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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?
What.. the... f*ck? Is the rest of the world watching China for guidance in this matter? What's happening? Seriously, this is just insane.
Tor.
Might take a bit 'til you find an exit node in China, but then you're free.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Here is how it works...
1) They tell you blocking will ONLY be used for child porn etc (they promise!)
2) Then blocking is added to terrorist material to "protect the public"
3) Then blocking is added to "violent sexual material" to "protect women"
4) ???
5) Now it is open season in the UK to block anything
Welcome to a free democracy. We're totally better than China's government, I promise ;)
....It sounds like people will have to start using Tor in the "free world."
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
I'm guessing BT are targetting a particular market demographic, judging by their adverts and the pricing structure they have. For me, their service is overpriced and I can get faster speeds, a lower price and a higher (unlimited actually) data cap with other ISPs. BT seem to be going for the "bewildered middle aged computer user" market with their Home Hub and associated services.
Really then I'm not surprised that they're blocking TPB, since they're probably fairly confident that this will have little effect on the customers they're targetting, whilst it raises their reputation with watchdog groups and copyright associations.
You can advertise in this sig from as little as £99.99 a month!
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
This is why we need net neutrality regulations. Today is TPB, tomorrow it will be something else.
Soon we will see a massive deployement of firewalls blocking everything apart from port 80 and 443. If you want to use VPN, torrents, POP email, ... pay or fuck off.
No worries hackers will find a workaround and some will be able to use the Internet the way it was meant to be.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Wikipedia explains cum shots here.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cum_shot
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 just navigated to thepiratebay.org successfully from my T-mobile phone in the UK. Just an FYI for anyone who has recently become interested in changing their mobile phone / internet contract.
It's worth noting however that I have my porn filter off. You have to call your service provider and have adult content switched on for this service for some unknown reason.
"If you want a vision of the future, Winston, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever." - George Orwell, 1984
...they won't do the same thing for MALWARE sites! You know, the places where people end up becoming part of a botnet.
Please note that the Internet Watch Foundation has subsequently told PC Pro that, although it hosts information about the filtering scheme, it has no involvement with the filtering or the creation of the blacklist. This is down to the mobile broadband providers themselves.
With the Wikipedia block and Internet archive blocks in recent months I couldn't help but think the IWF was testing the water for a general power grab, trying to move far beyond their remit of producing a black list of child porn sites.
I just found this FTA:
http://www.iwf.org.uk/public/page.113.243.htm
So it's true, the IWF has decided it has to be the moral crusader of society and should now start censoring all that it feels like.
Bets on how long they try to extend this voluntary code which covers all the UK's main mobile providers to hardwired, static internet connections?
The problem here isn't BT, it's not The Pirate Bay. It's the fucking IWF again.
Time they're disbanded, the problems they cause now go far, far beyond any benefit they can ever provide.
block "adult" content by default, but will remove the block once you've proved you're over 18, usually by supplying a valid credit card number. T-Mobile even included Facebook in the block a year or two back. Dunno if they still do.
You could theoretically make excuses for the cameras, but, man, when the British are blocking porn, you know that island nation has hit a rough patch in its history.
This is my sig.
Come on, BT? For the 92% of the planet who don't live in the U.K. BT means bittorrent.
Caveat Utilitor
Kinda missed an important bit of that article there, didn't you? "BT's warning message advises customers to contact customer services if they want the block on the site to be lifted." You still get to choose.
Self Regulation is usually the last resort of an interest group that is seeking to avoid the hassle and constrictions of government legislation. Its usually a stalling tactic but it sometimes works. I believe its how the MPAA was formed since its not a government organizations (If it was it'd likely fall under the wing of the FCC).
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.
These harsh restrictive laws are coming for all of us. It's just a matter of time.
What we need right now, is to plan the ways of defeating this sort of rubbish, and circulating that information while the net is still relatively free.
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?
What kind of sense does it make to have to verify you're over 18 to access content with your G3 connection? Do a lot of people 17 and under have credit cards, their own laptop and a G3 card + service? Isn't one of the provisions of getting service being of legal age since you must sign a service contract? I'm so glad companies and governments are taking it upon themselves to be my conscience.
Today TPB, tomorrow its your server. ...
Time to learn about networks, wireless, how to use other connections.
Time to become very smart and invisible.
Time to become Anonymous and say
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Some months ago, when a bunch of stories starting coming up of large ISPs starting up voluntary schemes and trials and whatnot I actually left BT and moved to a smaller, friendlier ISP exactly with the expectation that this sort of thing would come to be.
*big pat on the back*
Shameless plug for my current ISP, ADSL 24 - cheaper (for the typical user), just as fast (maybe even faster), no traffic shaping, no blocking, no bullshit. Never got any problem with them.
By the way, last I checked, the ISPs to avoid at all costs in the UK (with regards to things like blocking and traffic shaping) where BT, Virgin and Tiscalli.
There's plenty of legal stuff available on BT in general, and from TPB in particular. Linux distributions, patches for games and programs (be careful about them, though, sometimes malware disguises as such), indie movies, share- and freeware (same warning applies, careful about malware)... it's fun to browse through their selection.
You can spend literally terabytes of traffic on BT without even touching a single illegal file.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Just to clarify - what you refer to is the IWF blocking system that applies to all (home and mobile) systems, covers 95% of users. It cannot be removed by the user, and as you note, the Government have pressured ISPs to do this, and it's all rather worrying.
But this article is about a separate system. It covers a much wide range of material, but the upside is you can remove it. It's unclear if the IWF have any connection to this.
Another difference is that this system evidently tells the user, where as the IWF system fakes a 404 on most ISPs.
Doesn't this mean that they're voluntarily giving up common carrier status?
The old defense being that they were like phone companies, they had no responsibility in what their users did.
Well, BT just announced that they are, in some small way, taking responsibility for what their users look at.
So what happens when FOX releases yet another Summer Bomb in the theaters and decides to use Piracy on the Internet as an excuse? Well, BT banned TPB, that means since they DIDN'T ban the other sites this is partially their fault, right?
If you have a webserver, block 193.129.101.0/26 - Internet Watch Foundation (IWF). They use automated scrips to check for content that they dont like. I HATE censorship.
I would hope IWF has learned it's lesson to not block wipedia.
Actually, I hope it didn't learn it's lesson. The only way for them to die is to keep pissing people off by blocking mainstream stuff.
1984 was not supposed to be an instruction manual.