I think we should stop viewing this as a bad thing and start viewing it as a huge opportunity. Phone your congress person or senator and encourage them to vote for it.
As the torrent sites go down they'll come back up as tor hidden services. Once we're on tor or something like it the game changes entirely. As we stop trusting the root DNS, we'll start trusting something like a bitcoin hash chain based DNS system, as we create an anonymized, decentralized internet freedom of expression increases exponentially. No URDP, no SOPA, no unencrypted protocols, security of the person in their effects will be guaranteed by mathematics and not the good will of politicians.
With all the monitoring, etc thats already in place it's only a matter of time. We have the opportunity to lay the foundations of a decentralized internet over something as trivial as copyright rather than freedom of speech. We'll stop having to rely on a government to respect our liberties and instead instill them in the design of the system.
Decentralized information, decentralized currency, decentralized control over the future of humanity.
While it's true that this system created by SOPA will inevitably be abused to curtail civil rights, the important thing to remember is that most people care far more about getting their music than getting their rights.
Lets give the people their music, and they'll get their rights as they go along for the ride.
The problem is that SOPA also introduces a whole bunch of HIGHY SCARY laws and procedures. Disney did not like that review of Cars that you wrote? Then can abuse SOPA to get you off the net, sue you, and kill your revenue streams.
DNS hacks are nice but don't solve the real underlying problems that will actually kill businesses and bankrupt people because of abuse of this law.
And then the government makes using all that fancy tech a criminal offense (if they could pass PATRIOT act and SOPA, why not), makes a few demonstrative cases, and suddenly no normal people want to be part of that, since for the most part, the internet is still working fairly okay for them.
Using that fancy tech is an end in itself as far as I am concerned.
When you think about it, public key cryptography is just plain awesome. We can generate a pair of numbers that let you hide and authenticate messages! Why would you not want to use that?
Much more recently I became aware of these other technologies that amount to a secure public title registry. Distributed currency and name resolution. Awesome! I want to learn about these things and put them to use, and soon. The hacker appeal of these is just staggering!
The very idea that a government would even consider saying I can't or shouldn't use these (shouldn't do a certian kind of math) is merely a reason to hurry up and do it faster. How dare they.
But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their [the people's] right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
Sorry friend, but english has been modern since around the sixteenth or seventeenth century, depending on how you look at it. The language of shakespeare is literally the language of today. The changes since then have been minor when compared to the history of the language.
Slightly broken things stay slightly broken forever, things that don't work get replaced. Or at least that's what I learned from the "real world" business so far. That unfortunately also means that if you really want something fixed properly, sometimes it's easier to just break it completely than convince loads of people it needs replacing before it breaks...
Okay, first, the chances of youtube.com, or wikipedia (why?) disappearing tomorrow are approximately 0.
That said, a lot of these "solutions" that people are coming up with just end up getting closer and closer to what the DNS already accomplishes.
The worst case scenario here is just a fragmented DNS, and the US losing control of the .com TLD. The "doomsday" scenario here is that DNS servers stop trusting the root servers, and don't take updates from them.
This is a gigantic headache for network and system administrators. It is not the end of the internet.
Apply for access to the .com zone files, download them, and up your own DNS servers. Don't accept any updates from anybody ever and you'll have a much, much, much more complete, much more "you can query this as a daemon" version of these silly lists.
> "Okay, first, the chances of youtube.com, or wikipedia (why?) disappearing tomorrow are approximately 0."
Funny, the EFF and Google don't seem to think so.
And have you not noticed Wikipedia's donation campaigns? Do you really think they can afford the legal fees associated with fighting SOPA claims every time some corporate/political entity feels slighted by an article and feels like submitting a takedown?
The donations campaigns propel the growth of Wikimedia Foundation. Less than 50% is really directly dedicated to wikipedia website operation. Quite an overhead IMO. With 117 employees and $30 million budget, they can manage I think. They¡ll whine and do yet another campaign if they can't.
No by fragmented DNS he means DNS servers in Europe would route you perfectly fine to Megavideo.com but US servers wouldn't. So all you'd have to do is change your DNS address to a European one and bingo.
It's one thing to pass PATRIOT or SOPA, but try passing legislation to create a multi-billion dollar firewall to effectively block other DNS servers and block offending IP addresses.
But there's already a DNS "root", so in order to have a split DNS, you'd need to "roots", and two completely separate trees of .com, .org. .us, and .co.uk and everything. There wouldn't be any overlap. You might be able to hack something into some of the DNS zones now to give different answers based on geography, but when DNSSEC or DNS Curve are rolled out, it will break completely.
To be considered for acceptance into the program,
please print and complete the appropriate applications
and fax the forms to +1-703-421-5828.
Verisign, a company intimately involved with the Internet at every level, wants faxed forms, in the year 2011? For access to the TLD zone files, something technical enough that a sane person must have been involved at some point? I can't decide if it's funny or sad.
I've always heard that faxes may have some kind of legal status that other electronic communications don't (why?), but this is just getting silly.
Even more mind-blowing: Apple, one of the most forward-looking companies in the world, requires faxed forms for enrollment in their paid dev programs. They won't accept them via email (even though you know the fax number is a fax-to-email setup) and refused my faxed PDFs (copies of an electronic filing) of my articles of incorporation because they weren't authentic (read: photocopied) enough - despite being the authoritative (PDF) copies from the state.
i'm as big a hater of SOPA as the next guy, but this fearmongering is getting a bit silly. as if SOPA is going to pass and overnight all of those popular commercially-run websites are going to vanish with no notice or court hearings.
and from a technical standpoint, most of those websites listed use CDNs for static assets, so unless you list the constantly-changing IPs of akamai and other servers for all of the weird random-looking hostnames used by those CDNs, many of those sites will not even load to a usable state. (and porn sites? really?)
also, from the reddit thread:
As some posters suggested, you can use another DNS server. The two server I'm reasonably certain about are OpenDNS and Google DNS. Both of them are US based but I think Google will move it's server to Europe if SOPA passes.
using a resolver in the EU from the US would be frustratingly slow due to the latency. you're better off showing users how to setup their own caching servers to bypass their ISP (i've always run my own caching server just for technical reasons).
and do you really think google cares about SOPA? they have done practically nothing to stop it; no notice on their homepage, no public awareness, only one legal representative sent to the preliminary hearing, etc. this is the same company that partnered with china and supported their censorship just to make some additional ad revenue.
There's no need to worry about porn sites. One of the amendments proposed yesterday was to instruct the AG to not use any resources protecting the copyrights of pornography producers. I suppose their legal rights aren't as important as the industries that backed this bill.
I missed that, so thanks for highlighting that one. And that's pretty interesting, because I'd imagine that pornography producers are amongst those whose IP is most often stolen. But you're right: according to Forbes, "The [Porn / Adult Entertainment] industry is tiny next to broadcast television ($32.3 billion in 1999 revenue, according to Veronis Suhler), cable television ($45.5 billion), the newspaper business ($27.5 billion), Hollywood ($31 billion), even to professional and educational publishing ($14.8 billion)." http://www.forbes.com/2001/05/25/0524porn.html
The porn industry has grown a lot since 2001. The rationale given for the amendment was that without it, the AG would spend all its time working pornography cases, as they'd be the majority of copyright infringement occurring.
At the same time that amendment didn't pass (just to be clear). It was basically a tactic by the anti-SOPA contingent to blur the lines of legality...the pitch was "Why waste taxpayer dollars enforcing pornographic copyright? Vote for this!". I'm don't think it was raised was really a reflection of the lack of desire of the AG to enforce porn copyright...I'd guess not based on the context of it as a defensive, anti-SOPA move.
I don't understand this visceral hatred of pornography. Like it or not, it's an indisposable part of modern Western culture. It fulfills a need that is as old as mankind itself. Why can't we just acknowledge it for what it is instead of sweeping it under the rug?
Because it's not necessarily a part of all modern cultures. For example, pornography is illegal in many Islamic nations and can be difficult to come by, both online and in real life. In such a culture, the extermination of pornography would have a relatively minor effect on society, making it disposable.
Pornography is not difficult to come by in Islamic nations nowadays (if Pakistan is any indication). Its sold in the same places as other pirated western DVDs, often without the shopowner even realizing that it is a substantively different sort of thing compared to "normal" Western movies, which also tend to feature scantily clad women on the cover. There are also internet cafes with fairly unfiltered access to internet pornography and private rooms.
Pakistan, as a (nominally) democratic nation, is probably not the best example of your average Islamic nation (most of which do not possess democratic forms of government).
In any case, my familiarity with non-Western cultures is rather limited, and therefore I didn't want to unintentionally comment on any others in my initial post.
When you say "islamic nation," are you referring to one with majority islamic citizens, in the same way that britain, america or sweden are "christian nations," or are you referring to islamic theocracies?
It seems you are referring to the latter, but you should be careful bandying around such terms. There are highly secular democracies with muslim populations, such as turkey.
Since I considered Pakistan to be an Islamic nation (as I stated in my previous post), I was clearly using the former definition.
And while it is not impossible for Muslim-majority nations to be secular and/or democratic, it's highly unusual. Moreover, going back to the origin of this discussion, even in secular Turkey, the recent conservative movement there resulted in the banning of pornography in 2004. If you know Turkish, you can read the law yourself here: http://www.tbmm.gov.tr/kanunlar/k5237.html
It's not unusual for a Muslim-majority nation to be secular and/or democratic. It seems odd to go just be the number of countries and disregard the population size. Population-wise, the largest of those countries are Indonesia (pop. 228m, 86% Muslim), Pakistan (172m, 97%) and Bangladesh (162m, 89%). Even if you do go by the numbers and give Bahrain (1m) the same weight as the large countries, the word "secular" pops up often in the list at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Muslim-majority_countri...
Making it illegal suggests indispensability. Why make a law for something for which there is no demand or supply?
You suggest exterminating pornography would have a minor effect. If so many people want to exterminate it that they make it illegal (I suspect without checking that at times illegal under draconian punishment) but it still hasn't been exterminated, that seems another argument for indispensability.
But these points are irrelevant to my original question. Why specify Western culture?
Even if pornography were dispensable in some Islamic cultures (whether we label them as Western or not), that doesn't say it isn't also indispensable in non-Western cultures or dispensable in some Western cultures or both.
i was actually saying that because everything loaded from a porn site comes from other servers, so just listing its main hostname will not show anything at all.
> Is this really categorically true for porn sites and only porn sites?
Depends on the entire structure of the site, and no not only porn sites. If you run chrome, hit up your Network Inspector in the dev tools and go to YouTube (or RedTube if you want, it's just about the same) to watch a video. The random video I had in my chrome history loaded from o-o.preferred.nuq04s10.v21.lscache3.c.youtube.com , and all images loaded from *.ytimg.com
If Youtube were to go down and I tossed their IP address into my hostfile, I could visit their homepage, but there's a pretty good chance thumbnail images wouldn't load, and a 100% chance I would not have every single (seemingly dynamic) content server in my hostfile, so none of the videos would load anyways.
That is a simplistic and sexist view of the industry. It presupposes women have no agency, no will of their own, and that men can control them just by waving some money and the promise of fame in their faces.
I know it's hard to read my comment through the torrent of downvotes (which speaks for itself). However, in it, I've said nothing of free will. For discussion's sake, let's assume we live in a perfect society in which women do porn purely from choice. Total fiction, but let's assume that.
Now, back to my original assertion. Assuming we're all adults here, and are aware of what a modern porn scene looks and sounds like, I challenge you, or any other downvoter, to explain exactly how so is the porn industry not demeaning or not humiliating or does not objectify women.
But men are apparently presumed to have more ability to make a choice in the matter, more willpower to resist the things the pornmongers throw at unknown talent.
The funny thing is that, in reality, heterosexual male porn stars are a dime a dozen. If a man isn't willing to do something, they can throw him out and get someone else in time for filming to continue as planned. But the women are not so easily replaceable. First of all, they're in much shorter supply, but also, they have a fan following, meaning there are no alternatives.
Right because enforcement never overreaches and never abuses any weapon they are given.
In the meatspace world, see tasers and pepper spray which are only supposed to be used when a gun would have been, so they are less than lethal - then there is warrantless everything these days, or no-knock warrants on the wrong house from a "tip" and they kill your dog for good measure (happens so often it's a cliche already).
On the net see the DMCA mission creep and the thousands of Patriot Act "cannot tell anyone you were served, not even your lawyer" National Security Letters nonsense.
If someone copies the code to crack bluray or something like that to wikipedia - why wouldn't SONY's lawyers use SOPA to take down all of wikipedia for 10 days?
Right because enforcement never overreaches and never abuses any weapon they are given.
i didn't say that, and i realize why the bill is dangerous. but to fear that it's suddenly going to shut down a bunch of popular sites overnight and we have to scramble to revert back to an /etc/hosts-over-ftp distribution of addressing is silly.
we should be focusing on stopping the bill from passing first, rather than worry about how we'll get to the pirate bay in a few months.
"but to fear that it's suddenly going to shut down a bunch of popular sites overnight and we have to scramble to revert back to an /etc/hosts-over-ftp distribution of addressing is silly"
I'm more concerned that unpopular sites will be shut down. Or never created to begin with.
Sorry that wasn't meant to be at you at all - I am just really upset about all this stuff so much lately that I think I better stop watching the news for the rest of the year.
Reality is we cannot stop it from passing, the people in charge of the committee want it to pass so the hearing is just pretend to go through the motions. In some form or another it's going to pass, so start planning.
Just because it passes the committee doesn't mean it will pass the full house and senate votes, and then it has to pass through the President's veto powers. I'm holding out hope that Congress and the President have heard us and won't make it law.
If all else fails maybe we can get it declared to be unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. And even if the Supreme Court fails us, then we just have to vote some new people into Congress and overturn the law.
>then we just have to vote some new people into Congress and overturn the law.
No. Just no. That's so delusional it's not even funny anymore. It doesn't matter who "you" vote into congress, it's the same shit with different assholes. They are ALL corporate sellouts.
What's broken is the current system, where people who have no clue what so ever are allowed to vote on things they do not understand even on a surface level, dismiss the opinions of experts with comments such as "I'm not a nerd so I wouldn't understand" and vote "No" to everything because they've been told to do so.
Stop believing that "the next election surely will change everything". It's bullshit and you should know it. Worse, most people will think that their responsibility is done after voting, sheepishly waiting for the next election where they fall for the same empty promises and banal phrases as they did in the previous election.
Furthermore, even if we get SOPA to be repealed, the same shit will come up not even half a year later in a new disguise, I can promise you that with absolute certainty. As I said, the system is broken, and that is what needs to be fixed. Fighting SOPA and other abominations is just a never-ending battle with the symptoms.
Ok, what do you suggest be done about it? It's easy to complain about how broken the system is. The hard part is fixing it. If you aren't willing to work within the system (i.e. vote, call your representative, run for office yourself, etc...), then what are you going to do?
That's my point. It's impossible to fix it. Representative democracy is broken to its very core. It will inevitably lead to concentration of power towards groups or individuals who do NOT have the interest of the public or the advancement of humanity in mind.
>then what are you going to do?
Exactly what I've been doing anyways: advocate anarchism and technocracy. Only a society focused on scientific progress and advancement of humanity as a whole, centered around knowledge and logic, and opposing all forms of unnatural authority can bring us into the future.
> only one legal representative sent to the preliminary hearing
I'm not sure if you know how senate hearings work. There's a reason that no other tech companies were at that hearing, and it's not because they all support SOPA.
I would recommend against using these IP addresses for large sites. Most of them (Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc) use geographic load balancing to redirect users to servers as logically close to them as possible. Using this list could result in accessing much slower services via server clusters on the other side of the world.
Sounds like the eventual outcome of this is a dark/grey net DNS system. I wouldn't be surprised if something like this already existed, but now it will be much more useful and interesting to everyday people.
It's not the popular websites that will get hit. The public will flip out if their bread and Facebook, er, circuses, go away, and SOPA will not be in effect for very long.
The trouble will come when websites get blocked that do not have enough public support to bring them back again.
As long as Facebook and Gmail are up, it's only nerds like us who will care.
Please, adopt Namecoin. There are already open source DNS servers available I believe. :) Using google document or hosts file do not scale at all, while namecoin now have all hashing power of bitcoin thanks to merged mining.
If SOPA passes, can lots of people call the financial companies, ad companies and others doing business with the RIAA, MPAA, and so forth, and "allege" that they are "facilitating" copyright and trademark infringement. According to the SOPA law as it is now, they will have to be shut down.
At the very least it will tie up the system
Or it might actually show these guys what kind of monster they have brought about ... kind of like Sarcozy's household being disconnected from the internet
Correct me if I'm wrong, but under the current SOPA, only FOREIGN SITES can have their financials cut off, right? I thought the Operation In Our Sites is able to already seize domain names registered locally. So it seems to me that the SOPA simply adds provisions to censor sites registered abroad, in American DNS only, because their registrar is beyond US jurisdiction.
For example Russians use vkontakte.ru to listen to any song. What would SOPA do about this?
However, YouTube contains lots of uploaded songs and the US government could have seized their domain for a long time already, but didn't.
So I think the threat is more to the purity and security of the worldwide DNS system, as well as to the costs of the ISPs, than it is to social networking sites. At least, I hope. Does SOPA override the DMCA for locally-registered sites, or did Operation In Our Sites just give carte blanche to the government to take out sites?
> However, YouTube contains lots of uploaded songs and the US government could have seized their domain for a long time already, but didn't.
Correct me if I'm wrong here, but isn't this what the DMCA safe harbor protection is for? They can't just pull their domain if they are responding in a timely manner to reasonable DMCA takedown requests.
Or am I missing a point you're making? Entirely possible. It's 4:55. I'm burnt out.
I think the point is that they are looking to give greater remedies than DMCA. You would now be able to complain about a website to those doing business with it, and they are supposed to stop doing business with it. If it's foreign, anyway.
On a surface level, most of the items on this list are pretty absurd. Sites like Facebook, Amazon, and Youtube aren't immediately going down as soon as SOPA passes, except the torrent sites. There's a good chance they won't be affected at all by SOPA.
However, this list is interesting because it draws attention to the fact that these huge sites COULD legally vanish without a trace. Although I doubt anyone's going to seriously try to take down Facebook or Amazon using SOPA, it's still scary to imagine.
The list saddens me, to be quite honest. Yes, SOPA is morally wrong and technically stupid, and I don't think the government can or should fight piracy like this. But I think it devalues the cause if such a large portion of the "emergency list" is porno and piracy web sites. Seriously? The real reasons this is dangerous is because of civil rights and the damage that's already been caused to legitimate businesses by government incompetence (e.g. erroneously changing the DNS of small businesses to forward to an accusation of child sex crimes because they happened to share infrastructure with the real criminal).
The fact remains that piracy is dishonest, and only serves to legitimize the claims of Big Media. Say what you want about DRM, copyright law and ridiculous terms of service, but if you're really someone who believes in free government and the important role of the Internet in preserving it, I hope you join with me in rolling your eyes at people who torrent illegal media and worry about the effect of SOPA on their porn viewing. There are plenty of ways to buy inexpensive, DRM-free music, and plenty of ways to actually support the artists who make the music.
bypassing DNS is going to break the internet as much as SOPA is. content distribution networks rely on DNS for load balancing. legitimate sites moving to new servers rely on being able to push out records with low TTLs. by statically caching things for long periods of time, you are going to cause more problems with legitimate sites than you are going to fix to get to "rogue" sites that get taken down by SOPA.
a better approach would probably be to just hit that non-DNS cache for sites that don't resolve, or push out a list of known "killed" sites. if SOPA makes sites given the "death penalty" resolve to an ICE-style page, then the extension could just store the IP addresses of those government-run servers and consult the cache for sites that resolve to them.
If people have serious concerns, would it not be possible to build a Google Chrome/Firefox Plugin that acted as a sort of DNS service? It would be a lot easier for the average user to install one of these in one click than it might be for them to change their DNS settings.
Does anyone notice the irony... back when the internet was new, dns was just a bunch of dns/ip mappings in a text file... then we went to a big distributed system... now the US government is going to force us to go back to distributing text files.
maybe google in their fight against SOPA can come to the rescue and release a database publicly of all its crawled websites, which can be syndicated somehow via p2p. i mean they gotta have this info.
This is a horrible idea. What more could a cracker want than a list of IP addresses that are known web servers. Sure, the big guys are safe. But what about the mom and pop shop that pays $20 a month to host their website on a server that is running a 3 year old version of apache.
EDIT: Can someone show me specifically what I said that is objectively technically incorrect?
You may disagree with security through obscurity, and I agree with you that obscurity isn't a very strong defense mechanism, but that doesn't change the technical merit of it.
There is nothing preventing a cracker from getting a list of IP addresses. There are a number of ways to get an IP address of a specific server: whois on the domain, even pinging the domain on a *nix OS kicks back an IP address. Doing a trace route same thing.
That's not what I'm talking about though. If google released a list of all crawled websites and their IP addresses, if I was inclined I could then take those IP's and scan them for known vulnerabilities. Essentially what you're giving an attacker is a prequalified list of IP addresses to attack instead of attacking a specific range.
Thanks. I've never had issues with using whois or ping. The point still stands, there are plenty of ways of getting an ip address without needing google's help.
>If google released a list of all crawled websites and their IP addresses, if I was inclined I could then take those IP's and scan them for known vulnerabilities
You can already do that. You want a list of IPs running websites? So scan port 80? Your port 80 scan will be finding hosts and adding them to the list faster than the vuln scanning can grab them off the list.
No, my point is that it is already completely trivial, and getting a list from google wouldn't even be worth doing if they did provide it, as you can easily and quickly generate a more extensive list with a single command.
What if I'm a link spammer, then I'd love to have google's list. How can the list be more extensive than google? That is verifiably false. For example, generate a list of IP addresses(500,000+) that have the following characteristics:
1. Have websites that been indexed by google with a PR 2+.
2. Run Web Servers
3. Bonus Points if you can tell me which web servers run the most PR 2+ sites.
Now hopefully you can see how useful this list would be! I don't think nmap will do that for you.
> You are very confused. Asking google for a list of IPs does not provide you with their page rank. IPs are not domains, nor are they websites
No, you are again correct. But if I know the IP address and the domains associated with it's very easy to determine PR 2+ websites and also from there figure out which ones have multiple websites hosted on them.
I thought blocking IP addresses itself was a part of the proposed law. If that happens, this wont help. Using proxies is a solution, but this will make things much slower, especially for videos.
I have often wished for a way to see a history of what IP addresses domains are resolved to, from my system’s resolver or a DNS server. This, in contrast, seems awfully primitive.
I may not know that a domain no longer directs to the desired service before I am no longer getting it, and by that time I presume any caches from the previous resolvings have been deleted.
This happens not just because of legal troubles, but also because the website owners have forgotten to update their domain name.
I'm sure we could come up with some sort of host file synchronization application to circumvent the DNS changes. It would be awful compared to DNS, but at least it would be more workable than remembering and saving IP addresses.
I really hope that the internet anthropologists of the future will someday read this thread and have a hearty laugh on our behalf in the knowledge that all our worries were for nothing.
I'm not sure why this is being up-voted so much. It won't work. SOPA works by not routing specific IPs, not by failing to resolve domains (which is why it fundamentally breaks the internet). Additionally, a single IP won't work for a major site like YouTube or Facebook, which work off multiple data-centers and CDNs (which also complicates how to "block" a site served by 50 IPs that may also be distributing content for another major brand). This is bigger than a hosts file.
Cary Sherman, the head of the Recording Industry Association of America, wrote in a guest column for CNET that SOPA could be used to force Internet providers to block by "Internet Protocol [IP] address" and deny "access to only the illegal part of the site." The RIAA, along with the Motion Picture Association of America and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, strongly supports the legislation.
[...]
An aide to the House Judiciary committee -- chaired by Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Tex.), SOPA's principal sponsor -- did not dispute that IP address blocking and deep packet inspection could be required. It would be up to a judge to determine the nature of the court order that would be needed to block the site, the aide told CNET this afternoon.
They are definitely looking to block by IP, not just DNS.
The people who designed important pieces of its infrastructure (tcp/ip, dns, http, and so on) seem to be very concerned about what SOPA would allow politicians to do to the internet. Do you know something they don't?
There's being against proposed legislation, and there's "OH no! soon DNS will not work, we need to quickly collect IP addresses. Lets build an alternate DNS system. Lets overthrow the government!".
Do you really think the DNS entry for wikipedia.org will be removed? In the stupidly ridiculously rare event that it did, obviously they'd quickly remedy it, or we'd all just proxy through other countries etc, or it'd get mirrored onto other domains.
We had the same "The sky is falling" for the UKs "Digital Economy Bill". It's a ridiculous law, and is now being revised/investigated. ISPs are against it, and it'll never be enforced. People again wasted hours of their lives worrying about it.
As the torrent sites go down they'll come back up as tor hidden services. Once we're on tor or something like it the game changes entirely. As we stop trusting the root DNS, we'll start trusting something like a bitcoin hash chain based DNS system, as we create an anonymized, decentralized internet freedom of expression increases exponentially. No URDP, no SOPA, no unencrypted protocols, security of the person in their effects will be guaranteed by mathematics and not the good will of politicians.
With all the monitoring, etc thats already in place it's only a matter of time. We have the opportunity to lay the foundations of a decentralized internet over something as trivial as copyright rather than freedom of speech. We'll stop having to rely on a government to respect our liberties and instead instill them in the design of the system.
Decentralized information, decentralized currency, decentralized control over the future of humanity.
While it's true that this system created by SOPA will inevitably be abused to curtail civil rights, the important thing to remember is that most people care far more about getting their music than getting their rights.
Lets give the people their music, and they'll get their rights as they go along for the ride.