‘And all for what?’

to control the Internet, to preserve their way of life, to keep the exorbitant prices they charge, the refusal to adapt and try to force people to continue buying little plastic disks.

Prediction: the final version of whatever passes Congress will drop nearly all of the network technical stuff — after all, the government is already seizing domain names in bulk quantities, and judges are already ordering search engines to delete results.

What will go into law is the financial blockade — it will be trivial to command that Visa, Paypal, MasterCard etc. stop doing business with a site, and probably this will include advertisers as well.

The effectiveness of a financial blockade strategy has already been demonstrated against Wikileaks (where the US has marshalled private firms to destroy a journalism enterprise, but that’s another rant about the police state which is already here).

Google is already making big public hints about “follow the money”, indicating their support for the financial strategy.

This will have much the same effect of strangling future net developments as the full-monty version of SOPA would.

So might as well drop all the technical objections: it can be done. And as usual, you guys mistake an admittedly very low risk of being caught dodging DNS blocking with the fact that it will soon have a very large /potential/ down side, instead of none. As with your mistaken thinking on HADOPI 3 strikes, it’ll turn out to have a disproportionately large chilling effect on pirating.

You guys all style yourself intrepid hackers, but just ask yourself IF you’ll use those work arounds after you see a few examples made.

And yet again, I ain’t /for/ SOPA and whatever attendant problems it makes. But the industry reaction — and further escalation — is absolutely predictable and enough justified that Congress is easily swayed to yet more fascism.

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Think this more or less on topic: Know why I’m not much worried about SOPA? … Read Glenn Greenwald today for the latest actual danger to liberties: the entire world is to be “legally” treated as a battleground with the military arbitrarily nabbing people, no charge, no trial, no rights. The gov’t is on verge making all your premises of due process and reasonableness obsolete.

Greenwald writes poignantly: “To be perfectly honest, I just couldn?t get myself worked up over a bill that, with some exceptions, does little more than formally recognize and codify what our Government is already doing.”

So, continue to focus on that you’ll still be able to illegally download porn and games: lets me mourn less for the country to see how empty-headed you kids are.

Dear Mafiaafire,

I don’t get to ask these kinds of questions on other sites like ars or TF, but I was wanting to know if you have considered that putting a publicly available proxy list into your plugin may result in people using your plugin for “other questionable things” besides accessing TPB or other sites. Are these proxies taken from a private listing that can only be accessed one-at-a-time by clients or is it taking proxies at random from a large proxy listing site?