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Courts Force Danish ISP to Block Torrent Tracker

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the forest-meet-trees dept.

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."

7 of 145 comments (clear)

  1. they don't get it. by B00yah · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

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    1. Re:they don't get it. by orclevegam · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Quite correct. Likely the only outcome of this is that the ISP in question starts bleeding 1,000s of customers per day.

      Proxies, alternative sites, usenet, etc. etc. Plenty of alternatives. If past cases in Denmark are in indication Tele2 is just the first ISP to block access, all other ISPs in Denmark will soon follow. In short, if you live in Denmark, there really will be no alternatives. That being said however, there are other ways of establishing access other then switching ISPs (such as proxies as mentioned above). I'll be watching this closely as I can't wait to see the creative solutions that are going to be devised to prevent his sort of blocking in the future. Maybe we should take some notes from the botnets and see if there's a way to rework some of the tech like fast-flux DNS in a positive way to circumvent censorship.
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    2. Re:they don't get it. by rmccann · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Nope. It's easier than that. If I have a domain example.com, then I just need to point piratebay.example.com to the pirate bay. Then people can type in piratebay.example.com into their web browser and voilà, it's the pirate bay. This is advantagous because it means thousands of people all over the world can do it.

    3. Re:they don't get it. by BSAtHome · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Tele2 doesn't give a rats ass for its customers. They recently "upgraded" many customers to higher bandwidth because they are under pressure for competition, but they made a mistake that cause a large userbase to be downgraded instead. Tele2's support admitted the mistake and admitted that they _did_not_ actively went out to fix this. Each and every customer has to detect their degraded line themselves and then call support (and then wait 5 days until it is fixed). Tele2 has recently been bought and I do not give them very long anymore with their absolutely sub-standard service.

  2. IFPI by snowraver1 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    "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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  3. Good for the goose... by techpawn · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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...

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  4. Re:what's next? by ACMENEWSLLC · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.