> 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...)
Delay updates by 1 week.
Answer randomly with the up-to-date or the out-of-date records.
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!
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)
"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]."
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)
It's not about if it makes sense from a moral point of view.
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.
Attacking the people doing the actual bad things is hard, attacking a single unified organization is easy.
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.
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 want to be out of reach of French courts basically.
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.
Various European countries are very good at that, starting from UK brexiting the EU, Germany shutting down all their nuclear power plants. Do not get started on accepting unlimited illegal immigration.
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.
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.
- 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?
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.
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!"
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 :)
Yeah, fuck those billionaire authors and artists in coffee shops not wanting people to rip off the books and art they create without compensation.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think thus is the real problem. And you can easily replace France with Germany or US here.
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."
Okay, now waiting to see how they will technically block those french users from the 24th nov onward...
I didn’t attempt find the ruling; perhaps the lawsuit was written in an odd way.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
> €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.
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"
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".
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
If you can solve this for me it would actually help a lot at work :D
I have sympathy for my fellow man. There isn't enough liability in the world for these corporations.
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.
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.
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
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".
While it is indeed 20 years ago, it should not be forgiven, if they continue to pull off shitty things like this lawsuit.
Sony once was a great company. Excellent electronics, great service.
Then they became a media empire...