The Glade 4.0

Hooray -- more criminalization of reverse engineering. Just what this world needs.



1) http://www.ollydbg.de/. Oh ****, looks like the Glade now links to "hacking tools". Whoops, I did it again. My bad.


This really is the worst possible lesson we could learn from this arrangement.


If you've read through the full text of the DMCA (and all other related acts), and fully understand what it actually criminalizes as opposed to what people suppose it criminalizes, I don't think you'd be so swift to make a blanket condemnation of every "infringing" act.

Incidents like the Sony rootkit and the StarForce **** are prime examples of why reverse engineering is essential to protecting consumer rights, EULAs, DMCA, copyright, and patent laws be damned. And that's really just scratching the surface. This is act is going to be used to intimidate and take down sites like OpenRCE, which aren't even "cracking" sites, but deal with topics and tools that could be (and are) used in the practice of piracy if one has a mind to do so.

The best part of all is that the whole premise of COICA is hillariously flawed. DNS wankery? Really? This is the best you guys could come up with?


Sort of, but it's not that simple. The jurisdictional issues with respect to ICANN and the U.S. federal government are murky at best, and this is further complicated by the fact that many of the root server cluster nodes and owned and operated outside of the U.S. by entirely foreign entities. Even if the U.S. can still exercise this level of authority over ICANN (maybe), they still don't have an authority to **** with other country's property. And any way you turn it, ICANN is a sensitive political issue on the global scale. At the very least, announcing that they're going to start blacklisting domains at the root servers or GTLD servers is igniting a global shitstorm.


Among the target audience? Better than 99.99%. And in any case, one can beat this system in much better ways that using raw IPs. This whole thing is a complete waste of taxpayer money. Pro tip: the blackhats are smarter than Congress.

_________________
Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

I agree, I was addressing only the technical concerns, not the political ones.

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In time, this too shall pass.

My take on it is that the "target audience" is the casual user of ThePirateBay, Isohunt, or various other bittorrent/piracy sites that have their servers located outside the US and so can't be shut down. Blacklisting them via DNS would be pretty effective. I'd guess the other major thing this law will get used for is a vehicle to stop online gambling by blacklisting those sites, something Congress has tried to do with several pieces of legislation and pretty much failed at.

The law would obviously do nothing to the technically-savvy people that actually create the cracks to strip DRM out of software, but it would prevent the masses from ever getting their hands on it.

The powers that be don't much care about sites like OpenRCE, although the RIAA/MPAA might demand that it be taken down under the law since it might stop some piracy and it doesn't cost them anything to do so.

I don't know, Xeq. I'm no programmer, and no hacker, I couldn't hack my way out of a wet paper bag. But I would certainly get past a DNS block. You know how quickly custom hosts files would be be available?

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Host files? Pft.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_DNS_root

ICANN had it coming when they appropriated the .biz domain.

Anyway, the DNS system was never intended to be a pyramid. There are lot of compelling reasons to make DNS a scaleless network as is the Internet itself. The vulnerability of the Internet to root server attacks is a well known problem that everyone just wants to forget about. There are, for instance, some sizable botnets out there which are, in most likelyhood, capable of taking down the entire root DNS system.

_________________
Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

When I see this thread title, I just see "cloaca," which sends me laughing thinking of Cartman making fun of Steve Irwin.

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“The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.” - Thomas Paine

Damn you.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades