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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."
I actually have a setup to do that already - I've seen a couple trackers "go down" due to core router / dns problems, and it was quite handy to use Tor to see if an alternate exit point had the same problems.
I'd suggest people get the Tor package installer on general principles, it's quite useful to be able to torbutton for a bit if you're having trouble getting somewhere.
Indeed, my ISP (bethere.co.uk) had some serious routing issues just last night, I couldn't even access the likes of Google and OpenDNS was entirely unreachable. However, good ol' Tor saved the day and I was able to browse as normal (Albeit slowly and carefully, so as to not send any important cookies or passwords) for the 2 and a half hours or so it took for them to fix it.
Bollocks to privacy and all that, Tor has many applications and uses that I've come to rely on.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
It doesn't work, due to moles and snitches. Sooner or later someone is going to trust someone they shouldn't have -- it's human nature. And then the rest of the group inherits the trust, because that's also human nature.
The only reasonably safe way of organizing a network is through cells, where even if one cell is corrupted, it won't spread to others. This holds true for computer networks too, but few if any applications support such a model. Those that are vaguely similar fail by having the node belong to multiple cells, thus making the impact of subversion much higher.
Glad to see 2 well formulated posts on the subject. Props.
I will not dive deep into the technical issues as it would take a whole lot of "what ifs" and "What nots" to predict what technology could and would be implemented at some stage to counter illegal filesharing.
But the parent post adds a very interesting point:
The Internet is a carrier of freedom, but here as everywhere else in society it doesnt come without responsibility. TPB does not advocate this responsibility, in my view, at a very high level. Further down the road, this _could_ lead to stronger control of user activities and/or net neutrality. I dont think most small-time pirates gives this much thought, and it _could_ prove a high price to pay. Since stuff like P2P and spam takes alot of bandwith without any of the service and content providers making money, it is not far fetched to think that ISPs in the future will consider giving up identities behind IPs that are "too active" on illegal filesharing or similar activities. Or even be forced to do so by governments.
Even though the regular slashdot-user can throw up a few proxies and dive into the comfort zone of being anonymous in no time, this is not the case with most filesharers. And the minute the neighbour's kids start getting lawsuits in their mail, parents will stop bragging about the net skills of their prodigys and how they "just download whatever they want" (like my parents did), and start learning them about property rights instead. Trust me.
I am in the position that I have run 2 companies for the about 10 years. Rarely enough, the first one doing high end web programming, and the second a small Indie recordlabel. Needless to say, I have been puleld between my love for the net, and my love for music. For years I have been in heavy conflicts with most of the music biz, advocating offensive use of the net as a new distribution channel rather than lawsuits and war with consumers.
However ive started to come to the conclusion that this is a sociological issue rather than a technical one. There are elements in the arguments coming from filesharers that rises issues not possible to solve through technology.
1. 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.
In this way, people using illegal filesharing strenghtens the market position of the MAJOR labels, not the vivid but oh so weak Indie scene. Market power sucks, eh?
2. There seems to be alot of kids out there who really thinks music is free, and that the attempts to put down the likes of TPB is taking something away from them that they always had. This is disturbing. Ive had kids mailing me to have me send them rips of CDs as they had trouble finding them on the net. They dont thank me when I do, as they see it as a given right, and bad service from us when its not available for download. Needless to say, this is not the kids that will drive forward a music scene in the future. I dont know what this means in practical terms, but its a new kind of customer that will be pretty close to impossible to serve. This is not ideal for a number of reasons that most can work out for themselves.
3. The filesharers has a free choice to avoid stealing and hustling music they dont own any tights to. There is free music out there for several lifetimes of listening. Still people wants the stuff that they have to pay for. Why? Partly due