A central theme of Walled Culture the book (free digital versions available) and this blog is that the copyright industry is never satisfied. Now matter how long the term of copyright, publishers a…
Internet infrastructure in the US in particular isn’t a monolith like that. A “core router” is a high capacity router in an autonomous system that will usually communicate with other core routers in other systems, owned by different and often competing entities
That’s not exactly how it works. There is no specific core, all web traffic doesn’t go through one centralized location; it gets routed through the most direct route on each if these routers’ routing tables
Torrents are already very hard to block. You don’t actually need a tracker, because all modern torrent clients support DHT (distributed hash table). You only need some way to get the initial hash for a torrent, so that’s where trackers are still useful, but once you’re connected to the swarm, you can only be blocked if the entire swarm is blocked.
Tracking though… It’s too easy to get IP addresses for the entire swarm and I don’t see how you could ever fix that. Tor doesn’t really solve that issue either, it just moves it to places where you won’t get in legal trouble or to people who don’t mind getting in legal trouble, a bit like VPN providers.
I wonder what the legality would be of seeding the binary difference between the wikipedia.zim and a copy of the wild robot. But I digress… We could probably bolt on something I2P like to torrent, have everything pass through multiple nodes. I fear the best we could ever work out would be plausible deniability.
My point is, if you’re blocked traversing the routers across the sea you’re not reaching those other continents. That’s a bit of a simplistic way of looking at it, given satellite internet and stuff but my point is it is not that incredibly hard to block the routes. Especially with BGP. BGP on the internet also has some bodies regulating route ASN reputation, so those could be potentially null routed.
Anyways, I clearly have no clue what I’m talking about so I’ll stop there.
You can poison the routes within the BGP core to send traffic into a black hole. Basically, just tell everyone you have the best path, and they will send traffic to you.
There have been instances of this at the international level with adversary nations “accidentally” routing all traffic through them first. It can be done to a degree that it makes life difficult. They won’t be able to prevent you from finding a VPN that pops you out near a router that refuses the poisoned routes however- not without a global agreement at least.
Funny thing about the internet is we can just find a different route. Fucking idiots.
Core routers are the core.
Internet infrastructure in the US in particular isn’t a monolith like that. A “core router” is a high capacity router in an autonomous system that will usually communicate with other core routers in other systems, owned by different and often competing entities
That’s not exactly how it works. There is no specific core, all web traffic doesn’t go through one centralized location; it gets routed through the most direct route on each if these routers’ routing tables
Also, I’m pretty sure they can’t do shit about encapsulated data, such as VPN traffic.
You can’t even truly read what’s inside of an SSL packet. They probably want to fuck with the routes around torrent trackers.
There are always ways around, tor, retro share, i2p. I kind of wish we’d find a harder to track version of torrent.
Torrents are already very hard to block. You don’t actually need a tracker, because all modern torrent clients support DHT (distributed hash table). You only need some way to get the initial hash for a torrent, so that’s where trackers are still useful, but once you’re connected to the swarm, you can only be blocked if the entire swarm is blocked.
Tracking though… It’s too easy to get IP addresses for the entire swarm and I don’t see how you could ever fix that. Tor doesn’t really solve that issue either, it just moves it to places where you won’t get in legal trouble or to people who don’t mind getting in legal trouble, a bit like VPN providers.
I wonder what the legality would be of seeding the binary difference between the wikipedia.zim and a copy of the wild robot. But I digress… We could probably bolt on something I2P like to torrent, have everything pass through multiple nodes. I fear the best we could ever work out would be plausible deniability.
Well, Cloudflare.
My point is, if you’re blocked traversing the routers across the sea you’re not reaching those other continents. That’s a bit of a simplistic way of looking at it, given satellite internet and stuff but my point is it is not that incredibly hard to block the routes. Especially with BGP. BGP on the internet also has some bodies regulating route ASN reputation, so those could be potentially null routed.
Anyways, I clearly have no clue what I’m talking about so I’ll stop there.
You can poison the routes within the BGP core to send traffic into a black hole. Basically, just tell everyone you have the best path, and they will send traffic to you.
There have been instances of this at the international level with adversary nations “accidentally” routing all traffic through them first. It can be done to a degree that it makes life difficult. They won’t be able to prevent you from finding a VPN that pops you out near a router that refuses the poisoned routes however- not without a global agreement at least.