It’s as pointless as the war on drugs. Drugs won and the draconian laws in a futile attempt to enforce prohibition just make people miserable. They poison their DNS and then what? Hop on a VPN and you can be from anywhere and use any DNS server. All the traffic from the pirate content undernet is basically between VPN providers at this point.

What made piracy come down? Plentiful availability of content at reasonable prices. What happened when the streaming market fragmented and content houses went to walled gardens? Piracy resurged.

I don’t like the decision either, but the point you make (tech-savvy people can bypass it) doesn’t acknowledge the fact that you don’t need to block 100% of users to have an effective measure. Most people don’t know how to use a vpn, or even that it exists.

Additionally, VPNs aren’t the panacea many paint them to be, and I seriously wish that stopped. There’s nothing stopping a VPN provider from sharing your data, and governments can ban VPNs. The true defence is encoding rights in laws, not circumvention.

You can even build a Great Firewall. You can ban encryption, and mandate that the house walls must be made transparent to ensure no criminal activities could hide within.

The question is whether the societal cost of that is worth the societal benefits.

I would add as an indirect reply to the poster you’re replying to, that most people know about VPNs because of exactly the point you make. Loads of VPN businesses are out there and they’re advertising in the mainstream about how they protect you from hackers, your ISP, ambiguous WiFi shenanigans, etc. Those businesses have made VPNs fairly common and point-and-click easy to use. Even where they use the same protocols (IPsec, OpenVPN, WireGuard, et al) that you’d use as a technical person, they’ve wrapped them in mom-and-pop GUIs to make them accessible to the masses.

Gonna be a headache and a half for companies once all of their VPNs are banned. Guess it's back to the office for all of us.

Now that free unblocking/vpn apps are a tap away I'd disagree any tech-savviness is needed - just a little motivation.

Plus anyone who's watched sponsored youtube videos in the past 5+ years has definitely heard of VPNs.

> Hop on a VPN and you can be from anywhere and use any DNS server.

You don't need a VPN to change your DNS server. I hope...

DNS servers are anycasted. You hit the closest one routing wise. 1.1.1.1 and 8.8.8.8 most likely have poisoned records where required to. If you want to use them and not have domain poisoning you need a VPN.

There are thousands of other DNS servers out there, public and private. France (or whoever) isn't poisoning every random open DNS server in Kansas or whatever. I can even set up a new one right now on my VPS too for like 1 dollar a month.

I agree with you. They never learn anything.

They have learned that there is lobbying / campaign support money to be made off the industry's delusion that piracy can be "quashed". They are acting rationally, just not in your interest.

I will too, just not in their interests.

And the cycle will repeat.

Imagine the amount of funds we would have for better support and rehabilitation of drug victims...if we just use the funds spent on the futile attempt to beat digital piracy.

> as pointless as the war on drugs. Drugs won

Not the best argument amidst a global wave of recriminalisation. The war on drugs was a disaster. But decriminalisation didn’t work either; at the very least, the way it was done was deeply unpopular. The correct analogy might be Prohibition, not the modern war on drugs.

We can thank Canal+ for collating a nice list of streaming websites, for those it might interest.

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I don't usually use VPN on my personal computer, but my home-network pihole is always in a VPN (to denmark currently). I even put some firewall rules to block my pihole from sending traffic to any other network interface besides the VPN interface. So if the VPN goes down my DNS goes down for the whole household, but doesn't affect things like voice chats and active streaming.

Just an idea for french network geeks who don't want to be behind a VPN 24/7

Can't wait for the day when people just start installing recursive resolvers on their computers -- or even better, when ISPs start doing it on their routers. Which I could totally imaging happening on a future version of the Freebox router of French ISP Free.fr.

Then Canal+ and co would have to go after the websites again, instead of going after easily identifiable public DNS servers again. That would be fun to see.

Agreed, except they might go after ISPs who can poison/drop recursive queries.

Or just force them to block IPs; they don't care about collateral damage: https://torrentfreak.com/piracy-shield-blacks-out-tech-news-...

this is why we need DoT and DoH everywhere.

If my resolver can connect using DoT or DoH all the way up to the root servers then ISP cannot intercept or poison it..

And making ISP block the IPs is the correct way to approach this problem..

Not sure where my DNS from my ISP (Zen in UK) but nothing is ever blocked or broken. I’ve stayed away from the big providers because of their target size.

except many ISP are know to hijack DNS queries when the domain does not exist..

Others are using DNS data to build customer profiles and then profit out of it..

This is what caused people to turn to big providers..

I have my own recursive resolver that i host in a VPS and my local dns server connect to it via DoT..

Now my ISP cannot capture any information using DNS, cannot hijack or poison my requests..