DeSopa

DeSopa: DNS Evasion to Stop Organized Predators in America

SECTIONS:
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I.   ABOUT
II.  HOW TO USE
III. KNOWN LIMITATIONS
IV.  SPECIAL THANKS

I. ABOUT:
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Powerful special interests are attempting to force legislation
for tighter control of the Internet, because they believe such
legislation will preserve their power. The bill they have
sponsored, SOPA, not only has severe consequences for the
Internet, it doesn't even achieve their objectives. SOPA, under
the innocuous banner "Stop Online Piracy Act" will have the
following repercussions:

 1) Make organizations, such as Google, Facebook, Digg and Reddit
    liable to censor user generated content. Censoring billions of
    records for billions of possible violations is expensive. One
    of these companies has already stated that it may be forced to
    shut down as a result of the financial burden caused by SOPA.
    Other companies may have to scale back the services they offer
    for free, or otherwise charge for them.
 2) Provide well financed trade groups such the MPAA and RIAA with
    leverage to shape the future of the internet for the benefit of
    the organizations they represent, by threatening closure of
    services that they believe are not in their interest.
 3) Create a high barrier to entry for start-ups and a rough legal
    landscape for small businesses. If SOPA was implemented 10 years
    ago, there is a high probability that we would not have many of
    the online services we take for granted such as YouTube and Pandora.
 4) The probable dissolution of DNS caused by the natural circumvention
    of blocked sites will result in wide array of security problems,
    bleeding the digital economy of integrity.

The internet creates market efficiencies that forces industries to adapt,
thus pushing forward progress for humanity as a whole. Public freedoms
should not be curtailed and the Internet, built by the masses, should not
be destroyed, so that a powerful few may have a false sense of security
that their business models are sustainable without technological evolution.

This program is a proof of concept that SOPA will not help prevent piracy.
The program, implemented as a Firefox extension, simply contacts offshore
domain name resolution services to obtain the IP address for any desired
website, and accesses those websites directly via IP. Similar offshore
resolution services will eventually maintain their own cache of websites,
without blacklisting, in order to meet the demand created by SOPA.

If SOPA is implemented, thousands of similar and more innovative programs
and services will sprout up to provide access to the websites that people
frequent. SOPA is a mistake. It does not even technically help solve the
underlying problem, as this software illustrates. What it will do is give
undue leverage to predatory organizations, cripple innocent third party
websites, severely dampen digital innovation and negatively impact the
integrity and security of the Internet.

Please bring this to the attention of congressmen responsible for voting
on SOPA. SOPA will not technically achieve its stated objectives. Anyone
voting in favor of it is morally responsible for destroying the freedoms,
innovation, hard work and aspirations of many.


II. HOW TO USE:
---------------
 - Enable the Status/Add-on bar if it is not enabled (View->Toolbars->Add-on bar)
 - Click on the yellow DeSopa button in the Status/Add-on bar, at the bottom
   of the browser window, to access websites by IP.
 - Click the green DeSopa button to switch back to DNS resolution.


III. KNOWN LIMITATIONS:
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 - Does not resolve subdomains.
 - Can only resolve tabs one at a time.
 - First time resolution is a bit slow because three services are checked serially
   and compared. This may be done in parallel in the future, or a trusted single
   source may be used.


IV. SPECIAL THANKS:
-------------------
 - Tamer Rizk
 - Ralf D. Kloth
 - Craig Small
 - Anouar Adlani

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