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Courts Force Danish ISP to Block Torrent Tracker
Pirate writes "A Danish court ruled in favor of the IFPI, and ordered the Danish ISP Tele2 to block all access to the popular BitTorrent tracker. The Pirate Bay, currently ranked 28th in the list of most visited sites in Denmark, is working on countermeasures."
Sure, they're blocking traffic to that specific tracker, but that doesn't really fix the "issue". Torrent trackers are like hydras, cut off one, and two will grow back in its place. Focusing on TPB will not end piracy via torrents, just as shutting down the original nova didn't over a year ago, and all the other trackers that have been closed down in between.
How Jaded Are You?
"It's very frightening that IFPI can get through the courts with something like this. In Turkey and China its the state that decides what information the people can access and what should be censored. In Denmark its apparently the record industry,"
I think that sums it up quite nicely.
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If you're going to block one tracker, you have to block them all yes? What rank is Google? I can type in "insert torrent here" tor and get back a pretty solid list of torrents that way too...
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country did to you
It amazes me how much power the music and film industry can wield. If I recall, Sweden has a law against being pressured by outside interests? Maybe other countries should follow suit and pass their own similar laws before Hollywood becomes the law.
why not use a p2p approach for the tracker itself, with multiple entry nodes into the network? it's simple, elegant, resilient, robust, and powerful.
Just because a gun maker makes a gun for general "sport" doesn't mean it shouldn't be held to gun laws. Even if the laws are for a gun that you know is just for killing someone.
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country did to you
How? Does Google's cache software support the Bittorrent tracker protocol? If so, how do I use a .torrent that's been configured to use a different tracker server to use Google's instead?
I always wondered why folks didn't use other Internet technologies such as DNS to get around the "blocking" issue?
What's to prevent all the tracker information from being put into a master DNS server with a low TTL, and building up torrent search software which queries DNS?
You could store this into TXT records and query DNS to find the results;
"Thomas-Edison-The-Lost-Chord-1888" IN TXT a9cd93da939d9c9
The TXT being a unique code which again is looked up in DNS
a9cd93da939d9c9.subdomain.domain.toplevel
And the result is a list of IP's that are currently seeding the torrent,
and thus BT can subscribe to. I can do a dynamic DNS update to
add my client to the list of machines seeding the torrent.
So there is no HTTP traffic involved in this exchange. The DNS is
typically provided by the ISP, so caching would be in effect. So
you want TTLs to be low. The clients will be querying against the ISP's
DNS server. Dynamic DNS would be to the parent DNS server. The ISP could
blackhole the zone by putting in a dummy record, but that can be overcome
by using the root DNS servers or using any of the many open DNS servers.
Anyway, my thoughts on the subject. ICMP would be another protocol one could
potentially use to get around this too.
Oh, wait, did you mean the pirates' rights? Do please elaborate; I don't recall seeing a "right to download other people's IP for free" in any laws recently.
Sorry, but there is no defense in this case. Blocking BitTorrent per se would be trampling on people's rights, because BitTorrent is a neutral technology that is used for many legitimate purposes. But The Pirate Bay is not like that. There's a hint in the name, see? The Pirate Bay is openly and unashamedly dedicated to supporting and promoting illegal activity. Pirate Bay apologists are constantly telling us that the website itself is legal, and it's only the people who use it who are violating copyright law. Well, if that's the case, what exactly is wrong with stopping people from using it to violate copyright law?
Duh. The ISP can and will block outbound DNS to anything != their own server. :)
Don't underestimate the ability of consumer-focussed ISPs to violate every RFC in existance with impunity, as long as Joe Sixpack can access hotmail and youtube
That's not such a bad thing, and it beats the alternative.
For example: where I work we recently implemented a basic web filter (using Barracuda). Because we didn't feel like blocking all traffic (and for us it's impossible) we simply mandated that all traffic using IE go through a proxy into the Barracuda filter. This satisfied the requirements, but all a smart user, or even an average user, has to do is use another browser without the proxy settings. Net result: we did next to nothing, and the higher-ups got off our backs.
Did we fix the problem? No, and neither did the Danes. But we did the bare minimum (blocked something) and now we can go about in peace.
Clients supporting the trackerless torrent feature can become ad-hoc trackers on demand and they can be found by other peers via the DHT protocol which is also part of the trackerless torrent scheme. DHT is essentially a search engine which can locate trackers/peers via the "hash" checksum of a given torrent.
A common trick for websites listing torrents is to identify such (potentially) trackerless torrents via a "magnet" url which is essentially an ASCI-friendly version of the torrent "hash" instead of a link to a .torrent file. That way even the .torrent file is stored in a distrubuted manner.
There is no reason people should be encouraged to consume.
People should be encouraged to be smart with their money, not toss it away on stupid shit. People will invent if incentives are there and our patent system doesn't continue to get trashed further away from inventions and as they allow "concepts" and methods.
Greed is damaging to a person and that person's materials. No person is responsible to spend their money on the economy. Thats why some people are self sufficient and live off their land, or only purchase what they need.
Greed is not good, in any form. My kids will be taught that.
Convenience and invention doesn't mean profit was the intent. Profit was the result. It's not our job to buy into someone else's pocketbook. Welcome to capitalism sir. Manufacturers continually lower costs to actually maintain a business. Its called evolve or die. In simple forms manufacturing processes are never as expensive down the road as when they started (alternatives, more efficient methods, improved materials, etc). Greed is what keeps the price high on these things. It applies to businesses just as much as any physical organism.