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...
[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
Oh right, the blocked domain is probably not a french TLD...
I don’t get why you would still need to block french users if you also need to exit the jurisdiction.
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.
But even being based in Switzerland I believe there’s some inter-countries agreements, so it would not be practical.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
The Principality of Sealand*
* until the UK or French navy shows up
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Their offering is explained in the first paragraph of the home page, in fact the h1 and page title cover it.
Counterpoint: piracy is moral.
I’ll always support those who are willing to take such risks where I am not.
bruh
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"
> 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
...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?
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 have zero awareness of when futbol is on because I hate sports. So I didn't correlate it.
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?
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.
Things are pretty dire, attention-wise.
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.
It's like prosecuting the asphalt guys who paved the road the bank robbers used
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...
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.
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”.)
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.
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?
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
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.
And actually you can just make a gambling website overseas, people have done that since forever. You might have trouble with accepting payments, though.
'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....
Hm yeah but "action from Ofcom" doesn't really mean very much to a party half a world away.
Manifestly, the British still think they are a world power.
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
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 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.
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
[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)
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.
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
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.
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
> 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.
This is wrong.
In the UK, property rights are mostly leasehold, just as they are in Singapore for HDB flats.
they do if they build their own house and rent it out
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)
...
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.
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.
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".
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
EDIT: Look at that, downvotes but no rebuttals. (:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
While it is indeed 20 years ago, it should not be forgiven, if they continue to pull off shitty things like this lawsuit.
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.
Young assholes replace old assholes, and on and on it goes.
Sony once was a great company. Excellent electronics, great service.
Then they became a media empire...
Japan is just quiet about it. Sony is no aberration.
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.
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.
> 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...)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Delay updates by 1 week.
Answer randomly with the up-to-date or the out-of-date records.
...also, it's probably their own PlayStation, that their kid uses. Speaking from personal experience.
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)
unless someone could still use emudhra certs
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!
He is, obviously, not French.
His self-claimed annual income was about $15–25 million, and his personal wealth was about $70–100 million.
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.
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.
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.
And the only way to do that is via GeoIP blocking…
At first yes, but ultimately the blocking order was undone by a higher German court in December 2023.
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