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China Hijacks Popular BitTorrent Sites
frogger writes "China is not new to censoring the Internet, but up until now, BitTorrent sites have never been blocked. Recently, however, several reports came in from China indicating that popular BitTorrent sites such as Mininova, isoHunt and The Pirate Bay had been hijacked. The sites became inaccessible, instead redirecting to the leading Chinese search engine Baidu."
This seems to be SOP whenever the Chinese authorities find content they like accessable by a search engine, just redirect the entire search engine to Baidu until the site owners comply.
Doesn't word hijack imply something else? More like hacked, took over, infiltrated? But use word like hijack for redirect is pretty ridiculous.
Yeah, just the other day I tried to go to http://asdlfjkas/ and got redirected to google. It's time for a revolution!
I know I shouldn't feed the trolls, but anyway...
Surely even the most dim-witted super-conservative would realise that even under Obama, USA is still the most conservative nation outside of the middle east and Austria. Therefore, calling Obama socialist (as a pejorative) is calling the rest of the world socialists (or worse). Given the vast number of western countries that are "socialist" and have been for some time, (and are still going strong sans economic crisis) the next logical conclusion is "Well, maybe "socialism" works?" (not that what Obama is advocating is actual socialism by any accepted definition of the word).
Sorry for the offtopic.
Commodore64_love: I don't comprehend people who're so frightened of death that they'll bankrupt themselves to stay alive
Since when has the U.S. directed thepiratebay.org (or suprnova, or mininova, or demonoid, etc.) to google.com?
Computers allow humans to make mistakes at the fastest speeds known, with the possible exception of tequila and handguns
Point out that it's censorship in the US and prepare to be modded troll.
Are we talking of the same slashdot? Never mind, the US has probably filtered /. for you guys. Figures. (Now watch this not get modded troll ;D)
Since when has the U.S. directed thepiratebay.org (or suprnova, or mininova, or demonoid, etc.) to google.com?
They send you to jail instead?
How about when a Judge in KY orders the domain names of companies to be transferred to the State of Kentucky. I don't mean just redirection the DNS lookup, but changing the ownership?
http://techdirt.com/articles/20081020/0058002578.shtml
Or when a judge in CA blocked wikileaks?
http://techdirt.com/articles/20080218/115934282.shtml
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
Well not if you don't live in the U.S. Even if you do live there, I don't remember any recent file sharing cases ending in jail time. Fees that turn your life into indentured servitude maybe, but not jail.
Computers allow humans to make mistakes at the fastest speeds known, with the possible exception of tequila and handguns
I'm pretty sure that I've never been able to access piratebay from China. Even now, I don't even get redirected to Baidu. Nothing comes up in the browser at all. The "to"s below are timeouts *s that slashdot said I had too many junk characters ;)
tracert -d thepiratebay.org
Tracing route to thepiratebay.org [83.140.65.11]
over a maximum of 30 hops:
1 2 ms 1 ms 3 ms 192.168.1.1
2 to to to Request timed out.
3 4 ms 3 ms 3 ms 221.224.243.169
4 4 ms 4 ms 4 ms 222.92.175.74
5 4 ms 4 ms 4 ms 202.97.27.110
6 7 ms 6 ms 6 ms 202.97.39.165
7 9 ms 9 ms 14 ms 202.97.44.58
8 to to to Request timed out.
9 to to to Request timed out.
10 to to to Request timed out.
11 to ^C
Che "Che Guavara" Guavara
Chief Council
Association of Socialists Defending Life, Freedom, Justice, Knowledge, Alcohol, and Saxophones
(We really like jazz)
I don't remember any recent file sharing cases ending in jail time.
Wow... really? Let me refresh your memory.
I was in China for a while in 2007 and while I could search TPB I could not download the .torrent as it would just time out - similar to normal golden shield blocking
this was simply solved by putting the D/L url into my overseas proxy and from there the torrent client worked normally.
...I obey the laws of physics....
I know I shouldn't feed the trolls, but anyway...
Surely even the most dim-witted super-conservative would realise that even under Obama, USA is still the most conservative nation outside of the middle east and Austria. Therefore, calling Obama socialist (as a pejorative) is calling the rest of the world socialists (or worse). Given the vast number of western countries that are "socialist" and have been for some time, (and are still going strong sans economic crisis) the next logical conclusion is "Well, maybe "socialism" works?" (not that what Obama is advocating is actual socialism by any accepted definition of the word).
Sorry for the offtopic.
No, the real question is this: what does one mean by "works"? Europe's brand of socialism wouldn't work for the U.S. for a variety of reasons, and our style of capitalism would probably be a disaster over there. There is one thing that a "working" socialism generally requires: an effective and trustworthy bureaucracy (Germany is a good example of this, I think.) The U.S. has an ever-expanding, ever more powerful bureacracy that has its own agenda, which coincides less and less with the needs of the people.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Since when has the U.S. directed thepiratebay.org (or suprnova, or mininova, or demonoid, etc.) to google.com?
They send you to jail instead?
No, I think China has us beat there as well.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
... but I think corruption, hostility, and theft are stronger words. I've heard time and time again that it's in "Chinese culture to copy" and that copyright and patent law is foreign to not only the country, but their ethics.
While we certainly don't lead a prime example of IP law, I believe China is simply trying to cheat their way to becoming a super power. When their actions do not coincide with what they claim, it is clear they cannot and SHOULD NOT be trusted.
If it's in Chinese Culture to copy, why take down BitTorrent websites? If this was a disciplinary action, how can we trust them when attempting to visit the blocked websites leads to a Chinese company? This is just another play at "cheating the system." It isn't a perfect system by any means, but it is the one the Western world has established and all successful countries adhere to.
Removing peoples rights is wrong and by rights I mean forcing citizens to support a collective system and not giving them the choice to opt-out. It's irrelevant whether or not it works.
Putting every single person in jail might "work" at stopping crime but it doesn't make it right.
Yeah, that would be really funny, how the Chinese government would come in the middle of the night, take them, their family, and likely anyone else that knew or cared about them, and drop them in a hole somewhere, never to be heard from again. Yeah, that's fucking hilarious.
Well not if you don't live in the U.S.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hew_Raymond_Griffiths
THIS MEANS WAR!
Relax. It is a quote from Bugs Bunny. Still, rather appropriate, I think.
Since when has the U.S. directed thepiratebay.org (or suprnova, or mininova, or demonoid, etc.) to google.com?
Last I checked, they hijack the DNS and redirect to a Dept of Justice page or FBI warning.
remember isonews? elitetorrents? etc..
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
All your Bittorrent Base are belong to us!
You are on your way to Communism, take your time.
You have no choice, but to join us, hahahahahaahah!
We own your national debt, USA, 100 Trillion Dollars, now pay up or we won't give you back your BT sites. Your search engines Google and Yahoo and then megacorprations like Microsoft and IBM are next, muahahahaahahh!
Your Karate is no match for our Kung-Fu!
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
Some ISPs are hijacking DNS, granted not to torrenting sites. Closest thing I can think
In America, the line between business and government is very fuzzy, especially with Big Content, Big Corn, and Haliburton.
93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
In Beijing right now
The pirate bay hasn't worked from here for at least a year. Mininova and ISO hunt are still accessable. This would be roughly the tenth bogus article about China in the past few months. Why does slashdot bother posting rubish without checking their facts?
Flame bait
I am happy to see that the sheer number of bogus articles posted weekly about China has declined post olympics, Shock Horror!
What about when Wikileaks was black holed because they hosted the Palin email leak?
Isn't that the single biggest example of censorship in the US internet history?
Is the US government supposed to black hole websites instead of using the court system?
As of 12:16 PM, 11/09/2008, the sites are still working. Yes, in China. Shanghai specifically.
Baidu is an anagram for I bad U
Translated to English vernacular, this roughly translates to I fuck you. Chinese is notoriously difficult to translate on the computer, so I hear.
Baidu has a nasty habit of being at the center of redirection issues. I wonder. Just wondering, mind you. Just how hard would it be to release a bit of a bot that spammed those bit torrent sites from inside the great firewall?
Yes, I understand the ramifications of such an activity, but I'm laughing so hard I can't stop thinking of how to accomplish it....
Anyone up for a bit of weekend fun?
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
You gave Google permission to do that when you installed Google add-on software like Toolbar or Desktop.
"We Baid You, Fare Well"
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Mininova, isoHunt and The Pirate Bay...
Now I know the 3 popular BitTorrent sites! Mwahahaha! L337!!
that's funny, i wish i could get that instead of road runner's 'suggestions' site
Thank for helping us destroy those commie institutions.
You are on your way to a Capitalist Democracy, take your time.
You have no choice, but to join us, hahahahahahah!
Thanks for all the money which we used to buy all your plastic crap to make all our children happy. We have no intention of ever giving it back. Your financial institutions, China Contruction Bank, and Hangseng then mega-government institutions like the People's Liberation Army and the PRC itself are next, muahahahahahahh!
Your Shaolin Monks are no match for our Alabama rednecks!
The Unicode standard is over 20 years old. Why does Slashdot not support it?
Isn't Baidu the search engine which was at the center of the polemic about directly linking to copyrighted contents ? If so, this is nice from the China gouvernement to directly give a great search engine to find illegal stuffs. Another thought is that, if you are looking for some 'illegal' stuffs on Baidu, you end up with results linked inside Baidu, resulting in an infinite loop of results, bringing down the whole China innertube. Hum ?
EULA : By reading the above message, you agree that I now own your soul.
Or, you know, Firefox
But, more importantly: Woosh!
Any film ever made for a dollar including ones that haven't been released yet. All films with heads in the foreground and audience talking $0.50.
This is a blessing! The Chinese authorities have realized that Baidu and Gougou index torrents and pirated material for more effectively than TPB & co., and seek to save Chinese users the trouble of having to use them! Why bother going to TPB when Baidu has it earlier, faster, and in Chinese? Props to the firewall for this one!
Set your router up with OpenDNS.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
Please verify stuff before posting it.
- Pirate Bay has been blocked for over 6 months now, nothing new.
- Mininova works as usual, using it right now!
- isoHunt also works, just checked it for you.
Better check if you made some typo, in which case you'll indeed end up on Baidu and the likes.
Well, I'm kinda chuckling at that. This is the internet, what did you expect?
No, as you see, I was modded Troll exactly like I said I would be. I've posted this sort of thread before with the exact same results. On slashdot:
Different means, same result. Point out the uncomfortable truth and you are a troll. That's blind nationalism plain and simple.
Blind nationalism. Blind nationalism. Blind nationalism. The Germans were blind nationalists too. They sat back as their government abused, tortured, raped, murdered, and locked people up in concentration camps. They sat there like sheep and did nothing. They sat by passively and allowed the slaughter millions of people. The evidence was staring them right in the face, they watched their neighbors hauled off on cattle cars. They did nothing. They were despicable. Americans are despicable.
Except OpenDNS does the exact same thing, to their own "whoops" page.
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
I still keep holding on to the hope that there is actual intelligence out here in the wilds, but I'm continually disappointed. Guess that makes me a masochist..
Okay, do you have any evidence, beyond hearsay, that this actually happens?
I hear about this kind of shit all the time (mostly in comments on Slashdot), but here I am in China, and I've never heard of anything like this happening.
Frankly, I think it's mostly hyperbolic bullshit. And it's increasing. Is it time for another red scare?
They won't understand if you put things like that, because most of us have our own ideas about what China is like based on the news we see in our own newspapers. Most of us have never been and will never go to China, so I doubt people will understand how the Chinese see their country.
That said, I recently found a site called chinaSMACK which has helped me better understand how things are over there. Apparently, someone has enough spare time to translate random, popular blog posts and the comments on them into English. Maybe that will provide some perspective. Assuming anyone reads the information there, that is. We all know how many people like to comment without RTFA...
What you don't seem to understand is two basic mechanisms of Slashdot, so let me give you a refresher:
1. It takes one guy to mod you a troll and it takes either a careful meta moderation or another guy with mod points to think what you say has value in order to change that. Considering what you've said so far, I figure you adding something interesting to a conversation to be a rare event.
2. It only takes a few people to tag an article, which is why we often get tags that make no sense.
I'd like to also point out that most people see censorship as censorship, no matter what entity commits it.
By looking over what you've said, I've concluded that you're either an idiot or a troll. I think calling you a troll is being over optimistic, however.
-The world would be a better place if everyone had a hoverboard
Perhaps no Chinese study science in Canada (or wherever Victoria University is), but at Purdue (Indiana, USA), you'd have to be blind to miss the Chinese studying in all fields of science. There's nearly as many Chinese students as there are black students, and lots of Chinese professors, too.
hahaha at all the pacificst around here
I remember there being a story about a site simply loading up wikipedia within its own little border.
Cue offshore domains which do exactly this in 3..2..1.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Your post is typical of the slashdot couch potato.
China is not like this - take it from a guy which was there.
So all of a sudden we're supposed to feel bad for script kiddies?
I've been able to access it just fine literally minutes ago. I keep my scripting off though, because a couple of months ago, a tainted ad server tossed a trojan into my stytem. It's been purged, and since I remembered to turn scripting off, it hasn't happened since.
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
Apparently you can opt out of that if you have an account. Not sure on the details as I've never used it.
you didn't think we had free speech did you?
Silly comrade.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I'm in shanghai. The sites, except for tpb, are perfectly accessible. Perhaps just one ISP is playing games. tpb has always been blocked (for as long as i am here) on the great wall level, nothing to do with DNS.
I obviously didn't RT*A(duh!), but i think folks at RIAA may be making calls to get in link with however is blocking these sites for "tips".
I am an ACCA student. Got a query on Accountancy/Finance? Maybe I can help!
I'm not saying you're wrong, but if you lived in Nazi Germany, you'd never hear of disappearances either. It's not like the secret police operate in public view, with due process and arrest records, etc. They might be coming for you now...
I cannot confirm.
As I am typing from China, I am downloading several torrents and using IsoHunt.
:(){
I'm not saying you're wrong, but if you lived in Nazi Germany, you'd never hear of disappearances either.
Yes, you would, you would just pretend not to notice. You cannot make millions of people, mostly from urban areas, disappear without anyone noticing.
You can indeed -- it's quite simple, you just uncheck some options and then you can take advantage of OpenDNS' fast and reliable servers without helping them pay the bills.
One gotcha for home users is that the settings are tied to your IP address, so if you have a dynamic IP then you need to run an additional bit of software to let them know every time your address changes. Some people might not like that.
I don't remember any recent file sharing cases ending in jail time.
Wow... really? Let me refresh your memory.
The only case on that page that appears to be remotely relevant is the EliteTorrents one. But in that case, the person who went to jail was the administrator of the P2P site. Can you show us any cases where someone has been jailed for merely using P2P?
Because it looks to me like the US doesn't jail people for visiting TPB, whatever you might like to think.
At least in my area,mininova.org is perfectly accessible. Of course, thepiratebay.org is blocked since the Olympics, could only guess it was because of some Olympic video content. Viva la Baia!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Dangit!
Well they aren't redirected in the hotel I am staying at in Beijing, The Beijing Friendship Hotel. I am here for the OpenOffice.org OOoCon 2008 meeting. At least I can access isohunt and mininova here without trouble but thepiratebay is showing page load error.
Tried to get OpenDNS working, the servers kept timing out. Any idea why?
No one is even paying attention. You could DDoS fucking Xinhua and no one would bat an eye. Unless of course you have something else they want to bust you for, like being gnoG nulaF or a generic porn king.
The Chinese government is mearly trying to assist people in finding the files they seek :)
I would take Baidu over pirate bay any day of the week.
All {country name} companies have government connections. Well, they do if they want to have the slightest change of being successful. That's what operating in a {contemporary economic model} state means.
a set of p2p seeding sites such as btchina.net, verycd.com has been banned by China NetCom because of traffic concern. Most of them are local sites. I do not know why they choose baidu. It is a company's behavior. Blaming it on the so called Communist China provides no information.
What about Big Salad?
... and then they built the supercollider.
No idea really, I'd guess it's being blocked at some point. Checked your local firewall / router settings etc? It's possible your upstream provider might be filtering out DNS requests to resolvers which aren't theirs, but that seems unlikely. You're not behind a corporate firewall or anything like that?
Could also be worth trying some other resolvers that accept requests from the public. 130.95.128.2 is one that I know of (dns.uwa.edu.au).
TPB has been blocked since I began downloading stuff about a month and a half ago. The others are unblocked.
I see that someone believes in the Holocaust.
This is hilarious, its like you think the world revolves around american web sites. China has their own torrent sites (that do conform to government policies). You can download any chinese or american tv show / movie there. (You may end up with some government propeganda videos in your torrent file, but really who cares)
I don't remember any recent file sharing cases ending in jail time.
Wow... really? Let me refresh your memory.
The only case on that page that appears to be remotely relevant is the EliteTorrents one. But in that case, the person who went to jail was the administrator of the P2P site. Can you show us any cases where someone has been jailed for merely using P2P?
Because it looks to me like the US doesn't jail people for visiting TPB, whatever you might like to think.
China doesn't jail people for merely visiting TPB either. c_forg said "file sharing cases ending in jail time." So the case you mentioned not only adequately covers that, but it offers you a direct comparison.
China adds a rule to their firewall.
The US chooses to spend a fortune in taxpayer money hunting down, prosecuting, and imprisoning/housing/feeding people for a non-violent offense. [Said offense wasn't even a criminal one up until a decade ago.] Once released, that administrator who could have spent a lifetime being productive and paying taxes on a higher than average salary will instead spend the rest of his life as a burger flipping drag on the economy because of his felony record.
It looks to me like the US will continue begging China for loans and aid like a whiney little bitch, whatever you might like to think.