An update to the list of blocked websites in Australia was announced today via the Federal Courts system to block proxies and torrent websites. I’m not going to get into the moral or ethical debate over pirating material in this post but what I am going to do is show just how mind-numbingly easy it is to circumvent the blocking process that Australian internet providers have implemented it to keep the courts happy.
What is the DNS system?
DNS is how your computer translates a domain name into the IP address of the server hosting the requested content. It was first developed decades ago and started off as a manually maintained text file. Back then, there weren’t that many computers on the “internet” such as it was. Whenever a new machine was added to the network a new entry was added to the text file, then that file was sent around to all the computers. Obviously not a scalable solution.