The EU Wants Its Own DNS Resolver That Can Block 'Unlawful' Traffic,TorrentFreak
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"Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it." -Mark Twain
After all, it’s EU’s freedom which is at stake.
Worse even, it is typically a case where EU can loose some legal power to the European court of human right. Logically, the ECHR should have primacy over the EUCJ, but technically and legally, it does not yet. Any case as broad as this, if the EUCJ is forced by the parliement to enforce it against human rights, would trigger a shit storm, and the EUCJ would either have to bow to the ECHR, or a new constitution would have to be drafted and voted on, and _that_ would be an even worse shitstorm.
But freedom is only a part of human rights, there is also 'equality' in front of the law, and if you admit one exception for non-defense related reasons, you'll get censored by the echr too.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38109494 ("Last Chance to fix eIDAS: Secret EU law threatens Internet security", 299 comments)
That's with several major wars going on, including talks of nuclear escalation, worsening crime stats (in the US, but also elsewhere in the west), poverty on the rise (and thus hunger), and after the COVID pandemic toll (regarding diseases)...
Or I’m actually the one doing that here (and your comment is sarcastic as well)?
kamma could have written something like "the EU should solve <really difficult problems> before concerning itself with <simpler problenm>" but that would have made clear that the really difficult problems are really difficult. The sarcasm is rhetorical device to distract the readers so they won't pay attention to the different levels of difficulty. Handwaving, basically, and the handwaving was a little too strong and distracted some readers too much.
That's why we want attention on the hard problems instead of million small insignificant non-problems.
If you've been long enough on internet forums, you'll see every inanity you can think of as "of course it's sarcasm" being presented sincerely.
Also, I've read too many posts/comments of the "the world has never been better" variety (usually citing Hans Rosling or some tech-bro favorite like Pinker), that sincerely push similar ideas of the state of the world in 2024.
It's really possible to not be exposed to war, crime, poverty, hunger if you are living in a closed tech-bubble (which is more likely on Hackernews).
I think about Googlers in Zurich for example, or a VP @ Apple, they can really be disconnected from the other parts of the world.
Apparently not, from other comments. But then I don't really know what point is being made here.
You can't "fix" war or famine or disease in a faraway country, really. You can try to impact with stuff like aid, or sanctions, or cooperation, but the actual impact on the ground can vary wildly.
I want a digital ID, it would save me a lot of time and would be extremely practical (and it's already technically possible anyway, it would be a waste not to have it).
> Fix the damn war happening right on the border and the resulting energy crisis (I don't mean by buying Russian product)
Oh, just "fix" them, right? Click on the Fix button in the "Diagnose issues" wizard? Why didn't you say that earlier, if only EU leaders knew it was that easy!
The EU is doing a lot to help Ukraine, with funds for the military and humanitarian sides, and donations of lots of equipment. European armies cannot get involved without risking escalation to nuclear war, which nobody wants, so I can hardly see what more you can ask them to do.
A for the energy crisis, guess what, the EU as a whole, and each individual country, has plans already in place and in progress to "fix" it. It just takes decades to deploy enough "green" electricity generation, replace infrastructure, update insulation at people's homes, replace their heating method, etc.
No buttons. Hard, difficult and long work towards fixing. Instead of separating attention across things that are nice-to-have but don't really change that much.
It's exactly because the EU people know it's not easy they instead work on something else. That needs to stop.
My small country did more to help Ukraine than the largest economies in the bloc. There is much more that could be done. Censoring DNS to be more like Russia is not that.
Proving your identity online when you need that is a pain, for government services or other things like banks (opening a new bank account). I vastly prefer having a digital ID that can be used to prove who I am online over relying on varying validation methods with varying levels of actual security - e.g. in France, for the tax office to be able to process your tax returns online, you need to prove your identity which happens by getting snail mail with codes; for banks, there's varying stuff like uploading pictures of your ID, or having to go to a bank branch for them to scan it. Having an uniform digital ID that anyone can attest means the problem goes away and everything is more secure, because nobody needs a scan of your ID card anymore.
> Instead of separating attention across things that are nice-to-have but don't really change that much
Are you under the impression that something as big as the EU can only do one thing at a time?
> It's exactly because the EU people know it's not easy they instead work on something else. That needs to stop.
Or they work on the complicated stuff, but since it takes time, also have the energy and money to work on other stuff at the same time? Shocking, I know.
> My small country did more to help Ukraine than the largest economies in the bloc. There is much more that could be done
Like, what more can be done specifically? Give more money, weapons? Sadly pockets aren't infinite, and especially with the hit due to Covid and Russian gas blackmail, European countries don't have large amounts of money laying around. And yet, they've donated billions of euros and billions of euros worth of equipment, as well as provided training for Ukrainian forces.
I am under the impression that these hard problems require so much resources that not even something as big as EU can split their attention to some small insignificancies, yes.
If they have time for something small and merely nice to have, they're not doing enough about the important things.
Even the smallest countries donated billions, a significant percentage of their GDP. If the biggest economies didn't donate hundreds of billions, there is much more to be done.
% nslookup www.rt.com - dns01.mnet-online.de
Server: dns01.mnet-online.de
Address: 2001:a60::53:1#53
*** Can't find www.rt.com: No answer/'sɛnsər,ʃɪp/
noun
counterintelligence achieved by banning or deleting any information of value to the enemy
That was censorship too ...
Maybe better to say there are two different forms of censorship: 1) the government doesn't like something, 2) society reduces it attack surface
The two can coincide or not.
Can't the "free" and purportedly superior western media debunk whatever BS rt.com peddles?
But then they would probably be inclined to also call-out the psy-ops and other shenaningans staged by our govenments and targeting us. Ooops!
Debunking has limited effectiveness even in factual situations, beyond factual, not even sure what that would mean.
There is, of course, also a numbers game, flipping the side of a few people is quite sufficient for a some things, so even being really good at countering adversarial propaganda will leave a lot of gaps. Reducing an attack surface might not always be a bad idea.
What you cannot be is a foreign state at war with an ally and freely distribute state propaganda aimed at furthering your war goals. This isn't a hard line to draw.
And you can do that because it has literally no impact. This vision of free speech was a moment of genius from our institutions.
However, you can’t talk about the crimes of occupants in France in, say, a newspaper, or any broadcast channel, or anything that has an audience. Governments have literally made it a speechcrime to discover the authors who are killing our children at 23x the pace of the others.
If I'm reading your racist dogwhistles correctly, "occupants of France" would be muslims or brown/black people? Don't you worry, plenty of shit-tier "news" in France make it their life goal to cover every single crime committed by someone who cannot trace their lineage to 15th century France. (cf. Valeurs Actuelles) Hell, there are multiple political parties founded around those ideas, that don't forget to chime in any time anything happens.
> Governments have literally made it a speechcrime to discover the authors who are killing our children at 23x the pace of the others.
Who are those killing our children at 23x the pace, and what is the speech crime? Sources, please.
So I dare you make the study on how much crimes the occupying forces are doing in France.
But you missed the point: the illiberalism isn't the restriction on the foreign government's actions, but the restriction placed on your own citizens—the restriction that they are not allowed to read certain things: that certain books, prints, newspapers, are illegal for their eyes. That's anathema to open society.
This isn't about "foreign governments' rights"; it's about peoples' rights.
"To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker."
Again, the ban of RT isn't because they spread certain ideas that were considered wrong by the EU censors. The ban is because they are owned by an adversary state that currently invading an ally on the EU border.
> That's anathema to open society.
You should maybe read up what the inventor of the very term of the open society had to say about the limits of openness in an open society.
Right now the US has the tools to deal with that, if they need a domain down they can do it under their sovereign power. The EU doesn't.
You're conflating multiple issues into one. The US has jurisdiction to seize domains being used in furtherance of crimes; sure. But ideas aren't crimes in the US. The US isn't able, legally or practically, to use this power to censor opinion or information on the basis of its content: the US courts do not permit it.
~
Your other question ("What do you do...?") is much more interesting to me, but it's too big for me to be able to give it a respectful treatment. This is my shortest answer: we entrust democracy to decide whether to start a war or to a end a war*; whether to build nuclear weapons or abolish them. It's implicit in our method of government that we trust the civic deliberation process with our lives. The fact that our collective deliberation can make mistakes, and kill a million people with its "whoopsies!", is part and parcel of what it means to function as a republic. (To lay the responsibilities elsewhere is to have a different method of government). Most political ideas are capable of causing immense harm in a democracy (except unimportant, frivolous ones)—there aren't many important, but safe, ideas.
*(I think it's remarkable that much of the First Amendment jurisprudence involves censoring opinions about wars, in one direction or another: an acknowledgement that "ideas capable of killing millions" is at the heart of this civic question).
That's a distinction without a difference. Whether "macrosoft.com" is considered an idea or brand impersonation is in the eye of the beholder .
And of course something not being allowed doesn't mean it doesn't happen in plain sight without repercutions. On the practicality of it, getting a take down court order for brand or copyright violation seems straightforward, and civil forfeiture can apply to domains [0] as well, so vaguely sticking a potential associated crime to a domain owner is enough for an agency to take down a domain, whatever it is.
I think that's totally US's choice to have these laws and apply them their way. I also sympathize with the rest of the world planning to get out of that influence and their own tradeoffs.
> It's implicit in our method of government that we trust the civic deliberation process with our lives.
I feel you're looking at from the political lens only. A lot of "ideas" are not political and asking for civil debate everytime one of these gets a wide audience would be an issue.
A suicide inducing site could be such. And it doesn't need to be intentional nor straight illegal. If looking at it hundreds of kids took out their lives every single day, you'd shut it down and start asking questions later.
[0] https://www.aclu.org/news/national-security/ice-domain-name-...
It's not different this time or when we do it or any of the usual contortions attempted to maintain a barely passable facade of intellectual honesty.
You claim there is an equivalence, so why don't you put up some examples of these purportedly equivalent things.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-56030340
British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab called the move an "unacceptable curtailing of media freedom".
The European Union bureaucrats can keep their filters off my packets.
What's the difference other than semantics? When a government decides to "not allow" something, it's often achieved through active enforcement, or threats of active enforcement.
Remember, the EU is the ones that enacted the single most consequentially moronic internet-related law, the so-called "ePrivacy Directive", which has infected countless websites with stupid cookie nags. Governments tend to be pretty stupid when it comes to technology policy; my advice is to shut up, quietly work around it, and be thankful that they aren't any smarter.
Speech is speech. Only speech deemed non-normative needs defending.
Words can’t hurt you.
For better or for worse, words have consequences.
Sorry, but that is absurd. Propaganda has and will kill people. Look at the legions of dipshits who follow Ben Shapiro and Matt Walsh. Sure, all they do is sit at their desks talking absolute horseshit but it'd be deeply unserious to suggest that people haven't been killed as a result.
Tell that to Samuel Paty, his decapitated ghost would be thrilled to hear that.
BTW he didn't die by "words", he died because a bigoted idiot attacked him
He probably would, but do note that he caveated his free expression tremendously, doing everything he could do avoid offending brainwashed kids and their retarded parents.
> BTW he didn't die by "words", he died because a bigoted idiot attacked him
Because people called for his death based on a misinterpretation based on a lie from one of the brainwashed students. That was the speech that killed him, not his own. (And for the record, thankfully, all the pieces of shit responsible are being tried - that includes the brainwashed students that spread the initial lies, their parents that spread them online even further, as well as those that called for his death online, and the students that directed the murderer in the direction of the teacher. )
Or if we at least didn't call ourselves "liberal" as we're slipping down the slippery slope.
I don’t believe absolute free speech is a sustainable option for societies on the scale of countries. Absolute free speech would invite chaos.
Free speech is not a natural phenomenon. It is an artificial concept created by humans, and thus we have the complete power to define it and choose what it means. Different groups choose differently.
Of course the site is biased, but probably less than BBC.
ISPs in france already comes with censored DNS servers probably due to regulation for a few years now. I guess this is a suggestion to make EU wide not just for some countries.
The real problem is when they will ban and make it illegal to change from a list of censored ones.
This is understandable but the integration of government, DNS, and particularly blocking is a controversial intersection of concepts.
Having a state-approved DNS resolver is better than letting ISP and other private entities mess around with DNS. The current situation in many EU countries is that it is up to the ISPs to block unlawful/compromised domains, having an official EU resolver removes that burden from ISP, they now just have to point to that resolver. It will probably make it much easier for wi-fi hotspots, company networks, etc... to be in compliance, and it is better than relying on a third party that may have its own idea of what's acceptable, inject ads, etc...
Of course, it would be better without censorship, and some organizations are fighting for it, and it is a good thing. but the technical solution is not bad IMHO. And censorship will be circumvented anyways, DNS blocking is weak.
In summary:
- It doesn't make the current situation worse regarding censorship (DNS poisoning is already done at ISP level)
- It can keep ISPs in check
- Depending on how well it is run, it can be good for security (it implies good reactivity on the part of the EU, that's why I don't count on it)
Thanks, now i am really sad, the pinnacle of a dystopia.
DNS is harder to block because it’s not illegal, and it’s a core internet service, which means there’s a lot of interest in preserving access.
If your evil master plan involves winning against millions of horny teenagers: it’s bad plan.
I just wish that the focus is really on protecting citizens (e.g. block domains known to serve malware) rather than just filtering "illegal content".
The latter would just be a waste of EU money with very little added value for the EU citizens. I'd bet that blocking "illegal content" will be mostly blocking DMCA takedowns. I.e. EU will be spending from their own pockets to have the "privilege" to serve takedowns for US-owned IP from an EU-controlled DNS infrastructure.
This background article covers a lot of the whys and hows: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23738871.2023.2... including mentioning similar projects in the UK and Canada. It says public access to it (as an option, alongside other public DNS services) will be available from 2025.
I wonder if this is some misguided "torrent sites are malicious, so users should be able to block them" thing, rather than a "the government needs to ban torrent sites because they're illegal". It's bizarre to make a DNS resolver like this, and then make it opt-in.
They make it clear on the website that it is optional so that it cannot be used for censorship.
But then why is it blocking those sites? All that would do is reduce adoption and thwart their stated purpose.
Also, given that it's mainly aimed (so far) at government departments and telcos, it's not clear that that would reduce adoption at all.
Presumably the court orders would be to block things, right?
> I expect they don't want to repeat the Quad9 situation, where it just blocked requests from all of Germany.
Best way to resolve this is to not have laws requiring DNS servers to censor things, and make those laws as inconvenient to enforce as possible to encourage that outcome.
> And as others in the thread mention, things that court orders may block aren't just torrents - eg malware.
But as soon as they start blocking torrents then people stop using it and it can no longer block malware.
> Also, given that it's mainly aimed (so far) at government departments and telcos, it's not clear that that would reduce adoption at all.
Users can choose not to use their telco's DNS if it starts blocking things they don't want it to, which in turn limits use of the service by end users. It may even limit use of the service by telcos if they get customer complaints or notice that customers are switching from their DNS, which they don't want if they're redirecting NXDOMAIN to ad spam or using/selling DNS query data etc.
Digital sovereignty might have been the initial reason (and a sensible one). What's actually being delivered seems to be a DNS service for blocking malicious sites with real time threat intelligence feeds, for Telcos to upsell to their customers with antivirus-style security scaremongering.
That difference in focus is pretty troubling. It's taking away focus from the important part of delivering a robust DNS service, making the service more expensive to build out initially, and then also making it far more expensive to operate in perpetuity since they'll be spending the large majority of their time on maintaining the threat intel.
However, being able to access if you try hard enough is not O.K. Especially commercial operations are not viable if the Government doesn't like you because you instantly lose the non-techies.
Dangerous stuff, even if you completely agree with everything the current government does don't forget that governments change.
It's concerning this is even attempted to begin with.
Then again that would be a nightmare for large corporates that have customised internal DNSs, so I don't see it coming anytime soon.
Well, the call for proposal linked in TFA mention DoH and explains that they'll need to "engage with the community" (browsers, ISPs, ...).
Community engagement comrades!
The most fundamental goal of the EU is to enable free flow of goods, services and labor within the bloc. The EU tries to prevent member states from enacting subsidies or regulations that benefit their own companies at the expense of other EU companies.
The one area in which EU market policy isn't neoliberal is agriculture. EU subsidies there are meant to keep farmers happy and to prevent any food crisis from ever occurring. I think food security is an exception that even the most strident free-marketeer understands.
So when people call the EU communist, I just have to chuckle.
1) force ISP to use them as source DNS
2) force ISP to block ip of non EU DNS
3) add laws that forbid individuals and association to maintain an uncensored DNS
4) Force browser vendors to point to DNS over HTTPS server whose source is EU DNS
Not sure how they could limit people from using DNS over HTTPS with forked/reconfigured browsers but I guess that would at least limit the majority of non tech savy users.