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BT Blocks Access To Pirate Bay
Barence writes "BT and other mobile broadband providers are blocking access to The Pirate Bay as part of a 'self-regulation' scheme with the Internet Watch Foundation. BT Mobile Broadband users who attempt to access the notorious BitTorrent tracker site are met with a 'content blocked' message. The warning page states the page has been blocked in 'compliance with a new UK voluntary code.' 'This uses a barring and filtering mechanism to restrict access to all WAP and internet sites that are considered to have "over 18" status,' the warning states. It goes on to list a series of categories that are blocked, including adult/sexually explicit content, 'criminal skills,' and hacking. It's not stated which category The Pirate Bay breaches, although the site does host links to porn movies."
Anybody actually do this? How many people really would do this at this time?
Voluntary code, no right of redress, zero transparency for your own protection, we have your best interest at heart (translated: we are scared of lawyers, and are too dumb to realise that by being selective we open the doors wide for missing the odd one and being held liable) etc etc.
From the organisation that brought you Phorm (and didn't tell you), a new violation of their own service T&Cs.
Lawyers, please sharpen pencils and expense account - BT has just dropped the soap in the shower..
Insert
BT want to police the internet? No problem.
Get all the CP and bomb schematics you can folks; It's BT's fault for not preventing access, now.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
I didn't mean using TOR to route your P2P traffic through it, using it to access the page is what I meant.
I'm fairly sure the great firewall of great britain is clumsily enough set to only block access to the port 0x50 traffic, so you should be fine once you have the hash.
Aside from that, yes, China has the "Great Firewall". But they're too busy filtering anti-Chinese and anti-Communist stuff to care about petty things like our problems. Actually, the fun part is that China certainly doesn't mind if you accessed pages that your government considers "undesireable".
I mean, think about how much your government cares about anti-Chinese pages.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
But if the government starts to do it then (theoretically) there's somebody to hold publicly accountable for what ends up on the blacklist. At the moment, the IWF can block whatever they like and answer to no one.
Even better, once the government starts doing it, they might end up being forced to start paying ISPs to do the filtering (like they're doing with the email spying). Then it becomes a target for eventual cuts in public spending and one day may quietly disappear.
At some point, somewhere, the entire internet will be found to be illegal.
How is this implemented?
DNS?
OpenDNS' IPs are 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220
DPI?
https://thepiratebay.org/
-jX
Don't you just love politics? It's like a comedy of errors.
O2 are my mobile service provider (owned by BT) and I just navigated to thepiratebay.org with absolutely no issues.
I was using GPRS to do this rather than 3G though, so maybe that it... although that makes almost no sense.
Unless we only want to stop children downloading porn at high speed?
The website for the company I worked for was blocked too. The reason? A flatshare form on the site had the word "sex" (as in gender) on it. It was discovered when sales staff using laptops and Vodaphone mobile broadband couldn't demo our own site to clients without unlocking.
Simple private possession of 3 (for some values of) has already been criminalised, as of January 2009 - but curiously the IWF seemingly don't want to block it. Possibly because no one has a clue what exactly is meant to be covered by the law (not even the police or the Government - "it's up to the court to decide!").