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The Pirate Bay Blocked In Italy
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."
Unless and until every system connected to the Internet needs a unique key of some sort before it's allowed to exchange packets, blocking anything will be completely ineffective.
The current net neutrality debate is the first line of defense toward preventing such a system.
I'm a big tall mofo.
I am just an ignorant American, but I believe if an ISP is now taking it on themselves to filter content, then they are possibly no longer a common carrier and as such can be subject to many other sanctions to block "bad" content. In Italy it may be entirely different, but either way, if the ISP does not say in their TOS they can block sites at their will, then they could be in big trouble for breach of contract, if such a thing flies in Italy.
http://labaia.org/ .
The italy government sucks. Someone really should to put a bullet through Berlusconi's fascisti face.
That useless : use tor or another proxy to connect to the search engine/tracker (doesn't need high trafic).
Once you got the *.torrent you want and the ip of the peer that share the file, you can connect directly to them without needing to pass by a proxy...
Say it isn't so!
You know that Mussolini's party is still active in Italy right?
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
...is what happens when you elect a media owner as your country's president.
Ciao free speech!
Oh right, they block websites that could threaten what props their system up.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I've used TPB for legal torrents as well as the "illegal" ones. I taste movies before buying them, and TPB is a great way to try before I buy. I actually spend MORE money on DVDs purchased legally because of this method.
So the Italian prosecutor would call me a criminal. Fine. He's using public funding against what would be a "crime" between private parties. He's using the taxpayer's dollars to do the work the "harmed" party should be doing.
In reality, Italy has far larger problems than issues between two private parties. There is RAMPANT corruption that is costing REAL dollars to the taxpayer. The Italian government should be seeking out bad seeds amongst themselves as a priority. There is also massive amounts of theft and loss within their own body; maybe they should focus on those problems?
While I don't wish to distract from what is, in many respects, a premier example of the genus 'angry rant', I feel I should point out that no-one in Italy (or anywhere else that I know of) is actually blocking bittorrent.
They are blocking a website which serves bittorrent files. There's rather a lot of difference.
Also, lets get real, most of thepiratebays content links users to content which is being provided contrary to the laws of their countries.
Is this wrong? Well, the debate goes on, but we get nowhere by pretending that everything's lovely with downloading 'unauthorised' content, and get with the real problem, that copyright itself is very broken.
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
I suspect he has a lucrative career ahead of him in the entertainment industry. Wouldn't be the first case of that happening.
And how many seats do they currently hold in the parliament?
You're really beating the wrong cat. ;)
When ideas fail, words become very handy.
I'm sure the owners of TBP don't want to step anywhere near a courtroom, even less for one not in their own country.
They know that it is impossible to stop people from getting to it. But they also know that if they manage to reduce the amount of people that uses P2P down from what it is now (my guess is 80%~90%) to something like below 20%, then they will be able to say that this people are criminals.
Right now, they should send to jail the whole country.
When his defense asked, "Which computer has Jon Johansen trespassed upon?" the answer was: "His own."
Knowledgeable people in Italy will just use Tor or whatever to bypass the block. Less knowledgeable people will just move to the next big thing (mininova, kazaa, etc...)
The "Goverment" will look like it has made as much as possible to protect the interests of the artist lobby groups that are pushing this
Make It Secret Protect your privacy
I love these wishful thinking posts.
Here's a newsflash for you: the authorities and big business have way, way more control over the Internet than you appear to realise. Companies like Google have the resources to index the entire web. Every major international pipe is controlled by one of a pretty small group of major telecomms companies. Despite the grand redundancy claims, there are plenty of single points of failure that will disconnect, or at least seriously inhibit, flow of data to or from entire countries.
You can make defiant noises about how impractical it would be for the authorities to police everything and how important net neutrality is, but TPB is the enemy here, because by its very existence and public position on openly breaking the law in most countries, it provides all the evidence that politicians and their major contributors need to justify not fighting for net neutrality and pushing for ever more surveillance and control.
A few years ago, there was all this talk about the Internet being some new, special place. Sorry, but it's neither above international agreements nor above individual countries enforcing their own laws and cutting off anyone who doesn't play nicely with their efforts to do so.
The world will be a better place for most people if the freedom that generally exists on the Internet is preserved, but if that freedom is abused by a vocal minority, the rest of us will all get shafted by the consequences.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
That's just a glorified ad hominem attack. TPB's openly admitted purpose for existing is in violation of Italian law. When you break the law, you forfeit certain legal protections and certain freedoms. A public official blocking them from helping people to break the law isn't fascism or censorship, it's simply enforcing the law, and some random group of people who don't agree with the law do not get to decide what is the law for an entire country.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
If the law is fascist then yes, enforcing the law IS fascist.
A public official blocking them from helping people to break the law isn't fascism or censorship, it's simply enforcing the law
Enforcing the law or not, it is censorship. Whether you agree with it or not does not change the fact that it fits the definition of censorship.
some random group of people who don't agree with the law do not get to decide what is the law for an entire country
Are you objecting to people discussing what the law actually is, or discussing whether the law is right?
They have no right to strip away your capacity to consciously choose to break a law you feel is unjust.
They have a right to prosecute or litigate against you for it, but they don't have a right to impede your free will!
When you start doing this, it's called fascism. Information gets censored because it's "dangerous" and will "incite criminal actions". Butcher knives should be banned too! they are clearly designed with the express purpose of slicing flesh, and humans are made of flesh.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
That seems like an awful lot of work for free entertainment. Why not just work some shit job and buy it?
The "War on the greedy music biz" is failing. Or that is, it might be won, but at a high price. Running a small label I slowly started realizing that Im the one loosing the battle, not the major labels. The reason is simple. You wont find my music on TPB. And even when i put it there myself, people would still look around for Britney Schmears or whatever other brand the majors are launching at any given time through advertisements, media control and whatever. And even in the rare case they DO seek up my music, and even want to support my label by buying the record, they most likely wont be able to as most indies cannot distribute their records to all corners of the world until long after the air is out of the balloon.
It sounds more to me like the business model you have for your music is wrong.
1) I find it very hard to believe in this day and age that you couldn't sell world-wide through the Internet.
2) The fact that you don't even publish a link to your music here on Slashdot makes me believe that you're missing important business opportunities. Or is this connected with (1) (you would have no way to profit from Slashdotters being interested in your music)?
3) Your music may just be too "niche", in which case you'll just have to live with the reality that you're never going to be the next Brittney Spears, and will have to keep a day job also.
Why do you presuppose that anonymous sharing is only used for entertainment of the buyable kind?
What if you're trading movies and books that are banned for blasphemy where you live?
What if you're trading erotica that can't be sold where you are due to "decency" laws?
Or what if you're trading video footage and documents which the government wants hushed up?
Since stuff like P2P and spam takes alot of bandwith without any of the service and content providers making money
Excuse me, but how do the ISPs make money? from users subscription. And why do users care that their internet access have decent bandwidth (beyond the cheap basic service they need to read their mail on google or yahoo?) because of large, multimedia downloads, which are effectively distributed (legally or illegally) over P2P.
The ISPs have no natural economic incentive to block whatever the users want to do, unless either:
a) they have a flawed billing model, where they provide extremely high bandwidth at a flat rate and expect users not to use it
OR b) anticompetitive, vertical integration: the ISPs are also content providers, and want to hook you into whatever shit they are selling you
Of course, anti-P2P regulation can provide such incentive (by giving ISPs big fines if they don't block P2P, for instance).