My prediction that such crap will get routed around is more of a “water rolls down hill” sort of thing.
Even so, here is my take on how DNS blocking will go down: there are many, many, many projects and possibilities for decentralizing and fortifying the internet. Namecoin has been mentioned, I don’t know if .p2p is the same as namecoin, but it’s similar idea. .onion isn’t going anywhere, because civilian use of tor provides cover for military use of tor. I myself have dabbled in designing kademlia-like decentralized overlay networks that don’t rely on servers or DNS. i2p, freenet and so on also solve the censorship problem. There are at least three meshnet projects. There are many other projects I don’t know about. Oh and all the firefox addons: mafiaafire and so on. Oh and of course the simple alternative DNS solution. and /etc/hosts.
So those are the current level of activity and the seeds that anything will grow from. The way hackers and open source works is that the more important a project is, the more hackers will start working on it. As the mafiaa blocks more important stuff, pressure will build and start powering these other projects that route around it.
When there is enough demand, the market will supply a solution. We have no reason to believe it’s impossible, and much reason to believe it can be done.
Unfortunately this mechanism only works to supply things that people know they want, like free movies, videogames, music and communication. It will not protect the growth of startups that solve problems noone knew existed. Such startups are a huge creator of wealth right now, so SOPA and friends will probably do a lot of economic damage, which is why the internet engineers and startup founder-types are so concerned.
My prediction that such crap will get routed around is more of a “water rolls down hill” sort of thing.
Even so, here is my take on how DNS blocking will go down: there are many, many, many projects and possibilities for decentralizing and fortifying the internet. Namecoin has been mentioned, I don’t know if .p2p is the same as namecoin, but it’s similar idea. .onion isn’t going anywhere, because civilian use of tor provides cover for military use of tor. I myself have dabbled in designing kademlia-like decentralized overlay networks that don’t rely on servers or DNS. i2p, freenet and so on also solve the censorship problem. There are at least three meshnet projects. There are many other projects I don’t know about. Oh and all the firefox addons: mafiaafire and so on. Oh and of course the simple alternative DNS solution. and /etc/hosts.
So those are the current level of activity and the seeds that anything will grow from. The way hackers and open source works is that the more important a project is, the more hackers will start working on it. As the mafiaa blocks more important stuff, pressure will build and start powering these other projects that route around it.
When there is enough demand, the market will supply a solution. We have no reason to believe it’s impossible, and much reason to believe it can be done.
Unfortunately this mechanism only works to supply things that people know they want, like free movies, videogames, music and communication. It will not protect the growth of startups that solve problems noone knew existed. Such startups are a huge creator of wealth right now, so SOPA and friends will probably do a lot of economic damage, which is why the internet engineers and startup founder-types are so concerned.