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Off: Why Must Some People Fail So Much?

by svip at 15-02-2008 16:13

Now personally, I know, there are lot of computer illiterate people out there. Fair enough, they probably know a lot about stuff I never imagined I couldn't care less about. But sometimes these so called "computer illiterate" are in control or charge of something computer related. Remember some time ago where the Danish ISP Tele2 A/S was forced by the court in Copenhagen to block allofmp3.com? Nah, you probably don't, you are probably confusing it with the case where they had to block thepiratebay.org.

Each of these two blocks were on so called DNS level. What does this mean? This means that they do not block access to the server itself, but redirects the IP the domain name point at. Knowing this, it was a simple matter of entering the correct IP address into my /etc/hosts file, which would mean that my system would not bother looking it up through an ISP, but just pick the IP from this file, and I was in.

Just for curiosity, I do not use Tele2, but my ISP (TDC) have decided to block allofmp3.com anyway.

Now of course, such a block seems fair, not many people realise they can just edit their hosts file to get around it. Now here is where the disturbing part comes in, allofmp3.com is a simple location HTTP redirect to allofmp3.ru, which is not blocked by the ISP. Now this is at least the case on TDC, but I can only assume the court ruled that allofmp3.com was to be blocked rather than .ru.

This proves the problem with computer related laws today, those in charge of making the laws have no idea what the fuck is going on.