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September 2019
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Canadian ISPs Continue Quest To Bankrupt TVAddons, Site That Hosted Tons Of Legal Kodi Addons

Furnished content.


A few years back we wrote about how various Canadian telcos had appeared to completely lose their minds over TVAddons, a Canadian site that hosted various software add-ons for Kodi (open source home theater software that was originally the Xbox Media Center or XBMC). Now, it is true that there's a thriving market in pirated content via Kodi boxes and the like, but TVAddons was just a site that hosted all sorts of add-ons, and most of them had nothing at all to do with infringing content. As we mentioned in our original article, out of over 1,500 add-ons, only 22 were found to involve infringing content. To put this in perspective, think of the VCR/Betamax in the early years, when Jack Valenti was insisting that it would be the "Boston Strangler" to the movie industry. Back then, a ton of the content being passed around on those tapes would likely be considered infringing -- in part because that was before the industry learned to embrace home video (which quickly became a huge moneymaker for Hollywood). But that was found legal because, as the Supreme Court noted, there were "substantial non-infringing uses" of the technology. It seems pretty damn clear that there are "substantial non-infringing uses" of Kodi add-ons as well, and especially of a platform like TVAddons, that was there just to host those add-ons -- and not to host any infringing content directly.However, as we noted in that original piece, it seemed quite clear that the Canadian telcos were so hellbent on destroying TVAddons and its founder, Adam Lackman, that it didn't seem to care about any of this. They got a special "Anton Piller" order in Canada that allowed their own private investigators to search his home and take his stuff. While this was going on, Lackman called his lawyer, and the lawyers for the telcos literally ordered him to hang up and not talk to his lawyer. As we noted, this wasn't the police -- this was private companies ransacking a guy's house, because some people might possibly use some software that was hosted on his open platform for possibly infringing uses.Years later, it's perhaps not surprising that these Canadian telcos -- namely Bell Canada, Rogers, Videotron and TVA -- appear to have no interest in letting this case end. They remain hellbent on destroying Lackman and the site. While Lackman initially won the first round of the case, in which a court noted that the Anton Piller order was clearly unlawful, he lost on appeal, and was told he needs to pay the legal fees of the giant telcos, even though no actual trial has taken place (all of this is on preliminary issues)Lackman has now been left in the unenviable position of having to set up a GoFundMe just to try to raise enough to pay for the giant telcos legal fees, let alone continue the actual legal fight. The whole setup is ridiculous: giant companies (who never even sent a takedown notice to TV Addons) get to do a private raid, take all of his stuff (which was later recognized as against the law), block him from talking to his lawyer, and then bankrupt him through an ongoing legal process.This kind of story, of course, is not unique. We've seen it play out in many different ways over the years, but it's particularly galling to see how it's playing out here.

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posted at: 12:00am on 27-Sep-2019
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Kazakh Government Takes Down 93k Websites To Site-Block A Single Massage Parlour

Furnished content.


Site blocking. When it comes to law enforcement and IP enforcement efforts, site blocking is the simple man's solution to a very complicated problem. The claim that floats out there in the ether is something like: hey, if we discover sites are breaking the law in some way, we can just order ISPs to block access to the site and the problem's solved. Despite that simplistic send up, the practice of blocking sites in this way inevitably leads to massive collateral damage and flat out abuse. And, yet, those that advocate for site blocking shrug their shoulders at this. After all, if you want to make an IP omelette, you have to break some percentage of the internet, right?But the award for fucking this all up at scale must certainly go to the government of Kazakhstan, which wanted to take a massage parlor's website off of the internet for engaging in some very massage-parlor-y behavior, and managed to pull down 93,000 other websites along with it.

State censors trying to erase the web presence of an erotic massage emporium called Rainbow Spa back in late July did so by ordering the blocking of the site's IP address instead of its domain name.  The ban-happy block was targeted at two IP addresses, reported by local outlet Hola News as 185.165.123.36 and 185.165.123.206. The first of these hosts around 9,500 domains, while the second keeps just over 84,000 websites online.Unfortunately for the bungling censors, these two IPs resolve to shared infrastructure in Russia – including a large number of websites hosted on the Tilda Publishing platform, a sort of Wordpress-style CMS-plus-prebuilt-skins intended for rapid deployment by the unskilled.
First, blocking a website by its IP address in 2019 is hilariously inept. Sites these days routinely share cloud infrastructure through providers. This isn't strictly some cost-cutting measure by web providers, but necessary to secure sites at scale against attack by filtering against malicious traffic. This is how hosts protect against DDoS attacks. To be handing the keys to blocking websites to people that very clearly haven't the slightest clue what they're doing is the kind of thing only national governments can do.Tilda Publishing itself pointed this out.
Blocking a resource by IP address is an outdated and barbaric practice that has long been inconsistent with modern cloud-based IT technologies and access restriction mechanics.
And it's not just that there was so much collateral damage that makes all of this so damning for the Kazakh government. The massage parlor, as I type this, still has one of its websites up and live.It's hard to imagine a better example of why we shouldn't allow government the power to block websites than this.

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posted at: 12:00am on 27-Sep-2019
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