Tuesday, April 10, 2012

Understanding CISPA

SOPA is once again at our door under the name: Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, or CISPA. Since they failed to gain momentum by saying how piracy and IP is ruining the economy; their going after our fears. Now it's about security. How much of a threat the Internet is to YOU, how an unregulated Internet will hurt YOU. Which is a crock. No more dangerous then it is now. See, what their banking on is that the fear of the masses will think of CISPA as a way to stop the Russians, Chinese, or any other origin of threat.
The truth of the matter is that this is the same song and dance. The MPAA and it's affiliates want to stop Internet piracy. However, this will change none of that. Piracy is done at an IP level. Meaning it circumvents the DNS (domain name system, generally speaking common folks internet). When we go to something like google.com the DNS changes that into the IP address of Google's servers. CISPA wants to break this link if the publisher finds its content on a server's page. This is all fine and dandy except that it doesn't effect a torrent (peer to peer file sharing, generally used to anonymously or directly pirate data). Torrents track on an IP level 99% of the time, and even more so there are so many ways to strip DNS from a tracker anyhow.
So in short all this does is make you and I, the consumer, unable to access the Internet freely. We'll be blocked from our youtubes, facebooks, or whatever else we fancy. Imagine a world where your favorite Internet personality was removed from the Internet because the publisher of the movie the person was reviewing didn't like the review. So they censored it. Sounds pretty crappy to me.