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The Pirate Bay Blocked In Italy

Posted by Soulskill on from the not-giving-p2p-the-boot dept.

imhassan tips us to news that The Pirate Bay has been blocked in Italy. Other attempts to block the popular P2P site have been somewhat less than successful. From TorrentFreak: "Pirate Bay's IPs and the domain name are inaccessible, as they are blocked by ISPs all over the country. Whether these blocks will be very effective, however, is doubtful, since The Pirate Bay has already announced several countermeasures. An insider working at an Internet provider in Italy told TorrentFreak that all the relevant large access ISPs in Italy have complied with the request to block the popular BitTorrent tracker, which was sent out yesterday. Italy is taking a stand against BitTorrent sites, so it seems. Two weeks ago, the largest Italian torrent site, Columbo-BT, was shut down by the same prosecutor who is responsible for the Pirate Bay block."

7 of 247 comments (clear)

  1. Tor is the answer by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Tor is the answer to everything.
    Use Tor to access the trackers. Problem solved.

  2. at least TPB has a sense of humor about it by Essequemodeia · · Score: 5, Informative

    Our fine Italian friends can still access TPB at labaia.org. Here's to hoping for as little irritation as possible.

    1. Re:at least TPB has a sense of humor about it by Vectronic · · Score: 5, Informative

      La Baia
      The Bay

  3. It's not blocked here... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    I am in Italy and I can surf to Pirate Bay right now. My ISP is Tiscali.

  4. Better yet - get involved by btarval · · Score: 5, Informative
    Go one step further beyond being a leech, by downloading and setting up a Tor exit node.

    And, since the usual RIAA fanbois usually pop up once you mention Tor, casting FUD to scare people away from it, here's the EFF's legal FAQ, and here's the Tor FAQ.

    Also note carefully what the parent said, namely, "Use Tor to access the trackers". Tor is, by default, set up to disable bittorrent transfers, since it heavily loads the Tor network. Here's one article which well explains Why you shouldn't run bittorrent over Tor.

    And if you look at the default exit node policies (see section 4.16 of the Tor FAQ), the standard bittorrent ports are explicitly rejected. So you really don't want to run bittorrent over Tor.

    --
    The best way to predict the future is to create it. - Peter Drucker.
    1. Re:Better yet - get involved by Stellian · · Score: 5, Informative

      Go one step further beyond being a leech, by downloading and setting up a Tor exit node.

      I would be very careful with that. Running a TOR exit point will get your IP on all kinds of black lists and you will soon find you can't use your internet connection normally, you get strange timeouts, captchas whenever you try to search Google and so on. Just sniff a bit and see exactly what people are doing over your IP - you will be appalled. There are also all kinds of spiders that keep black lists of TOR proxyes (even non-exit nodes !). So I recommend running a TOR server only if you either have a dynamic IP, or you can dedicate a separate static IP to it.

      Also note carefully what the parent said, namely, "Use Tor to access the trackers". Tor is, by default, set up to disable bittorrent transfers, since it heavily loads the Tor network.

      To emphasize the GP's point, he was talking about setting the tracker (http announce) connection over TOR; this is totally negligible in terms of load (a few 1KB connections per hour, per active torrent) and perfectly effective against the mafia block. Running the actual bittorrent file transfer across TOR is quite a pointless thing to do: most exit nodes allow a very small white list of ports to connect to, so there's little chance of getting decent download speeds - you will only connect to very few peers or only over the very overloaded exit nodes with a more relaxed policy. All this aside from the implicit slowness of TOR. Simply put, I don't think you could download anything (thankfully - we need TOR for other things than piracy).

    2. Re:Better yet - get involved by MagdJTK · · Score: 5, Informative

      Running a TOR exit point will get your IP on all kinds of black lists and you will soon find you can't use your internet connection normally, you get strange timeouts, captchas whenever you try to search Google and so on.

      Very true. I've played around with Tor and a number of sites (understandably) ban all tor exit nodes from contributing. Wikipedia is an obvious example.