Titan Network: SOPA Blackout

As has been said earlier, you clearly don't understand what is at stake.

Thanks for reminding me there is always one ^_^.

I completely forgot about that guy.

Who let the civilian into our super party?

Congratulations. You not only missed the point by about a billion miles, you also broke my Facepalm page. I do not possess a facepalm with enough force to quantify the amount of [pancake] you have going on there!

Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

Which really defines the underlying problem. If the representatives actually represented the people, legislation like this would never even be introduced. It's painfully obvious that, instead, they represent whoever pays them the most money.

Well said.

I have to give a nod to Zill if that is from him as a company stance, very admirable. More reason to hang my proverbial tights right here in Paragon. Both the city and the Studio

I hear that it's bliss.

Is that true?

Originally Posted by Dechs Kaison See, it's gems like these that make me check Claws' post history every once in a while to make sure I haven't missed anything good lately.

SOPA and PIPA, by name, are American bills, albeit ones that would block Americans from accessing overseas sites on the US Attorney General's say-so that there is supposedly infringing content somewhere on the site.

But no, it doesn't stop there. One of things found in the Cablegate dump on WikiLeaks was the Obama administration has been threatening every other country in the world with harsh trade sanctions if they don't pass compatible legislation by the end of this year.

The big names must have moved to the 18th to make it united rather than spread to 2 days... kinda lame imo that Reddit did that, but whatever.

The above is why even though support for SOPA itself is waning in the house, it's important to not back down now. PIPA is still on track in the Senate, and both bills do still have supporters and a lot of lobbyists whispering in their ears. We have to make it perfectly clear to our representatives that this kind of overreaching and biased legislation is unacceptable in any form.

Otherwise, it may be shelved for now, only to quietly reappear in a year or two under an inconspicuous name (or worse, attached to another bill) with the hope that no one notices until it's too late. It wouldn't be the first time this has happened; see earlier in the thread for examples.

I applaud Paragon Studios for their position on the issue. Despite being in the entertainment industry, such a law would leave them in a vulnerable position. A major comic publisher or movie studio could decide to hold them liable for characters created by their players, and unlike now where they have some legal recourse and bargaining chips, their sites could be simply blocked off without due process. This is especially alarming with Free-to-Play where anyone can create an account and make xx.Wulver1ne.xx. Name / concept enforcement and genericing would have to be increased from "best effort" to "draconian" in order to comply, assuming the resources even exist to do that.

I'm trying not to soapbox too much, but it's great to see how much support there is in this thread. Even though Titan Network is a fairly small site in the grand scheme of things and is unlikely to have a major impact by itself, we feel it's important to make a stand nonetheless.

it's the American version of what the Chinese did and many people worry that if American follows through, other countries will follow.

WARNING: TECH AHEAD

When you request a webpage from a server, you send something that looks like this:

GET /newreply.php HTTP/1.1
Host: boards.cityofheroes.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 Chrome/16.0.912.75 Safari/535.7
Referer: http://www.google.com/

I simplified it for our purposes, but that's a valid request. It contains these bits of information:

"GET" the file "newreply.php" from the server. The web browser is asking this page from the domain "boards.cityofheroes.com", using "Chrome" as a browser, and the last page it visited was "www.google.com".

The part that matters to us is the "Host" bit. In this field, the browser tells the server that the user wants a page located at that particular domain and subdomain, boards.cityofheroes.com.

Why is this important? A lot of web hosts (most, really) share the same IP address with a bunch of different sites. This simplifies things from the server side, and reduces costs. But because of this, that IP cannot be mapped to a single site. When you enter the IP in the address bar, you either get an error, or you are directed to the main page of the hosting service. Without the "Host" field to tell the server what domain you are trying to access, the host has no way to know which of the many sites it hosts should be sent to you.

So how do you access those sites in the event that DNS is crippled and doesn't give you an IP for a domain? Simple: every operating system has a file named "hosts" in which you can enter a domain and an IP, an the OS will use that information, without asking a DNS. In Windows, that file is located in c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts. Go ahead, open it with Notepad, it won't break anything. You will most likely only see a single line:

127.0.0.1 localhost

That means that any program that tries to contact the server name "localhost" will be directed to the IP 127.0.0.1, which is the IP of your own computer (always; that IP is reserved to always mean "this computer").

Google's IP address is 74.125.229.177. So, you can add this line to the hosts file:

74.125.229.177 leandroisawesome.com

And save it. Now, if you try to go to leandroisawesome.com, it will load Google! That domain name is unregistered and doesn't actually exist. You can enter any valid server/domain name in there, and you will be directed to Google when you enter it in your browser, because you manually mapped Google's IP to that server.

So, if DNS were to block the City of Heroes website, all you would need to do is add this:

64.25.35.207 cityofheroes.com

And you'll be perfectly able to access the site again, even if it shared an IP with a bunch of other websites, because you will be accessing the file by typing in its domain name -- and thus, sending the correct "Host" header that the server needs to work.

This is, by the way, why the DNS provisions in SOPA are a major problem for legit sites but at most a minor nuisance to pirates. There are already addons for Chrome and Firefox that redirect people trying to go to a bunch of pirate sites to the proper IP in the event of a DNS meltdown. Messing with DNS will not stop piracy.

Thanks for that explanation ^.^

So what we this reveals if you think it through is that the only thing that the DNS thing does if everyone has work arounds for them is that you are left with a system of easy look up and referral crippled...Not so much access.

Basically all links would have to be re-structured so that they'd have the ip and domain in them to refer someone to a particular site. And that handles the access (though its a lot more hacker friendly).

The problem comes from how do I find a website that I don't know exists or not... For example if I wanted to look up web comics or information on comics... right now I can just type in web comics... and i can get a whole list of web comics, but once the DNS thing happens someone could say "THAT'S COPYRIGHTED!!!!" and suddenly a site vanishes. So what if i want to look up Furry Web Comics? You're thinking well how does that correlate? The answer is in the abuse that can happen. I can make the claim that something is copyright infringing, whether it's true or not, because due process is not followed someone could in theory remove all the web comics that have furries in them if they wanted to from searches and then you'd never be able to find them and those sites would die.

What's worse though is that I've heard some places that this process is started by paying for it, but I could be wrong, but if this is the case then it's not only just giving power to those with money it is literally creating a ruling class straight out (we can discuss whether there is one now or not but not here) and pretty much says "You can't have these laws enforced for you because you aren't wealthy enough" Think about that... Law paid for by money? That's just wrong.

Given that the Obama administration has recently come out against the bill as it currently stands, if that were true before it probably isn't now.

>.> I don't want to be political, but anyone that buys that hasn't been paying attention... Obama hasn't got a good track record of following through on what he says. For example he said the Guantanamo Bay would be shut down as it is a travesty and unconstitutional and he said that the NDAA which pretty much allows the government to bring soldiers on US soil and incarcerate people for life without trial would not be signed by him...well... Guantanamo Bay is still open and the NDAA was signed by him. So him saying something has no meaning to me.

Yeah I was pretty forgiving of him up tot he whole "I won't sign this bill...oops I signed it" thing with NDAA. Will not reelect.

The proper answer to this is "Who cares?"

Anonymous is a bunch of script kiddies, thieves and vandals hiding behind a Robin Hood persona and some vague trappings of civil disobedience.

I'm sure there are individuals with high-minded goals in the group. But they're overshadowed by those with far shadier purposes.

Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.

Personally I don't vote because it's pointless to. Could go into Politcal philosophy as to why but someone would say something, but I can't really see why anyone would vote this year as it is a vote between Obama or Romney more or less and both are probably near the bottom of the barrel... only shining because the lunatics around them... Really wish that whole 2 term thing was removed so we could go back to Clinton...

And worse, between the US and several countries, we have a legislative "race to the bottom" going on. One country passes an ever-more-draconian bill, and all the countries it's doing business with or have treaties with begin similar legislation designed to bring it in-line, but winds up being ever more draconian.

So all this crap piles up over time. And to be sure, it's an impressive pile of crap. But it's still crap.

Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.

Just remember.

POLITICIAN.

They're not even dependable when dead.

Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.

...

I

...

You

...

I'm just going to shut up and not comment on this because what I'd say would be completely inflammatory.

Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.