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No Pirate Bay for Comcast Customers
An anonymous reader writes with a PC World article, according to which "The Pirate Bay is unavailable for customers of Comcast, even as the torrent site remains online for other users. Problems began early Thursday morning, when several Comcast users told TorrentFreak that they were having issues with The Pirate Bay. Commenters at Techland and Engadget are confirming that they can't access the site." Right now, I'm on a Comcast connection in Pennsylvania, and get an "Ooops, could not connect" message when I try to reach The Pirate Bay.
And so the building of the Comcast/NBC walled garden begins.
There is a war going on for your mind.
Does 194.71.107.15 work?
Must not have paid their tithe...
-
Engadget is reporting that it's not limited to Comcast. I'm on FIOS and I can confirm that it's unreachable as well.
Further comments in that thread suggest that it might be a problem with the LAN on their end, perhaps a routing issue or something.
that they don't block The Pirate Bay.
http://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/2011-May/036088.html
Nothing to see here folks... move along. Comcast knows best.... Dang Big brother.
So where are all those people claiming that network neutrality was a solution looking for a problem? Hmm?
This could be a glitch, or it could be real (probably real, Comcast doesn't deserve the benefit of the doubt.) In either case, Comcast and all ISPs should be legally barred from looking at the data streams and destinations of their customers. Tier 2 telecommunications providers, just like the telephone companies have been for years on end.
That was the news THIS MORNING. Then it was found that Pirate Bay couldn't be accessed by anyone. Web server died. It sounds like they segment traffic to certain web servers based on IP ranges for load-balancing, and the one for the Comcast group died. No big conspiracy here.
And why link to PCWorld? Who are they? TorrentFreak broke the news and continually updated it through the day. They should be cited:
http://torrentfreak.com/comcast-blocked-the-pirate-bay-110512/
Did anybody check this? As of right now, thepiratebay.org's home page is up.
More importantly, Bitsavers, an archive or historical technical data,is down, and has been down for days. That site would be a major loss; they have copies of rare documents not available elsewhere. Anyone know what's going on there?
n/t, just comment and I'll see about sending them out.
Whenever I would try to go to TPB last night my running torrents would drop down to 0kbps for a few minutes then start back up eventually. Comcast customer near Seattle, WA.
I'd do it if I had mod points
a mother in ar who had kill her three kids.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Censorship can only be performed by a government. Comcast is practicing private property rights.
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
Because I was not able to reach the site from Charter.
MAFIAA started paying all major ISP's underpaid IT staff to quietly slip in a few lines of code in their core router filter configuration... (Yes, I made that up. Let's hope it stays untrue...)
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
of the conflicts of interest that will become entrenched with the Comcast/NBC merger, if it's allowed to happen. Comcast is obviously incapable now of separating its responsibilities as an information carrier from its interests as a content marketer. Comcast's "anti-piracy" sabotage makes it clear as day that allowing it to add one of the country's largest content providers to its mix will be a disaster for freedom in information in America. The FCC, Congress, and the DOJ need to head this one off at the pass.
I can't get to ubuntuforums (nor a couple of other Ubuntu sites, although ubuntu.com is ok) from Comcast, but I can get to it quite happily from my phone via 3G and AT&T. It's not a DNS problem (IP address is the same), but one works and the other doesn't. Traceroutes have absolutley no IP addresses in common.
It's been this way for a few weeks now. I finally got around to complaining to Comcast a couple of days ago, answered the first ("have you turned your modem on?") reply with a traceroute, and got the same message back. I give up.
The moral? Never attribute to malice something that can be explained by sheer incompetence.
...Except that Comcast is a goverment-established monopoly in many areas. Don't believe me? Try to get a fast upstream connection and set up your own networks for people to connect to. You will either be 1) immediately shut down by the government or 2) sued out of existence by the major network providers.
This just emphasizes YET AGAIN the importance of net neutrality laws. We absolutely, positively MUST force network providers to be just that--dumb pipes--and nothing more*.
*Unless you specifically ask them not to be; for example, I wouldn't be opposed to Comcast providing a premium "parent-friendly" tier of service where they agree to block sites for you if you want, or a "custom priority" tier where you can set up QoS settings to make sure traffic you deem important gets through, that kind of thing. Though I wouldn't subscribe to such services, it should be well within their rights to offer.
"The Pirate Bay - The world's most resilient bittorrent site".
Resilient. Not so much, eh?
There practicing it with my property.
I'm sorry, but providers of public infrastructure do not have those "private property rights". IRL when you corner a market you also incur an obligation. Stop with the "this is what our purchased laws say we can get away with", already!
Caveat Utilitor
Error 101 (net::ERR_CONNECTION_RESET): The connection was reset.
Comcast Business Class
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comcast is given a monopoly as, essentially, a public utility. Capitalism and free market and all that would be fantastic. Competition and all. The problem is when regulation and government involvement make them a tax-payer subsidized monopoly with no competition to shape the services, performance, and behavior they offer customers.
No actually Comcast is operating on Local Government property (roads) using a monopoly issued by the Government. There is no privacy or rights involved. It's all Government endorsed.
In fact your local government could revoke Comcast's monopoly and hand it to some other CATV provider (cox, cablevision, time-warner,etc) anytime it wishes. Which of course is why comcast generously bribes the politicians.
>>>Censorship can only be performed by a government.
Or a monopoly (phone, cable, electricity utility) given the power BY the government to censor.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
This is a common misperception, but in fact censorship can be performed by anyone who has power over what another person sees, hears, or reads.
However, the First Amendment guarantees only apply to government. The Constitution has no power over private party censorship.
Just as the three television networks exerted a monopoly or 35 years, not the down the telecommunications monopoly As soon as I have another ISP Comcast is history.
Bitsavers has mirrors.
Web
bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de
computer-refuge.org/bitsavers
minus-zero.net
www.bighole.nl
University of Kent
textfiles.com
FTP
bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de
University of Kent
(T>t && O(n)--) == sqrt(666)
is open DNS a workaround?
8.8.8.8 and 4.4.4.2 is a lifesaver IME
Where?
Why would you get a notice from the RIAA or MPAA? What copyright of theirs are you infringing by visiting a torrent indexing website?
"Resilient" and "Reliable" are two different beasts, to a requirements writer.
If they can bring it back up to the same state every time it goes down, it's resilient. But the going down part makes it not reliable.
Either they were being pretentious, or they chose that word for this precise reason. Either way, it's proved to fit better than the one you'd expect them to have used.
I can't access The Pirate Bay regularly. I noticed that I wasn't able to get on it a few days ago, too, but didn't think much of it. But I can access it just fine through a proxy.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comcast is not blocking this, at least for outbound packets. Maybe a lot of ISPs are blocking them incoming based on source addresses. But I think it is more likely a network issue at the piratpartiet.se end since I can reach thepiratebay.piratpartiet.se (194.14.56.29) but no further, from multiple ISPs.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
I have Comcast. Can't get to TPB, works fine through warpproxy.
This is what level 1 Tech Support (probably in India) told me about the outtage: "PriscillaBCBU: Yes, we are receiving reports from the site inaccessible when using Comcast connection. Currently, we are already fixing it here in our end. Our network engineers are working on it as of this moment. PriscillaBCBU: The pirate bay issue is also a problem from other Internet service provider. We have been receiving reports that they also experience this issue and it is happening worldwide."
http://www.comcastsupport.com/redirects/com/useremailstartcom.asp
Dear Comcast Customer Support:
Re: Blocking the Pirate Bay.
On May 12, I tried to access thepiratebay.org at with my Comcast High Speed Internet for which I pay $(PUT DOLLAR AMOUNT HERE) a month.
Unfortunately, your service was inadequate because I was not able to access the site. I am disappointed because thepiratebay.org has typically worked previously, but as of today has failed to connect even though it appears to be working on all other Internet Service Providers.
To resolve the problem, I would appreciate your quick action in restoring access to thepiratebay.org.
I look forward to your reply and a resolution to my problem and will wait until Monday, May 16th before seeking help from a consumer protection agency or the Better Business Bureau. Please contact me at (EMAIL ADDRESS HERE) or by phone at (home and/or office numbers with area code).
Sincerely,
Your name
on the comments section of the PCWorld article.
Wish Chairman Mao take over the USA already. This so called "Ethics" is what caused the economic meltdown. Bring all those Christians and Jews to hell. Flexible ethics is the ONLY way to prosperity.
Twitter: @dainsanefh
No actually Comcast is operating on Local Government property (roads) using a monopoly issued by the Government. There is no privacy or rights involved. It's all Government endorsed.
In fact your local government could revoke Comcast's monopoly and hand it to some other CATV provider (cox, cablevision, time-warner,etc) anytime it wishes.
What is this goverment issued monopoly status of which you speak? Exlcusive franchise agreements you say? Don't you realize that they were outlawed by the Telecommunication Act of 1996? Federal law makes them criminal and there hasn't been an exclusive cable franchise agreement in the United States of America for 15 years. Are you just repeating something you heard from a friend? Where did you get your "facts"?
Which of course is why comcast generously bribes the politicians.
>>>Censorship can only be performed by a government.
Or a monopoly (phone, cable, electricity utility) given the power BY the government to censor.
I am with you on the bribery point. I think the collusion of big business and goverment is reprehensible and rampant. I don't think anyone missed todays news about former FCC Chairperson Magaret Atwell Baker becoming a paid lobbyist for Comcast-NBC just four months after she was involved in approving their merger. That is digusting and yet we sit here and take it.
link: http://www.freepress.net/press-release/2011/5/11/free-press-blasts-comcast-fcc-merger
But, again, what monopoly are you talking about? Do you not have satellite and DSL as options where you live. And if not, how is that any fault of the cable company? You might as well have said that Magneto and his rogue mutants are to blame as both statments are pure fiction and demonstrably false.
The is a huge groupthink for hating the cable company. Unfortunately, many arguments for this hatred are misinformation, not fact. If the franchise agreement isn't exclusive, if there are phone, internet and TV competitors offering products/services in the same area then answer me this (and let me apologize in advance for the yelling): How in fucking hell is that a monopoly?
http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/thepiratebay.org
Can't get on with Verizon/Frontier/whatever. Pretty pissed.
TPB's tracker has been unreachable for months if not longer via Comcast.
Because Comcast is the only company that offers the service of 50mbps/10mbps Internet to my location.
And don't try to make the case that I COULD go and buy a DS-3 connection to my home. That's like saying I COULD have my own electric power plant to avoid paying to the local electric monopoly.
Grammer Nazis - I mod you "troll" unless you actually add something on-topic. Yes, I know I have mispellings in my sig.
In my state, Ohio, it is either difficult or *impossible* to have two cable companies service the same customers. I don't know the law or anything, but our local cable co-op was forbidden, as in the utilities commission nixed fully funded plans, from expanding into a neighboring township that has Time Warner, or whatever. The local residents in this neighboring township are, understandably, quite jealous of our 24Mb up/8Mb down service for $49. Apparently their service is inferior.
It goes further. Another township to the south has no cable, and was still the federal broadband funds because Verizion, now Frontier, can *theoretically* service the area with DSL. I say theoretically because unless you happen to be one the 300 so people within a couple miles of the main town you can't get DSL. The only option for the majority of that community is dialup.
So whatever the law says, or what your rights are, here in no-where-ville Ohio, unless you happen to live in my exact geographic location you're Internet options are between dial-up... and smoke signals.
If they are censoring sites (doesn't look like it at the moment), then yes, you are right. Comcast's service isn't a service that connects you to the internet, it is Comcast's "internet product". The farmer guarantees that his product is 100% cheese, except and only except when it is not cheese.
Ha, still got it :)
way to suck slashdot, we've known comcast isn't blocking for hours
time to exit your own webosphere and get some new seources
More seriously though, you don't want to take up a duty that is not imposed on you because you may, by custom, come to be responsible for that duty. In the same sense that you aren't responsible for the safety of a tresspasser on your property until you observe them regularly tromping past your open pit mine and don't do something to either bar them from the property or protect them from your mine.
The realm of the quasi-contractual relationships and expectations of industry custom is a dangerous place for corporations. Not because the opposing party will win necessarily (they might I gues... not going to think about it very hard), but because they'll get past a motion to dismiss and force you to fight out discovery and all the other expensive stuff that follows.
The verdict is the least of your worries.
-GiH
I can confirm. It was dead yesterday.
"Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
They are taking extraordinary measures to keep themselves resilient. So when (if) you go to their site by name, you are hitting a box with nothing on it. It is relaying the requests on to the REAL server(s) out there in the world. This way, when some **AA goon manages to convince someone to take the server offline, they can just put up another front facing server, update the DNS and go! It's an ingenius way of planning to be reactive. You gotta love it right?
I think the next steps for the piratebay will be to hack one of the **AA servers to make it host the pirate bay's contents. :) Somehow, I doubt they would ever figure it out. :)
Who still uses Pirate Bay? Last time I looked it was pretty much crippled.
http://www.acetonestudio.com
So, is your repsonse that Comcast is a monopoly because while there are competitors, they are more expensive? It that what you think a monopoly is? So, if Ferrari has the faster cars at the better price, but you could get a Ford or Toyota that was less powerful and more expensive, then Ferrari would have a monopoly?
I don't think the word "monopoly" means what you think it means.
stop voting Republican. Even if the Dems want to do something there's always enough Repubs to filibuster it into oblivion. You'd think after 30 years of declining wages for middle class and skyrocketing wages for the rich, people would learn...
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Sounds like a botched man-in-the-middle. Comcast probably agreed to cooperate with an investigation and allow the action.
I'm in argentina, in an ass backwards ISP nobody knows.
And piratebay doesn't work here either.
The site is down, simple as that. Move along.
...of the walled/policed garden. Tor is only a half-measure that creates the expectation of accessing 'normal' sites in their block-able form. People should look more to I2P and similar networks if they want to circumvent the ISPs self-interested control.
Car analogy fail. Here's a better one:
Imagine that there are 2 car companies left on the planet: Ford and Ferrari. The government gives those car companies the right to decide where you are allowed to drive. But Ford has decided that it doesn't want you to be allowed to go to the public library, because the library holds beliefs that differ from Ford's.
At that point, is Ford exercising monopoly power? By your logic, no, because people who want to go to the library can just as easily go out and buy a Ferrari. By any rational person's logic, Ford is abusing an effective monopoly. But it gets worse (for you) from a legal perspective...
A monopoly occurs when a company totally dominates an economic market. Not a product niche; an economic market. In the above scenario, Ford and Ferrari do not exist in the same economic market, just as Comcast and a T1 line do not exist in the same economic market. But because Ford and Ferrari are the only companies offering automobiles in their respective economic market (Ford in the $20,000 market, and Ferrari in the $200,000 market), they are BOTH viewed as monopolies by any legal body.
Get it now?
I can't reach TPB via TeleBarbados but I can reach them via LIME.
Torrent plz?
This is sweet. The internet is going to break in tiny wallet gardens, evey part "protected" with firewalls.
Corporations are going to get be able to use slave manwork in china, and sell expensive as hell in USA and Europe.
While people outside the "right" zones are going to pay x10 more for a product.
Portal 2 in australia: 108$ USD.
Portal 2 in USA: 10$ USD with 20$ gift bonus
-Woof woof woof!
That was my number one choice to grab the Pioneer One episodes (and how I even heard of it in the first place) as well as torrent archives of my favorite podcasts.
Twinstiq, game news
*There!*
He just told you, man.
Traceroute not helpful
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd
I just logged into TPB through one of my servers at the AT&T International data center outside of Chicago and it loaded up no problems. I don't think the problem is on TPB's end... For reference my pings to 4.2.2.2 are 3ms that's as high up the chain as I can go. I can also confirm it is not working from my personal computer on comcast at home so maybe it's an issue affecting consumer level connections?
Right now connecting from Net or Telefonica, no piratebay.org
If you know what it is, for 10-15$ a month you can have a cen$or$hip free internet.
They can't fick with our networks.
If the link is from PC/Computer/NetworkWorld, it is probably a bunch of unconfirmed nonsense which will turn out to be false in the time it takes to blink your eye.
I'm no fan of Comcast, but I'm even less of a fan of PC World. It didn't exactly take long for the real reasons to come out, which is that tpb had a server outage earlier. But hey, things like facts aren't important to PC World when you can just make things up.
I've just been using http://torrentz.eu/ more myself.... Since TPB doesn't actually link to direct torrents anymore.
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
Seems to be working fine for me, I am in Cleveland.
Now Comcast's customers must resort to one of the many other torrent trackers, or find the torrents using any number of general search engines like Google!
The fiends!
switch to using openDNS. IT will work fine then.
Here on comcast in Seattle the site pops right up, hopefully we won't be next
Put there by bands themselves, fed up with labels. Including people like fucking Trent Reznor (Nine Inch Nails).
Fucking stupid. USA, busily making China's censorship look legitimate.
I'm on Comcast connection right now, and I can access tpb just fine.
I'm a Comcast user in the Midwest region. It was down earlier in the day for me, but is back up. Must have been a network issue.
Now they have proven it is possible and their responsibility to block sites offering illegal content, are they liable for any illegal site they don't block?
They are not excersizing private property rights. They don't own the internet, they dont own the site they are blocking, They are excersizing censorship of information from a service that they should just be connecting through to.
For whatever it's worth it's working again now.
>>>How in fucking hell is that a monopoly?
This is not grade school. Please try to act like an adult. I did a quick review of court cases, and you are HALF correct. The 1996 Act forbids exclusive agreements (thereby allowing the phone company to offer TV service), but it does not abolish existing agreements. Many agreements have not expired yet so this comment:
>>>there hasn't been an exclusive cable franchise for 15 years
is flat wrong. Also the 1996 Law still allows local/state governments ultimate control over their rights-of-way, such as forbidding a company to lay wires in the middle of the night, or during rush hours (6-9am, 3-6pm).
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
From the FA:
UPDATE: 5/12, 5:43 p.m. ET - PCWorld received an e-mail from Magma Hindenburg, CEO of Serious Tubes Networks, The Pirate Bay's upstream provider. "The issue was not Comcast blocking The Pirate Bay," Hindenburg wrote. "The problem was a routing error at Global Crossing. The problem has been resolved and all customers should be able to reach thepiratebay.org by now. No attempt to block or censor the site as been made."
>>>So, is your repsonse that Comcast is a monopoly because while there are competitors, they are more expensive? It that what you think a monopoly is?
It is under the Antitrust Laws.
It is why Microsoft was sued - because their browser was cheaper (free) than Netscape's browser (~$30), giving them an unfair trade advantage. The same argument was later used in the EU Action initiated by Opera browser.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
I just fired Comcast and switched to ATT U-Verse. Comcast SUCKS!
I'm on a comcast connection right now and I've got no problem connecting.
Connecting to TPB and the like without some sort of RIAA/MPAA/BSA countermeasures is just plain dumb. At least use PeerBlock. Better yet, get a proxy service, located in another country from your own. They are pretty cheap. Surprising that with so many security- and privacy-conscious people here, nobody has mentioned it.
Or steal your neighbor's WiFi at least. Then you can stand on your front lawn, shaking your head in disapproval with the other neighbors as he is carted away by the IP police. "Hmm...must be kiddie porn."
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
I'm on Comcast in MN.
Works fine for me.
I can get to it just fine. I'm in the SF Bay Area.
if Ferrari has the faster cars at the better price, but you could get a Ford or Toyota that was less powerful and more expensive, then Ferrari would have a monopoly?
How many bales of hay can you throw in the back of your Ferrari to take to the cows? Zero? Hmm, maybe when considering whether various products may or may not be something that can be substituted for each other, you should consider whether they are fit for the purpose you are trying to achieve.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
More importantly, Bitsavers, an archive or historical technical data,is down, and has been down for days. That site would be a major loss; they have copies of rare documents not available elsewhere. Anyone know what's going on there?
I have no idea on the cause for this outage, but Al Kossow, who founded and still runs bitsavers, is also the software curator for the Computer History Museum. Given their purpose, I'd imagine that any problem with bitsavers would be a high priority for them. I found a brief posting he made today on ba.broadcast.moderated, so it's not like he's out of commission or anything. Most likely it's just a technical problem which will eventually be cleared up.
I tried checking the classiccmp mailing list, which would be the most obvious place to discuss any bitsavers outage, but their site is currently down too. *headdesk*
Maybe localized to the OP, I have not had any issues at all. In fact I'm D'Ling ubuntu netbook remix off it right now.
Looks like both bitsavers and classiccmp are back. I can't see any obvious signs that the classiccmp lists ever discussed a bitsavers outage over the past two weeks, so whatever the problem was, they never noticed it.
Comcast Biz Class in Miami can access TPB
because they have to at least PRETEND to be pro-labor & pro-middle class. The Republicans just say the magic of the free market will fix everything. Unfortunately, the Dems have complex answers to complex problems, and the Repubs have simple answers. The simple answers resonate better with voters. Americans hate elitism. Personal, I love elitism. I recognize that I'm a mediocre leader, economist and strategist at best. That might propel me to the top in my little neck 'o the woods, but it doesn't cut it when you're solving global economic crisis. I WANT elitists in charge. I want people better, smarter, and faster than me running things. Most Americans don't feel that way. They're honestly convinced they could run the country, and the only thing holding them back is they can't pencil it in around their kid's soccer practice. It's hard to say what frightens me most about American ignorance, but I think that'd make my top 5...
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