Here’s Proof That SOPA Is Simply Idiocy

Earlier today Dan York posted a lovely and very simple explanation of how to completely circumvent the DNS based filtering scheme that’s been put forward in the Stop Online Piracy Act. This bill, known generically as SOPA, has been the focus of the senate judiciary committee for the past while.

The bill is being promoted by Big Media in all it’s facets. I would have thought that a decade’s worth of debacles with digital rights management (DRM) would have taught the industry something. There is no technological solution that cannot be overcome. This I understand to be a universal truth.

You may have some very smart people come up with some clever technology. That doesn’t matter because there are lots of very clever people around who will find a way around it. From the earliest days of DVD Jon cracking the encryption on DVDs, to HD-DVDs and BluRay…people will find a way.

In the realm of wifi WPA-PSK2 with AES encryption using long passphrases was once considered “practically unbreakable.” Now, with the assistance of cheap, high-performance computing via Amazon’s EC2 you can get it brute force cracked in minutes for a paltry sum.

Only the arrogant and the wholly uninformed would think that they can impose a technological solution. Further, technology moves faster than law, so it’s folly to impose technological solutions in law.

In all of the noise about SOPA the most poignant tweet that I recall seeing was from @doctorow

“Thank GOD Congress is tackling the populist grass-roots supported topic of movie piracy, rather than crap like joblessness.”