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Google, Cloudflare & Cisco Will Poison DNS to Stop Piracy Block Circumvention * TorrentFreak
(torrentfreak.com)
this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2024
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Call me a Luddite, call me ignorant, the simple answer is we don’t need to solve the Byzantine generals problem for privacy because we are able to work indecently I.e. if it’s floss we can compile ourselves. I don’t need to trust anyone when I can vet the code and roll my own with it.
TL;DR: the Byzantine general problem isn’t a problem.
It isn't a problem when you're just running software on your own computer and have no need to communicate with anyone else.
But that's not the case for domain names. It wouldn't work at all if we each had our own private little parallel universe, it defeats the whole purpose of a domain name system. We all need to agree on which names are associated with which IP addresses.
I'm not trying to promote blockchains as a one-size-fits-all universal solution for every problem. That's silly, no technology is a universal solution for every problem. Blockchains are very good at solving a specific subset of problems, and DNS names IMO is one of those. When you need everyone to agree on a particular fact and you don't want to designate some particular authority to be "in charge" of validating that fact then that's exactly what a blockchain is for.
…what? I’m not sure you understand what I mean by compiling on my end. Why would that preclude my being able to communicate with other people?
Let's say that your computer has the IP address 1.2.3.4. When you register for a DNS name, let's say bolexforsoup.com, you tell the DNS registrar to associate that name with your IP address. So later when my computer wants to communicate with your computer it asks the DNS system "what's the IP address for bolexforsoup.com?" And it tells me "1.2.3.4", which I can then use for communicating. The DNS service is not something you're running yourself, it's a service that someone else is running. That's the problem here. Your computer can be completely 100% FLOSS, you can be a master programmer who can manipulate your computer at will, but if my computer wants to talk to bolexforsoup.com the only way it can know the IP address for it is to ask DNS for it. That happens outside of your control. As we're seeing in this case with anti-piracy laws, this is something that an outside force - a government, a company, maybe even a lone malicious hacker - can interfere with if they want to stop me from reaching your computer.