New Bill Would Require U.S. ISPs to Block Pirate Sites

Tews said:

The problem with setting this type of precedent is that once it is established, then it becomes easy to censor other "suspect" content.. say websites that offer political dissent... and it all started out with the best of intentions... to curb piracy ... but the road to he*l is paved with good intentions...

Yeah, I guess you are right...since it could be abused and used for other things and likely won't stop all hacking...we should absolutely not do anything.

HQuest said:

Banning pirate sites? Good luck trying to block Google.

The thing is you could search google and you could find results, but when you tried to navigate some of the links and what not...you might have blocked routing that prevents you from accessing the IP address of the source server.

SledgeDG said:

Good one, HQuest Besides, you don't have to be a hacker to know how to use a proxy.

True, some people don't know how to do it. So, therefore they would just think it doesn't work. And proxy access could also be regulated and like the google example above, even if a proxy gets you search results if the routers won't route your traffic to the destination it won't do you any good.

Clearly we all understand that nothing is perfect and there will be ways to work around it. But not everybody puts in the extra effort or knows how to do these things. And even if they find out, they might be too nervous to do it suspecting that somebody is watching.

As a few others have said, the biggest concern here is the slippery slope. Give a man an inch, and right away he thinks he's a ruler.

pparks said:

Yeah, I guess you are right...since it could be abused and used for other things and likely won't stop all hacking...we should absolutely not do anything.

I can't tell if you are being sarcastic or not, but it's correct that we shouldn't do this. The potential for abuse far outweighs any possible benefits.

24c said:

Tews said:

The problem with setting this type of precedent is that once it is established, then it becomes easy to censor other "suspect" content.. say websites that offer political dissent... and it all started out with the best of intentions... to curb piracy ... but the road to he*l is paved with good intentions...

Web sites that offer illegal software/activities for sale/distribution are not the same as websites that offer opinions. Opinions are not illegal, although I think many should be.

And who's going to watchdog everything to make sure only true piracy sites are being blocked?

Pirating is sharing files. So essentially, one would have to disable copy and paste, click and drag, uploading and downloading. Sidenote, torrenting is much more efficient than traditional downloading since it puts a small load on several clients rather than a large load on a single server.