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Show HN: Ideas to work around SOPA
10 points by zackzackzack on Dec 17, 2011 | hide | past | favorite | 3 comments
Over breakfast, I thought about how to circumvent SOPA (as I understand it).

Key problem: SOPA allows the government to tell DNS servers to stop linking certain website addresses to their IPs.

Abstract Solution: Remove the need for DNS servers in the majority of cases.

Idea 1: Have a list of IP addresses stored in each browser so they don't have to be resolved. Just have an associative array somewhere that contains a bunch of really popular websites. Every time the browser auto upgrades, it updates and expands its list of IPs. This could be done as a plugin for most modern browsers.

Idea 2: Congress is smarter than to try and take down facebook. Every 15 year old girl in the country would be marching on Washington within a week. Make a facebok app that has easily clickable IP's to popular websites.

Throwing them out here to see a.) if I understand the problem right and b.) these ideas could work. They would be limited by the size of the objects people could save, so it might only cover the top 1000 websites.



What you are saying is essentially "Start independent DNS servers without filtering, and get browsers to use them by default."

It is the obvious 'solution,' but somehow I think the answer would be more filtering, probably on a lower level.


My question is how could they filter further down than we are able to work with? Wouldn't it get to the point where they would just have to say "Unplug the servers or else?"

I am the first to admit I don't know much about the stack here, I haven't looked much into anything deeper than DNS resolving the IP's with http. What would the next level of filtering be?


They don't have to take down Facebook to take down one app in particular.

It might work better as a set of browser plugins for the popular browsers (well, Chrome and Mozilla at least).




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