17-year-old student exposes Germany's 'secret' pirate site blocklist

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Blocklist characteristics

  • List covers ~104 “main domains”; commenters expected more given secrecy and lack of court orders.
  • Blocking is at DNS level (NXDOMAIN / misdirected responses), not IP blackholing.
  • Domains are largely sports, movie, and game sharing/streaming; Sci‑Hub is included, LibGen generally not mentioned as blocked.
  • Some frequent pirate/torrent sites used by commenters are notably absent, leading to speculation about selection criteria and enforcement priorities.

Circumvention techniques

  • DNS-based blocking is trivially bypassed with third‑party resolvers (e.g., 8.8.8.8), VPNs, or Tor.
  • ISPs can interfere by forcing their own DNS (e.g., blocking port 53 or hardwiring DNS in rented routers), but:
    • Users can often use their own routers; in Germany, that right is legally protected.
    • DNS-over-HTTPS/TLS (e.g., Firefox DoH, NextDNS, Cloudflare, DNSCrypt‑proxy) works around port‑53 blocking since it looks like normal HTTPS on 443.
  • More advanced approaches include custom routers (OpenWrt, OPNsense), local DNS proxies, Tailscale exit nodes, VPS/seedboxes, and residential-proxy-like setups.
  • Some note tradeoffs: VPN/seedbox IPs are increasingly blocked by streaming services; residential exit nodes avoid this.

Who is actually blocked

  • View that DNS blocking is a “hard stop” for the vast majority of users with low technical skills.
  • Counterview: anyone motivated to pirate can quickly find workarounds or ask a friend; in poorer or more heavily censored countries, such skills are common.
  • Consensus: blocks mostly stop “normies” and casual access (e.g., to Sci‑Hub), not determined users.

German copyright enforcement context

  • Commenters say torrent users in Germany risk expensive settlement letters (hundreds of euros per movie), based on rights-holders joining swarms and logging IPs.
  • Debate over whether the legal hook is “commercial distribution” vs simple copyright infringement, but several report paying substantial settlements.
  • Result: many in Germany avoid torrents and use streaming/direct-download or Usenet, often behind VPNs.

Legality, transparency, and scope creep

  • Strong concern that a private “clearing” body plus ISP DNS blocking, without court orders, amounts to privatized censorship and weak democratic oversight.
  • Austria is cited as a contrast where blocklists and legal bases are published.
  • Some argue DNS blocking is chosen precisely because it’s symbolic and easy to bypass, yet normalizes censorship infrastructure that could later expand (e.g., to “misinformation”).
  • Others see a Streisand effect: secrecy failed and the published list now serves as a discovery index for piracy.