Technology

When I turn off my Adguard Home DNS in Sweden, many sites are suddenly blocked. People, get your own DNS server. You can set it as private dns via https with letsencrypt certificates and be safe even on your mobile devices.

There appears to be no legitimate end to this one, which is wild

As long as DNS blocking stops some subset of users from reaching pirate sites, the court ruled, it’s “proportionate.” Under that line of thinking, any measure that inconveniences even a fraction of would-be pirates is legally justified, no matter how much collateral damage it causes for everyone else.

The court’s core reasoning — that any entity technically capable of blocking must do so, that circumvention doesn’t make blocking disproportionate, and that the “neutral and passive” function of an intermediary is irrelevant — creates a legal framework that can reach basically anything. If a DNS resolver can be conscripted because it’s “in a position to help,” what about browsers? What about operating systems? What about CDNs, or cloud hosting providers, or certificate authorities? The logic has no brake pedal. Every layer of the internet stack is, in some sense, “in a position to help” block access to content. The question the court’s reasoning cannot answer is: where does it end?

Left off their list is hardware, should your router and modem deny IP requests to known servers? Even if they're on shared hardware? What about the networking card in your PC?

Honestly shocked that cflare said no considering their entire business model

I didn’t see anything in there about forcing authoritative TLD DNS servers to censor SOA records of disfavored domains, and it’s quite easy to run your own recursive resolver at home. It’s trivial, for example, to configure pihole to use unbound to do recursive resolving locally, and of course that gives you a bunch of ad blocking as well (although not nearly as good as UBO).

I wonder if this ruling will lead to an uptick in French usage of pihole and similar projects. It would be funny to see a future lawsuit from an advertiser or their trade group arguing against the copyright folks.