Throw a roadblock out and a new route is recalculated. So it is with DNS. Add blocks in the ICANN systems, and people work their way around them.

The most common way until now has been a browser plugin, like MAFIAAFire, but alternate DNS systems are starting to become more popular. One of those, OpenNIC, is looking to capitalise on that with its new .pirate TLD (top level domain).

Registration takes just minutes, and then your new .pirate domain will be accessible by anyone using one of OpenNIC’s many DNS servers. That’s the big drawback at present.

However, the OpenNIC project is not just limited to .pirate (or dotPirate, as they’ve called it). They also have .geek, .oss (as in open source software) and .parody, among others.

The man behind the dotPirate project is Travis McCrea, Deputy Leader of the Canadian Pirate Party.

“While the world gets smaller and more connected through advancements of the Internet and web technology, every day our ability to have a free flow of information becomes more and more threatened by countries who wish to censor and control the communication platform which brings us all together,” McCrea told TorrentFreak.

“This is something that we cannot let happen, and why the dotPirate Foundation, … is proud to announce the launch of the new Top Level Domain (TLD) .pirate on the OpenNIC root system.”

To prevent abuse, some of the more popular domains have already been reserved (including torrentfreak.pirate and thepiratebay.pirate). As an extra bonus, people using blockaid.me for their DNS will already be able to access .pirate domains – they added support for OpenNIC over the weekend.

For those using OpenDNS, the provider announced a new service for Windows users last week. DNSCrypt, previously only available for Mac OSX and Linux, is a technology that encrypts all DNS traffic between an Internet user and the OpenDNS service. It can be downloaded here.

.Pirate domains can be registered for free at dotpirate.me.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

From residing almost exclusively in the awareness of computer engineers and nerds, recent attempts by various copyright holders to censor sites such as The Pirate Bay and introduce even more broad powers with the introduction of the SOPA legislation in the US, the existence and mechanisms of the Internet’s DNS have now broken through into the mainstream.

In a response to growing attempts at censorship, various alternative DNS systems have been proposed with an emphasis on those that can’t be meddled with by the authorities. The latest, called ODDNS, comes out of France.

As its name suggests, ODDNS (Open and Decentralized DNS) is an open and decentralized DNS system running on the P2P (Peer-to-Peer) model. It’s creator, web developer Jimmy Rudolf, told PCinpact he invented the system with two specific aims in mind.

The first, and of most interest to people fighting censorship, is to “show governments that it is not possible to prevent people from talking.”

The second, of interest to anyone who owns and maintain their own domain names, is to take back control of them. “I find it absurd to have to regularly pay for a domain name,” Rudolf explained.

ODDNS is an application which allows everyone running the software to share information about domain names with each other, a bit like how a P2P network functions. ODDNS can supplement or even replace regular DNS.

Because domain names and related IP addresses are shared among peers in the network, they can no longer be censored. Furthermore, buying a domain name from a registrar is no longer required since people running ODDNS can create and maintain their own.

Still under development, as expected the source code to ODDNS is licensed under GNU GPLv3. PCinpact reports that the current ODDNS website will be updated next week and the first beta release of the software will follow shortly after.

Of course the success of the project will sit on the developers’ ability to overcome the technical hurdles and, crucially, if they can encourage enough people to come on board and stay on board. The desire to stick with this kind of system will be driven by need so more censorship will become this and similar projects’ lifeblood.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

“There is nothing new about the techniques of domain blocking used to target criminals in the Stop Online Piracy Act,” the MPAA’s Paul Hortenstine wrote.

“They are currently used to protect consumers and combat all kinds of harmful behavior including spam, phishing, malware, viruses, copyright infringement and other forms of Internet crime,” he added.

But anyone with an understanding of the file-sharing space during the last decade will know that what SOPA domain blocking will actually bring is a whole lot more phishing, scams, malware and viruses. And here’s why.

Once SOPA kicks in, millions of people will suddenly lose access to potentially hundreds, maybe even thousands of websites. Since people generally do not like being restricted online, particularly when they are stopped from doing something they were previously allowed to partake in, the market for circumvention solutions, such as VPNs, will go into overdrive.

Unusually, Hortenstine references a recent one in his article – the MAFIAAFire Firefox plug in. Even more surprisingly, its inclusion in the blog post actually shows the tool in a positive light, in an attempt to show that domain blocking workarounds don’t always have to “break the Internet”.

Indeed, the client created by Newzbin2 to nullify ISP blocks in the UK also achieves its purpose without breaking the Internet, but already we are witnessing the start of a trend – third party software being made available to counter a growing problem – web censorship.

Now, we’re pretty sure that the MAFIAAFire and Newzbin2 people can be trusted not to stab web users in the back, but what will happen as soon as sites start getting censored under SOPA is that software created by Gods-knows-who will come onto the market with grand promises of re-enabling access to sites.

Some of these new breeds of tools will do as they say and will definitely come with fairly innocent adware to generate some revenue for their creators. Many, however, will screw over anyone who dares to install them. Malware, scamware, viruses and phishing attacks will all play their part. These practices have been happening to a certain extent in the file-sharing space for a decade already, but domain censorship will give the conmen a much-needed boost.

Contrary to claims that domain blocking won’t affect trust in the Internet, users seeking to legitimately access domains that have done no wrong (DaJaZ1 anyone?) or that are entirely legal in their own countries outside the United States, will be redirected to sites that look just like the previously blocked ones, but with nefarious tricks up their sleeves.

There are already many ‘fake’ sites around, such as those trying to pass themselves off as The Pirate Bay, but since they aren’t the real deal the amount of traffic they currently get is limited. Should the real Pirate Bay disappear from Google, these fake sites will appear at the top of the search giant’s results, and pull in a hell of a lot of money. Real Pirate Bay is free to use, these others require credit cards.

There is a huge mess just waiting to happen and if SOPA passes we won’t have to wait long to experience it. The Internet may not completely break, but it won’t be a safer place, that’s guaranteed.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.