I’ve sort of wanted to write things about the frankly worrying SOPA bill in the US Senate and PIPA bill going through the US House of Representatives at the moment, but the fact is, others are doing a perfectly good job writing about it elsewhere, and why the hell should I waste even more precious bits repeating the good stuff they have already said.
So, I’ll quickly roll-up what I think are interesting articles:
- A technical whitepaper on how the proposed method of doctoring DNS responses (domain blackholing) isn’t a good idea if we want to maintain a cohesive Internet.
- The open letter to Congress from some 80 distinguished Internet engineers about the same.
- A blog article by Paul Vixie about the end-to-end nature of a DNSSEC query and response.
- Tom Daly, IaaS provider Dyn Inc’s CTO, on why breaking the DNS to achieve the goals of SOPA/PIPA is a bad idea.
I’ll add more as I find/read them and think they are worth linking to. There are a lot of articles and opinions out there, as you can imagine, and I’m now just adding to the melee, I suppose.
But, the most worrying thing I find is that what is being proposed is effectively the same type of DNS doctoring and blackholing that other “less liberal” Governments (China, for instance) have been known to use to block access to things like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.
“Oh, but we’ll only use it for blocking X”, they say. Question is, does the existance of the mechanism to do this constitute an invitation for it to be used for blocking other things in the fullness of time? Are we going to end up with domains being injected into the feed of “bad things” because it hosts something that arbitrarily earned some sort of “dislike” from those who have control?
Paging George Orwell, to a courtesy telephone, please.
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