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."

Comments

Re:Wishful thinking

[EdIII]

Here's a newsflash for you: the authorities and big business have way, way more control over the Internet than you appear to realise

Every major international pipe is controlled by one of a pretty small group of major telecomms companies

You are oversimplifying things a great deal. You are not incorrect in stating that governments and businesses have a large control over the pipes themselves. However, there is a HUGE difference between controlling the pipe and controlling what goes through the pipe.

You could say that the pipes and their routers would be like large highways with millions of people walking. At the intersections you could be checking the identity of every person and searching the contents of their bags. If this were true, then yes you would be right, a large amount of control could be exerted by governments and the corporations which control the highways and intersections.

However, the Internet is not like that. You just cannot simply turn off a route and eliminate all flow to another network (which can affect a whole country) as often it would be like shooting a fly with a cannon. You would eliminate 1% undesirable traffic while also eliminating 99% of all the desirable traffic.

So what do you have left as options to eliminate only the 1% of the traffic which is undesirable? Packet Inspection. There are several challenges to overcome if you are going to effectively block anything:

1) Encryption. It's hard to tell with 100% accuracy what is going on with a session when you cannot read the packets. Encrypted packets, IPSec, VPN, etc. all raise the level of difficulty significantly which necessitates the next step.

2) Behavioral Analysis. When you can't decrypt, sometimes you can tell what is going on by looking at other factors and clues.

Now I know what you may want to say, that you can just block all traffic going to TPB's servers. What do you do about mirrors? What about VPN connections to servers that will host torrents and reside on wholly different networks outside of your control? How do stop the fact that somebody on the Internet can create a secure session with somebody else that does not have the same restrictions on their own network?

With all due respect, the "Grand Redundancy" claims are valid. As long as a SINGLE country allows connections of any kind to a restricted network, while also not being restricted from the rest of the countries, people WILL be able to establish connections to the undesirables. This cannot be stopped.

Please note that I am not writing this in support of The Pirate Bay or IP Piracy in general, but only to point out that your statement is just not factually correct. It IS wholly impractical for authorities to police the net as they will never be able to take the steps necessary to accomplish their goals as it would hurt more than help.

Now if you disagree with my assessment, please provide a more detailed technical explanation of how such control can be exerted other than superficial observation that corporations own the pipes and governments can exert control over corporations.

"the law" does not equal morality..

[plasmacutter]

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.