I just installed a #SOPA blackout plugin for WordPress on the blog that no one but Google reads and it occurred to me, rather than content providers turning their sites black, why not start blocking gov’t netblocks? Congressional offices don’t need the internet, do they? They can use the telephone or a FAX machine, maybe go to the library. Though if I was a librarian and a SOPA sponsor or his staff tried to use the public terminals, I might be inclined to turn them away: you have to know how it works before you can use this, and those people plainly don’t get it.

We know that torrent downloads have been traced to governments everywhere, even our own. Seems to me the best option is a variant of how we deal with email spam: a realtime blacklist. Any organization that attacks free speech should be banned from accessing any website that objects to those attacks. I can see a special 503 error page that makes plain why they can’t be served at this time.

Imagine if email relays refused to send mail from .gov addresses (just the legislative branch), just sent them all back with an error explaining why their mail is undeliverable. Web page loads would fail, display a simple black and white message that “This content cannot be served to you at this time. Users in your domain have engaged in copyright infringement which means your domain is banned. Have a nice day.”

Maybe it’s unworkable, maybe not enough sites would do it, certainly no large ones. But I am tired of this being labelled a technology problem when it’s really a business problem. Someone abuses a technology, be it the internet or a hammer, it’s not the person who made the tool who is at fault but the person using it and in this case, the organization claiming injury.

#!/usr/local/bin/bash
export THEN=`dnsip mail.thistledew.org` # hostname you're monitoring
#export THEN=`nslookup ${HOME} | tail -1 | awk -F" " '{ print $3 }'` # alternate method w/o djbdns
export NOW=`http://wget -qO- icanhazip.com` # what the internet thinks your address is
if [ ${NOW} != ${THEN} ]; then
    # echo "ping";
    logger "ip addresses out of sync: updating"
    /usr/local/bin/update-afraidns.sh # your various update methods go here
    /usr/local/bin/dyndns.sh > /dev/null 2>&1
else
    # echo "pong";
    exit 0
fi

Update: at the month mark, this seems to be working. I get notified when it needs to sync addresses (usually at just past 4AM) and it’s not too often. It runs every 5 minutes (not sure when I changed it to that: used to be once per hour but that seemed miss some of the IP address fluctuations). I could use some of the other client software I see (OpenDNS recommends one but I never got on with it) but this seems to work. Just enough to get the job done, not enough to be truly useful anywhere else, except as a model of how not to do it, perhaps.

Update, July 5, 2011: If I had thought this through, I would have tested the DNS servers I use more carefully. Turns out one of the four, between two providers, was constantly flaky.

$ host mail.thistledew.org ns1.afraid.org
mail.thistledew.org has address 174.21.112.113
 
$ host mail.thistledew.org ns3.afraid.org
mail.thistledew.org has address 174.21.112.113
 
$ host mail.thistledew.org ns9.zoneedit.com
mail.thistledew.org has address 174.21.112.113
 
$ host mail.thistledew.org ns15.zoneedit.com
mail.thistledew.org has address 174.21.122.16

Someone got voted off the island.

NEA – What we can learn from Finland’s successful school reform

Couple of things come to mind: 

• Finland is a pretty homogeneous place, not a lot of immigrants to accommodate, in either numbers or diverse languages
• It has a reputation for social equality (as does the rest of Scandinavia)
• It has some well-known high-tech industries (Saab, Nokia)
• There are benefits to being a small independent country instead of a superpower.

Couple of things I looked up:

• Finland’s population is 5,338,395 vs 307 million for the US
• $34K GDP vs $46K for the US
• 64% of Finns live in towns, with most in one southern central plain: 81% of Americans live in cities or suburbs, with densities for both countries at 44 and 84 people per sq mile, respectively. 

Interestingly, Finland’s organized labor is more prominent and more powerful than we have here in the US. But they’re not the problem. 

The perpetual school reform movement is a societal and cultural issue more than anything. We talk about equality as a key part of our democratic ideals but our thought leader abandon public schools for private schools as soon as they can.