281 points by farrokhi 3 hours ago|94 comments
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nadermx 2 hours ago
"The plaintiff (Sony Music Entertainment GmbH) then used a VPN to access the blocked content from Germany in circumvention of the geoIP blocking. The court agreed with Sony in their assertions of noncompliance, and we were fined for contempt of court."

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"

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bitpush 2 hours ago
> Imagine doing everything possible to stop something. They then circumvent your protections with yet another service, and you get fined.

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".

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zamadatix 29 minutes ago
I think, usually, in those cases it's that people believe the company did not really do anywhere near everything it could - it did the bare minimum it thought it could get away with then seemed shocked it wasn't enough to matter.

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.

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warkdarrior 24 minutes ago
> I think, usually, in those cases it's that people believe the company did not really do anywhere near everything it could - it did the bare minimum it thought it could get away with then seemed shocked it wasn't enough to matter.

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.

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crote 15 minutes ago
> At a minimum they could have asked users to register and provide proof of residency

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.

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zamadatix 13 minutes ago
Let's take this level of user tracking for DNS would be accepted & fine by Germany as well as what folks were thinking was feasible for the company to do as a given, how does it prove the user+ip who registered is the user+ip who submitted the request instead of the place it got proxied? Or malware enabling the same?

If you can solve this for me it would actually help a lot at work :D

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matheusmoreira 35 minutes ago
As we should. These corporations are rent seeking monopolists. Like many Japanese companies, Sony is an intellectual property absolutist. PlayStation creator Ken Kutaragi called our objections to the "you'll own nothing" future a "mentality issue".

I have sympathy for my fellow man. There isn't enough liability in the world for these corporations.

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warkdarrior 20 minutes ago
> These corporations are rent seeking monopolists. Like many Japanese companies, Sony is an intellectual property absolutist.

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.

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irusensei 44 minutes ago
Lately Sony Corpos have been really getting into their supervillain arc aren’t they?
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sunaookami 37 minutes ago
Lately? Did you forget the rootkit they installed on everyone of their customers PCs?
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nubinetwork 17 minutes ago
That was 20 years ago
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qingcharles 11 minutes ago
It's my Roman Empire.
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matkoniecz 6 minutes ago
So it proves that this behavior is not new.
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mitxela 2 hours ago
And for contempt of court nonetheless. That's meant for when you blatantly don't do the thing the court told you to do, not when you did it but it didn't work how the court wanted.
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euio757 16 minutes ago
Seems they're following Cisco similar move 2y ago of exiting the market

> 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...)

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JokerDan 2 hours ago
DNS resolvers getting sued should stop resolving domains/properties of the companies suing them too when they are forced to take these kinds of actions/steps off the back of a legal decision like this.
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WhyNotHugo 18 minutes ago
While I agree in spirit, this also makes the resolver away from being able to claim they're just a neutral service which just delivers existing records without being opinionated
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rpdillon 10 minutes ago
Fair point. I'd say "We're neutral, unless you attack us, in which case we stop being neutral about you, in particular". I'd still use them if this were the policy.
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drdexebtjl 2 hours ago
Keep resolving, but instead of resolving multiple A records, resolve just one. Fuck that one server in particular.

Delay updates by 1 week.

Answer randomly with the up-to-date or the out-of-date records.

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tredre3 8 minutes ago
Hopefully the leadership of public resolvers isn't as a childish as you are.

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!

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polski-g 7 minutes ago
Redirect porn websites domains to them.
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raverbashing 2 hours ago
Obviously

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)

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anonymous908213 43 minutes ago
Or, get this, anything that is useful can be misused, so maybe we should go after the people misusing things rather than locking all of society in a cage to pre-emptively prevent misuse.

"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]."

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AspireOne 41 minutes ago
What "types" of companies do you mean exactly?
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raverbashing 21 minutes ago
Tomato sauce companies?

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)

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0x0000000 2 hours ago
Maybe i missed it in the post, but how are they going to implement it? They mentioned geoIP is insufficient for complying with the block, so if they dont have a way to block only these domains for users in France, how will they block all requests for users in France?

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.

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eloisant 54 minutes ago
They're removing all presence they have in France, their servers mostly.

They want to be out of reach of French courts basically.

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keoneflick 30 minutes ago
Do you think they will geoblock in addition to physically leaving?
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disiplus 39 minutes ago
You stop serving anything for french ips. Its like you dont exist.
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hk__2 26 minutes ago
"french ips" don’t mean anything as the post said; see their case in Germany.
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djha-skin 26 minutes ago
...That's just geoIP blocking, which he covered in his comment.
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babarock 2 hours ago
Punishing the DNS resolver is weird. Would you punish the phone book company for having the number of a criminal listed?
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teroshan 2 hours ago
Same reason copyright abusers threaten people that help remove the DRM from their Amazon-bought e-book so it can be read on their non-Amazon bought e-reader with a $250,000 fine and five years in prison for circumventing a digital lock using DMCA, because it's what the legal API allows them to achieve their end goal.

It's not about if it makes sense from a moral point of view.

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JoshTriplett 2 hours ago
The most likely answer is that they didn't think about it or didn't understand or didn't care. But on the off chance they did, perhaps they thought the DNS provider would enforce the ruling worldwide.
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pixl97 2 hours ago
Because they can.

Attacking the people doing the actual bad things is hard, attacking a single unified organization is easy.

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crote 13 minutes ago
Sue the government for providing the road that criminals walk on!
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rdtsc 45 minutes ago
It shows maliciousness (we can bully this smaller player for a win) and/or total incompetence (we don't even understand how internet works, but we'll issue rulings anyway).
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mitxela 2 hours ago
You would if you could and it'd probably work.

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.

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iamnothere 49 minutes ago
Where does this line of reasoning end though? Shouldn’t the browser makers be blocking the sites too? What about curl? What about the OS and local DNS resolvers (unbound etc)? Maybe Ethernet and wifi cards should contain blocking logic? At some point you have to draw a line!
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artooro 2 hours ago
Quad9 is getting picked on because they do not have a large financial backing. Not because it makes any logical sense. France is shooting themselves in the foot.
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DemiGuru 2 hours ago
I mentioned not too long ago that Mullvad was handing its resolver users over to Quad9. Sadly, I didn’t realize how accurate my concerns would be. Quad9 is a good operator, they actually fought Sony in a German court instead of quietly complying. Yet, they were still ordered to block the content. That’s the core problem. A blocking order is only as damaging as the resolver it impacts. Every time an operator shuts down and redirects its users to Quad9, it pools more users into one place. This makes the next blocking order even more valuable and effective for whoever files it. And now we're seeing Quad9 backing out of a market.
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alberth 35 minutes ago
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9cb14c1ec0 3 minutes ago
Sometimes I wonder if the days of a global internet are drawing to a close.
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this_user 44 minutes ago
Whenever people talk about why you should host in the EU, this is just the most recent example for why should shouldn't.
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nairboon 39 minutes ago
Host in Switzerland, that's where Quad9 operates from.
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_imnothere 2 hours ago
Time to boycott Sony, they deserve no money from anyone, and I meant anyone.

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.

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antiframe 58 minutes ago
> Time to boycott Sony, they deserve no money from anyone, and I meant anyone.

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.

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raquuk 51 minutes ago
Yes, but in this case the plaintiff is beIN SPORTS France.
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egorfine 14 minutes ago
Why stopping serving french IPs though? Remove your legal presence in France, sure. But block IP ranges from reaching your servers.. just why?
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rpdillon 8 minutes ago
Most likely, so they have legal standing to say "We don't operate in your country or serve your citizens, your laws do not apply". Also, punishment for a stupid ruling.
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egorfine 3 minutes ago
> We don't operate in your country

Yes, by leaving french jurisdiction.

> or serve your citizens

This is not necessary. At all.

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Bender 60 minutes ago
I am curious if a large number of people stood up their own DoH/DoT servers:

- 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?

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nish__ 2 hours ago
How have our democracies not abolished copyright law yet? These laws only serve the 1%. I have no idea why we still put up with them.
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numpad0 60 minutes ago
FOSS depends on copyright laws. Oldest versions of Linux and UNIX are more than 20 years old, so early versions of both would be hypothetically now in public domain in the absence of Disney-lobbied maximalist versions of copyright laws, or in the total absence of one.
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nish__ 29 minutes ago
No it doesn't. Most projects are MIT or some other permissive liscense.
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tredre3 51 seconds ago
> Most projects are MIT or some other permissive liscense.

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.

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dist-epoch 58 minutes ago
How do you feel about OpenAI training on all of the books in the world.
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nish__ 28 minutes ago
It makes me feel like the rules are "for thee, not for me." Like it proves that the rich can just do whatever they want.
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sham1 41 minutes ago
The irony with these AI corpos is that they're okay with scraping all of human creative endeavours yet they get annoyed at others doing distillation on their models.

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 :)

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christophilus 54 minutes ago
Fine, as long as they aren't the only ones who get to do it. Having the world's knowledge at everyone's fingertips is a goal I think we should aim for.
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cyanmagenta 2 hours ago
> How have our democracies not abolished copyright law yet? These laws only serve the 1%

Yeah, fuck those billionaire authors and artists in coffee shops not wanting people to rip off the books and art they create without compensation.

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roblabla 53 minutes ago
I find it extra funny that you think copyright protect small time authors and artists, when we have _very clear_ examples of it not protecting them for shit, even before the entire IA saga. Remember the Disney/Star Wars saga where they refused to pay the Star Wars author for the books they were selling?

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.

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cyanmagenta 44 minutes ago
I don’t necessarily disagree, but by that same logic we shouldn’t have any civil laws because regular people can’t afford to hire lawyers to sue people.

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.

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warkdarrior 8 minutes ago
> 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.

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AndroTux 2 hours ago
The 1% just copied all available data without consequence. Yet, Quad9 gets sued and loses.
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nish__ 2 hours ago
Copyright laws don't benefit independent artists. They only work for you if you can afford a litigation team.
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surgical_fire 57 minutes ago
AI companies already ripped those things off.

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.

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sham1 53 minutes ago
While your point is valid enough -- although it could have been made without this kind of snarky and sarcastic snide -- it seems clear that global copyright legislation is a lot more beneficial to the wealthy capital owners rather than the artists that you were alluding towards. Now, this is no insurmountable obstacle at least in theory. The laws could be modified in a way that lets small artists etc focus on following their passions without starving, without allowing capital to do what is essentially the intellectual equivalent of enclosure of the Commons.

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.

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rickydroll 9 minutes ago
All copyright does is give you standing to sue if somebody reproduces your work, in whole or in part. To sue "successfully," you need more financial resources than the copier.

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.

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jeroenhd 28 minutes ago
Sports broadcasters truly are the bane of society. May they get DDoS'd during important matches until they're bankrupt.
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intrasight 21 minutes ago
Sports is the only thing left of value in broadcasting. I can totally understand why they're gonna fight tooth and nail to protect it.
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whh 23 minutes ago
> The plaintiff (Sony Music Entertainment GmbH) then used a VPN to access the blocked content from Germany in circumvention of the geoIP blocking. The court agreed with Sony in their assertions of noncompliance, and we were fined for contempt of court.

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."

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declan_roberts 2 hours ago
Europe needs to strengthen its free speech protections. It turns out, even though the US founders had no idea what DNS was, they still created the right framework to protect it.
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AndroTux 2 hours ago
As long as you don’t say Artificial Intelligence instead of Super Intelligence, you’re all good.
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rafram 2 hours ago
They are in a difficult position because the entire point of their DNS resolver is that it blocks malicious sites (malware, phishing, etc.). Very easy for Sony to say, why can't they add piracy to the list? They "refuse to alter or lie to you" in their DNS responses - how would a malware block be lying if those other blocks are not?
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dmantis 42 minutes ago
I guess the issue is that they are ordered to block it for all users, not only those particular users who picked some particular lists.

And nobody would pick a piracy list, why'd you do it as a user.

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Felger 2 hours ago
"There are more important reasons geoIP blocking will not work."

Okay, now waiting to see how they will technically block those french users from the 24th nov onward...

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burnte 2 hours ago
They don't have to. Despite Europe's best efforts, national laws are not enforceable outside the borders without lots of cooperation, and tech regulation is not an area where people are collaborating.
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trentor 2 hours ago
Crazy. A company that actually exits the market they threatened to leave. Meta and Twitter should take note.
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gumby 2 hours ago
Why does it matter that it’s a recursive resolver? They mention this a lot but it seems like the decision would just as much apply to a non-recursive resolver.

I didn’t attempt find the ruling; perhaps the lawsuit was written in an odd way.

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ButlerianJihad 2 hours ago
It is difficult to envision a "non-recursive DNS resolver" in public service. Recursion is the usual and customary way that DNS names are resolved by the leaf servers, because they are not authoritative for much of anything.

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.

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gumby 2 hours ago
We used to just leave that responsibility to the querying host’s own resolver. I don’t fetishize the end-to-end principle (though I come close) so I suppose a recursive resolver service could be a sort of optimization (plenty of ppl look up, say, gmail.google.com so why not cache it).

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!

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toast0 2 hours ago
> We used to just leave that responsibility to the querying host’s own resolver.

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.

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lokar 37 minutes ago
Back then most computing was done in office, lab, university settings. Running recursive resolvers for the local network was part of the standard IT setup.
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toast0 7 minutes ago
While I agree it was common, running a centralized recursive resolver for the local network is not the same as "leave that responsibility to the querying host’s own resolver"
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lokar 4 minutes ago
Sure, but it goes with a more centralized approach to systems management in general. The attitude was often that all of the computers were one thing.
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Jepacor 2 hours ago
Welp, I've been using quad9 and I'm French, does anyone have an alternative I can switch to?
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capitol_ 54 minutes ago
I recommend Norway, they have lovely fjords.
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drcongo 26 minutes ago
This comment made my day, beautiful.
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greatgib 40 minutes ago
Sadly no-one responsible from this situation will care.

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.

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martinjc 2 hours ago
Sony being sleazy again. You start to wonder why they pick on the wrong people.
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coldfloor 37 minutes ago
What's with all the Sony comments? This has nothing to do with Sony.
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Onavo 2 hours ago
Another user commented on

> €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.

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jubilanti 2 hours ago
Per each infraction. They said they currently have 20 other cases pending. And who knows how many would be to come.