Circumventing SOPA is as Easy as Installing a Browser Add-On

Peter Suderman | December 22, 2011

Circumventing the website blocking mechanism proposed by the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) is as easy as adding a browser extension. Via Andy Greenberg at Forbes:

While Congress has postponed the second half of its hearing on SOPA until next year, a developer named Tamer Rizk has been busy building an add-on for Firefox called DeSopa, which aims to give any Firefox user access to sites that SOPA’s copyright protection measures have blocked. “This program is a proof of concept that SOPA will not help prevent piracy,” reads a note including on DeSopa’s download page. “If SOPA is implemented, thousands of similar and more innovative programs and services will sprout up to provide access to the websites that people frequent. SOPA is a mistake. It does not even technically help solve the underlying problem, as this software illustrates.”
DeSopa takes advantage of an blatant weakness in how SOPA’s controversial filtering mandate would function under the current version of the bill. The new copyright infringement regime would allow editing of the Domain Name System, the registry that converts websites’ domains (like Google.com or Yahoo.com) into an Internet Protocol address (like 74.125.157.99 or 98.137.149.56). When you type “Google.com” into your browser, your computer communicates with DNS servers that convert that name into an IP address. But type the IP address directly into your browser, and it works just as well.
Since SOPA would lead to editing American DNS servers’ IP lists to insert errors for sites deemed illegal, DeSopa simply checks with foreign DNS servers to find the correct IP address and navigates directly to whatever blocked site the user enters. To avoid incorrect IP addresses in those foreign servers, the program even checks domains with three DNS servers and grabs whichever IP address has at least two agreeing answers.

As currently envisioned, SOPA looks like a stunning anti-success: Not only would it undermine core elements on the Internet’s architecture, it wouldn’t stop much piracy. Indeed, as Greenberg points out, it would probably make the Internet substantially less secure: