Dangerous Meddling

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//Disclaimer
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 Before anyone gets mad, yes, I did actually read SOPA.  Admittedly I didn't understand all of it, but I got a fair amount.  I was not about to get politically involved without knowing the details from the source.  So if you disagree, that's fine, but don't try and go the route of "you've just been brainwashed by [insert something here]."  If you would like to read SOPA, here is the official copy of the bill:  link
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 I try very hard to avoid discussing politics via electronic means.  Simply put, I find it horrifically ineffective since people tend to be "bold" (aka. combative and disrespectful) when they can hide behind either the mask of anonymity or don't have to confront their opposition face to face.  That being said, I've been very politically involved these past few weeks thanks to the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and it's Senate counterpart, the Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act of 2011 (PIPA).  These two bills were introduced in an effort to combat the very real issue of online piracy which, as it turns out, is extremely difficult to stop (surprise!).

Now what about these bills has me up in arms you ask?  The fact that they grant the media industry power to censor the web within US borders, grant the US Government power to attack any group that provides means to bypass filters (you know, like the ones used by democratic activists to bypass Internet filtering methods in countries like China and Iran), will cripple the internet, inhibit the growth of new companies, and prohibit the spread of new ideas... all without even denting the pirating world.  Sound scary?  It is.  But what is even more frightening is that the bills author, congressman Lamar Smith, and the supporters refuse to listen to the tech industry giants (Google, Facebook, Amazon, Wikipedia, YouTube, PayPal, LinkedIn, Mozilla, Reddit, Twitter, Yahoo!, and literally hundreds of other major players in the data communications world) when they come out in open opposition saying that these bills would destroy the internet as we know it.
 
But don't worry.  Smith assures us all that those companies don't know what they are talking about.


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// How it Works
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As I've talked with people about computers, one thing I've realized is that most people see the computer as, what programmers call, a Black Box.  That is to say, they see what goes into the box, they see what comes out of the box, and they have no idea what happens inside the box.  To understand what these bills are trying to do, it would be helpful to understand a little bit about what is going on behind the scenes as you use the internet.  Lets go to the very basics:

One of Facebook's server rooms

Everything you see online is physically located somewhere in the world.  Every photo you've uploaded to Facebook is stored on a server, which--for our purposes here--we will define as a gigantic hard drive that knows how to talk to other computers.  In order to access those pictures of your friends cat, your computer has to go to the server, ask for them nicely, and the server has to agree to give it to you.

How does this communication between computer and server happen?  Well, if I asked you to go to Facebook's website (and thereby connect to Facebook's servers), how would you do it?  Odds are pretty good that you'd open up your favorite browser and type in, "www.facebook.com".  But did you know that, to your computer, asking it to find "www.facebook.com" is a lot like me asking you to meet me at my friend Jordan's house?  Do you know where Jordan's house is?  Probably not.  But what if I asked you to meet me at 48 South 300 West  Provo, UT?  Ah, now you could do it!  (FYI, that is the address of the Provo police station, so the joke is on you if you had some evil plan to rob my wonderful friend).  The difference is, for the first one you just had a name.  The second one, you actually had an address! Servers have addresses to! It's called an IP address.  An IP address is a unique series of numbers associated with a single server.  You've probably seen them before.  They look like this: 192.168.0.1.  THAT is how your computer is talking with the server.

Your computer gets this address by looking it up in a giant internet phonebook called a DNS Server.  You tell it the name of a place, it looks up the name and remembers the address.

Summary: 

www.facebook.com = name.  69.171.229.16 = address. (Actually, you can even open up a new window and type "http://69.171.229.16" and watch the magic happen).

 *Phew*!  Ok, now that you're a computer expert, you can understand one of the biggest problems with SOPA.

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//SOPA and You
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At it's core, SOPA's purpose is to cut off funding to "rouge sites" (sites that allegedly "engage in, enable or facilitate" infringement or "allegedly [are] taking or have taken steps to 'avoid confirming a high probability' of infringement") and to have them removed from the DNS Server (the phonebook from above).  This, in theory, will stop downloaders from getting to the files... only it won't.  Remember how you could get to Facebook by typing in the IP address directly?  Yep, same thing will work to get around these censorship blocks.  As long as someone somewhere is willing to share the IP address with downloaders (who, by the way, tend to be fairly tech savvy), they'll be able to get the files all the same.  Like I said before, it won't even dent the pirating world.  That being said lets look at what it could do if the MPAA decided to use the full power granted to them by SOPA:

Any website that provides access to copyrighted material is labeled as a rouge site.

That isn't my photo and I didn't ask for permission to use it.  Am I worried about it?  Not right now, no.  But lets pretend somebody had a blog that was being used to organize protests against Warner Brothers because... I don't know, it's discovered that they are responsible for the financial meltdown or something.  WB has the right and power to label www.blogger.com as a rouge site since they haven't been doing enough to stop me from posting such images.  *poof* The next time you go to check your blog (a blog that had nothing to do with my dubious practice of posting Harry Potter pictures AND had nothing to do with the protest), you're greeted with a screen like this:

The only way for you to get to Blogger is through the IP address.  Do you know what that address is?  Didn't think so.  Whats more, if WB sends a notice to Bloggers bank, the bank has 5 days to freeze Bloggers accounts completely.  Sure, Blogger could file a counter-notice, but good luck planning a sound legal defense in 5 days.

Any website that allows user contributions is at risk of being labeled a rouge site.  All it takes is for someone to feel that the website "isn't doing enough" to stop the links from being posted or goods from being sold.  A single judge issues the order (no trial by the way) and the site is wiped from existence to all who don't know it's actual address.  Do you think the early YouTube would have survived this?  I really doubt it!  To the right judge places like the early Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, and YouTube would all have looked like pirate havens.  SOPA supporters assure us that companies won't take advantage of this power to... oh I don't know, target competition...  Yet the bill hasn't even passed and Craigslist is already on the chopping block.  As it turns out, Monster--the company that makes ridiculously overpriced cables-- considers it a rouge site because people are selling their used cables.  That makes Craigslist an unauthorized distributor.

And this is all where it starts.  Who knows where it will go in a few years, or where other countries will take it while following in our footsteps.  This isn't a game.  We are honestly considering handing over the power to censor what information we have available to us! You know what the worst part of censorship is?  Neither do the people in Iran, China, or Syria (which, by the way, use this very same DNS blacklisting technique to filter the web).

And the problems go on, by the way.  This bill fiddles with the very design of the internet.  That is one of the reasons why Kaspersky Labs (one of the major anti-virus developers) is opposed to it; they claim it will open up a host of major issues that current software doesn't defend against.

Ok.  I've got to stop before I get too worked up here!  Bottom line?  Although I believe companies have the right to go after pirates and those who distribute illegal warez, I am adamantly opposed to the methods suggested to do so here.  I consider this the equivalent of using a howitzer to remove a sliver.  The damage caused by the bill will far outweigh any possible benefits it brings.  I hope you'll all read more about SOPA, form your own opinion, and share that opinion with your congressional representative.

For more information about SOPA (from the oposition side), you're welcome to visit www.americancensorship.org