Kickin' It Up A Notch

Authors Jason Self

Plaintext

jxself.org

Kickin' It Up A Notch Home

I predict that The Pirate Bay's announcement regarding their latest project in Linux-libre
development will change the way the war on sharing, censorship, and surveillance is
fought. Their new weapon won't end the war, but it will force the enemy to abandon
GitWeb
their traditional weapons. Government censors, copyright maximalists, and the puppet
ISPs that collaborate with them will find it's going to be much more difficult to restrict
access to websites, stop people from sharing, and monitor what they're up to. How To

What is The Pirate Bay building? Articles
They're building a peer-to-peer browser-like application that will let people access a
RSS Feed
decentralized DNS. Instead of typing in a standard domain name, you will use a
parallel DNS with peer transfers to download the site to your computer. When you go
there next time, you'll just get updates, not the entire site again. About Me

Website owners will register a "domain name" with a peer-to-peer domain extension Contact Me
on a first come, first served basis. Instead of the site being hosted in one central
location, it becomes distributed with people essentially keeping a portion of the site on GPL enforced
their own computer and sharing it when others access the site.

In addition to a standalone program, it will also be available as a plugin for browsers. If you appreciate any of the things I
am doing you can make a donation.
How it will circumvent government IP blocks

The U.K. government tried to stop Pirate Bay users from exchanging files by issuing a
court order demanding ISPs block access to the Bay. The British Phonographic
Industry, the U.K. equivalent of the U.S.'s RIAA, put pressure on the government to
issue a court order and force the ISPs to comply when their own efforts to censor the
Internet were thwarted by ISPs that didn't believe in censoring the Internet. With the
plan to store files and websites in a decentralized, peer-to-peer fashion, governments
are prevented from having a specific IP to target.

What's to stop a government from continuing to seize domain names?

The U.S. government's Operation in Our Sites program regularly seizes domain
names from both U.S. and foreign registrars. Now, there won't be a traditional domain
name to confiscate since it's using a decentralized DNS with peer-to-peer top level
domain names that don't rely on ICANN. Plus, there's no facility for authorities to
storm and no servers to confiscate.
Sharing culture, such as movies, music and games, is good. The War On Sharing is
only one battle in a larger war against Internet censorship and mass surveillance.
When governments can force ISPs to censor what people access and demand search
engines remove entire websites from search results, there is more than peer-to-peer
sharing at stake. The Pirate Bay is showing the world that Internet freedom, the ability
to surf the Web without surveillance or censorship, is possible and it's coming soon.

Here's to kickin' it up a notch.