), one can feel less comfortable about this affair; even thought the judgement mentions that the case is backed by the ARCOM, the french authority for broadcasting, which should instead IMHO deal with a couple or two of private TV channels that are obvious vectors of fake news.
But, this is the same copyright that can protect you when you publish programs, source code, images, etc., even when you use a free and open license; the licence has meaning thanks to the copyright.
You raise good, classic points when defending copyright. I would argue that your first examples are for the good of society, and the individual copyright protections are for the good of small creators.
Copyright enforced at this scale, for the profit of a corporation that streams their content off the infrastructure paid for by the public, does make one less comfortable.
And exclusive broadcasting rights… why is that a thing and conflated with copyright regulations? Why would the public regulator charge, say, 1M€ for the steaming right to something that will net 20M€ in advertising? That’s not really about copyright, I’d argue that it’s actually the job of the public channels to stream this content that takes place on stadiums built with public funds, streamed via a largely public TV system, etc.
I suppose the work against sports piracy is profitable enough to continue. Canal+ makes quite a lot of money, and their subscription in France is pricey compared to most other services.
They could, for starters, split the sports bundle and lower its price. Lots of people would probably pay a little bit to watch sports in 4K, instead of hunting for shady streaming websites that do 720p at best.
The most likely answer is that they didn't think about it or didn't understand or didn't care. But on the off chance they did, perhaps they thought the DNS provider would enforce the ruling worldwide.
It shows maliciousness (we can bully this smaller player for a win) and/or total incompetence (we don't even understand how internet works, but we'll issue rulings anyway).
I believe the position of the French government is that anyone in the path of a crime can be ordered to block the part of the crime that relates to them, without having any liability for the crime. So quad9 are not criminals for not blocking pirate sites, but still have to block specific sites when ordered.
Where does this line of reasoning end though? Shouldn’t the browser makers be blocking the sites too? What about curl? What about the OS and local DNS resolvers (unbound etc)? Maybe Ethernet and wifi cards should contain blocking logic? At some point you have to draw a line!
The way it worked is that the French government forced all major ISP to block some sites.
But using a third party DNS circumvents the block, so they went after them too.
Web browsers however (unless they include a VPN or 3rd party DNS) don't allow you to access sites blocked by your ISP. Same goes with ethernet and wifi cards.
I'm not saying I agree with it but that's the logic.
Right, but many browsers include a VPN. Tor Browser bypasses any such blocks. Many browsers also let you set your own DNS servers, so you could pick one that allows circumvention. Same at the OS level, and some OSes come with built in VPN clients. I guess I just don’t see how this stops here, unless legislatures step in to limit the scope. It’s an insane theory of liability that makes all steps in the chain liable for anything bad that end users might do.
I think there's at least one clear line between DNS providers and your examples. In your examples the enjoined parted is providing being a tool - a thing someone else uses - not a service where the enjoined party themselves does the thing.
It's one thing to say that you can't CNC machine guns for customers of your CNC-on-demand service, it's another to say you can't sell CNC machines because someone might use them to make guns.
Here the DNS service is being told they can't direct traffic to pirate sites, not that they can't give out tools (e.g. browsers or local DNS resolvers) that could be used by someone else to direct traffic to pirate sites (or could be used innocently). Your examples are all the latter - tools.
> It's one thing to say that you can't CNC machine guns for customers of your CNC-on-demand service, it's another to say you can't sell CNC machines because someone might use them to make guns.
And yet some places (California for instance) are attempting to do just this by requiring some kind of vaporware AI mediator to review files before the machine operates. Intermediary liability is out of control.
While I'm no fan of that law, it isn't a case of intermediary liability. It's a case of legislators (in a baffling move) deciding that selling 3d printers (and I guess CNC mills?) without vaporware attached should be directly illegal, much like most of the world has decided selling guns should be directly illegal, regardless of how they are used.
It's not illegal to sell these because it would be illegal for the end user to make a gun with them (it might or might not be - but is irrelevant) - it's just illegal to sell them because the legislator said it is.
It’s not the same legal conception of intermediary liability as with online services, but I’d argue that it’s an extension of the same idea. The manufacturer has somehow been conceived as a legally vulnerable intermediary between the user and the printed/milled product, and the legislature is attempting to force them to interfere in the manufacturing process, with the threat of liability as a club.
This same trend is happening all over, from banking to communications to manufacturing, where private industry is deputized by force to police consumer behavior, without consumers receiving any of the usual protections provided by the legal process. We’re effectively witnessing the construction of a privately mediated police state.
The line is drawn wherever a particular judge decides it's drawn, and each judge has a different ability to understand the broader implications of the line being drawn on any individual case.
If phone book publishing were regulated in a way that paid content on the internet is regulated, then absolutely yes. Not only that, people who mention the existence of phone books as means to obtain phone numbers, and people developing software capable of storing phone numbers, would be threatened and harassed too, as enablers of criminal activity. Copyright leeches have enough money to buy laws favorable to them. Which, also, gives them more money to buy even more laws favorable to them. It doesn't have to make sense for you because it's not designed to serve your interests.
Because they've already got the ISPs DNS resolvers blocking shit and when they see clients from those same ISPs still connecting they get hints on which public DNS resolvers people are using. You can make a safe bet French ISPs played an active part in pointing people to go after quad 9.
DNS resolvers getting sued should stop resolving domains/properties of the companies suing them too when they are forced to take these kinds of actions/steps off the back of a legal decision like this.
While I agree in spirit, this also makes the resolver away from being able to claim they're just a neutral service which just delivers existing records without being opinionated
Fair point. I'd say "We're neutral, unless you attack us, in which case we stop being neutral about you, in particular". I'd still use them if this were the policy.
I can't help but imagine that the sort of user choosing to use a service like this in lieu of their ISP default is also likely to support this bit of pain.
...also, it's probably their own PlayStation, that their kid uses. Speaking from personal experience.
I mean if they're getting sued for failing to block proxy/vpn services they're being told to be opinionated and they can't be a neutral service. "You asked us to be opinionated about traffic, so we're doing that. Do you want us to go back to being neutral?"
That ship sailed. The court unequivocally determined that the resolver is not a neutral party, and their ruling explicitly demands that the resolver not be neutral.
That's risking yourself getting flashbanged on a plane for suspicion of human trafficking and sacrilegious creation of fictions and engaging in Antaractican nuclear programs.
The problem is that these types of companies are started by naive idealistic techs who only know how to play by the rules and can't figure out why people would misuse their products
They were very well described by the "rubber hose crypto" XKCD
(Not that I don't think a DNS company stays at the same level of complexity - both legal and technological - as a VPN company, but still)
Or, get this, anything that is useful can be misused, so maybe we should go after the people misusing things rather than locking all of society in a cage to pre-emptively prevent misuse.
"The problem is that these types of companies [kitchen knife manufacturers] are started by naive idealistic [craftsmen] who only know how to play by the rules and can't figure out why people would misuse their products [by stabbing people]."
Hopefully the leadership of public resolvers isn't as a childish as you are.
That kind of action would penalize their users far more than it would hurt the evil corporation that slighted them. Not to mention they'd lose users. People who choose quad9 likely aren't too keen with DNS tempering.
Isn't the intent of rejecting, or boycotting, a company supposed to cause a disruption in the first place? If the people boycotted a company into bankruptcy, because said company refused to change their behavior, would the people be in the wrong because it might hurt the users? No.
The person behind this legal warfare is the beIN Sports chairman, Nasser Al-Khelaifi. He is also president of Paris Saint-Germain and chairman of Qatar Sports Investment.
He is, obviously, not French.
His self-claimed annual income was about $15–25 million, and his personal wealth was about $70–100 million.
Quad9 is getting picked on because they do not have a large financial backing. Not because it makes any logical sense. France is shooting themselves in the foot.
Maybe i missed it in the post, but how are they going to implement it? They mentioned geoIP is insufficient for complying with the block, so if they dont have a way to block only these domains for users in France, how will they block all requests for users in France?
To be clear I dont think they should comply with the block, but i didn't grasp how they're going to block everything if they dont have a way to only block some things.
Probably. They will want to do everything possible to be able to prove that they took all measures at their disposal to stop serving the French market on top of taking all measures to have their business operations be outside of French jurisdiction.
Unfortunately France is also a Lugano signatory, so we'll have to eventually prevail in France as well as Germany, and that will be a long and expensive project.
no, its different, in german case they served germany as a whole but for queries that where supposed to be blocked in germany they did not serve those to germans.
so you operated in germany and your "tricky" way to follow the regulations did not work. if you dont resolve to german customers at all, like you dont exist then nobody can theoretically say you are operating in german. so that is the difference for me.
no its not, one is you dont resolve anything for the country and therefore dont operate in it, the other is you operate in the country and the block you implemented does not work for my customer.
similar how a lot of the US pages blocked europeans from accessing because they did not want to follow the cookie laws.
I mentioned not too long ago that Mullvad was handing its resolver users over to Quad9. Sadly, I didn’t realize how accurate my concerns would be. Quad9 is a good operator, they actually fought Sony in a German court instead of quietly complying. Yet, they were still ordered to block the content. That’s the core problem. A blocking order is only as damaging as the resolver it impacts. Every time an operator shuts down and redirects its users to Quad9, it pools more users into one place. This makes the next blocking order even more valuable and effective for whoever files it. And now we're seeing Quad9 backing out of a market.
Reminds me of Cloudflare going down every time there was a football game in Spain as the ISPs blocked all the "bad" ips, which ironically also served government websites.
It’s still happening every time there is football, at least they now seem to lift the block when the games end, when this started sometimes they took 12 hours after the game ended.
Spain's government is made up of spineless dinosaurs. So the official soccer diffusion corps bought the courts and sued all the ISPs to force them to block all the soccer piracy sites during a match. Those sometimes ended up being hosted on cloudflare's IPs. Thus, a good portion of cloudflare goes down for the spanish clients when there's a game on.
Did that work? Hell no, piracy sites just moved elsewhere. But big soccer is slowly ruining the internet and all the EU governments are letting it happen
One of the things I find most amusing is that Movistar is both one of the main football diffusion corp, and one of main national ISPs. So Movistar sued itself so that it can block the parts of the internet that they don't like
Eventually the soccer corpos will end up tasking an AGI with solving soccer stream piracy and it will hopefully destroy all stadiums and free us from this bullshit.
I wonder what pressure Qatar put on France to force this through?
BeIn is owned by the Qatari state, who just so happen to own Paris St Germain.
Their owners Yousef Al-Obaidly and Nasser Al-Khelaifi (for both the network and the club) are outspoken about piracy and 'the damage it causes football and creative industries'.
They've also been in and out of court a fair bit on corruption charges, and seems they've paid their way out of trouble through fines. Seems just last month a new case opened:
Sam Ellis of SearchParty just did a video on UAE on the same premise: they own ManCity F.C. and have considerable influence over the UK government. The current UK prime minister also happens to be the former mayor of Manchester.
Indeed. If it were just a question of Swiss law, we'd be in excellent shape. The problem is that France and Switzerland are both signatories to the Lugano Convention, while the US is not. As long as the Quad9 Foundation has to have a legal domicile somewhere, there will always be some lever that can be used against it. Switzerland was the best place, but does not offer perfect protection.
Quad9 is not a telecommunications service provider as defined by Swiss law, which is where that application becomes enforced. Details of this (and many other things) can be found on the "Compliance and Applicable Law" section of the website. https://quad9.net/privacy/compliance-and-applicable-law/
It still feels a little strange that that loophole is allowed: everyone who has a Swiss ISP could switch to Quad9 and be strictly better off. But if everyone does that, then the DNS ban is completely ineffectual. Maybe I should let sleeping dogs lie.
I have a feeling the fact that people have to opt in to using Quad9 does a lot to help them in this case vs an ISP where all of their users are using the ISP’s DNS by default. But yeah it does seem like a “letter of the law vs spirit of the law thing”.
That's because the Swiss DNS blocking originated in an anti-unregulated-gambling law. Basically all unregulated gambling websites are blocked. There shouldn't be any other sites on that list.
I'm a little mad because it's the principle of the thing.
In practice the only site I occasionally want to check that's blocked is Polymarket. I don't trade on there myself, but I find it useful to check the odds of certain events.
I don't personally care about betting sites but it's the legal precedent and principle that the government can add anything to such a list and make obligatory.
"First they came for the shady weird-ass online gambling sites...."
It hasn't passed yet, but legislators are very hard at work trying to "catch up". [1][2]
And there are other countries outside the US and Europe, it's not just a "EU" thing. (I wanted to write North America first, but even Canada does blocking, in some cases even without court orders [3])
At least in the US, it’s not a matter of "understanding". It’s a matter of "you are paid to misunderstand".
The law is vast and subject to various levels of interpretation. If there’s anything I have learned is that the court is just a rich persons weapon to "peacefully" resolve problems. In this modern capitalistic, greedy shithole we have dug ourselves into. Money and resources talks.
They still get paid when people watch pirated streams. All those billboards against the pitch and on every uniform are still getting their viewership.
It would be interesting if one of these advertisers one day actually sues the broadcasters for going after pirated streams, and diminishing the value of their ad placements as a result. I would think it is technically damages. One just has to quantify it a little.
They like to claim millions to billions in lost revenue every time they send a takedown request, so clearly they must have a pretty good idea how many pirates are watching.
I am curious if a large number of people stood up their own DoH/DoT servers:
- Would France go after each one, even if they were not operating servers physically in France? It only takes a few minutes to configure Unbound+LetsEncrypt to accept DoH+DoT internet traffic. A few minutes longer to compile support for DoQ.
- Could they realistically expect individual operators of small DoH/DoT/DoQ open servers to block domains at their behest?
DNS needs a way to say “unavailable for legal reasons” so your system just picks a different resolver or resolves recursively.
As far as I know there is no way to reliably:
- let the user see this error. The client would need to surface the DNS EDE error. Stub resolvers and browsers overwhelmingly ignore EDE.
- geo-fence the client. Unbound does not have native Geo support and will not let one set custom per-zone EDE text even if that was a thing AFAIK.
This might be possible by putting dnsdist in front of Unbound with client IP rules + Lua + MaxMind but there again the client won't know what to do with this.
- custom views only trigger off client IP's and only control resolution views, not error messages.
I think it's probably best that if people wish to run their own DNS instances, they do not geo-block anything. France has no jurisdiction in other countries and can't really do anything to "Alice and Bob's Public DNS". It's up to the people in France to find a way to tunnel their traffic out of their country to bypass any border filters should that ever become a thing. I am still waiting for a lawyer to challenge my thinking on this part.
I don’t want the user to see the error, I just want the browser/the operating system’s resolver to not be a stub resolver, and actually ask the authoritative servers when something like this fails on a non-authoritative response.
Public DNS like Quad9 should be a cache (because recursing is pretty slow) and, at most, a way to find the IPs of the root name servers.
Courts asking non-authoritative resolvers not to resolve a name should have no effect on clients successfully resolving that name, such that they wouldn’t even have a reason to go after Quad9 or Alice and Bob, and would have to go after the TLD registry (likely in a different jurisdiction).
The only thing I know of that operates somewhat like you are asking is Unbound itself, when it is not the server doing the root/tld lookups. One can configure Unbound with a series of Upstream DoT servers and it can retry each of them and cache which ones answered, answered fastest, so if the upstream just refused to answer that would cause it to move to another upstream resolver and eventually retry the one that refused but once it gets another refusal it would avoid that one again for some time. Clunky but it would sortof work.
Beyond that I think you are asking for behavioral and RFC changes to everyone's workstations, cell phones, tablets, TV's, and DNS resolvers.
It’s configured exactly like I mentioned: it tries a couple of resolvers, and if they all fail, tries authoritative servers starting from the root. That last part, missing from your suggested configuration, is the key: it’s what ensures courts have to actually go after the parties responsible for the domain, and not just random DNS resolvers.
> Beyond that I think you are asking for behavioral and RFC changes to everyone's workstations, cell phones, tablets, TV's, and DNS resolvers.
Because Sony was mentioned once in the article in reference to a different earlier case and people seem to have stopped reading there to come here and immediately complain about Sony.
FOSS depends on copyright laws. Oldest versions of Linux and UNIX are more than 20 years old, so early versions of both would be hypothetically now in public domain in the absence of Disney-lobbied maximalist versions of copyright laws, or in the total absence of one.
And this would be a problem how? If copyright expired after 20 years and an evil commercial company privately forked the public domain Linux kernel 2.6.18, what would we lose?
Who is "we"? Going back to the origin of Free Software to proprietary printer drivers causing hardware to be unfixable by its users and otherwise become ewaste. The loss is users are nearly beholden to the manufacturer to customize or maintain their own devices. Android phones, most ereaders, can have long lives when obsolete, but this is only because Linux is Free Software; with proprietary kernels they are entirely ewaste instead of a small fraction having continuing life. OTOH most do become ewaste. OAH this Free Software allows competitors to start from almost the same place and prevent total monopolies, hence why Apple makes most of the profit and I can buy a $150 phone instead of what appears to be $799 minimum from Apple.
But, I think 20 year-old software is probably mostly safe from the above effects and I'm not sure GP was arguing otherwise, just against total absence of copyright.
> Most projects are MIT or some other permissive liscense.
Exactly, most projects have a license of some kind, they aren't "free-for-all-do-whatever."
MIT requires attribution. Forcing enforcement of this cannot be done without copyright law. You can argue that attribution is stupid and nobody deserves credit for their work (which might be increasingly true in a post-LLM world), but you can't speak on behalf of all projects that chose those license and say "it's what they want!"
I think projects should be able to license their work how ever they want within reason, which GPL and MIT clearly are. At the same time, I don't see what material difference this makes. The spirit of GPL doesn't seem maintained, cause at this point it's very clearly being used for profit in proprietary systems that stay compliant by not technically distributing any GPL'd code. LLMs appear to legally wash away GPL for now, still grey area though. And GPL is straight up violated all the time, especially in countries that don't care.
MIT is free-for-all-to-do-whatever. You can do literally anything, except remove a short text notice that has zero legal or practical value. You can even hide the text notice very deeply, so that it's effectively been removed. You can fork and stop releasing source code, you can use it for AI training, you can add DRM to the product and make it illegal to remove.
Aside what was already said: a lot of people do genuinely think GPL is a stupid idea that needs to go and Linux could have been licensed under MIT or even CC0; however, I think one should be cognizant of the fact that virtually no mass produced product other than Macs and PS4/PS5 use BSD and the rest uses Linux, often begrudgingly, but benefiting tremendously from both free-beer and forced-libre nature of it.
FOSS only "depends" on copyright laws in the sense that it is a hack to get around the existence of them (and now their children, anti-circumvention laws.)
There was a recent attempt to substantially reform copyright in the EU - it was called "Stop Killing Games". It gathered over one million signatures, forcing the EU parliament to consider it. Their response was "this would require us to change copyright law, and we can't do that, sorry."
The USA strong-arms copyright law into every single trade deal. I think it was Chile who tried to strike DMCA 1201 out of some trade deal with the US about food staples, but were swiftly informed by the US that if they didn't make DMCA 1201 into Chilean domestic law, the US would completely cut off their trade. This stuff is serious business for the US and no other country is in the geopolitical position right now to question it.
Fortunately since the US is mid-collapse that last point may change soon.
Fine, as long as they aren't the only ones who get to do it. Having the world's knowledge at everyone's fingertips is a goal I think we should aim for.
This. Some people here are now acting as if AI is a bad thing. People need to realize that human knowledge is so vast now that such tools (which effectively perform data compression and interpolation) are absolutely necessary. I don't feel bad for copyright holders at all because copyright shouldn't probably exist at all.
> Some people here are now acting as if AI is a bad thing.
It is. But that is also not particularly relevant to the point. As long as the AI companies operate under the same rules as everyone else, I don't really care. If they can use copyrighted works for training, we should all be able to use those works. Conversely if we can't use something due to copyright, neither should the AI companies be able to.
Is it still a worthy goal if it the knowledge includes the rantings of every lunatic on X or Reddit? If it hallucinates facts and even citations in its non-deterministic reconstruction of the knowledge it ingested?
The irony with these AI corpos is that they're okay with scraping all of human creative endeavours yet they get annoyed at others doing distillation on their models.
Compensating authors would be a moral thing to do, but morals aren't really a thing for corpos, so whatever. However the fact that they then turn around and get annoyed at other actors for scraping their stuff is very hilarious and shows how much they care about the social contract :)
> How have our democracies not abolished copyright law yet? These laws only serve the 1%.
I don't think that claim is true, personally. But if we grant it for the sake of argument, it should be completely unsurprising that copyright hasn't been abolished. Governments primarily serve the powerful and wealthy, not the common man.
I find it extra funny that you think copyright protect small time authors and artists, when we have _very clear_ examples of it not protecting them for shit, even before the entire IA saga. Remember the Disney/Star Wars saga where they refused to pay the Star Wars author for the books they were selling?
Copyright doesn't protect small-time authors - because small-time authors don't have the means to harness the legal system to their advantage the way that big corpos that take advantage of them do.
I don’t necessarily disagree, but by that same logic we shouldn’t have any civil laws because regular people can’t afford to hire lawyers to sue people.
But still, if someone posts a copy of your book or painting online, you can pretty cheaply file a DMCA request that it be taken down, and most large players will comply. If you throw out copyright law altogether, you get rid of that too.
> But still, if someone posts a copy of your book or painting online, you can pretty cheaply file a DMCA request that it be taken down, and most large players will comply. If you throw out copyright law altogether, you get rid of that too.
Good, get rid of copyright law! It has only lead to pure rent seeking.
Authors and artists have no basis for payment in the absence of copyright laws. Like, anything they make would be literally free to steal. Literally... 1700s? Late 1600s?
What would be controversial is the current form of copyright that had been extended and expanded multiple times even during lifetime of many of us alive, often said semi-jokingly said to have been forced by Disney to keep Mickey Mouse covered under it until it had finally expired 70 years after the first publication and long after the death of its creator.
Copyright was established for the benefit of publishers, not authors. In the 1600s publishers were licensed, as part of a censorship system; the point was to only give licenses to publishers who followed the censorship rules. It was quite profitable for the publishers because they faced far less competition than they otherwise would.
The censorship system was abolished but the publishers wanted to keep the licensing system, so they came up with a new idea: licensed monopolies to publish specific books.
While your point is valid enough -- although it could have been made without this kind of snarky and sarcastic snide -- it seems clear that global copyright legislation is a lot more beneficial to the wealthy capital owners rather than the artists that you were alluding towards. Now, this is no insurmountable obstacle at least in theory. The laws could be modified in a way that lets small artists etc focus on following their passions without starving, without allowing capital to do what is essentially the intellectual equivalent of enclosure of the Commons.
Of course, one thing needed for this is the political will as well as getting rid of the idea of defending exploitation by the billionaire class by conflating their needs with the needs of starving artists because one can technically argue that copyright helps both, despite everyone knowing that one party is benefiting a lot more from it than the other.
All copyright does is give you standing to sue if somebody reproduces your work, in whole or in part. To sue "successfully," you need more financial resources than the copier.
The small artist copyright is a red herring. I think the number of small artists who make money from their work is frightfully small. For example, my partner makes some rather nice jewelry that is different from anything out there. We're doing the craft fair circuit to see if she can sell any and if it's worth continuing to make them.
She sells a relatively small number of pieces at each fair. Occasionally it's even enough to cover expenses.
Would copyright help her? No, because we wouldn't have the money to sue. Small copyright violations might be worth a cease and desist. Large copyright violations would have more money than us for the lawsuit. We would need that Goldilocks-sized violation. They are small enough to be responsive to the threat of a lawsuit but big enough that they have enough money that would be worthwhile suing them, i.e. enough to pay our lawyer.
> All copyright does is give you standing to sue if somebody reproduces your work, in whole or in part. To sue "successfully," you need more financial resources than the copier.
That is the fault of the way the legal system works, not anything to do with copyright law. It is true that we need a system in which you can't just get away with breaking the law if you have deeper pockets than your victim, but that will be true whether or not we have laws protecting copyright.
I’ll bite. I have written a recursive DNS resolver. It’s buggy, mind you, it doesn’t handle improperly configured domains bug-for-bug the way BIND9 does, it doesn’t support IPv6 for resolving records (it can still resolve AAAA records, mind you), but it’s about 80 kilobytes in size, runs nicely on 32-bit systems, and does full DNS resolution starting from the root servers.
Does the fact I have written this resolver make me liable should it not block the domains they listed which may contain copyright infringing content? Am I now required to add these domains, and make them part of a mandatory block list? Will I still be held liable if people can still access these allegedly copyright infringing domains by modifying the source to my program?
Keep in mind that when Quad9 had a similar lawsuit in Germany, they blocked queries from German IPs, but the idiots said Quad9 was still liable because people could use VPNs in Germany to bypass their geoIP blocking.
Quad9 being forced to block these domains will achieve nothing. Will these copyright enforcers now go after Google for 8.8.8.8? Cloudflare for 1.1.1.1? Level3 for 4.2.2.1? Will they go after ISC for BIND? NLnet Labs for Unbound? CZ.NIC for KnotDNS? Me for MaraDNS? Even if they enjoin me from making a recursive resolver which can resolve these domains, that won’t stop anyone and everyone from forking my code (see also: Twitter trying to take down Nitter).
> Does the fact I have written this resolver make me liable should it not block the domains they listed which may contain copyright infringing content?
I use unbound and have a similar question. Shouldn't we just encourage everyone to run their own resolvers (it's turnkey for the most part!)? Will Sony/beIn start going after the root servers and enforce a global block?
Understandable choice. Let French users work around these controls in other ways rather than have authorities force you to abandon who you are and what you believe in.
I share the opinion that DNS is a purely technical system part of running the Internet. That DNS is attacked is only out of convenience rather than solving whatever actual problems the actors in question are facing.
In case of copyright infringement claims as in this article, the way to solve this is to deal with the criminals, not terrorize the road network that gets you to them or burn phone books just because it's "easiest".
Why is it that this so often is excused on the Internet? My theory is that it's because the inner workings of Internet is opaque to the common user; a takedown notice via a DNS redirect will look to an end user as if law enforcement got to the criminals themselves, so they get away with it. Even if they didn't because they did a too poor work, were too lazy or didn't want to spend the resources. But these factors shouldn't result in attacking others' valid business models for it and instead result in either accepting your situation or changing your situation.
France also regulates encryption in applications. Some percentage of apps are not available in France, because apps don't comply with the rules imposed by bureaucrats or more often developers find procedures cumbersome or unfamiliar
Genuinely baffled by the incompetence (or ill-intent, corruption?) demonstrated by our courts, did they do it at behest of Qatar ? Another stain on our country's reputation but they don't care.
> demonstrated by our courts, did they do it at behest of Qatar
Honestly, this is a possibility.
beIN, like any Qatar based company, is majority owned by the state. Qatar is infamously rich in oil with the state able to subsidize luxury lifestyles for citizens it deems worthy.
France needs oil, like any other country. So if a journalist could follow the money. Could probably find where the pressure was applied within the government.
The rich using archaic copyright laws to get their way has been modus operandi for quite awhile. Seen this applied both in USA and abroad.
So it is no secret that Dodi Fayed and his family were prominent Egyptians, but I recently discovered that a memorial to Dodi and Princess Diana, Innocent Victims is displayed prominently in a Harrods department store. Harrods itself is owned by the Qatari sovereign wealth fund; in other words, Qatar owns the Harrods chain of department stores.
Europe needs to strengthen its free speech protections. It turns out, even though the US founders had no idea what DNS was, they still created the right framework to protect it.
US just pushes the enforcement mechanisms to private companies not so hamstrung by legalese. E.g. try and torrent all you want. After all, all you are really doing observably is connecting to various IPs, essentially no different than browsing websites. But you might get a letter in the mail not from the government, but from the ISP threatening legal action against you, solely because their systems saw your IP connected to another.
These days you can land in jail for simply bad mouthing the government. US needs to strengthen its adherence to their constitutions. Words on paper are useless if they aren't followed.
Sadly no-one responsible from this situation will care.
French authorities and network operator will in fact prefer that you don't have alternative than using the dns servers that they are providing.
So it sucks that Quad9 is closing their resolver to french IPs. If they stand by their values, they should continue to accept the requests, just leave all office and business ties with France.
We've all seen this sort of thing many times before, but I still don't understand how it works.
I transmit a radio signal in Dover that can be picked up by radios in Calais, the message it carries happens to be illegal in France ("Brittany is still part of the UK", say). Could I be taken to court in France? I'm guessing no.
> The plaintiff (Sony Music Entertainment GmbH) then used a VPN to access the blocked content from Germany in circumvention of the geoIP blocking. The court agreed with Sony in their assertions of noncompliance, and we were fined for contempt of court.
I knew courts were dumb, but didn't think they were this dumb.
"The neighbour's dog bit me, so they put up a fence. I climbed over it and got bitten again. The fence doesn't count."
Quad9 is illegal in France as long as it exists anywhere in the world. French courts can issue judgements ruling Quad9 illegal, as long as it exists anywhere in the world.
I'm super confused as to what it means to withdraw for French users if geoIP doesn't work.
So remove 9.9.9.9 BGP announcements? Unless France wants to build a great firewall... a Ligne Maginot du DNS, I don't see how this is enforceable. The internet is not Minitel...
Why does it matter that it’s a recursive resolver? They mention this a lot but it seems like the decision would just as much apply to a non-recursive resolver.
I didn’t attempt find the ruling; perhaps the lawsuit was written in an odd way.
It is difficult to envision a "non-recursive DNS resolver" in public service. Recursion is the usual and customary way that DNS names are resolved by the leaf servers, because they are not authoritative for much of anything.
The most common configuration for non-recursive DNS servers is with forwarders. The DNS server accepts queries and simply forwards all of them upstream to another resolver, which... makes its own recursive queries.
It is simply not feasible to avoid having recursive resolvers in the chain of lookups. That's how things work with DNS.
We used to just leave that responsibility to the querying host’s own resolver. I don’t fetishize the end-to-end principle (though I come close) so I suppose a recursive resolver service could be a sort of optimization (plenty of ppl look up, say, gmail.google.com so why not cache it).
In any case, if all resolvers these days are recursive why mention it?
I know this is far from the most important question on the topic of this thread!
> We used to just leave that responsibility to the querying host’s own resolver.
When? I didn't get online until the 90s, but resolv.conf delegating recursion to some other node was the way of the world back then. And still is. Some people do run a recursive resolver locally, but it's not so common afaik.
> In any case, if all resolvers these days are recursive why mention it?
Quad9 is named as a recursive resolver in contrast to being an authoritative server. Quad9 and the server I run for my domain are both DNS servers, both provide name resolution, but one is recursive and the other isn't. Used to be, you might run one server for both jobs, but that fell out of fashion for good reasons.
Back then most computing was done in office, lab, university settings. Running recursive resolvers for the local network was part of the standard IT setup.
While I agree it was common, running a centralized recursive resolver for the local network is not the same as "leave that responsibility to the querying host’s own resolver"
You'd have to go back to the 1980s I think, when systems were still using /etc/hosts and if the host you wanted to talk to wasn't listed there you'd have to use its IP address directly.
IIRC there were some trusted lists of "well known" hosts that were passed around between administrators. DNS was invented because that obviously became impractical quickly as the internet grew.
Noob question: Isn't there like a panel of existing case law or amicus-briefs that would speak to the logical and historical stupidity of arguments by the plaintiffs? I mean this is like blaming airbus for hijackings.
> We could add these names to our global malicious domain blocking database, which is what we use to provide internet users with malware and phishing protection. This is a single, monolithic set of names applied to all users of our protective services (9.9.9.9 & secondaries) globally but not to our nonprotective services (9.9.9.10 & secondaries)
I see how that could work against a service claiming to give users the DNS lookups they expect
As a swiss company they have to obey swiss laws. So in that respect swiss laws are enforced onto all users of Quad9.
International companies always have to make a decision: Follow the local rules or leave the market. Unfortunately most companies follow local rules, even if that means obeying the rules of a dictatorship, because money doesn‘t stink. Exceptions are very rare.
It would have been funny if you forked and made a quad9-fr which blocked this stuff for FR and let people opt in to that. Obviously not scaleable to every jurisdiction on Earth, but maybe viable for the first ~20 stupid jurisdictions.
Love to see some Lavabit action in response to government overreach. (Not that it's fun to see a provider have to shut down operations in an area, but more that I prefer to see them sticking to their principles rather than showing the government that this behavior is tolerated.)
Seems unlikely to resolve their legal issues, as the French lawyers will use the same tactic as the German ones, using a VPN to access the services from France to justify continuing their lawsuits. Perhaps they should consider relocating out of Europe.
Why is everybody (in the government) in the EU so illiterate? Do they not understand that their economies are dead and football streaming isn't going to save them.
they "cannot" blacklist the domains on geoIP basis, yet the "can" withdraw from France? via what method? Removing the French servers is clearly insufficient, so why can they deny France entirely via geoIP, but not block the domains just via geoIP?
they do claim a value-based reason (good on them for it), but they are very very insistent about the "impossibility" anyway. can't have it both ways.
They don't have to. Despite Europe's best efforts, national laws are not enforceable outside the borders without lots of cooperation, and tech regulation is not an area where people are collaborating.
French law does not care if the servers are in France or anywhere else - just that the users are in France. This sounds unexpected, but that is the law. There is a treaty called the "Lugano Convention" that allows civil lawsuits to be extended across borders of the member nations in events like this - France and Switzerland (where Quad9 is based) are signatories on that convention, so effectively French law can apply in Switzerland on matters involving internet activity. It is much more nuanced than that, so forgive this short summary, but removing servers from France is not sufficient.
I believe that French law does not extend past France's borders, but that is common sense speaking in me. I know that EU law is not generally based on common sense.
Most likely, so they have legal standing to say "We don't operate in your country or serve your citizens, your laws do not apply". Also, punishment for a stupid ruling.
>The plaintiff (Sony Music Entertainment GmbH) then used a VPN to access the blocked content from Germany in circumvention of the geoIP blocking. The court agreed with Sony in their assertions of noncompliance, and we were fined for contempt of court.
>We eventually won that case against Sony, but it took several years, six figures of cost to Quad9, and massive wasted time – all of which set us back in our ability to deliver services and is a resource debt we are still paying for today
Yeah, that was mentioned as an anecdote on why they believe geo-blocking wouldn't be sufficient, and it happened 5 years ago, in Germany. It's completely irrelevant and Sony has nothing to do with what's happening here. The actual post is about a current lawsuit, in France, brought by a sports-streaming service called beIN.
Shame on you, Macron. What a loser guy. Big
words but these are just lies. We really need
to no longer put our future into the hands of
any politician here. Direct democracy is the only
way forward past this point. Courts that work for
foreign countries need to be removed. Courts must
work, first and foremost, for the local people
living in a country.
> The plaintiff (Sony Music Entertainment GmbH) then used a VPN to access the blocked content from Germany in circumvention of the geoIP blocking. The court agreed with Sony in their assertions of noncompliance, and we were fined for contempt of court.
This is some fucked up level of incompetency.
That’s why Justice can be abused by whoever got the most money, if it was competent they wouldn’t waste much time on these ridiculous claims.
They are in a difficult position because the entire point of their DNS resolver is that it blocks malicious sites (malware, phishing, etc.). Very easy for Sony to say, why can't they add piracy to the list? They "refuse to alter or lie to you" in their DNS responses - how would a malware block be lying if those other blocks are not?
But even malware filter is supposed to cut malware, not pirated content. Cutting piracy while saying that you cut malware is def lying because pirated resources might not provide anything malicious for the end user.
Am I the only one who find it disturbing that a privacy focused service publishes a detailed report of which institutions is accessing their service, just to make a point?
They say they don't have data about individual IP addresses, and their report is follows their privacy policy. Yes, right, but think about it as a matter of principle. Normally, a privacy focused service shouldn't collect any data, but for technical or legal reasons, sometimes, they have to. They may need to know how many queries they have and from which zones to properly dimension their infrastructure for instance, so it is normal for them to have these logs, but publishing them in a blog post just to make a point feels like they are ready to use collected data beyond their intended purpose if it serves their interests.
Legally, it is fine, and is is unlikely to hurt anyone, but on principle, that's a red flag.
> Am I the only one who find it disturbing that a privacy focused service publishes a detailed report of which institutions is accessing their service
I don't find it disturbing at all, and it's perfectly in line with what you would expect a privacy focused service to do: name and shame those that are attacking privacy.
I wonder why Anonymous seems to be like a thing of the past these days ... There's so many of these fuckers going scot free these days. If anyone know any Anonymous-style movement going after these kind of people, I'm interested to know more.
Lmao. The world is run by morons who are voted for by even more morons. That's why you get stuff like "durrrrrrr we used vpn and could still access it, contempt of court!"
Just absolutely braindead behaviour from so many members of our species.
Yeah, I’m really mixed on this story. Why are they so insistent on not just blocking the sites? I don’t even really think a slippery slope is at play here. This is a very specific legal circumstance that doesn’t seem to have any chance of expanding to other forms of censorship.
Quad9 already states that they strongly oppose piracy, so just block the sites. The piracy sites will be fine.
I don’t think DNS is as neutral as Quad9 believes it is. DNS is like the sign for a business on the road and the domain registrar is like the building permit you get to build the sign. DNS is a way to find a website or business without even bothering with a search engine. Try typing in stamps.com, office.com, booking.com, weather.com.
> €580,000 to €1,000 per day. But deleted his/her comment.
To put this into perspective, €365K a year is roughly the fully loaded total comp cost of a high-senior to low staff level software engineer or a mid level ML engineer at a frontier lab in Cali.
What exactly are you trying to convey here? That this penalty is not an issue? Would you be willing to pay it from your pocket then? Quad9 is not Cloudflare nor Google. It's a nonprofit, in case you blinked right at the sentence that mentioned this.
I'm disappointed in how many pro-piracy comments are in this thread. Free speech does not mean you have the right to steal someone else's labor unencumbered. When actual free speech is blocked, then I'll be among the people rallying -- but blocking a piracy site is blocking cybercrime not legal free speech.
I think the sympathies to this story would change a lot if Quad9 was refusing to block DNS resolution to websites for other illegal organizations like human trafficking rings, cartels, gangs, etc.
Copyright infringement isn’t exactly a violent crime but it is very clearly a crime.
What I don’t think Quad9 realizes is that being neutral from a technical and architectural basis is meaningless in law and doesn’t reflect your intent. If you have awareness and means to make a change that mitigates harm and you refuse, that’s how you lose cases.
I think it can be very easily argued by a lawyer that Quad9 intended to keep the infringing content easily available and at best minimally comply.
(context: I'm the CTO of Quad9 and am one of the people dealing with the lawyers)
There is an understandable focus on "how are you going to block French users" when we have also claimed that geoIP blocking is insufficient for selectively denying resolution for certain names - we understand this conflict, but we think it is energy spent in the wrong place.
It is probable that we will use geoIP filters to block French users from our services after November 24. We could apply this same geoIP filter list now to selectively block French users from reaching the sites that we've been told to make unavailable. But this would corrupt our core premise, which is that the DNS is not the right place for this to happen, and if we comply within France to meet the requirement then we accept the worst eventual outcome for users and we still do not have legally perfect coverage. We wish to first remain consistent with our core mission, and secondarily we must remain as close to compliance as we can to the legal constraints put upon us. By accepting the demands for blocking, we would admit that such demands are permissible within our mission - that we will act on behalf of companies (or others) to create ineffective and mis-directed regimes of content constraint.
We would be admitting that we think this solves the problem - it does not. We would be admitting that we will do this for an ever-increasing number of names - we will not. We would be permitting these methods to be applied for more areas of filtering such as moral, religious, social, or political reasons - we must not.
So we accept that there is the possibility that we will have errors in our blockade, but in this case (blocking French users) we maintain consistency with our stated mission of integrity of the DNS. We would rather there be a clear distinction made for users of our services: you get the DNS as you (the user) expects, or if Quad9 is forced to pollute the service with unexpected and arbitrary number of fragmentation demands, then we will not offer the services at all.
The underlying issue is not ONLY that geoIP blocking is ineffective, but that the entire premise of any of these demands is inappropriately applied to DNS recursive resolution providers. We would hope that this discussion continues to be on the most fundamental of the disagreement we have with the outcome in this court case, not on the details of the technical implementation which have yet to be entirely decided and which can be tuned over time.
Thanks for fighting this.
I wonder how much longer the internet will manage to hold out. Governments will continue trying to impose their laws on it, causing the international network to degenerate to numerous national networks with heavy filtering at the borders. It's really sad to watch...
It's hard to monger WWIII when people from all over the world talk to each other and know for a fact that it's not the guy to this or that side of a border who's the enemy, but their own governments are (working to the same squid endgame).
Or maybe it's easier, if you can convince the people over the border that the enemy is people living among them, and their government.
What's the name of this rhetoric trick when you equate people and government?
No it's two separate calls. No equating at all.
Except that it IS the guys on the other side of the border and current internet makes it clear.
The opinions differ about which other border side guys are the bad ones and what should the goverment do about it.
Everyone should own their entire chain to the wider internet, and everyone should have access to a chain that is horrifically hard or expensive to detect by governments (VLESS/Hysteria2/etc), and not be financially dependent on a provider in order to do it.
If they want to fuck with us, it's time to start fucking back.
On the plus side the internet is designed to be quite hard to block at the borders and you can still access most stuff most places with a little effort. Governments have been trying for years to block stuff and had limited results.
I think most haven't put in the effort yet, but it is rather possible to make it extremely inconvenient where even if you get around the blocks, the experience will be extremely slow, random disconnects, non existent upload bandwidth so you could consume but not publish much etc.
I've been to a lot of countries and it was mostly trivial. China was tricky although I see on the web now you get round the great firewall just by using a foreign esim. I think places like China put in a lot of effort.
> I see on the web now you get round the great firewall just by using a foreign esim
Yes, but that's not circumventing anything. That's an essentially approved method for foreigners specifically because they don't care about keeping foreigners within the GFW.
Once that foreign esim is behind a GFW equivalent of whichever country it is from, what then?
> I think places like China put in a lot of effort
Yes, which is why China was tricky.
Conceptually, it represents the same as any other illegalization:
1. A government has authority for a geographical "box".
2. The government succeeds if it can plug all the "holes".
3. Rogue anti-government behavior punches new holes all the time, which is an endless battle.
In the case of the internetwork, we're two underwater cable cuts away from severing the planet asunder and effectively patching most of the "holes", but that would also destroy most of the economy, so no government really wants to do it.
I guess my political statement/point is that as long as there's too much to track, we're all safe, so making more things across more domains makes everyone safer.
It isn't just governments. Cases like this are started by companies.
Necessity is the mother of invention. Fortunately what's needed is already invented, but the motivation to push 'normal' people there hasn't. In particularly decentralized techs, TOR, and other technologies are fully robust against these actions.
Our inability to push "normal" people onto these things is precisely what will kill us. Tor needs a massive anonymity set to work properly. If people don't use it, we are all weakened. It also gives the corporations economic leverage: they can just ban Tor exit nodes and take the small loss instead of being forced to connect.
For most practical cases a vpn is enough. I use the free service with VeePN's Chrome extension and that does most things. They nag you to upgrade to paid every now and then. I think there's also a free one in Firefox now.
There is a dichotomy to this thread. One side is free internet from government grasp, but I bet that the same people are the government gib me stuff people that want the government to care for them and intervene from cradle to grave.
I don’t see how you can claim there’s a dichotomy when the “second thing” is something you’ve conjured up from your own assumptions.
We have no clue whether they're their assumptions. They claim 100% that they are theirs, but we can't know that. Especially in similar situations, when politics is mentioned and usually too many people have the same assumptions shouted by some "news" sources.
Keep up the good fight! I'm happy that you take a stand for your beliefs and try to do what's best for all of us.
If you have no presence in France do you need to care about the ruling or the fines?
I mean, theres probably EU provisions in place to make that kind of local ruling have teeth, n'est-ce que pas?
Ok, but Switzerland is not a part of the EU. They participate only by treaty. So there has to be more to this story (legally-speaking)
As some other comments on this post have mentioned, there is a a treaty known as the "Lugano Convention", whose parties are the EU (as a whole), Denmark [0], Iceland, Norway and Switzerland; post-Brexit, the UK wanted to join in its own right, but the EU refused. Under the Lugano Convention, if you get a judgement in a French court, you can then apply under the convention to have a Swiss court enforce it; however, there are exceptions which the Swiss court could rely on to refuse to do so – but I have no idea what are the odds that a Swiss court would decide any of those exceptions apply.
[0] Denmark has an opt-out from this area of EU law, which is why it is the only EU member state which needs to be directly party to the treaty; it applies to the others indirectly through the EU as a whole being a party to it
This was my vague impression of things
Well, one option Quad9 could consider, is moving to Liechtenstein - it is part of the EEA (unlike Switzerland which isn’t, although its bilateral agreements with the EU/EFTA partially approximate EEA membership), but unlike Switzerland, it isn’t party to the Lugano Convention
However, I don’t know whether the other aspects of Liechtenstein’s legal and political system would make that viable or not.
EU is a treaty, or lots of them.
(« n’est-ce pas »)
Merci! Je suis idiote
Thank you for the explanation! I couldn't agree more with your stance, and I appreciate deeply you fighting to maintain your (correct) principles. You've gained at least one fan and new user today.
Quick question: what would happen if you decided to simply shield yourself from France’s action without applying any change to your dns? Or is blocking french users considered a compliant answer by French courts?
I don’t get why you would still need to block french users if you also need to exit the jurisdiction.
Because continuing to provide the service to French users would mean they have not exited the jurisdiction. You cant provide services in a jurisdiction and at the same time expect not be subject to that jurisdiction. That's just not how any country treats legal jurisdiction.
As a side project I help out with some technical stuff at a hosting company that provides services to a political group that is strongly anti Erdogan. The infrastructure is in the USA.
We do not block IP traffic from known Turkish ISP ranges. The customer (the political group) receives all sorts of dire legal warnings and threats that what they publish is contrary to Turkish law.
None of our other hosting platforms are configured to block any traffic to/from Turkish IP ranges. We have no business presence or financial involvement with anything domestically in Turkey. Am I subject to Turkish jurisdiction? I don't think so.
But by what you wrote, I am providing services in Turkey.
If you go to Turkey you might find yourself in a prison until you abruptly close this website. This is what happened to Pavel Durov (Telegram creator) in France. Telegram now complies with French law, because otherwise Pavel Durov would still be in French prison.
That's certainly a valid risk, if I were to put myself physically at the mercy of Turkish armed law enforcement inside their borders. In my particular case there's no public information that links my real name to the hosting company, as my work is behind the scenes.
Could Turkish intelligence link me to the company if they spent significant resources researching the hosting company that provides services to their political enemies? Probably. Do I have any personal plans to take a vacation in Turkey any time soon, or a pressing need to visit Turkey? No.
I am pretty sure we also have someone, somewhere hosting something that insults the King of Thailand, so I suppose that's a risk too.
This is a Swiss company offering services to French users. Although Switzerland is not an EU member, it is a party to the European Free Trade Area (EFTA) and through this, the Swiss government would likely be required to help enforce French rulings against their companies.
> This is a Swiss company offering services to French users.
If I operate a bookstore physically in switzerland and a few of the books I sell are illegal in france I'm not required to check passports or whatever, am I? I can just sell books to whoever (subject to swiss law) and if a french national illegally imports one to france that's a problem for customs or the local police or whoever (analogously the french ISPs) to deal with. Not me, the swiss bookstore operator.
Now consider if I were handing out pamphlets for free rather than selling anything. At that point I'm arguably not even doing business because no money has changed hands.
I realize that the current legal reality might be that quad9 needs to block french users in practice but the entire thing is a farce if you stop and think about it.
What about countries friendly with Turkey? I can easily imagine you being arrested in half of the world and extradited to Turkey because you are being criminally prosecuted in Turkey.
It sounds like your point is that (1) you think Türkiye is unlikely to unmask any individuals associated with your company and also (2) you have little interest in ever visiting that country anyway.
In the Quad9 people’s case, defying French law and still doing operating the services under French jurisdiction might work out just fine for as long as (1) holds true, but it doesn’t take a consorted effort of research to change that. It could just be that some leaked piece of information eventually surfaces. It could be a tweet posted by someone else. And I don’t know how many people work for that organization, or might do so in the future, but it seems like a bad move to make a decision on their behalf to paint a target on all their backs.
Also, France being part of the EU makes being an enemy of the state there seem even more unwise for anyone who might want to have associations in any other EU country.
I personally would do exactly what they are doing: if French people want a government that respects free speech, they had better elect one themselves. I wouldn’t become a martyr to that cause - it wouldn’t help anyway.
Bad example, especially githen the fact that Durov is a french national.
Yes but if you don’t have any assets in the country you could not liable, that was OP’s point.
But even being based in Switzerland I believe there’s some inter-countries agreements, so it would not be practical.
Let's say you are a software company based in country C (company) and offer services to users in country U (users), only over the internet, and having no physical assets in country U. You could imagine Microsoft offering Office 365 to customers in Liechtenstein, for example.
GP's point is that whenever you sell or offer something to users in U, you have to abide by U's laws in doing so - no matter whether you did that all while sitting at your desk in country C.
Whether or not enforcement or liability is realistic is up to the relationship between U and C I guess - my guess is France and Switzerland are on pretty good terms.
I understand that's probably how the law works, but it is kind of nonsensical to me that it passively allowing visitors from a country would pull you into their jurisdiction. Requiring you to be responsible for blocking any users to your service from U ensures seems analogous to an author of a book that is illegal/censored in U being required to make sure that no one from U buys the book and takes it back to their country.
“Dear France, have your ISPs block us because we won’t block you” could buy a few days of uptime there.
Then Law is both broken, and dumb -
This is not exactly your focus, but this means that it can be possible for there to be a set of laws in U, such that an action is required and illegal if not present, but that this same action is illegal in C...
I.e., the predication is both meaningless and pointless, unless the supposition is that the laws of U don't hold - if C extradites a citizen of U over said action, is then U's law not supreme?
It's funny that you think Microsoft doesn't have at least a single person living and working in Liechtenstein
The problem is that, technically, an IP address doesn't have a country. GeoIP is at best a suggestion, and it is trivial to route your traffic through a "foreign" IP.
It is about as enforceable as "don't read letters written by redheaded people": it'll never be airtight, and it'll always have a huge amount of false positives.
The only possible "solution" is to ban all open devices from the internet, mandate a DRM-style "trust zone", have the device do mTLS, and embed a realtime DNA sequencer in every device.
Don't give them ideas... That's the wet dream they all salvate at... complete control of what's allowed to be published with a instant way of banning content and people.
They wouldn't be providing services in France, they'd be providing service in Switzerland to people from France. No different than if someone from France traveled to a bagel shop in Switzerland for a bite to eat. If France wants to make it illegal for French citizens to communicate with a foreign business in Switzerland, I don't see how it's the business's responsibility to enforce that.
If someone put a bagel shop on the Swiss/French border and sold bagels across it (using, I don’t know, a long pole or something) I guess there would be some questions.
Realistically, Switzerland and France have a relationship; treaties, etc. Quad9 has to comply with Swiss law, and they probably hope that making reasonable good-faith moves to block French users will cause Swiss courts (if it comes down to that) to see them as the more sympathetic party.
Nothing's crossing the border in this case other than information. It's more like a guy on the French side of the border shouting over to a guy on the Swiss side, and the French government trying to regulate what the guy on the Swiss side is allowed to say in reply.
Regardless of what analogy you use, the point is that the company isn't in France, it's in Switzerland. It doesn't make sense for it to have to do anything to comply with French law, even if it's interacting with someone who happens to be in France.
None of these analogies work very well because providing services across the border without crossing it doesn’t scale very well in-person. I should have just said that directly, but the image of cross-border bagel service was too funny to pass up.
WRT your second paragraph, I think I addressed it already in my second paragraph.
Hence the “shield” part. I guess it’s easier said than done when you’re a Swiss non-profit and not an anonymous sysadmin in Iraq (or whatever jurisdiction would work for this example, idk).
> whatever jurisdiction would work for this example
The Principality of Sealand*
* until the UK or French navy shows up
One can only hope the tribunal that rendered this ridiculous decision is one of the organizations that lose DNS access on November 24.
Honest question here: why don't they target the operators for the nameservers that own the affected domain, basically the TLDs?
Oh right, the blocked domain is probably not a french TLD...
Well, they might be able to go against the domain registrars and possibly cloud providers that also operate in the french market. But those companies probably have a bigger expensive legal team, while quadnine is just a little non-profit.
And what is your proposed solution to that? It takes minutes to move a service to a different IP, this is a gigantic whack a mole
If france wants to institute their own great firewall then they should just do that rather than engaging in twisted extra-national half measures that make liability confusing for everyone.
Unrelated but hoping you could answer this:
There was a rumour years ago that Quad9 was connected to UK intelligence, or something like that. I haven't heard anyone discuss there for a long time, but wondering if you (or anyone reading this) can comment on the source of the rumours and whether there is any veracity to them.
https://quad9.net/ lists as being founded by Global Cyber Alliance, which was founded by City of London police, Manhattan District Attorney’s Office and Center for Internet Security.
Quad9 openly operate in threat intelligence: https://quad9.net/news/blog/protecting-millions-in-asia-a-ca...
City of London and Manhattan District Attorney’s Office suggests finance is a factor, so I'll hazard a guess that Quad9's telemetry is useful for protecting the interest of finance: e.g. learning of new/popular domains that might be tricking users/businesses into fraudulent activity.
Quad9 meanwhile have the remit to provide the best public resolver, including fighting cases as they do.
The thing about DNS is that you can do your own investigations, rather than rely on rumour and innuendo. You can query their DNS and anyone else you can get at and compare results. You can use a VPN to appear to come from somewhere else or ask a friend to perform a query on your behalf.
You can literally [sigh] be your own journalist in this regard. All you need is a DNS query tool. I recommend dig but you might only have nslookup available out of the box.
Now, this UK intelligence thing. Even if James Bond Q's mates were actually running a DNS system you can still query it and compare it to someone else's view of the internet, say 1.1.1.1 or 8.8.8.8 or whatever.
You can also go to the source, ie root: . and work your own way down to decide on what is what.
Let's have a go at an analogy: DNS is (not really) a bit like a topographical map. You could buy your maps from DodgyRussianMaps'R'us and be surprised that Ukraine has somehow been subsumed by a bunch of murderous wankers. On the other hand you might buy your maps from HonestJonOffOfFaceb00c and note that it isn't. You can, of course, ask for a few other opinions and make up your own mind.
My real point is that DNS is actually quite hard to tamper with, without breaking so many things that everyone can know it is being messed with. When an org resorts to fiddling with DNS they've already lost whatever argument is to be had.
I think you fundamentally misunderstood the potential issue.
Sure, on a reply based approach you can audit a DNS service.
But that doesn't tell you about other things like "is my DNS provider also providing intelligence agencies with my entire DNS query history?". The issue isn't "oh no the MI6 can redirect my PornHub link to anothe site", but "oh no the MI6 knows every single webpage I visited". Which is a valid worry given the current British political climate.
DNS is simply a look up service and yes, you do have to be sure of your sources. You can avoid the (sic) MI6 by using DTLS. Not sure why you'd bother though for everyday use.
That's not for the average punter but where there is a will there is a way.
I don't think that you live within the "current British political climate" nor do I think you know too much about it. Please feel free to educate us about your ideology and then we can usefully engage.
It’s like buying a dodgy map, except the map pulls updates every time you use it. You could very well provide DNS for free and get everyone to use it and then suddenly serve tampered responses at some specific time and use that until everyone affected notices and switches.
And also you can just serve DNS normally and get the intelligence.
I think the point is more about the intelligence gathering rather than the tampering.
I’m sorry for being so dense, so what do you plan to do?
It sounds like selectivd site blocking is against your mission, so will you then just not offer Quad9 to any person in France instead (total blackout across all sites)?
Sorry if I’m missing the obvious or your stated solution.
You should make the case of Qatar corruption money having bought this ruling.
Qatar spends a lot of money to bribe european politicians - that is known for a long time now:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qatar_corruption_scandal_at_th...
And now we know why Qatar bribes everyone in the EU. They buy legislation. Or at the least rulings.
Respect. I'm not a big fan of politics, but have you ever tried to explain your mission to EU legislators and try to make them understand your viewpoint? There seem to be some quite strong-handed tactics to make content disappear from the internet, and having some of those in charge understand that this is not the way forward might turn out to be very important to all of us in the future.
Sorry that you guys have to go through this. I use quad9 and it works great!
Thank you for bringing your cause to light, with the very well thought and written write-ups on the blog post and further here on HackerNews.
Despite going against you stand for, why not consider implementing a service fee of 100,000 euros per domain name that is requested to be blocked?
I wish I was /s on this but this be a way for you to say that you comply, with no sane company would go about requesting tens or hundreds of domains to be blocked, endlessly, for the rest of eternity (as the courts currently are asking your company to do, forever, at your own cost).
Technically, there is GeoIP filtering going into place after the 24th so why not put that to good use for a while until you get some orders for this new service (or a drop in interest from the suitors) ?:)
Better than geoip, y'all could work with the French to have French networks point to a black hole server by having BGP point 9.9.9.9 at said server.
The French might just do that anyway and point it at some government-approved “safe” DNS resolver.
I wish you the best! I wonder how many percent of your overall budget id eaten up by anything legal related?
It seems you are under heavy legal pressure, mostly from companies which are abusing usual ignorance of courts.
Good to see leaders stand up for what they believe in. Soemtimes I simply do not understand this obsession with controlling the internet by European countries. So ridiculous.
I asked his elsewhere but aren't there like a prepondeance of existing case law or amicus-briefs that would speak to the logical and historical stupidity of arguments by the plaintiffs?
I suggest you present a SplinterCon in Stockholm in December. It is, very sadly, an important situation to explain.
considering france can put u in jail if u dont decrypt whats encrypted it must be blocked loong time ago
This was clearly a difficult decision, but I support your position. I have donated to help you continue the work.
Good luck.
[flagged]
So, basically, you admit you will comply exiting all countries that ask for it; Pushing users to allegedly less safe resolvers in the name of security and integrity; And eventually ending the service in a couple of years because no one will be able to use your service since you'll be blocking most parts of the world and won't work without VPN exit in specific places. The decision is understandable, this really is a dillema I wouldn't want to take part in. You'll die by a thousand cuts of authoritarianism.
I haven't seen your donation to their legal defence fund? Cheque is in the mail?
It's strange that Quad9 openly does malicious domain filtering [1] using what it terms "threat intelligence feeds", but apparently filtering piracy domains is technically impossible and not the right place for this to happen. I think courts rightly are suspicious of this kind of doublespeak from DNS companies. If DNS filtering is effective for protection against malware and ransomware, it will be at least somewhat effective for piracy filtering too.
[1] https://quad9.net/service/threat-blocking/
(context: I am the CTO of Quad9) Using those threat intelligence feeds is optional, as the blog post indicates. 9.9.9.10 & secondaries have no filtering.
The threat feeds we offer are in alignment with what the user expects and intends. Mandatory restriction of DNS resolution by a third party (not the user, not Quad9) is expressly what users do NOT want, regardless of the outcome. Once such restrictions are enacted and treated as normal, the channel for making demands will fill with a flood of "objectionable" names from every corner for every reason. Quad9 has already received demands from the French regulator to block sites which deliver adult content found to be objectionable to minors. We see an extremely slippery slope which has already moved out of piracy as the scoped intent which is this case in particular.
More to the point: prohibiting content via the DNS is a useless exercise when it is done out of alignment with the end users' goals - they will simply use some other recursive resolver (or their own) probably without the benefits of being oriented towards security and privacy. We have no monopoly on DNS resolution - there are thousands of others open to public use, and anyone can set up their own, for free, with no mandatory requirements by governments or regulators. This case (and any others like it) only drives out law-abiding organizations who are trying to promote better cyber hygiene and who want to keep the DNS as a single, un-splintered high-integrity pointer system.
> Using those threat intelligence feeds is optional, as the blog post indicates. 9.9.9.10 & secondaries have no filtering.
TIL that filtering is on by default on the standard resolver (9.9.9.9). That’s certainly a surprise to me; I would have expected the standard resolver to provide “honest” DNS responses and a secondary to provide filtering, rather than the reverse (which is what I think Cloudflare does).
While I think that the ruling is both morally and legally questionable, I do agree with GP that this weakens your original argument quite a bit.
> TIL that filtering is on by default on the standard resolver (9.9.9.9).
Their offering is explained in the first paragraph of the home page, in fact the h1 and page title cover it.
Yeah, it's not the right place for it to happen. One's a service to protect the consumer, and the other is a corporate profit preserving concern. Why should a free DNS service be doing their work for them?
Because a court interpreted the law and ordered them to. And protecting companies from unlawful piracy is just as much a moral good as protecting the consumer from ransomware and threat actors. And if the DNS company can do the one, they can do the other.
> protecting companies from unlawful piracy
Counterpoint: piracy is moral.
Only if purchasing doesn’t mean ownership. ;)
Nobody's owning a thing, BeIN is a live sports channel
Enabling the transfer of information from companies to people through piracy is a moral good
I’ll always support those who are willing to take such risks where I am not.
It is not obvious that any specific unauthorized act of copying is "piracy," there is always a fair use argument and at the end of the day it is up to the courts to determine whether or not fair use applies.
Pretty inconvenient with the Internet being a thing.
protecting companies from unlawful piracy is just as much a moral good
bruh
"The plaintiff (Sony Music Entertainment GmbH) then used a VPN to access the blocked content from Germany in circumvention of the geoIP blocking. The court agreed with Sony in their assertions of noncompliance, and we were fined for contempt of court."
Imagine doing everything possible to stop something. They then circumvent your protections with yet another service, and you get fined.
I wish I could even suggest what someone could do against these trolls.
This is like saying "we put a lock requested by court and where found guilty because plantif hacked us after"
The article rightfully mentions the Sony case, but the article is actually mainly about another company:
> beIN, a Qatari company with offices in France, previously sought to force Quad9 to block resolution for a set of domain names they assert are participating in copyright infringement of its audiovisual rights on sports event broadcasts.
This seems to be the relevant wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeIN_Channels_Network
...I'm dumbfounded at the idea of using real-life courts to enforce real-life sporting events' streaming rights by getting rapid injunctions against DNS providers as the means of striking at a multiply-redundant head of a piracy hydra when DNS TTLs are often longer than the actual sporting event being infringed upon.
...it's like going after the independent printshop who printed your local telephone directory book to redact known ne'er-do-wells from the directory because a local weed drug deal took place 5 minutes ago but the next telephone directory print isn't scheduled for another 6 months.
also, doesn't DNSSEC prevent this anyway?
> I'm dumbfounded at the idea of using real-life courts to enforce real-life sporting events' streaming rights by getting rapid injunctions against DNS providers
It could always be worse, like here in Spain, where they got one court order a few years back, and just arbitrarily block half the internet (i.e. all of Cloudflare) whenever the futbol is on...
Ah is that what's happening? I thought Cloudflare hated me. Thanks, I will check that next time it happens.
I have zero awareness of when futbol is on because I hate sports. So I didn't correlate it.
Some countries turn the internet off when there's a big protest against the government. Others turn the internet off when the football is on telly.
To be fair, football hooligans do look like violent protestors. Except, the only thing they seem to be protesting is their brains.
You may wish to bookmark https://hayahora.futbol/
This is hilarious, thanks for sharing. I had no idea.
> ...I'm dumbfounded at the idea of using real-life courts to enforce real-life sporting events' streaming rights by getting rapid injunctions against DNS providers as the means of striking at a multiply-redundant head of a piracy hydra when DNS TTLs are often longer than the actual sporting event being infringed upon.
There's a youtuber who breaks down samples in songs by hip hop artists, and he gets striked or all his earnings taken by someone who stalks his videos, he used to cut samples to below 15 seconds, and still gets striked. You can't even defend yourself, and arguably he is within FAIR USE of the content.
Someone, somewhere is going out of their way to strike their videos. It's ridiculous, do they strike news channels when copyrighted music plays in the background without their control too?
> do they strike news channels when copyrighted music plays in the background without their control too?
Yes, they do. In Brazil, to avoid some news reports about stores selling contraband items, the store owners started playing Disney songs in the background, meaning they weren't able to publish the videos or broadcast them.
Maybe I haven't considered this enough but couldn't they just remove the audio and put subtitles up with what was said? Just preface this segment segment with the information that the owners of the store are playing copyrighted Disney music in an attempt to prevent them from recording them. Maybe have a voiceover explaining the situation if dead air is unacceptable for some reason.
The general public didn’t even make it through this comment, unfortunately.
Things are pretty dire, attention-wise.
Hopefully someone has pointed this youtuber at Rick Beato / Legal Eagle's initiative in this direction.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8HxQkk0PSY
That's not real life courts, that's an unaccountable corporation who rightly considers you irrelevant
That seems much more sensible than what is being discussed. Sure fair use offers some protections, but youtube the platform is not required to protect individual youtuber revenues for fair use. Fair use effectivly entails an exception to the normal rules, and as such, requires actual judgement on a case by case basis instead of being something that can be scaled like content id. If you actually got sued, you could use Fair Use as a defense in court, and the judge would decide if you are right or not. In the case you are discussing, no-one got sued because youtube handled it without a court, so fair use never really comes into play.
What is being discussed would be more like if a court tried to get Google to take down individual spam bot youtube accounts that had popped up that same morning. Its rediculous because the legal system doesn't move that fast (nor does DNS), so things that require that level of heavy-handedness are typically much slower processes taking months or years.
> also, doesn't DNSSEC prevent this anyway?
As per usual, the answer is no. DNSSEC prevents resolver cache poisoning for trusted resolvers which validate DNSSEC. That is literally it. It provides no security against the vast majority of attacks against DNS.
Also limited protection against MitM upstream of the resolver, spoofing is prevented but denial of service is still possible.
So much this.
It's like prosecuting the asphalt guys who paved the road the bank robbers used
Sometimes when I come up with analogies they miss the mark. Yours was on point.
In the meanwhile AI companies neglect copyright infringement at industrial scale
> Imagine doing everything possible to stop something. They then circumvent your protections with yet another service, and you get fined.
Isnt this what gets all tech companies into trouble all the time. Something objectionable happens (ChatGPT helping someone bulid a bomb for instance) and we go like "Do better".
I think, usually, in those cases it's that people believe the company did not really do anywhere near everything it could - it did the bare minimum it thought it could get away with then seemed shocked it wasn't enough to matter.
Here, if any pair of countries have conflicting rules then you simply can't expose your service to both because it's plain impossible for you to block all means of VPN/proxy regardless of how perfect your service tries to detect it. There's no payment, there's no account, there's no anything - you're just serving DNS to an IP that reports to be out of Germany according to German law. At some point it stops being a mistake/malintent of the company and one of the user. Where that transitions probably depends on the person though.
> if any pair of countries have conflicting rules then you simply can't expose your service to both
Yes. This is also how physical products work. The internet makes it easy and the default to offer a service worldwide, hence also making it easy to get in conflict with the law worldwide. You have to pick and choose which laws to break, which laws to comply with by minimizing exposure, and which laws to comply with by making a tailor-made version for a specific market.
You say this confidently, but this is merely one theory about how things should work.
If I make a product in my country, where it’s legal, and a buyer purchases it from me and then brings it to you overseas where it’s illegal, and someone in your county tries to sue me for it, they are typically going to have a hard time. (Unless your country is powerful enough to violate the sovereignty of my nation.)
In most cases, you accessing my website is more like this scenario. Intermediaries (ISPs) brought you the product. I simply offered it to anyone who came to my “store” (server). I admit that this dynamic changes if you directly pay me for something.
Your framework implies that every social website needs to make a decision on whether or not users are allowed to insult the Thai monarch[0], and then must block access to Thais if they decide it’s allowed. In reality nobody does this, although they may choose not to put a server in Thailand if they are worried about it.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A8se-majest%C3%A9_in_Thai...
> If I make a product in my country, where it’s legal, and a buyer purchases it from me and then brings it to you overseas where it’s illegal, and someone in your county tries to sue me for it, they are typically going to have a hard time.
Except the analogue to your ISP for your example is UPS and they are far less (if at all?) responsible for the content of packages they deliver.
It’s just a metaphor and it breaks down if you dig into the specifics too deeply, as with all metaphors. But if you insist, I as the seller am not responsible either. If I’m a bookseller and I send a banned book to you via UPS, after you paid me in person in cash, and your customs seizes it, you don’t get your package and nothing happens to me. YOU might get in trouble though.
Now if I keep sending banned materials to your country, it might be a bad idea for me to travel there. But nothing else is going to happen, unless you’re a global power and you drone me or compel my government to extradite me. (Or if my own country was foolish enough to make mutual extradition agreements for such things.)
(Note, I specified in person in cash above because as I mentioned before, electronic payments make things messy. But most websites are “free”.)
UPS is partially liable for incorrect declarations of international packages and for attempting to deliver packages they should have known were illegal...
> In most cases, you accessing my website is more like this scenario. Intermediaries (ISPs) brought you the product.
Offering a website to a certain country is not something ISP decided for you, but you actively did that yourself. I cant create a gambling website and host it in Monaco and then serve it to someone in CA and say that, it isnt on me, but on Comcast.
How do you "actively" offer a website to a country?
Websites aren't broadcasting, they are waiting there and responding to requests. Why should it be on every server in the world to have to figure out whether they're allowed to respond to a given request based on the client's country?
Why is it not the user's responsibility to not send requests? Why isn't it the ISP's responsibility to not route the requests? And every single router in between?
FWIW, this theory was attempted in court with a bittorrent case in Hong Kong. [1]
Defendant's lawyer argued that seeding a copyrighted movie was not (active) distribution but merely "making it available" (which was not associated with a criminal offense in HK law as opposed to "distributing infringing copies").
Didn't work out.
---
[1] HKSAR v Chan Nai Ming [2005] 4 HKLRD 142
This is someone in HK judged under HK jurisdiction. That's fine.
My point is it's weird to expect website operators to be aware of every jurisdiction on the planet and take steps to comply with each of them.
If that expectation becomes common, the obvious way to go isn't to block the countries you aren't allowed to serve. It's to only allow the ones you know you are allowed.
Imagine how the internet would be if you were default blocked from accessing any website hosted in a different country.
> Imagine how the internet would be if you were default blocked from accessing any website hosted in a different country.
It's a difficult issue for sure. It's almost a geopolitical problem -- the larger economic blocs (eg. EU, China, USA) can basically dictate terms and expect general compliance (eg. GDPR) because most companies can't avoid operating in those areas, while smaller countries can't really do much unless they're part of a bigger economic bloc.
False. Making a website accessible from the internet is not “offering” it to anyone. You might have a claim if I were paying to advertise in that country, maybe.
And actually you can just make a gambling website overseas, people have done that since forever. You might have trouble with accepting payments, though.
See also the UK's Online Safety Act and the UK's regulator Ofcom, which stated:
'Ofcom told the BBC: "We are aware of this lawsuit. Under the Online Safety Act, any service that has links with the UK now has duties to protect UK users, no matter where in the world it is based."
A service doesn't have to be based in the UK to be subject to the act, and therefore face action from Ofcom.'
The US-based lawyers for the services in question take a very different view....
For those not aware, note that Ofcom have effectively conceded defeat on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50167028
> A service doesn't have to be based in the UK to be subject to the act, and therefore face action from Ofcom.'
Hm yeah but "action from Ofcom" doesn't really mean very much to a party half a world away.
> A service doesn't have to be based in the UK to be subject to the act, and therefore face action from Ofcom.
Manifestly, the British still think they are a world power.
> I think, usually, in those cases it's that people believe the company did not really do anywhere near everything it could - it did the bare minimum it thought it could get away with then seemed shocked it wasn't enough to matter.
Yes, and Quad9 could have done better in the German court case. At a minimum they could have asked users to register and provide proof of residency, and then could have ensured that their DNS service is offered only to registered users.
> At a minimum they could have asked users to register and provide proof of residency
This would have been a massive burden to them, and (as we have seen from the ongoing data leaks) a gigantic privacy risk to its users. It would have also been a big overreach, as the German ruling would have mostly impacted non-German users.
Let's take this level of user tracking for DNS would be accepted & fine by Germany as well as what folks were thinking was feasible for the company to do as a given, how does it prove the user+ip who registered is the user+ip who submitted the request instead of the place it got proxied? Or malware enabling the same?
If you can solve this for me it would actually help a lot at work :D
Just shift the legal burden of ensuring that no unauthorized users use an IP to the legitimate user of the IP /s
Germany did this, it made free wifi illegal.
It is my understanding that getting infected by a botnet is not illegal yet, so there is room for improvement.
It could be in Germany until the law was reformed. You were civilly responsible for whatever the botnet did.
How would you imagine this could work?
A recursive DNS resolver is identified just by an IP address for your system level DNS resolver to use (eg. in /etc/resolv.conf). Even if you assigned a random, secret IPv6 address for every individual user, they could simply share that with anyone else too. In IPv4, pretty much impossible.
User authentication is not a function of DNS. You are requiring an entirely new protocol to be designed. And the nobody will use it.
This is an insane take. Where does it stop? Are we going to be tracked and surveilled from every service?
I’m not defending it and hate it too, but it’s worth remembering that from the perspective of many governments and regulators, the internet is a legally broken Wild West that the law needs to catch up with. Viewed through the lens of legal precedent that balanced privacy/safety/liberty before telecommunications networks, that is true: surveillance was permitted within a very broad set of parameters (by default, even: that’s why we talk about e.g. private residences being protected exceptions to no-privacy-by-default).
Again, I don’t endorse that framing. But that’s where a lot of lawmakers are at. They’re not corrupt or fascists or hysterical about porn or whatever (well, plenty are, but not most). They’re trying to correct what they identify as a dangerously uncontrolled area.
As we should. These corporations are rent seeking monopolists. Like many Japanese companies, Sony is an intellectual property absolutist. PlayStation creator Ken Kutaragi called our objections to the "you'll own nothing" future a "mentality issue".
I have sympathy for my fellow man. There isn't enough liability in the world for these corporations.
> These corporations are rent seeking monopolists. Like many Japanese companies, Sony is an intellectual property absolutist.
The whole intellectual property space is pure rent seeking. Everybody wants name recognition and/or money whenever some text, code, image, or video they produced is used or remixed. It is pure rent seeking, from FSF to Sony to Metallica.
> The whole intellectual property space is pure rent seeking. Everybody wants name recognition and/or money whenever some text, code, image, or video they produced is used or remixed. It is pure rent seeking, from FSF to Sony to Metallica.
If that's true, so is the private property space in general.
But what you say isn't true. The "intellectual property space" is not pure rent seeking. If someone labors to write a novel, they're no less justified to get economic benefit from it than someone who labored to build an apartment building.
Intellectual property critics have a tendency to throw the baby out with the bathwater. There are problems with IP, but those specific should be fixed through reform.
Copyright has never existed for the benefit of authors, and anyone who authors a scientific paper knows this. Copyright has always benefited the publishing industry and was established at the request of publishers in the first place, after they lost the monopoly they had under the previous censorship regime (the "star chamber"). Authors receive at best a small fraction of the sales of their work and most authors never receive enough compensation to actually live on, hence the expression "don't quit your day job."
At this point copyright is an obsolete system. It was set up at a time when large-scale copying required an industrial operation, and that is simply not the reality of the world anymore. We do not need to "reform" copyright, we need to build a brand new system that is more reflective of modern technology. Maybe that new system will actually focus on compensating authors as there is no need for a publishing industry, or maybe we will just accept that authors are not guaranteed any payment for their work and will have to make money some other way.
> Copyright has never existed for the benefit of authors, and anyone who authors a scientific paper knows this.
That's some bizarre logic: copyright predates the existence of scientific papers [edit: published as a for-profit activity dependent on copyright]. Why would the 20/21st century experience of publishing a scientific paper have any bearing on what it's always been?
Scientific publishing is messed up because, unlike most other creative work, it has a different funding model (basically state patronage), which basically makes the publishers very profitable parasites. That should be addressed directly instead of abolishing copyright for all works.
> Authors receive at best a small fraction of the sales of their work and most authors never receive enough compensation to actually live on, hence the expression "don't quit your day job." ... or maybe we will just accept that authors are not guaranteed any payment for their work and will have to make money some other way.
That's more bizarre logic: "Authors don't get paid enough, so lets take away their rights so they get paid less."
> At this point copyright is an obsolete system. It was set up at a time when large-scale copying required an industrial operation, and that is simply not the reality of the world anymore.
Copyright was setup before the industrial revolution, so your statement doesn't make sense. Also, at least in some countries, its foundation is the moral rights of the author, not some argument about production.
> We do not need to "reform" copyright, we need to build a brand new system that is more reflective of modern technology. Maybe that new system will actually focus on compensating authors as there is no need for a publishing industry, or maybe we will just accept that authors are not guaranteed any payment for their work and will have to make money some other way.
You're throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It seems like you have gripes coming from a particular problem area (scientific publishing?) and are too narrowly focused on that. "I have this gripe, lets decommission this important legacy system, and then rewrite it completely from scratch!" is usually not a good plan.
> That's some bizarre logic: copyright predates the existence of scientific papers
Firstly, this isn’t true, but more importantly it doesn’t matter because the parent’s claim doesn’t depend on scientific papers predating copyright.
The first scientific paper was Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, published in London on March 6, 1665 (or you can go back as far as Aristotle if you prefer). The first copyright law is England’s Statute of Anne (1710).
> copyright predates the existence of scientific papers
[citation needed] /s
"Philosophical Transactions is the world’s first and longest-running scientific journal. It was launched in March 1665 by Henry Oldenburg (c.1619-1677), the Society’s first Secretary, who acted as publisher and editor. "
https://royalsociety.org/journals/publishing-activities/publ...
"Modern copyright law was invented on April 10, 1710, with the enactment of the Statute of Anne in Great Britain"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright
see also the U.S. Copyright Act of 1790: Signed into law by President George Washington on May 31, 1790 and the Berne Convention (1886)
> "Philosophical Transactions is the world’s first and longest-running scientific journal. It was launched in March 1665 by Henry Oldenburg (c.1619-1677), the Society’s first Secretary, who acted as publisher and editor. "
My bad. I edited out a "probably" I shouldn't have, and was writing based on the intuition that there were people working as authors writing plays and the like before you had people working as scientists.
> there were people working as authors writing plays and the like before you had people working as scientists
Indeed, the entire history of humanity is that of creation and sharing and teaching - of ideas, stories, songs, poems. Copyright is a mere three centuries old. And somehow people have come to believe that without it, creation will cease. Even while simultaneously correctly understanding that virtually every person who writes, sings, raps, dances, etc will never be able earn anything but trival sums from doing so even under the current legal regime.
It's worth going to read Macaulay's speeches from the early nineteenth century to see how little what copyright supporters claim as the intent of copyright was seen as such at the time these ideas were being rendered into law.
https://ia601406.us.archive.org/34/items/in.ernet.dli.2015.2... beginning at p 156/pdf page 180
> Indeed, the entire history of humanity is that of creation and sharing and teaching - of ideas, stories, songs, poems. Copyright is a mere three centuries old.
Yeah, and a lot of that was either amateurish or in the thrall of some wealthy elite (either the creator was an elite themselves, or directly dependent on them).
> And somehow people have come to believe that without it, creation will cease.
Come on, you're being black and white about it? Without copyright, will it stop? No. Will it change, for the worse? Probably. More paid for and catering to the whims of the wealthy, far less "middle class" creation, and almost no "middle class" professional creation, etc.
This discussion probably doesn’t fit in HN comment boxes, but how would you a) motivate people to create without any form of compensation or b) create the artificial scarcity needed to force compensation for goods with essentially infinite supply?
Among the various options:
- Pay in advance, before the product exists.
- Pay for early access that other people don't have. (Yes, in the absence of copyright, people could take the early-access version and share it with others. People already do this today, and that doesn't stop folks from continuing to be patrons anyway.)
- Accept that the 0.0..01% case of absurdly popular works will end up making less money than they otherwise might have. Small price to pay for having a rich and vibrant ecosystem of people sharing things and modifying things.
> Accept that the 0.0..01% case of absurdly popular works will end up making less money
For books and music maybe the difference is not quite that big, but for games and movies these 0.0..01% cost so much more to make that they would definitely not get made if they made significantly less money.
Nobody is stopping you from monetizing your own creative work via the methods you described without a publisher involved today. If those ways of getting paid would create a “rich and vibrant ecosystem of people sharing things”, why doesn’t it already exist?
Because the incentives are not aligned. In a capitalist society societal consciousness is necessarily imprinted with capitalist (value extracting) logic.
If most of the people around you believe that making money is the logical way to survive then making money will become the goal of many to most human interactions. People will choose big publishers because big publishers guarantee them some amount of money (and services around publishing) in exchange for the ownership and monetisation rights (and then the right to sue somebody into oblivion when they break copyright law).
So the rich and vibrant ecosystem can be reality, just not within current society.
They do already exist, in multiple forms. The reason why they're not the norm, and copyright law still exists, is because the publishers with the most money won't make as much money that way.
How are the publishers forcing creators to engage with copyright law? Anyone who creates a work can decide to waive their rights under copyright law today, no need to wait for it to be abolished. Why do so few of them do it?
You don't need to motivate people to create. That's a spontaneous move of human beings. Humans were making music and were paintings on walls far before any obsession of legal owning started to haunt their mind.
Crowdfunding. Services like Patreon, Kickstarter, GitHub Sponsors.
People should be paid for the labor of creating, not for artificially scarce copies of the finished product.
Patronage has been known as an alternative to copyright since around 200 years ago:
https://www.thepublicdomain.org/2014/07/24/macaulay-on-copyr...
The cited drawbacks are valid: creators are beholden to the elites who fund their work, and their influence in their creative process is felt to this day.
With modern technology, however, funding is diffused through large groups of people which minimizes this impact through diversification.
The ideal model is one where lots of people pitch in to fund a creator for the full cost of creating something, then the resulting work is released directly to the public domain.
the labourer who built the apartment doesnt get a hundred year claim to economic benefit from that apartment though?
are you saying that electricians should get a monthly rent fee from any circuit theyve touched?
i think we can do just fine treating IP like other work - you pay for the creation of it, not the consumption
>the labourer who built the apartment doesnt get a hundred year claim to economic benefit from that apartment though?
they do if they build their own house and rent it out
> the labourer who built the apartment doesnt get a hundred year claim to economic benefit from that apartment though?
> are you saying that electricians should get a monthly rent fee from any circuit theyve touched?
My example was a simplification, so don't take it to literally.
It's also worth noting that other property rights have no time limit. Except in China, whoever owns that apartment building can own it forever.
>It's also worth noting that other property rights have no time limit.
This is wrong.
In the UK, property rights are mostly leasehold, just as they are in Singapore for HDB flats.
It's called copyright as things change when works are easy and cheap to copy.
Replicating work of an electrician or builder is very similar effort to their original work.
Making a copy of a novel or software program or art today is practically free.
In case of work for hire, things pretty much work the same way already — company owns the copyright, except in some jurisdictions where actual humans keep "moral rights" and reserve the right to renegotiate the fee if the work produces disproportionate earnings (one cannot even transfer these rights away).
But if you did the work out of pocket, how should it work? Any recipient could trivially and cheaply produce a copy and distribute it. If you do not get any exclusivity at all, others would profit a lot more and you'd get nothing at all.
So in general, there are multiple things:
* exclusivity lasts too long (I understand some motivation like supporting your children off it, especially if work only became profitable late in your life or in death, but you could have different mechanisms too — akin to moral rights, exclusivity could run from the moment it turns a significant profit like an average annual salary, and for a fixed, much shorter period after)
* types of works which are utilitarian (like software tools) should have entirely different treatment
* it should ensure both transferability and perpetuity of use (no licensing bullshit and your games/music are gone because our service does not offer them anymore)
...
Toll roads exist because sometimes that's the best way to make the money to construct a road. But they are the exception, not the rule, and they don't last forever either.
Copyright is a monopoly granted by the government on what's essentially numbers. It's a lot like democracy: utterly terrible, yet somehow the least bad way to accomplish some goal, in this case compensating creators for their labor.
In its current form, it is absolutely rent seeking. We will be dead and buried long before our culture enters the public domain. The so called "stakeholders" have systematically robbed us of our public domain rights.
Limit copyright duration to at most 20 years and it will still be a disgusting monopoly on numbers, but at least it won't be intolerable. We might actually forget that we can use technology to trivially copy stuff at negligible costs.
They are the same yes, except we don't have yet a technology to instantly copy whatever macrosized object ad nauseam like we can with intellectual work in digital era.
If anyone could duplicate the whole universe at will, of course current human laws would all seem as silly as those covering random virtual monopoly on cognitive experience possibilities.
Exactly. Digital IP can be transferred infinitely and cheaply (by copying it) without loss of use. Physical items cannot (yet!?) be transferred infinitely and cheaply without loss of use. Once the item is transferred, the previous holder of the physical item loses use of it.
> If someone labors to write a novel, they're no less justified to get economic benefit from it than someone who labored to build an apartment building.
They absolutely are, because an apartment building is a _rival_ good, as are all physical goods, meaning that you and somebody else cannot both own and use it at the same time. Intellectual property is a non-rival good, meaning if somebody else copies your song or story, you still have that song/story! It's a very different moral claim; the apartment is "I built it, so nobody should be able to take it away from me without paying", while the IP is "I built it, so nobody else should be able to copy it without paying".
> They absolutely are, because an apartment building is a _rival_ good, as are all physical goods, meaning that you and somebody else cannot both own and use it at the same time.
I don't think that distinction is as important as you make it out to be. Private property law allows individuals to own far, far more physical goods than they can personally use.
If were going to talk about abolishing intellectual property, how about lets talk about abolishing private property too? Maybe replace it with some kind of active-use right.
Anyway, lets destroy it first and work the details out later. /s
ChatGPT isn’t “dumb pipes” like DNS or ISP infrastructure. Judgment/intelligence is the entire product for ChatGPT.
EDIT: Look at that, downvotes but no rebuttals. (:
There is nothing 'dumb' about DNS. It is a 'sophisticated software to translate human readable addresses to machine-understandable and infinitely routable identifiers'.
Anything can be reduced down to 'dumb' if you try hard enough. Officer, these are just chemicals in a specific quantity and just goes boom when mixed together.
You missed the point spectacularly. “Dumb pipes” doesn’t denigrate DNS, it means that DNS doesn’t make judgment calls, there is no intelligence making decisions about where and whether to route things.
It's as clever as a phonebook. Better now?
I know what you're getting at, and I agree DNS is simple for folks who hang out in HN but at its core DNS is pretty complicated.
Try explaining top level authoritives, ttl, DoH etc etc to a lay person. Yes, it is example.com in, a.b.c.d out but it is anything but simple.
My larger point is calling "phone book" doesnt make DNS dumb.
Phone books get updated!
I'm confused; how does the geoIP block they implemented in Germany differ from the planned end of service for French users?
My question as well. I suspect they will update their terms of service to forbid use within France. Then anyone who uses their services from France will be in violation of the terms, which opens them up to legal penalties themselves.
Or perhaps they are just planning to physically withdraw any operating presence in France, so as to not have any facilities, equipment, or employees who are located in French jurisdiction.
But it wasn't clear from the article, unless I missed it.
Reply in separate thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50200111
I had the same question and read through it to get an answer but it is indeed not there :)
My guess is that they brought Germany example of doing GeoIP as the model they'll use but mostly noted as a fun quirk that even that solution received a weird challenge which they managed to fight off (at cost, though).
Obviously, it'd be nice to get a direct response from them as it is unclear.
> I wish I could even suggest what someone could do against these trolls.
While trolls are awful, something like trolls can always exist in a free society. The root problem here is the French courts enabling the trolls with unworkable rulings. Both the French and Italian justice systems have a history of making some clueless and even incoherent rulings which are never corrected.
>Imagine doing everything possible to stop something. They then circumvent your protections with yet another service, and you get fined.
The point is that they want to use these cases to get global blocks in place. Geoblocking a single country from accessing content that country wants blocked is not doing everything that could be done. They could remove access to that content for all users everywhere, then the block could not be circumvented
I'm not saying that is what they should have done or should do or that they should give in to any of these situations, but that is the end goal of someone like Sony in these cases. They want to block it in the territory in question, yes, but truly the purpose of these laws is to apply those rules and controls globally
Lately Sony Corpos have been really getting into their supervillain arc aren’t they?
Lately? Did you forget the rootkit they installed on everyone of their customers PCs?
In the last year, I have started to think that the internet was a mistake.
My theory was 'the death of the internet'. Once everyone has been scammed, once everyone has been hacked and stripped naked in public, when there are more lies than truths, when you are the tool and the computer uses you, when everything has been sold and you have nothing: then you would say, this was a mistake.
Actually, I don't know much about the history of the internet. The Sony stuff is before my time. Now you mention this, perhaps the idea that the internet was designed to be beneficial was actually a total lie.
The Internet was a project to build resilient military communications during the Cold War. It was designed so that in case Russia would nuke the USA, the USA would still be able to nuke Russia, and all its other targets. This was not going to help people.
keeping the ability to nuke Russia always available is very much helping people
That was 20 years ago
WP article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...
While it is indeed 20 years ago, it should not be forgiven, if they continue to pull off shitty things like this lawsuit.
Ok but Sony is not a time-contiguous person. Half the people there 20 years ago are dead or retired by now.
Heard this one about microsoft on HN as well. How did that turn out?
Companies culture tend to degrade over time, rarely improve.
It's perfectly faire therefore to requiere overwhelming demonstration of good faith to invalidate such a massive bad behavior.
They Never did So they deserve the PR hit.
Which honestly they didn't take nearly as much as they should have.
Stop defending the billion dollars corps. They have proved over and over they are not our friends.
At best our interests are temporarily aligned.
People working for them are not innocent either. They know the company past, they signed their contracts, and stayed despite the culture.
There is such thing as free will, they have their responsability too.
The "a few bad apples" argument is old and tired now. And the "not all People have a choice" have been repeated a nauseam.
You're right. The people working there now have had plenty of time to learn about these egregious crimes and implement better policy so that they don't repeat the crimes of their predecessors... Right?
And it makes it our problem exactly how?
Young assholes replace old assholes, and on and on it goes.
Yes, they've been at it for that long.
Sony once was a great company. Excellent electronics, great service.
Then they became a media empire...
Japanese companies have always been heavy enforcers of IP, at least since the 1980s. For example, IIRC, they're one of the top filers of patents. Sanrio makes more money globally on their characters than Disney does. And Japan pushes for stronger international IP enforcement systems than even the US.
Japan is just quiet about it. Sony is no aberration.
So it proves that this behavior is not new.
It's my Roman Empire.
Would you consider 20 years "lately"?
Depends on how old you are :D
I wait for Netflix (and other streaming services) to be fined due to their users accessing content that shouldn't be available in a certain territory via a VPN.
isn't that precisely why they block most VPNs now? I worked for one, and all of our content licensing agreements stipulated that we had to block VPNs, and which vendors were allowed to give us the list of VPN addresses to block. (it's Digital Element, by the way.)
Of course, we weren't liable for failing to block any VPN address not on the list, but we also weren't allowed to not block an address that was on the list, which resulted in customer complaints.
And for contempt of court nonetheless. That's meant for when you blatantly don't do the thing the court told you to do, not when you did it but it didn't work how the court wanted.
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Seems they're following Cisco similar move 2y ago of exiting the market
> Canal+ has been busy getting web-blocking injunctions in France against sports piracy sites which stream sporting events for which it has the exclusive broadcast rights within the French market. It previously targeted DNS resolvers operated by Google, Cloudflare and Cisco.
> All three unsuccessfully opposed the web-blocking orders. Google and Cloudflare, therefore, have been forced to instigate them. However, Cisco just pulled its OpenDNS service out of the French market entirely.
(Per https://completemusicupdate.com/quad9-vows-to-fight-absurd-w..., https://completemusicupdate.com/opendns-pulls-plug-on-france...)
Rare Cisco W lol
Punishing the DNS resolver is weird. Would you punish the phone book company for having the number of a criminal listed?
Same reason copyright abusers threaten people that help remove the DRM from their Amazon-bought e-book so it can be read on their non-Amazon bought e-reader with a $250,000 fine and five years in prison for circumventing a digital lock using DMCA, because it's what the legal API allows them to achieve their end goal.
It's not about if it makes sense from a moral point of view.
Well you wouldn't steal a car, why steal a book you rented from the feudal lord? It's his intellectual property.
Huh? You're not stealing the book, just reading it on another device.
Edit: not to mention that even if you were to steal a book and not pay for it, copying is kind of a victimless crime, as no one lost anything.
The same method is used to block sites that don't respect the decisions the French people have made regarding the limits of the freedom of speech (no hate speech, no terrorist proselytism, no pedo, etc.).
Granted, that's the theory.
When the demands come from a company on the basis of copyright/intellectual property (that is, exclusive broadcasting rights), one can feel less comfortable about this affair; even thought the judgement mentions that the case is backed by the ARCOM, the french authority for broadcasting, which should instead IMHO deal with a couple or two of private TV channels that are obvious vectors of fake news.
But, this is the same copyright that can protect you when you publish programs, source code, images, etc., even when you use a free and open license; the licence has meaning thanks to the copyright.
You raise good, classic points when defending copyright. I would argue that your first examples are for the good of society, and the individual copyright protections are for the good of small creators.
Copyright enforced at this scale, for the profit of a corporation that streams their content off the infrastructure paid for by the public, does make one less comfortable.
And exclusive broadcasting rights… why is that a thing and conflated with copyright regulations? Why would the public regulator charge, say, 1M€ for the steaming right to something that will net 20M€ in advertising? That’s not really about copyright, I’d argue that it’s actually the job of the public channels to stream this content that takes place on stadiums built with public funds, streamed via a largely public TV system, etc.
I suppose the work against sports piracy is profitable enough to continue. Canal+ makes quite a lot of money, and their subscription in France is pricey compared to most other services.
They could, for starters, split the sports bundle and lower its price. Lots of people would probably pay a little bit to watch sports in 4K, instead of hunting for shady streaming websites that do 720p at best.
The most likely answer is that they didn't think about it or didn't understand or didn't care. But on the off chance they did, perhaps they thought the DNS provider would enforce the ruling worldwide.
It shows maliciousness (we can bully this smaller player for a win) and/or total incompetence (we don't even understand how internet works, but we'll issue rulings anyway).
It is actually worse than that. This amounts to punishing someone for looking up a phone number in a phone book that someone else published.
Because they can.
Attacking the people doing the actual bad things is hard, attacking a single unified organization is easy.
Sue the government for providing the road that criminals walk on!
You would if you could and it'd probably work.
I believe the position of the French government is that anyone in the path of a crime can be ordered to block the part of the crime that relates to them, without having any liability for the crime. So quad9 are not criminals for not blocking pirate sites, but still have to block specific sites when ordered.
Where does this line of reasoning end though? Shouldn’t the browser makers be blocking the sites too? What about curl? What about the OS and local DNS resolvers (unbound etc)? Maybe Ethernet and wifi cards should contain blocking logic? At some point you have to draw a line!
The way it worked is that the French government forced all major ISP to block some sites.
But using a third party DNS circumvents the block, so they went after them too.
Web browsers however (unless they include a VPN or 3rd party DNS) don't allow you to access sites blocked by your ISP. Same goes with ethernet and wifi cards.
I'm not saying I agree with it but that's the logic.
Right, but many browsers include a VPN. Tor Browser bypasses any such blocks. Many browsers also let you set your own DNS servers, so you could pick one that allows circumvention. Same at the OS level, and some OSes come with built in VPN clients. I guess I just don’t see how this stops here, unless legislatures step in to limit the scope. It’s an insane theory of liability that makes all steps in the chain liable for anything bad that end users might do.
I think there's at least one clear line between DNS providers and your examples. In your examples the enjoined parted is providing being a tool - a thing someone else uses - not a service where the enjoined party themselves does the thing.
It's one thing to say that you can't CNC machine guns for customers of your CNC-on-demand service, it's another to say you can't sell CNC machines because someone might use them to make guns.
Here the DNS service is being told they can't direct traffic to pirate sites, not that they can't give out tools (e.g. browsers or local DNS resolvers) that could be used by someone else to direct traffic to pirate sites (or could be used innocently). Your examples are all the latter - tools.
> It's one thing to say that you can't CNC machine guns for customers of your CNC-on-demand service, it's another to say you can't sell CNC machines because someone might use them to make guns.
And yet some places (California for instance) are attempting to do just this by requiring some kind of vaporware AI mediator to review files before the machine operates. Intermediary liability is out of control.
While I'm no fan of that law, it isn't a case of intermediary liability. It's a case of legislators (in a baffling move) deciding that selling 3d printers (and I guess CNC mills?) without vaporware attached should be directly illegal, much like most of the world has decided selling guns should be directly illegal, regardless of how they are used.
It's not illegal to sell these because it would be illegal for the end user to make a gun with them (it might or might not be - but is irrelevant) - it's just illegal to sell them because the legislator said it is.
It’s not the same legal conception of intermediary liability as with online services, but I’d argue that it’s an extension of the same idea. The manufacturer has somehow been conceived as a legally vulnerable intermediary between the user and the printed/milled product, and the legislature is attempting to force them to interfere in the manufacturing process, with the threat of liability as a club.
This same trend is happening all over, from banking to communications to manufacturing, where private industry is deputized by force to police consumer behavior, without consumers receiving any of the usual protections provided by the legal process. We’re effectively witnessing the construction of a privately mediated police state.
The line is drawn wherever a particular judge decides it's drawn, and each judge has a different ability to understand the broader implications of the line being drawn on any individual case.
Then it might be worthwhile for legislators to put some fences around this ASAP before copyright extremism completely disassembles modern computing.
My representative in the legislature is 90+ years old and never seems to understand what I’m saying.
Yes, I believe all of those would be legal for French courts to order. Practicality of enforcement is a different question.
Potentially all of the above as long as they are not tested in court.
unfortunately, I feel all these things are going to happen within a few decades.
If phone book publishing were regulated in a way that paid content on the internet is regulated, then absolutely yes. Not only that, people who mention the existence of phone books as means to obtain phone numbers, and people developing software capable of storing phone numbers, would be threatened and harassed too, as enablers of criminal activity. Copyright leeches have enough money to buy laws favorable to them. Which, also, gives them more money to buy even more laws favorable to them. It doesn't have to make sense for you because it's not designed to serve your interests.
Because they've already got the ISPs DNS resolvers blocking shit and when they see clients from those same ISPs still connecting they get hints on which public DNS resolvers people are using. You can make a safe bet French ISPs played an active part in pointing people to go after quad 9.
DNS resolvers getting sued should stop resolving domains/properties of the companies suing them too when they are forced to take these kinds of actions/steps off the back of a legal decision like this.
Keep resolving, but instead of resolving multiple A records, resolve just one. Fuck that one server in particular.
Delay updates by 1 week.
Answer randomly with the up-to-date or the out-of-date records.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work-to-rule
Thanks! That article is to the point in so many ways, these days.
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Then you're harming your own customers/users as much as anything. They probably don't want to do that.
Resolve to porn.
Randomly resolve some requests with 127.0.0.1
While I agree in spirit, this also makes the resolver away from being able to claim they're just a neutral service which just delivers existing records without being opinionated
Fair point. I'd say "We're neutral, unless you attack us, in which case we stop being neutral about you, in particular". I'd still use them if this were the policy.
Yeah, until your kid wants to use the PlayStation.
Playstations, like most network-ready devices, support custom DNS resolvers.
I can't help but imagine that the sort of user choosing to use a service like this in lieu of their ISP default is also likely to support this bit of pain.
...also, it's probably their own PlayStation, that their kid uses. Speaking from personal experience.
I mean if they're getting sued for failing to block proxy/vpn services they're being told to be opinionated and they can't be a neutral service. "You asked us to be opinionated about traffic, so we're doing that. Do you want us to go back to being neutral?"
That ship sailed. The court unequivocally determined that the resolver is not a neutral party, and their ruling explicitly demands that the resolver not be neutral.
Redirect porn websites domains to them.
That doesn't work if they use https.
unless someone could still use emudhra certs
That's risking yourself getting flashbanged on a plane for suspicion of human trafficking and sacrilegious creation of fictions and engaging in Antaractican nuclear programs.
This would hurt their users by making their DNS services less useful than competitors.
Obviously
The problem is that these types of companies are started by naive idealistic techs who only know how to play by the rules and can't figure out why people would misuse their products
They were very well described by the "rubber hose crypto" XKCD
(Not that I don't think a DNS company stays at the same level of complexity - both legal and technological - as a VPN company, but still)
Or, get this, anything that is useful can be misused, so maybe we should go after the people misusing things rather than locking all of society in a cage to pre-emptively prevent misuse.
"The problem is that these types of companies [kitchen knife manufacturers] are started by naive idealistic [craftsmen] who only know how to play by the rules and can't figure out why people would misuse their products [by stabbing people]."
What "types" of companies do you mean exactly?
Tomato sauce companies?
Or companies that sit between tricky legal and technical questions without having f-you money but especially lacking on f-you legal advice
(One thing about these founders is that they also have a hard time understanding context and follow-up questions)
> One thing about these founders is that they also have a hard time understanding context and follow-up questions
I feel like you're purposefully being sarcastic.
Hopefully the leadership of public resolvers isn't as a childish as you are.
That kind of action would penalize their users far more than it would hurt the evil corporation that slighted them. Not to mention they'd lose users. People who choose quad9 likely aren't too keen with DNS tempering.
But yeah, take that sony-or-whatever!
Isn't the intent of rejecting, or boycotting, a company supposed to cause a disruption in the first place? If the people boycotted a company into bankruptcy, because said company refused to change their behavior, would the people be in the wrong because it might hurt the users? No.
Well, the user of that company, not the users of the DNS service.
The person behind this legal warfare is the beIN Sports chairman, Nasser Al-Khelaifi. He is also president of Paris Saint-Germain and chairman of Qatar Sports Investment.
He is, obviously, not French.
His self-claimed annual income was about $15–25 million, and his personal wealth was about $70–100 million.
These are the best: At home he is obeying the dictator and in France he is fighting for his rights.
Quad9 is getting picked on because they do not have a large financial backing. Not because it makes any logical sense. France is shooting themselves in the foot.
France is not doing anything. This is BIG SOCCER suing the hell of everyone.
This is the French state kowtowing to BIG SOCCER.
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Maybe i missed it in the post, but how are they going to implement it? They mentioned geoIP is insufficient for complying with the block, so if they dont have a way to block only these domains for users in France, how will they block all requests for users in France?
To be clear I dont think they should comply with the block, but i didn't grasp how they're going to block everything if they dont have a way to only block some things.
They're removing all presence they have in France, their servers mostly.
They want to be out of reach of French courts basically.
Do you think they will geoblock in addition to physically leaving?
Probably. They will want to do everything possible to be able to prove that they took all measures at their disposal to stop serving the French market on top of taking all measures to have their business operations be outside of French jurisdiction.
Then Sony (or whoever) will simply use a VPN to bypass the block...
Though I guess if they stop operating in France entirely, there will simply be nothing left to sue, even if the company still exists elsewhere.
Unfortunately France is also a Lugano signatory, so we'll have to eventually prevail in France as well as Germany, and that will be a long and expensive project.
beIN, not Sony.
beIN also sued the VPNs
Reply in separate thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50200111
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You stop serving anything for french ips. Its like you dont exist.
"french ips" don’t mean anything as the post said; see their case in Germany.
no, its different, in german case they served germany as a whole but for queries that where supposed to be blocked in germany they did not serve those to germans.
so you operated in germany and your "tricky" way to follow the regulations did not work. if you dont resolve to german customers at all, like you dont exist then nobody can theoretically say you are operating in german. so that is the difference for me.
The post said they eventually won that case, though
...That's just geoIP blocking, which he covered in his comment.
no its not, one is you dont resolve anything for the country and therefore dont operate in it, the other is you operate in the country and the block you implemented does not work for my customer. similar how a lot of the US pages blocked europeans from accessing because they did not want to follow the cookie laws.
> one is you dont resolve anything for the country
And the only way to do that is via GeoIP blocking…
I mentioned not too long ago that Mullvad was handing its resolver users over to Quad9. Sadly, I didn’t realize how accurate my concerns would be. Quad9 is a good operator, they actually fought Sony in a German court instead of quietly complying. Yet, they were still ordered to block the content. That’s the core problem. A blocking order is only as damaging as the resolver it impacts. Every time an operator shuts down and redirects its users to Quad9, it pools more users into one place. This makes the next blocking order even more valuable and effective for whoever files it. And now we're seeing Quad9 backing out of a market.
> Yet, they were still ordered to block the content.
At first yes, but ultimately the blocking order was undone by a higher German court in December 2023.
HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49568579
Reminds me of Cloudflare going down every time there was a football game in Spain as the ISPs blocked all the "bad" ips, which ironically also served government websites.
It’s still happening every time there is football, at least they now seem to lift the block when the games end, when this started sometimes they took 12 hours after the game ended.
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I don't see the relation and want to laugh with you guys. ISPs blocked cloudflare during football matches? Or the government websites directly? why?
Spain's government is made up of spineless dinosaurs. So the official soccer diffusion corps bought the courts and sued all the ISPs to force them to block all the soccer piracy sites during a match. Those sometimes ended up being hosted on cloudflare's IPs. Thus, a good portion of cloudflare goes down for the spanish clients when there's a game on.
Did that work? Hell no, piracy sites just moved elsewhere. But big soccer is slowly ruining the internet and all the EU governments are letting it happen
One of the things I find most amusing is that Movistar is both one of the main football diffusion corp, and one of main national ISPs. So Movistar sued itself so that it can block the parts of the internet that they don't like
Eventually the soccer corpos will end up tasking an AGI with solving soccer stream piracy and it will hopefully destroy all stadiums and free us from this bullshit.
I wonder what pressure Qatar put on France to force this through?
BeIn is owned by the Qatari state, who just so happen to own Paris St Germain.
Their owners Yousef Al-Obaidly and Nasser Al-Khelaifi (for both the network and the club) are outspoken about piracy and 'the damage it causes football and creative industries'.
They've also been in and out of court a fair bit on corruption charges, and seems they've paid their way out of trouble through fines. Seems just last month a new case opened:
https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20260920-psg-president...
Nation state meddling, dodgy characters, corruption and greed is more of a threat to football than a DNS resolver, tbh.
Sam Ellis of SearchParty just did a video on UAE on the same premise: they own ManCity F.C. and have considerable influence over the UK government. The current UK prime minister also happens to be the former mayor of Manchester.
video link: https://youtu.be/fUrNOVjWUVM?si=koBbVj67CxfMhncC (skip ahead to the second half of the video).
Whenever people talk about why you should host in the EU, this is just the most recent example for why should shouldn't.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/05/judge-rules-ever...
US ISP ignore blocking orders and that was never challenged.
Host in Switzerland, that's where Quad9 operates from.
Switzerland is not in the EU, thankfully. And it seems to be one of the few places left in Europe where privacy is taken somewhat seriously.
Indeed. If it were just a question of Swiss law, we'd be in excellent shape. The problem is that France and Switzerland are both signatories to the Lugano Convention, while the US is not. As long as the Quad9 Foundation has to have a legal domicile somewhere, there will always be some lever that can be used against it. Switzerland was the best place, but does not offer perfect protection.
Switzerland has its own DNS blocklist that all ISPs obey. [1]
Quad9 doesn't obey it but I never understood how they can get away with that legally. I'd be interested in an explanation if someone knows more!
1. https://www.gespa.ch/en/fighting-illegal-gambling/access-blo...
Quad9 is not a telecommunications service provider as defined by Swiss law, which is where that application becomes enforced. Details of this (and many other things) can be found on the "Compliance and Applicable Law" section of the website. https://quad9.net/privacy/compliance-and-applicable-law/
Sounds like they get away with it legally because the law applies to ISPs and they’re not an ISP.
From your link:
> Internet service providers in Switzerland are obliged to take measures to prevent access to these domains (DNS blocking).
I suppose that's it.
It still feels a little strange that that loophole is allowed: everyone who has a Swiss ISP could switch to Quad9 and be strictly better off. But if everyone does that, then the DNS ban is completely ineffectual. Maybe I should let sleeping dogs lie.
I have a feeling the fact that people have to opt in to using Quad9 does a lot to help them in this case vs an ISP where all of their users are using the ISP’s DNS by default. But yeah it does seem like a “letter of the law vs spirit of the law thing”.
I opened the blocklist expecting some juicy Linux ISO sites and... it's all betting sites. I'm not even mad.
That's because the Swiss DNS blocking originated in an anti-unregulated-gambling law. Basically all unregulated gambling websites are blocked. There shouldn't be any other sites on that list.
I'm a little mad because it's the principle of the thing.
In practice the only site I occasionally want to check that's blocked is Polymarket. I don't trade on there myself, but I find it useful to check the odds of certain events.
I don't personally care about betting sites but it's the legal precedent and principle that the government can add anything to such a list and make obligatory.
"First they came for the shady weird-ass online gambling sites...."
Also, hosting location is kind of a deception for real ways to protect data, like E2EE, which work no matter the country.
> The French courts have fundamentally misunderstood the working of the internet and the role of the domain name system
I think thus is the real problem. And you can easily replace France with Germany or US here.
The US doesn't compel ISPs to block websites. The FBI will occasionally seize a domain after a court order, but that's it.
This is a pretty uniquely EU thing.
It hasn't passed yet, but legislators are very hard at work trying to "catch up". [1][2]
And there are other countries outside the US and Europe, it's not just a "EU" thing. (I wanted to write North America first, but even Canada does blocking, in some cases even without court orders [3])
[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/04/congress-reviving-site... [2] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/10/congress-has-another-s... [3] https://piracymonitor.org/canada-evolving-piracy-threats-pro...
What was this all about?
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/05/judge-rules-ever...
That was reversed instantly because the order was illegal.
Judges try things all the time that end up getting struck down and reversed because they're illegal.
https://torrentfreak.com/court-orders-for-all-us-isps-to-blo...
> The FBI will occasionally seize a domain after a court order
Aren't that is about the same?
It’s a worldwide problem
At least in the US, it’s not a matter of "understanding". It’s a matter of "you are paid to misunderstand".
The law is vast and subject to various levels of interpretation. If there’s anything I have learned is that the court is just a rich persons weapon to "peacefully" resolve problems. In this modern capitalistic, greedy shithole we have dug ourselves into. Money and resources talks.
Sports broadcasters truly are the bane of society. May they get DDoS'd during important matches until they're bankrupt.
Sports is the only thing left of value in broadcasting. I can totally understand why they're gonna fight tooth and nail to protect it.
They still get paid when people watch pirated streams. All those billboards against the pitch and on every uniform are still getting their viewership.
It would be interesting if one of these advertisers one day actually sues the broadcasters for going after pirated streams, and diminishing the value of their ad placements as a result. I would think it is technically damages. One just has to quantify it a little.
If they include pirates in viewership data, they might have a valid claim.
They like to claim millions to billions in lost revenue every time they send a takedown request, so clearly they must have a pretty good idea how many pirates are watching.
I am curious if a large number of people stood up their own DoH/DoT servers:
- Would France go after each one, even if they were not operating servers physically in France? It only takes a few minutes to configure Unbound+LetsEncrypt to accept DoH+DoT internet traffic. A few minutes longer to compile support for DoQ.
- Could they realistically expect individual operators of small DoH/DoT/DoQ open servers to block domains at their behest?
DNS needs a way to say “unavailable for legal reasons” so your system just picks a different resolver or resolves recursively.
DNS needs a way to say “unavailable for legal reasons” so your system just picks a different resolver or resolves recursively.
As far as I know there is no way to reliably:
- let the user see this error. The client would need to surface the DNS EDE error. Stub resolvers and browsers overwhelmingly ignore EDE.
- geo-fence the client. Unbound does not have native Geo support and will not let one set custom per-zone EDE text even if that was a thing AFAIK.
This might be possible by putting dnsdist in front of Unbound with client IP rules + Lua + MaxMind but there again the client won't know what to do with this.
- custom views only trigger off client IP's and only control resolution views, not error messages.
I think it's probably best that if people wish to run their own DNS instances, they do not geo-block anything. France has no jurisdiction in other countries and can't really do anything to "Alice and Bob's Public DNS". It's up to the people in France to find a way to tunnel their traffic out of their country to bypass any border filters should that ever become a thing. I am still waiting for a lawyer to challenge my thinking on this part.
I don’t want the user to see the error, I just want the browser/the operating system’s resolver to not be a stub resolver, and actually ask the authoritative servers when something like this fails on a non-authoritative response.
Public DNS like Quad9 should be a cache (because recursing is pretty slow) and, at most, a way to find the IPs of the root name servers.
Courts asking non-authoritative resolvers not to resolve a name should have no effect on clients successfully resolving that name, such that they wouldn’t even have a reason to go after Quad9 or Alice and Bob, and would have to go after the TLD registry (likely in a different jurisdiction).
The only thing I know of that operates somewhat like you are asking is Unbound itself, when it is not the server doing the root/tld lookups. One can configure Unbound with a series of Upstream DoT servers and it can retry each of them and cache which ones answered, answered fastest, so if the upstream just refused to answer that would cause it to move to another upstream resolver and eventually retry the one that refused but once it gets another refusal it would avoid that one again for some time. Clunky but it would sortof work.
Beyond that I think you are asking for behavioral and RFC changes to everyone's workstations, cell phones, tablets, TV's, and DNS resolvers.
Yes, I use Unbound :)
It’s configured exactly like I mentioned: it tries a couple of resolvers, and if they all fail, tries authoritative servers starting from the root. That last part, missing from your suggested configuration, is the key: it’s what ensures courts have to actually go after the parties responsible for the domain, and not just random DNS resolvers.
> Beyond that I think you are asking for behavioral and RFC changes to everyone's workstations, cell phones, tablets, TV's, and DNS resolvers.
We did it once for DoH/DoT, we could do it again.
If you want to support Quad9 in their dealing with this, you can donate to the cause here: https://quad9.net/donate/
Quad9 is a Swiss-based not-for-profit organization whose operational budget comes entirely from sponsorships and donations.
Time to boycott Sony, they deserve no money from anyone, and I meant anyone.
They're just f*ing with people without getting anyone good stuff.
Suppose they're doing this for copyright, it's not like the pirates would be stopped by a mere DNS block rule set anyway.
> Time to boycott Sony, they deserve no money from anyone, and I meant anyone.
Because when they installed rootkits on user's machines wasn't that time?
Because when they removed content users purchased from their machines wasn't that time?
Because when they spy on what users watch on their TVs in the privacy of their home wasn't that time?
Sony is like a tree. The best time to boycott Sony was decades ago. The second best time is today.
Sony copyright-striking pianists performing public domain music and uploading their own performances on YouTube wasn't that time?
Why are so many comments talking about Sony? The case was brought by beIN Sports.
Because Sony was mentioned once in the article in reference to a different earlier case and people seem to have stopped reading there to come here and immediately complain about Sony.
Yes, but in this case the plaintiff is beIN SPORTS France.
Read the article, it’s not Sony it’s Bein the ones who have the soccer broadcast rights.
How have our democracies not abolished copyright law yet? These laws only serve the 1%. I have no idea why we still put up with them.
FOSS depends on copyright laws. Oldest versions of Linux and UNIX are more than 20 years old, so early versions of both would be hypothetically now in public domain in the absence of Disney-lobbied maximalist versions of copyright laws, or in the total absence of one.
And this would be a problem how? If copyright expired after 20 years and an evil commercial company privately forked the public domain Linux kernel 2.6.18, what would we lose?
> what would we lose?
Who is "we"? Going back to the origin of Free Software to proprietary printer drivers causing hardware to be unfixable by its users and otherwise become ewaste. The loss is users are nearly beholden to the manufacturer to customize or maintain their own devices. Android phones, most ereaders, can have long lives when obsolete, but this is only because Linux is Free Software; with proprietary kernels they are entirely ewaste instead of a small fraction having continuing life. OTOH most do become ewaste. OAH this Free Software allows competitors to start from almost the same place and prevent total monopolies, hence why Apple makes most of the profit and I can buy a $150 phone instead of what appears to be $799 minimum from Apple.
But, I think 20 year-old software is probably mostly safe from the above effects and I'm not sure GP was arguing otherwise, just against total absence of copyright.
No it doesn't. Most projects are MIT or some other permissive liscense.
> Most projects are MIT or some other permissive liscense.
Exactly, most projects have a license of some kind, they aren't "free-for-all-do-whatever."
MIT requires attribution. Forcing enforcement of this cannot be done without copyright law. You can argue that attribution is stupid and nobody deserves credit for their work (which might be increasingly true in a post-LLM world), but you can't speak on behalf of all projects that chose those license and say "it's what they want!"
I think projects should be able to license their work how ever they want within reason, which GPL and MIT clearly are. At the same time, I don't see what material difference this makes. The spirit of GPL doesn't seem maintained, cause at this point it's very clearly being used for profit in proprietary systems that stay compliant by not technically distributing any GPL'd code. LLMs appear to legally wash away GPL for now, still grey area though. And GPL is straight up violated all the time, especially in countries that don't care.
MIT is free-for-all-to-do-whatever. You can do literally anything, except remove a short text notice that has zero legal or practical value. You can even hide the text notice very deeply, so that it's effectively been removed. You can fork and stop releasing source code, you can use it for AI training, you can add DRM to the product and make it illegal to remove.
Aside what was already said: a lot of people do genuinely think GPL is a stupid idea that needs to go and Linux could have been licensed under MIT or even CC0; however, I think one should be cognizant of the fact that virtually no mass produced product other than Macs and PS4/PS5 use BSD and the rest uses Linux, often begrudgingly, but benefiting tremendously from both free-beer and forced-libre nature of it.
FOSS only "depends" on copyright laws in the sense that it is a hack to get around the existence of them (and now their children, anti-circumvention laws.)
No, it is a hack that uses copyright to force establishing a set of freedoms. Without copyright FLOSS cannot exist, by definition.
There was a recent attempt to substantially reform copyright in the EU - it was called "Stop Killing Games". It gathered over one million signatures, forcing the EU parliament to consider it. Their response was "this would require us to change copyright law, and we can't do that, sorry."
The USA strong-arms copyright law into every single trade deal. I think it was Chile who tried to strike DMCA 1201 out of some trade deal with the US about food staples, but were swiftly informed by the US that if they didn't make DMCA 1201 into Chilean domestic law, the US would completely cut off their trade. This stuff is serious business for the US and no other country is in the geopolitical position right now to question it.
Fortunately since the US is mid-collapse that last point may change soon.
https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/28/disenshittification-natio...
How do you feel about OpenAI training on all of the books in the world.
Fine, as long as they aren't the only ones who get to do it. Having the world's knowledge at everyone's fingertips is a goal I think we should aim for.
This. Some people here are now acting as if AI is a bad thing. People need to realize that human knowledge is so vast now that such tools (which effectively perform data compression and interpolation) are absolutely necessary. I don't feel bad for copyright holders at all because copyright shouldn't probably exist at all.
> Some people here are now acting as if AI is a bad thing.
It is. But that is also not particularly relevant to the point. As long as the AI companies operate under the same rules as everyone else, I don't really care. If they can use copyrighted works for training, we should all be able to use those works. Conversely if we can't use something due to copyright, neither should the AI companies be able to.
Is it still a worthy goal if it the knowledge includes the rantings of every lunatic on X or Reddit? If it hallucinates facts and even citations in its non-deterministic reconstruction of the knowledge it ingested?
The irony with these AI corpos is that they're okay with scraping all of human creative endeavours yet they get annoyed at others doing distillation on their models.
Compensating authors would be a moral thing to do, but morals aren't really a thing for corpos, so whatever. However the fact that they then turn around and get annoyed at other actors for scraping their stuff is very hilarious and shows how much they care about the social contract :)
It makes me feel like the rules are "for thee, not for me." Like it proves that the rich can just do whatever they want.
Is there some reason I should have a problem with it?
> How have our democracies not abolished copyright law yet? These laws only serve the 1%.
I don't think that claim is true, personally. But if we grant it for the sake of argument, it should be completely unsurprising that copyright hasn't been abolished. Governments primarily serve the powerful and wealthy, not the common man.
because people have been successfully propagandised into believing it to be necessary or good. of course they argue for it without any evidence.
> How have our democracies not abolished copyright law yet? These laws only serve the 1%
Yeah, fuck those billionaire authors and artists in coffee shops not wanting people to rip off the books and art they create without compensation.
I find it extra funny that you think copyright protect small time authors and artists, when we have _very clear_ examples of it not protecting them for shit, even before the entire IA saga. Remember the Disney/Star Wars saga where they refused to pay the Star Wars author for the books they were selling?
https://archive.bookstr.com/article/royalty-wars-over-star-w...
Copyright doesn't protect small-time authors - because small-time authors don't have the means to harness the legal system to their advantage the way that big corpos that take advantage of them do.
I don’t necessarily disagree, but by that same logic we shouldn’t have any civil laws because regular people can’t afford to hire lawyers to sue people.
But still, if someone posts a copy of your book or painting online, you can pretty cheaply file a DMCA request that it be taken down, and most large players will comply. If you throw out copyright law altogether, you get rid of that too.
> But still, if someone posts a copy of your book or painting online, you can pretty cheaply file a DMCA request that it be taken down, and most large players will comply. If you throw out copyright law altogether, you get rid of that too.
Good, get rid of copyright law! It has only lead to pure rent seeking.
Authors and artists have no basis for payment in the absence of copyright laws. Like, anything they make would be literally free to steal. Literally... 1700s? Late 1600s?
What would be controversial is the current form of copyright that had been extended and expanded multiple times even during lifetime of many of us alive, often said semi-jokingly said to have been forced by Disney to keep Mickey Mouse covered under it until it had finally expired 70 years after the first publication and long after the death of its creator.
Copyright was established for the benefit of publishers, not authors. In the 1600s publishers were licensed, as part of a censorship system; the point was to only give licenses to publishers who followed the censorship rules. It was quite profitable for the publishers because they faced far less competition than they otherwise would.
The censorship system was abolished but the publishers wanted to keep the licensing system, so they came up with a new idea: licensed monopolies to publish specific books.
Exactly right. Karl Fogel's excellent write-up recaps the history: https://questioncopyright.org/promise/index.html
Copyright laws don't benefit independent artists. They only work for you if you can afford a litigation team.
AI companies already ripped those things off.
Copyright is a sham. It does not protect the small guy, only the rich corporations.
I am back to piracy, now on a moral imperative. I can pay for stuff, but I think the morally superior thing to do is to pirate away.
The 1% just copied all available data without consequence. Yet, Quad9 gets sued and loses.
While your point is valid enough -- although it could have been made without this kind of snarky and sarcastic snide -- it seems clear that global copyright legislation is a lot more beneficial to the wealthy capital owners rather than the artists that you were alluding towards. Now, this is no insurmountable obstacle at least in theory. The laws could be modified in a way that lets small artists etc focus on following their passions without starving, without allowing capital to do what is essentially the intellectual equivalent of enclosure of the Commons.
Of course, one thing needed for this is the political will as well as getting rid of the idea of defending exploitation by the billionaire class by conflating their needs with the needs of starving artists because one can technically argue that copyright helps both, despite everyone knowing that one party is benefiting a lot more from it than the other.
All copyright does is give you standing to sue if somebody reproduces your work, in whole or in part. To sue "successfully," you need more financial resources than the copier.
The small artist copyright is a red herring. I think the number of small artists who make money from their work is frightfully small. For example, my partner makes some rather nice jewelry that is different from anything out there. We're doing the craft fair circuit to see if she can sell any and if it's worth continuing to make them.
She sells a relatively small number of pieces at each fair. Occasionally it's even enough to cover expenses.
Would copyright help her? No, because we wouldn't have the money to sue. Small copyright violations might be worth a cease and desist. Large copyright violations would have more money than us for the lawsuit. We would need that Goldilocks-sized violation. They are small enough to be responsive to the threat of a lawsuit but big enough that they have enough money that would be worthwhile suing them, i.e. enough to pay our lawyer.
> All copyright does is give you standing to sue if somebody reproduces your work, in whole or in part. To sue "successfully," you need more financial resources than the copier.
That is the fault of the way the legal system works, not anything to do with copyright law. It is true that we need a system in which you can't just get away with breaking the law if you have deeper pockets than your victim, but that will be true whether or not we have laws protecting copyright.
The question I have is what is copyright for? As far as I can tell, it is used for censorship, and rent extraction.
I’ll bite. I have written a recursive DNS resolver. It’s buggy, mind you, it doesn’t handle improperly configured domains bug-for-bug the way BIND9 does, it doesn’t support IPv6 for resolving records (it can still resolve AAAA records, mind you), but it’s about 80 kilobytes in size, runs nicely on 32-bit systems, and does full DNS resolution starting from the root servers.
Does the fact I have written this resolver make me liable should it not block the domains they listed which may contain copyright infringing content? Am I now required to add these domains, and make them part of a mandatory block list? Will I still be held liable if people can still access these allegedly copyright infringing domains by modifying the source to my program?
Keep in mind that when Quad9 had a similar lawsuit in Germany, they blocked queries from German IPs, but the idiots said Quad9 was still liable because people could use VPNs in Germany to bypass their geoIP blocking.
Quad9 being forced to block these domains will achieve nothing. Will these copyright enforcers now go after Google for 8.8.8.8? Cloudflare for 1.1.1.1? Level3 for 4.2.2.1? Will they go after ISC for BIND? NLnet Labs for Unbound? CZ.NIC for KnotDNS? Me for MaraDNS? Even if they enjoin me from making a recursive resolver which can resolve these domains, that won’t stop anyone and everyone from forking my code (see also: Twitter trying to take down Nitter).
> Does the fact I have written this resolver make me liable should it not block the domains they listed which may contain copyright infringing content?
I use unbound and have a similar question. Shouldn't we just encourage everyone to run their own resolvers (it's turnkey for the most part!)? Will Sony/beIn start going after the root servers and enforce a global block?
>Will these copyright enforcers now go after Google for 8.8.8.8? Cloudflare for 1.1.1.1?
they already have.
Have you received a court order from France addressed to your person?
Crazy. A company that actually exits the market they threatened to leave. Meta and Twitter should take note.
Only companies that are good for the world do this and make the world worse by doing it
Understandable choice. Let French users work around these controls in other ways rather than have authorities force you to abandon who you are and what you believe in.
I share the opinion that DNS is a purely technical system part of running the Internet. That DNS is attacked is only out of convenience rather than solving whatever actual problems the actors in question are facing.
In case of copyright infringement claims as in this article, the way to solve this is to deal with the criminals, not terrorize the road network that gets you to them or burn phone books just because it's "easiest".
Why is it that this so often is excused on the Internet? My theory is that it's because the inner workings of Internet is opaque to the common user; a takedown notice via a DNS redirect will look to an end user as if law enforcement got to the criminals themselves, so they get away with it. Even if they didn't because they did a too poor work, were too lazy or didn't want to spend the resources. But these factors shouldn't result in attacking others' valid business models for it and instead result in either accepting your situation or changing your situation.
France also regulates encryption in applications. Some percentage of apps are not available in France, because apps don't comply with the rules imposed by bureaucrats or more often developers find procedures cumbersome or unfamiliar
Macron's party has also been trying to require encryption backdoors for years, and are major supporters of Chat Control.
Can you tell more? Which apps?
Syncthing apps for example. Search for example comments of Synctrain app developer in syncthing forum.
https://github.com/pixelspark/sushitrain/discussions/128
https://cryptomator.org/blog/2016/06/16/indepth-french-app-s...
Genuinely baffled by the incompetence (or ill-intent, corruption?) demonstrated by our courts, did they do it at behest of Qatar ? Another stain on our country's reputation but they don't care.
> demonstrated by our courts, did they do it at behest of Qatar
Honestly, this is a possibility.
beIN, like any Qatar based company, is majority owned by the state. Qatar is infamously rich in oil with the state able to subsidize luxury lifestyles for citizens it deems worthy.
France needs oil, like any other country. So if a journalist could follow the money. Could probably find where the pressure was applied within the government.
The rich using archaic copyright laws to get their way has been modus operandi for quite awhile. Seen this applied both in USA and abroad.
So it is no secret that Dodi Fayed and his family were prominent Egyptians, but I recently discovered that a memorial to Dodi and Princess Diana, Innocent Victims is displayed prominently in a Harrods department store. Harrods itself is owned by the Qatari sovereign wealth fund; in other words, Qatar owns the Harrods chain of department stores.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrods
And by contrast, Selfridges (among other chains) is owned jointly by a Thai conglomerate and the Saudi Arabian sovereign wealth fund.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selfridges_Group
Europe needs to strengthen its free speech protections. It turns out, even though the US founders had no idea what DNS was, they still created the right framework to protect it.
As long as you don’t say Artificial Intelligence instead of Super Intelligence, you’re all good.
US just pushes the enforcement mechanisms to private companies not so hamstrung by legalese. E.g. try and torrent all you want. After all, all you are really doing observably is connecting to various IPs, essentially no different than browsing websites. But you might get a letter in the mail not from the government, but from the ISP threatening legal action against you, solely because their systems saw your IP connected to another.
These days you can land in jail for simply bad mouthing the government. US needs to strengthen its adherence to their constitutions. Words on paper are useless if they aren't followed.
>Europe needs to strengthen its free speech protections
Europe does not have free speech in the first place.
Sadly no-one responsible from this situation will care.
French authorities and network operator will in fact prefer that you don't have alternative than using the dns servers that they are providing.
So it sucks that Quad9 is closing their resolver to french IPs. If they stand by their values, they should continue to accept the requests, just leave all office and business ties with France.
Similar to ofcom things against 4chan.
We've all seen this sort of thing many times before, but I still don't understand how it works.
I transmit a radio signal in Dover that can be picked up by radios in Calais, the message it carries happens to be illegal in France ("Brittany is still part of the UK", say). Could I be taken to court in France? I'm guessing no.
> The plaintiff (Sony Music Entertainment GmbH) then used a VPN to access the blocked content from Germany in circumvention of the geoIP blocking. The court agreed with Sony in their assertions of noncompliance, and we were fined for contempt of court.
I knew courts were dumb, but didn't think they were this dumb.
"The neighbour's dog bit me, so they put up a fence. I climbed over it and got bitten again. The fence doesn't count."
Quad9 is illegal in France as long as it exists anywhere in the world. French courts can issue judgements ruling Quad9 illegal, as long as it exists anywhere in the world.
I'm super confused as to what it means to withdraw for French users if geoIP doesn't work.
So remove 9.9.9.9 BGP announcements? Unless France wants to build a great firewall... a Ligne Maginot du DNS, I don't see how this is enforceable. The internet is not Minitel...
Welp, I've been using quad9 and I'm French, does anyone have an alternative I can switch to?
I recommend Norway, they have lovely fjords.
This comment made my day, beautiful.
You keep using it. They're not going to block your IP but response times may drop since they won't have any servers in France.
Updating my reply, the CTO said they'll likely do GeoIP blocking even though it's not effective.
DNSCrypt or RethinkDNS (the resolver, not the app, although the app is awesome as well)
I would probably use one of the suggestions built in Firefox (Cloudflare, NextDNS) or Chrome (Cloudflare, Google, DNS4EU, OpenDNS, CleanBrowsing).
Why does it matter that it’s a recursive resolver? They mention this a lot but it seems like the decision would just as much apply to a non-recursive resolver.
I didn’t attempt find the ruling; perhaps the lawsuit was written in an odd way.
It is difficult to envision a "non-recursive DNS resolver" in public service. Recursion is the usual and customary way that DNS names are resolved by the leaf servers, because they are not authoritative for much of anything.
The most common configuration for non-recursive DNS servers is with forwarders. The DNS server accepts queries and simply forwards all of them upstream to another resolver, which... makes its own recursive queries.
It is simply not feasible to avoid having recursive resolvers in the chain of lookups. That's how things work with DNS.
We used to just leave that responsibility to the querying host’s own resolver. I don’t fetishize the end-to-end principle (though I come close) so I suppose a recursive resolver service could be a sort of optimization (plenty of ppl look up, say, gmail.google.com so why not cache it).
In any case, if all resolvers these days are recursive why mention it?
I know this is far from the most important question on the topic of this thread!
> We used to just leave that responsibility to the querying host’s own resolver.
When? I didn't get online until the 90s, but resolv.conf delegating recursion to some other node was the way of the world back then. And still is. Some people do run a recursive resolver locally, but it's not so common afaik.
> In any case, if all resolvers these days are recursive why mention it?
Quad9 is named as a recursive resolver in contrast to being an authoritative server. Quad9 and the server I run for my domain are both DNS servers, both provide name resolution, but one is recursive and the other isn't. Used to be, you might run one server for both jobs, but that fell out of fashion for good reasons.
Back then most computing was done in office, lab, university settings. Running recursive resolvers for the local network was part of the standard IT setup.
While I agree it was common, running a centralized recursive resolver for the local network is not the same as "leave that responsibility to the querying host’s own resolver"
Sure, but it goes with a more centralized approach to systems management in general. The attitude was often that all of the computers were one thing.
You'd have to go back to the 1980s I think, when systems were still using /etc/hosts and if the host you wanted to talk to wasn't listed there you'd have to use its IP address directly.
IIRC there were some trusted lists of "well known" hosts that were passed around between administrators. DNS was invented because that obviously became impractical quickly as the internet grew.
there's no such thing as a non-recursive resolver or a recursive non-resolver - these words come as a pair
The internet is a distributed system, they said.
It is - you can have your own DNS resolver. If you use a central one instead, you're centralising it.
Yeah how does that stop Chrome bypassing my dns and talking to their dns servers?
I agree. I wonder if there's an easy-to-use DNS resolver one can install everywhere. Any recommendations for win/mac?
Noob question: Isn't there like a panel of existing case law or amicus-briefs that would speak to the logical and historical stupidity of arguments by the plaintiffs? I mean this is like blaming airbus for hijackings.
> We could add these names to our global malicious domain blocking database, which is what we use to provide internet users with malware and phishing protection. This is a single, monolithic set of names applied to all users of our protective services (9.9.9.9 & secondaries) globally but not to our nonprotective services (9.9.9.10 & secondaries)
I see how that could work against a service claiming to give users the DNS lookups they expect
As a swiss company they have to obey swiss laws. So in that respect swiss laws are enforced onto all users of Quad9.
International companies always have to make a decision: Follow the local rules or leave the market. Unfortunately most companies follow local rules, even if that means obeying the rules of a dictatorship, because money doesn‘t stink. Exceptions are very rare.
>The French courts have fundamentally misunderstood the working of the internet
Sums it up. Applicable basically for any court anywhere.
It would have been funny if you forked and made a quad9-fr which blocked this stuff for FR and let people opt in to that. Obviously not scaleable to every jurisdiction on Earth, but maybe viable for the first ~20 stupid jurisdictions.
Love to see some Lavabit action in response to government overreach. (Not that it's fun to see a provider have to shut down operations in an area, but more that I prefer to see them sticking to their principles rather than showing the government that this behavior is tolerated.)
Seems unlikely to resolve their legal issues, as the French lawyers will use the same tactic as the German ones, using a VPN to access the services from France to justify continuing their lawsuits. Perhaps they should consider relocating out of Europe.
Why is everybody (in the government) in the EU so illiterate? Do they not understand that their economies are dead and football streaming isn't going to save them.
It’s a judge. Nothing to do with the government or the EU. You have stupid tech illiterate judgements in the US all the time
Judges are part of the government
Isn't this a case for the ISPs? Shouldn't they either block access to Quad9 or the servers in question? And what about 8.8.8.8 and others?
I'm confused
Well, that’s unfortunate. On the other it’s the best advertising for Quad9 I could have imagined. After reading the article I’m sold on their services
Thinking about that year when Google pulled out of China
The great wall of Orleans... Living abroad, I've been embarrassed by my french passport for a number of years. Our reputation sucks, for a reason.
how do they not see the self-inconsistency?
they "cannot" blacklist the domains on geoIP basis, yet the "can" withdraw from France? via what method? Removing the French servers is clearly insufficient, so why can they deny France entirely via geoIP, but not block the domains just via geoIP?
they do claim a value-based reason (good on them for it), but they are very very insistent about the "impossibility" anyway. can't have it both ways.
"There are more important reasons geoIP blocking will not work."
Okay, now waiting to see how they will technically block those french users from the 24th nov onward...
They don't have to. Despite Europe's best efforts, national laws are not enforceable outside the borders without lots of cooperation, and tech regulation is not an area where people are collaborating.
Why stopping serving french IPs though? Remove your legal presence in France, sure. But block IP ranges from reaching your servers.. just why?
French law does not care if the servers are in France or anywhere else - just that the users are in France. This sounds unexpected, but that is the law. There is a treaty called the "Lugano Convention" that allows civil lawsuits to be extended across borders of the member nations in events like this - France and Switzerland (where Quad9 is based) are signatories on that convention, so effectively French law can apply in Switzerland on matters involving internet activity. It is much more nuanced than that, so forgive this short summary, but removing servers from France is not sufficient.
I believe that French law does not extend past France's borders, but that is common sense speaking in me. I know that EU law is not generally based on common sense.
Most likely, so they have legal standing to say "We don't operate in your country or serve your citizens, your laws do not apply". Also, punishment for a stupid ruling.
> We don't operate in your country
Yes, by leaving french jurisdiction.
> or serve your citizens
This is not necessary. At all.
The Internet is International And That’s A Problem For Companies, exhibit 97,000…
Sorry Quad9. I love you. I am sad France does not understand you the way I always have.
Stay Swiss, my friend.
the lawyers are ruining the internet
Similar misunderstandings have led to Cloudflare blockages during soccer matches in Spain.
Sony being sleazy again. You start to wonder why they pick on the wrong people.
What's with all the Sony comments? This has nothing to do with Sony.
>The plaintiff (Sony Music Entertainment GmbH) then used a VPN to access the blocked content from Germany in circumvention of the geoIP blocking. The court agreed with Sony in their assertions of noncompliance, and we were fined for contempt of court.
>We eventually won that case against Sony, but it took several years, six figures of cost to Quad9, and massive wasted time – all of which set us back in our ability to deliver services and is a resource debt we are still paying for today
Yeah, that was mentioned as an anecdote on why they believe geo-blocking wouldn't be sufficient, and it happened 5 years ago, in Germany. It's completely irrelevant and Sony has nothing to do with what's happening here. The actual post is about a current lawsuit, in France, brought by a sports-streaming service called beIN.
You may defend your employer but it is bad taste to do so using sock puppet accounts.
That's sad. France sold out to Qatar.
Shame on you, Macron. What a loser guy. Big words but these are just lies. We really need to no longer put our future into the hands of any politician here. Direct democracy is the only way forward past this point. Courts that work for foreign countries need to be removed. Courts must work, first and foremost, for the local people living in a country.
Sometimes I wonder if the days of a global internet are drawing to a close.
Have closed, you already can't access in or out of Russia, China, or the UK without illegal circumvention tools
> The plaintiff (Sony Music Entertainment GmbH) then used a VPN to access the blocked content from Germany in circumvention of the geoIP blocking. The court agreed with Sony in their assertions of noncompliance, and we were fined for contempt of court.
This is some fucked up level of incompetency.
That’s why Justice can be abused by whoever got the most money, if it was competent they wouldn’t waste much time on these ridiculous claims.
They are in a difficult position because the entire point of their DNS resolver is that it blocks malicious sites (malware, phishing, etc.). Very easy for Sony to say, why can't they add piracy to the list? They "refuse to alter or lie to you" in their DNS responses - how would a malware block be lying if those other blocks are not?
I guess the issue is that they are ordered to block it for all users, not only those particular users who picked some particular lists.
And nobody would pick a piracy list, why'd you do it as a user.
Quad9 doesn’t let you pick lists. It’s a public resolver with no accounts. Everything it blocks is blocked universally.
https://quad9.net/service/service-addresses-and-features/
You can use 9.9.9.10 - it has no filtering.
But even malware filter is supposed to cut malware, not pirated content. Cutting piracy while saying that you cut malware is def lying because pirated resources might not provide anything malicious for the end user.
But telling the court you shouldn't or can't block stuff falls flat when you are blocking stuff
Am I the only one who find it disturbing that a privacy focused service publishes a detailed report of which institutions is accessing their service, just to make a point?
They say they don't have data about individual IP addresses, and their report is follows their privacy policy. Yes, right, but think about it as a matter of principle. Normally, a privacy focused service shouldn't collect any data, but for technical or legal reasons, sometimes, they have to. They may need to know how many queries they have and from which zones to properly dimension their infrastructure for instance, so it is normal for them to have these logs, but publishing them in a blog post just to make a point feels like they are ready to use collected data beyond their intended purpose if it serves their interests.
Legally, it is fine, and is is unlikely to hurt anyone, but on principle, that's a red flag.
> Am I the only one who find it disturbing that a privacy focused service publishes a detailed report of which institutions is accessing their service
I don't find it disturbing at all, and it's perfectly in line with what you would expect a privacy focused service to do: name and shame those that are attacking privacy.
Look at the list, only a few of them have anything to do with this legislation.
Many of these probably against it and expect privacy, that's why they are using quad9. They are the victims here.
If they had said "this service is used by this or that proponent of the legislation", your point could stand, even though I still disagree.
Also, it is about blocking, not spying, still bad, but orthogonal to privacy.
I wonder why Anonymous seems to be like a thing of the past these days ... There's so many of these fuckers going scot free these days. If anyone know any Anonymous-style movement going after these kind of people, I'm interested to know more.
France becoming China.
How can they even sue you if you aren’t based in France? Just do what 4chan did and tell them to fuck off.
4chan has a privilege of being based in the USA.
Lmao. The world is run by morons who are voted for by even more morons. That's why you get stuff like "durrrrrrr we used vpn and could still access it, contempt of court!"
Just absolutely braindead behaviour from so many members of our species.
Voting has nothing to do with this, courts are bought not elected
Cloudflare and Google already blocks these domains. Just saying.
Yeah, I’m really mixed on this story. Why are they so insistent on not just blocking the sites? I don’t even really think a slippery slope is at play here. This is a very specific legal circumstance that doesn’t seem to have any chance of expanding to other forms of censorship.
Quad9 already states that they strongly oppose piracy, so just block the sites. The piracy sites will be fine.
I don’t think DNS is as neutral as Quad9 believes it is. DNS is like the sign for a business on the road and the domain registrar is like the building permit you get to build the sign. DNS is a way to find a website or business without even bothering with a search engine. Try typing in stamps.com, office.com, booking.com, weather.com.
Donated
Blah blah blah. Social social social.
c'est une catastrophe décidément la fascisation de ce pays
typical France L as seen in the past few weeks
So this is yet another reason why I run unbound locally.
There's really no reason not to.
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> that failed state
Aren't literally every country doing the same?
Failed states are quite popular these days
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> €580,000 to €1,000 per day. But deleted his/her comment.
To put this into perspective, €365K a year is roughly the fully loaded total comp cost of a high-senior to low staff level software engineer or a mid level ML engineer at a frontier lab in Cali.
Per each infraction. They said they currently have 20 other cases pending. And who knows how many would be to come.
What exactly are you trying to convey here? That this penalty is not an issue? Would you be willing to pay it from your pocket then? Quad9 is not Cloudflare nor Google. It's a nonprofit, in case you blinked right at the sentence that mentioned this.
I'm disappointed in how many pro-piracy comments are in this thread. Free speech does not mean you have the right to steal someone else's labor unencumbered. When actual free speech is blocked, then I'll be among the people rallying -- but blocking a piracy site is blocking cybercrime not legal free speech.
I think the sympathies to this story would change a lot if Quad9 was refusing to block DNS resolution to websites for other illegal organizations like human trafficking rings, cartels, gangs, etc.
Copyright infringement isn’t exactly a violent crime but it is very clearly a crime.
What I don’t think Quad9 realizes is that being neutral from a technical and architectural basis is meaningless in law and doesn’t reflect your intent. If you have awareness and means to make a change that mitigates harm and you refuse, that’s how you lose cases.
I think it can be very easily argued by a lawyer that Quad9 intended to keep the infringing content easily available and at best minimally comply.
Counterpoint: piracy is awesome actually and most entertainment companies don't deserve a cent