How can it possibly be, that an ISP, which I’m paying for gets to decid, which sites I’m allowed to have access to, and which not?

All the torrenting sites are restricted. I know, I can use VPN, and such… but I want to do it because of my privacy concerns and not because of some higher-up decided to bend over for the lobbying industry.

While on the other hand, if there’s a data breach of a legit big-corp website (looking at you FB), I’m still able to access it, they get fined with a fraction of their revenue, and I’m still left empty-handed. What a hipocracy!!

What comes next? Are they gonna restrict me from using lemmy too, bc some lobbyist doesn’t like the fact that it’s a decentralized system which they have no control over?

Rant, over!

I didn’t even know that my router was using my ISPs DNS, and that I can just ditch it, even though I’m running AdGuard (selfhosted)

      • noride@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        Yeah, even if they miss your DNS request, the ISP can still do a reverse lookup on the destination IP you’re attempting to connect to and just drop the traffic silently. That is pretty rare though, at least in US, mainly because It costs money to enforce restrictions like that at scale, which means blocking things isn’t profitable. However, slurping up your DNS requests can allow them to feed you false error pages, littered with profitable ads, all under the guies of enforcing copyright protections.

        • moreeni@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          It’s pretty much the only way they enforce stuff here in Ukraine. Back in 2015 when the government blocked social media websites tied to Russian companies and in 2022 when .ru domains were blocked, changing your DNS provider didn’t help. I’m not sure about piracy sites, though, because everyone kinda doesn’t care about this stuff here, but I don’t think they would invent other mechanisms when they have a working one that doesn’t rely on DNS.

          • noride@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            That makes sense! Believe it or not it’s actually easier for an ISP to block a whole country than select websites and services. We actually null route all Russian public IP space where I work, that would absolutely be plausible on a national scale as well.

            It’s imperfect, you can get around it, but it catches 99% of normal users, which is the goal.

            • Case@lemmynsfw.com
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              1 year ago

              Not just ISPs, it can be blocked at the enterprise level in a few clicks.

              I was temping at a place during the pandemic when my hospitality based IT job shuttered. With their set up, I could just block a country in a couple clicks.

              I didn’t do the clicking, but we were getting hit with a DDoS from a nation we had no business in, and it was just blocked in a matter of minutes once the meetings and BS were attended to. Those took hours over days.

  • CriticalMiss@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I don’t know where you’re from and therefore don’t know what laws affect you but unless the ISP is involved in the media game (i.e HBO & AT&T) they don’t care about restricting access. In fact, they’re against it in most scenarios because if a competitor that doesn’t restrict access to piracy related websites exists, that competitor is likely to siphon customers from ISPs who impose restrictions.

    On top of that, most ISPs do the absolute bare minimum to restrict your access so that you can bypass it easily, the most common being the modification of DNS records which you can easily bypass by changing your resolver.

    TL:DR blame your lawmakers not your isp

    • Morgikan@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      The DNS modification is slightly off. Some ISPs check UDP packets since they are insecure and will modify query results regardless of the DNS server you are sending to. Mediacom is known to do this for their billing and DMCA systems. They use DNS redirection to assist in MITMing the connection to load their own certificate to your browser. With that done, they can prepend their own Javascript to the response they receive from whatever web server you are trying to contact. That’s how they get their data usage and DMCA popups loaded when you load up whatever site.

  • nephs@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    They already do restrict you from using lemmy by charging full Internet price for it, and allowing special free data plans for Facebook.

    Net neutrality matters.

  • gordon@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    My state of residence restricts access to certain sites. It’s all bullshit.

    Anyway… The ISP is either a common carrier or a content provider. Pick a fucking lane. You can’t have half and half. Either you are responsible for ALL content provided or NONE.

    If you choose none then you MUST NOT restrict access to any content.

    If you chose ALL then you may restrict content based on what you are willing to take responsibility for. But in that case if someone does something illegal with content you provided you are liable.

      • MorrisonMotel6@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        California. The internet contains chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm.

      • thirteene@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        The list is growing: Utah, Florida, Kansas, South Dakota, and West Virginia, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Virginia all have legislation in progress

  • XTornado@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    No offense but if they can do that you have to blame your government not the ISP… as those are the ones allowing this to happen.

    • nephs@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      As if the government wasn’t controlled by probate lobbyists.

      Blame goes to private interests being allowed to influence public decision makers, in my opinion. Infrastructure companies should not be for-profit companies.

  • z00s@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Well you can buy a car but the gov’t will still make you drive on the correct side of the road.

  • _number8_@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    i know america is ass but at least we don’t have this here, as far as i can tell