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

Pirates blocked in Italy?!?!

[BitterOldGUy]

Was it the mafia? I heard that the mafia doesn't like pirates or fascists for that matter.

Tor is the answer

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Tor is the answer

[Moryath]

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.

Yeah, that will be effective.

[bigtallmofo]

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.

at least TPB has a sense of humor about it

[Essequemodeia]

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

Re:at least TPB has a sense of humor about it

[Vectronic]

La Baia
The Bay

Re:at least TPB has a sense of humor about it

[bmo]

I went to labia.com and labia.org and I was disappointed both times.

Both are parked domains.

I do this difficult task so you don't have to.

--
BMO

Re:Common Carrier?

[thermian]

Of what relevance is US law to Italy?

It's not blocked here...

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Proxy Server

[Nom du Keyboard]

And have they managed to block every proxy server that can connect to every other proxy server that can see and connect to TPB? It just sounds like more press grandstanding to this observer.

And how about an ICQ that serves up torrent files? The file you need to get from TPB just isn't that big.

And how about IMBF (Information Must Be Free) people offering to e-mail in .tor files upon request? Got that blocked yet?

Strikes me that shutting down TPB countywide (unless you're China, Saudi Arabia, Iran, or the like) isn't easy, or likely.

Re:The TPB guys will do absolutely nothing about t

[HappySmileMan]

They've already changed their IP address and bought the domain name labaia.org for Italians to access the site. Seems very different from "absolutely nothing"

Re:The Italians giving into authoritarian governme

[badpazzword]

Had you said, "Mussolini's *daughter* is in politics", you would have been correct.

this...

[owlnation]

...is what happens when you elect a media owner as your country's president.

Ciao free speech!

Re:this...

[antibryce]

You're thinking of the Prime Minister. The president isn't involved in media companies.

Instead of fighting obvious crimes...

[dada21]

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?

Official The Pirate Bay announcement for italians

[Spy der Mann]

From the webpage:

Fascist state censors Pirate Bay

We're quite used to fascist countries not allowing freedom of speech. A lot of smaller nations that have dictators decide to block our site since we can help spread information that could be harmful to the dictators.

This time it's Italy. They suffer from a really bad background as one of the IFPIs was formed in Italy during the fascist years and now they have a fascist leader in the country, Silvio Berlusconi. Berlusconi is also the most powerful person in Italian media owning a lot of companies that compete with The Pirate Bay and he would like to stay that way - so one of his lackeys, Giancarlo Mancusi, ordered a shutdown of our domain name and IP in Italy to make it hard to not support Berlusconis empire.

We have had fights previously in Italy, recently with our successful art installation where we had to storm Fortezza in order to get our art done. And as usual, we won. We will also win this time.

We have already changed IP for the website - that makes it work for half the ISPs again. And we want you all to inform your italian friends to switch their DNS to OpenDNS so they can bypass their ISPs filters. This will also let them bypass the other filters installed by the Italian government, as a bonus. And for the meanwhile - http://labaia.org/ works (La Baia means The Bay in Italian).

And please, everybody should also contact their ISP and tell them that this is not OK and that the ISPs should appeal. We don't want a censored internet! And the war starts here...

Re:"web of trust"

[arth1]

Local groups sharing between themselves. Able to physically meet and verify each other.

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.

From the site itself

[houghi]

http://thepiratebay.org/blog/123 or http://labaia.org/blog/123 for people in Italy

Copty and paste
(I sure hope they don't sue me for copyright infringement)

Fascist state censors Pirate Bay

We're quite used to fascist countries not allowing freedom of speech. A lot of smaller nations that have dictators decide to block our site since we can help spread information that could be harmful to the dictators.

This time it's Italy. They suffer from a really bad background as one of the IFPIs was formed in Italy during the fascist years and now they have a fascist leader in the country, Silvio Berlusconi. Berlusconi is also the most powerful person in Italian media owning a lot of companies that compete with The Pirate Bay and he would like to stay that way - so one of his lackeys, Giancarlo Mancusi, ordered a shutdown of our domain name and IP in Italy to make it hard to not support Berlusconis empire.

We have had fights previously in Italy, recently with our successful art installation where we had to storm Fortezza in order to get our art done. And as usual, we won. We will also win this time.

We have already changed IP for the website - that makes it work for half the ISPs again. And we want you all to inform your italian friends to switch their DNS to OpenDNS so they can bypass their ISPs filters. This will also let them bypass the other filters installed by the Italian government, as a bonus. And for the meanwhile - http://labaia.org works (La Baia means The Bay in Italian).

And please, everybody should also contact their ISP and tell them that this is not OK and that the ISPs should appeal. We don't want a censored internet! And the war starts here...

Re:Yeah, that will be effective

[monsul]

It doesn't need to work. It's a gesture, you see.

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

...and everybody is happy :)

Re:Common Carrier?

[PopeRatzo]

US IP laws have been being force fed to other countries via political maneurvering(sic).

I think it's a little disingenuous to say that these are cases of the US exporting their IP laws.

It's not so much the US government that is "forcing their laws" on other countries, as it is international corporations forcing these fascistic, protectionist laws down the throats of sovereign countries, just as they have done here in the US.

Would you say that the behavior of Sony Music or EMI are the fault of the US?

Those of you who still see the world as a game of Risk don't seem to realize that these multinational corporations see borders, and liberty, as damage and route around them.

So you've got these incredibly wealthy and powerful multinational corporations vs. a group of nerds who can't even agree on Net Neutrality laws. Who the fuck do you think is going to win that one?

Better yet - get involved

[btarval]

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.

Re:Better yet - get involved

[Stellian]

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).

Re:Better yet - get involved

[MagdJTK]

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.

Wishful thinking

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

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.

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.

Re:Wishful thinking

[surpeis]

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

Re:Wishful thinking

[catxk]

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.

How can you call it freedom if it's removed if you take advantage of it? If I have freedom, you cannot remove it. If you can, it's not freedom. That's sort of the point.

TPB is not the enemy here. TPB is an indicator on how corrupt our political overlords are, especially in Italy. Once a fascists...

Just the DNS A replies are squishy

[eaman]

I semms like that Telecom, wich is italian n.1 priver, is just gibbering the DNS replay: A query for thepiratebay.org returns 127.0.0.1 .
So just a static record in you /etc/hosts should do:

# echo -e "83.140.176.200 thepiratebay.org\n83.140.176.156 torrents.thepiratebay.org" >> /etc/hosts

Or you (gentle italian reader) can just use a different DNS. Http is fine, so appears to be the peer to peer thing.

You know: it's not like I fell the need to download some copyrighted materials, it's just that _I_'m used to be the one who blocks things in my net, and I go mad when someone tricks my DNS (they did some other trash on those DNS some time ago as a sort of forwarder for mispelled domains: some one in there found a new toy and since then each day they play a new trick...).

"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.

Re:"web of trust"

[The End Of Days]

That seems like an awful lot of work for free entertainment. Why not just work some shit job and buy it?