BitTorrent-Based Domains Could Make Sites Invincible Against Government Seizure
71 replies, posted
[img]http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/gizmodo/2009/09/gizmodo-gallery-poster1.jpg[/img]
[url=http://gizmodo.com/5702432/bittorrent+based-domains-could-make-sites-invincible-against-government-seizure]Source[/url]
[release]In response to the recent flurry of aggressive takedowns against P2P and piracy-related websites, a group of programmers is working on a new, decentralized system that would make domains untouchable. The Dot-P2P project is partially powered, appropriately enough, by BitTorrent.
The problem—if you're either running or patronizing a website that runs afoul of US copyright law—is that it's extremely easy for your site to be knocked offline, should a court give the OK. It might sound like a gross generalization, but an enormous part of the internet is essentially owned by the United States. ICANN, responsible for handing out and maintaining the domain suffixes (.com, .org, and the rest) is part of the US Department of Commerce, and works closely with domain registrars. So when a US court decided that rap music sharing site OnSmash.com (among others) had leaked its last album, yanking the domain from under its feet was a cinch.
The alternative system would direct browsers to .p2p domains, through a decentralized, BitTorrent-style system. No ICANN, no court interference, and, presumably, no takedowns. The project already has the backing of major internet rebels like Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde and torrent powerhouse EZTV. Dot-P2P is still in its infancy, but, as Sunde himself commented, is sending a clarion message: "If they try anything, we have weapons of making it harder for them to abuse it. If they then back down, we win." Just how righteous a battle this is depends on your views of copyright law, but it's an interesting take on web liberties nonetheless. [TorrentFreak][/release]
[url=]Source 2 (Torrentfreak)[/url]
[release]The domain seizures by the United States authorities in recent days and upcoming legislation that could make similar takeovers even easier in the future, have inspired a group of enthusiasts to come up with a new, decentralized and BitTorrent-powered DNS system. This system will exchange DNS information through peer-to-peer transfers and will work with a new .p2p domain extension.
dot-p2pIn a direct response to the domain seizures by US authorities during the last few days, a group of established enthusiasts have started working on a DNS system that can’t be touched by any governmental institution.
Ironically, considering the seizure of the Torrent-Finder meta-search engine domain, the new DNS system will be partly powered by BitTorrent.
In recent months, global anti-piracy efforts have increasingly focused on seizing domains of allegedly infringing sites. In the United States the proposed COICA bill is explicitly aimed at increasing the government’s censorship powers, but seizing a domain name is already quite easy, as illustrated by ICE and Department of Justice actions last weekend and earlier this year.
For governments it is apparently quite easy to take over the DNS entries of domains, not least because several top level domains are managed by US-based corporations such as VeriSign, who work closely together with the US Department of Commerce. According to some, this setup is a threat to the open internet.
To limit the power governments have over domain names, a group of enthusiasts has started working on a revolutionary system that can not be influenced by a government institution, or taken down by pulling the plug on a central server. Instead, it is distributed by the people, with help from a BitTorrent-based application that people install on their computer.
According to the project’s website, the goal is to “create an application that runs as a service and hooks into the hosts DNS system to catch all requests to the .p2p TLD while passing all other request cleanly through. Requests for the .p2p TLD will be redirected to a locally hosted DNS database.”
“By creating a .p2p TLD that is totally decentralized and that does not rely on ICANN or any ISP’s DNS service, and by having this application mimic force-encrypted BitTorrent traffic, there will be a way to start combating DNS level based censoring like the new US proposals as well as those systems in use in countries around the world including China and Iran amongst others.”
The Dot-P2P project was literally started a few days ago, but already the developers are making great progress. It is expected that a beta version of the client can be released relatively shortly, a team member assured TorrentFreak.
The project has been embraced by many familiar names in the P2P-community. Former Pirate Bay spokesman Peter Sunde is among them, and the people from EZTV have been promoting it as well.
“For me it’s mostly to scare back. To show that if they try anything, we have weapons of making it harder for them to abuse it. If they then back down, we win,” Peter Sunde told TorrentFreak in a comment.
Although the initiators of the project are still debating on various technical issues on how the system should function, it seems that the administrative part has been thought out. The .p2p domain registration will be handled by OpenNIC (requires OpenNic DNS), an alternative community based DNS network. OpenNIC also maintains the .geek, .free, .null and several other top level domains.
On the other hand, there are also voices that are for distributed domain registration, which would keep the system entirely decentralized.
The domain registrations will be totally free, but registrants will have to show that they own a similar domain with a different extension first, to prevent scammers from taking over a brand.
The new P2P-based DNS system will require users to run an application on their own computer before they can access the domains, but there are also plans to create a separate root-server (like OpenNIC) as a complimentary service. It’s worth noting that the DNS changes will only affect the new .p2p domains, it will not interfere with access to any other domains.
It will be interesting to see in what direction this project goes and how widely it will be adopted. There are already talks of getting Internet Service Providers to accept the .p2p extension as well, but even if this doesn’t happen the system can always be accessed through the BitTorrent-powered application and supporting DNS servers.
If anything, this shows that no matter what legislation or legal actions are taken, technology stays always one step ahead. The more aggressive law enforcement gets, the more creative and motivated adopters of the Open Internet will respond.[/release]
There's no stopping internet pirates :colbert:
The more strain you put on pirates, the more power you give to them. They will always be a step ahead.
So they're pretty much going to start using fast-flux DNS, just like botnets have to host phishing sites for years?
Cool. I was wondering when we would get to this.
No government who allows its population access to the internet can prevent access to the materials therein, regardless of how much control you try and build in. Today's leaders don't understand this, the next generation will and the internet should be a better place because of it.
Internet censorship is getting bad. They're not going to stop internet piracy. It's the same stupid concept behind taking guns from the people to stop criminals. It's not going to impede real criminals in the process.
Thank god, I can be put to rest now knowing that I'll at least have some place to find and share my Linux distros.
[QUOTE=GreenDolphin;26409609]Thank god, I can be put to rest now knowing that I'll at least have some place to find and share my Linux distros.[/QUOTE]
Its not really about this at all. For the one side as little as for the other, presumedly.
The government and Hollywood will never win this.
This is actually a really good idea on the part of the project, a true cloud website is any technician's wetdream
wouldn't the latency be gigantic
They still won't be able to host on US soil. As soon as the US government becomes aware of this, they'll create a law which allows them to request a dedicated server provider to cut off access when piracy is in question. The only solution is this with offshore hosting in Malaysia or some other country that doesn't care.
[QUOTE=DainBramageStudios;26409688]wouldn't the latency be gigantic[/QUOTE]
Well it would depend on the number of seeds. At the same time, sites that simply host torrents don't need to be blazing fast seeing that at most you will browse a few pages and download a 100kb file.
[QUOTE=|FlapJack|;26409689]They still won't be able to host on US soil. As soon as the US government becomes aware of this, they'll create a law which allows them to request a dedicated server provider to cut off access when piracy is in question. The only solution is this with offshore hosting in Malaysia or some other country that doesn't care.[/QUOTE]
Sweden.
[QUOTE=d3450;26409480]There's no stopping internet pirates :colbert:[/QUOTE]
You attribute this to piracy but a BitTorrent-based web would be great for the free flow of information in countries where the state chooses to censor it.
[QUOTE=|FlapJack|;26409689]They still won't be able to host on US soil. As soon as the US government becomes aware of this, they'll create a law which allows them to request a dedicated server provider to cut off access when piracy is in question. The only solution is this with offshore hosting in Malaysia or some other country that doesn't care.[/QUOTE]
This is true, but laws don't appear instantly. It could be years before a law comes into affect. Even then, if many people were to participate in this I doubt ISPs would be too happy cutting off their customers. The ISP business interests could have some serious influence on whether this passes or not, and what's the big deal if it does? The US is only a single country. Granted it has insane influence over other nations, before this spreads anyway it could take many years.
[editline]30th November 2010[/editline]
[QUOTE=Zeke129;26409841]You attribute this to piracy but a BitTorrent-based web would be great for the free flow of information in countries where the state chooses to censor it.[/QUOTE]
This too. A P2P website has other advantages for non-piracy based sites as well.
Am I the only one that was smiling when i read this?
[QUOTE=mycheesecake;26410000]Am I the only one that was smiling when i read this?[/QUOTE]
Nope. I'm glad to see innovators fighting FOR the internet against powers that want to destroy it.
The war on copyright infringments will be the same as the war on drugs. They'll never catch up, they might win a couple battles, but they will be hundreds of steps behind.
I've been the IRC channel for this since it had like 20 users on the channel.
(EFnet, #dns-p2p)
Torrentfreak jumped the gun with the article, everyone's still arguing over how it works, brokep is AFK on the channel and nobody's written even a single line of code.
Edit, sorry, my mistake, trompele wrote #include <stdio.h>
One line done, a couple thousand to go. Or more. Lots more.
That's something nice. Is it me or are pirates the ones that "unify" the internet, unlike government?
[QUOTE=nikomo;26410152]I've been the IRC channel for this since it had like 20 users on the channel.
(EFnet, #dns-p2p)
Torrentfreak jumped the gun with the article, everyone's still arguing over how it works, brokep is AFK on the channel and nobody's written even a single line of code.
Edit, sorry, my mistake, trompele wrote #include <stdio.h>
One line done, a couple thousand to go. Or more. Lots more.[/QUOTE]
It's still possible and it's already done for less kind usage. (Botnets utilize systems similar to this to host their phishing websites over the whole thing.)
Mixed emotions about this. I dislike piracy, and I dislike heavy handed government procedure...
Hmm...
I'll have to think about it.
[QUOTE=Kagrenak;26410416]It's still possible and it's already done for less kind usage. (Botnets utilize systems similar to this to host their phishing websites over the whole thing.)[/QUOTE]
Oh, it's possible.
But someone's just going to have to do it and ignore what people keep yelling on IRC.
[QUOTE=MrEndangered;26410436]Mixed emotions about this. I dislike piracy, and I dislike heavy handed government procedure...
Hmm...
I'll have to think about it.[/QUOTE]
This isn't about piracy. It has been so far because the only domains seized have had something to do with piracy.
But what next? They could take over political sites. They could take Google.com if they wanted. They can seize any domain they want because ICANN is their bitch.
[QUOTE=nikomo;26410455]This isn't about piracy. It has been so far because the only domains seized have had something to do with piracy.
But what next? They could take over political sites. They could take Google.com if they wanted. They can seize any domain they want because ICANN is their bitch.[/QUOTE]
I disagree, it is mostly about piracy for alot of people (Not all). It's just simply not a subject you can apply Occam's razor to. The government needs laws and powers to remove piracy sites, but there is a lack of powers preventing them from removing 'anything remotely related', which I don't like at all. Saying they could remove 'anything' is an overreaction, but it is worrying.
So, I'm mostly in the middle of the subject, that's all.
[QUOTE=windwakr;26410589]Wouldn't this just be a sort of DNS? The website itself won't be bittorrent based. So, you only need the bittorrent aspect just to get the IP address, then it's not needed anymore.[/QUOTE]
ah I thought that the whole internet would be run from bittorrent
my mistake
[editline]30th November 2010[/editline]
[QUOTE=MrEndangered;26410571]I disagree, it is mostly about piracy for alot of people (Not all). It's just simply not a subject you can apply Occam's razor to. The government needs laws and powers to remove piracy sites, but there is a lack of powers preventing them from removing 'anything remotely related', which I don't like at all. Saying they could remove 'anything' is an overreaction, but it is worrying.
So, I'm mostly in the middle of the subject, that's all.[/QUOTE]
even so, it's nice to have the alternative there just in case the government starts going crazy over censoring things
remember this isn't just in the US, they can take down any website hosted in any country so long as it has an extension which falls under the control of ICANN. I oppose this on principle even if they're doing it for entirely noble reasons
[editline]30th November 2010[/editline]
[QUOTE=nikomo;26410152]Torrentfreak jumped the gun with the article, everyone's still arguing over how it works, brokep is AFK on the channel and nobody's written even a single line of code.[/QUOTE]
ahahaha
[QUOTE=windwakr;26410589]Wouldn't this just be a sort of DNS? The website itself won't be bittorrent based. So, you only need the bittorrent aspect just to get the IP address, then it's not needed anymore.[/QUOTE]
You could do cloud hosting too; again, botnets already do this sort of thing.
[QUOTE=MrEndangered;26410571]I disagree, it is mostly about piracy for alot of people (Not all). It's just simply not a subject you can apply Occam's razor to. The government needs laws and powers to remove piracy sites, but there is a lack of powers preventing them from removing 'anything remotely related', which I don't like at all. Saying they could remove 'anything' is an overreaction, but it is worrying.
So, I'm mostly in the middle of the subject, that's all.[/QUOTE]
Well you have guns [i]in case[/i] the government tries to come and take all your freedoms or w/e so I think it's fair that the internet has some kind of weapon [i]in case[/i] the government comes for it.
Yar har fiddlie-fucking-dee,
That didn't take them long to find a way around that.
Sorry, you need to Log In to post a reply to this thread.