Comcast Helps Fix Pirate Bay Connection Problems

MagusSlurpy writes "Far from blocking The Pirate Bay, Comcast was just one of several ISPs on which TPB was unreachable today. Comcast reached out to the torrent site, and its engineers provided technical support, eventually determining that the connectivity issues stemmed from a reverse path filtering issue at an intermediate ISP, Serious Tubes Networks."

Comments

Re:I'm confused.

[Anonymous Coward]

No.

Re:Seriously?

[jaxtherat]

"Serious Tubes Networks"? What is it, an ISP run by /b/tards?

Looks that way! http://serioustubes.org/

A whole food chain of idiots.

[goodmanj]

I'm sick and tired of Slashdot editors blindly reposting everything that comes down the firehose without stopping to check whether articles are dupes, PR volleys, or just plain wrong.

Look at it this way. Anyone in the chain of publication of the original story, from the orginal commenter on Engadget to Engadget's editors to the anonymous coward who submitted to Slashdot to the Slashdot editor who approved it, could have done what I did: "ping thepiratebay.org" from work, and find it was down outside of Comcastland too. Then they would have had a *real* headline: "Comcast falsely accused of jamming ThePirateBay."

I hear that investigative journalism is too expensive for major news outlets to handle these days, so it's up to bloggers and websites to do the journalism. But when nobody can be bothered to type a 1-line bash command, what's left of the Fourth Estate is in deep shit.

Re:A whole food chain of idiots.

[Seumas]

TPB was not down outside of Comcast land, initially. For several hours when the initial reports were being published online, nobody could reach TPB from Comcast, but they could useing a proxy or VPN and those on other networks could reach it. It wasn't until hours later that the same behavior started to appear on other networks. In light of those circumstances and prior Comcast behavior, it's not entirely irrational that people started to question if they were intentionally blocking them.

So, no, what would have happened in your example is that someone with Comcast would have tried to reach TPB and failed. Then they'd ping it and fail. Then they'd login via another network and ping it and it would work.

Re:Innocent until...

[Anonymous Coward]

A nice, well-deserved boot in the face to everyone who prejudged, and who therefore should never be allowed onto a jury.

I take it you've never got home from work one day and found port 80 http redirecting to a sad face and a message to call your ISP to get told off about stealing a movie from a company you've never heard of in a country you don't care about?

You know what I said to them? Fuck you, prove it, and turn my internet on or I'm calling up your competitors.

Comcast did not help us fix The Pirate Bay

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem was GBLX using reverse path filtering. We shut down one of our transits because it was flapping. The result was that all outgoing traffic to GBLX got filtered even though the packets took the same path as before. The Pirate Bay is using different paths for incoming and outgoing traffic to avoid beeing traced. We don’t even know where their servers are.

Regards

Magma Hindenburg
CEO Serious Tubes Networks

Re:Hahaha have some crow

[dotancohen]

Actually, according to Serious Tubes Network (the ISP in question), Comcast did _not_ help them:
http://serioustubes.org/

Important news:

Comcast did not help us fix The Pirate Bay. The problem was GBLX using reverse path filtering. We shut down one of our transits because it was flapping. The result was that all outgoing traffic to GBLX got filtered even though the packets took the same path as before. The Pirate Bay is using different paths for incoming and outgoing traffic to avoid beeing traced. We don’t even know where their servers are. We resolved the issue by activating our other transit again.