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

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Germany’s major ISPs have been quietly enforcing a DNS-based blocklist of alleged pirate and research sites, recently exposed by a 17‑year‑old student, despite the absence of transparent court orders or public oversight. Commenters note that the blocks are trivial to bypass with alternative DNS, VPNs, or encrypted DNS, making them effective mainly at deterring non‑technical users while having little impact on determined pirates. Many see this as a worrying precedent for privatized, opaque internet censorship that could easily expand beyond copyright to other types of content.

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.