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Unblocking The Pirate Bay the Hard Way Is Fun

TheGift73 writes in with a link for those of you who like to do things the hard way. "Now that The Pirate Bay is being blocked by ISPs in the UK, millions of people have a new interest in accessing the site, even if they didn't before. The reasons for this are simple. Not only do people hate being told what they can and can't do, people – especially geeks – love solving problems and puzzles. Unlocking The Pirate Bay with a straightforward proxy is just too boring, so just for fun let's go the hard way round."

12 of 151 comments (clear)

  1. *facepalm* by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Using a proxy is too easy... using google search as a proxy is u83r 1337 and sooooooooo different.

  2. You ever see... by Genda · · Score: 4, Insightful

    A guy driving without license or registration, they just look suspicious, driving too careful, looking around, freaking out when a police car appears. When will people get it (including governments) when you have nothing to hide, when you aren't provoking a stupid reaction from the universe at large things go well. Case in point, screwing with people's freedom of choice is just wrong. You erect a wall in the middle of a highway, and pretend business as usual. Sorry, it doesn't work that way/ First you draw incredible unwanted attention. Then you start pissing off the locals. Finally, you inspire them in huge numbers to profound acts of civil disobedience.

    Let's face it. There are two kinds of infringing acts perpetrated against media producers. 1. Illicit copy by the general public and 2. Illegal mass manufacture by bootleggers in developing countries. For the first shut up, leave them alone. Every single iota of evidence suggests the folks doing the heaviest bootlegging are your best customers and they're just sampling you're wares before going out and buying the friggin' 3D Blueray. They just want to know if this film or game or song is crap or worth adding to their huge collections. You want to sell more media, stop foisting heavily mass marketed feces on the public, and for the luv-o-jebus STOP KILLING THE GOLDEN GOOSE!!! as for number 2. Its the third world, how many copies of your movie, or song or game were you planning on selling in Mogadishu anyway? If your film is preventing kids from being on the street and ending up being co-opted into death squads, nominate yourself for a friggin Humanitarian award and figure out some way to monetize it. In either case, you haven't got a single logical leg to stand on, other than y'all are greedy control freaks who want to squeeze every last drop of blood from every human being with eyes and ears. Enough already. Call it a day. Your behavior has been reprehensible, your logic brain damaged, and you keep trying to force the earth to spin backwards. Figure out the world as it is, bring in people with functioning brains and hearts to create new business models and thrive like you never have before. Get a clue, hell get two, they're small.

  3. Pfft. That's still the easy way. by VortexCortex · · Score: 5, Insightful

    These folks claiming to be "unblocking The Pirate Bay the Hard Way" are still doing it the easy way. They want to do it the hard way? Rally a bunch of supporters and go to Parliament and MAKE them unblock it. Rouse friends and family in support of sharing of information (the BASIS OF HUMANITY) and don't let anyone forget who the bastards are that blocked it in the first place and why they should be voted out. Get some money together and run smear campaigns on the media networks if you dare.

    "Oh that's too hard", yes well, that's why it's called the HARD way.
    "Oh, I'll just use $NEXT_ON_THE_BLOCK_LIST tool or service to get around the censorship", not only are they not doing it The hard way, they're just plain doing it wrong.

  4. Re:What a joke by girlintraining · · Score: 5, Insightful

    use Google cache and copy the magnet link.

    That's not making a direct connection, that's just using cached data. The entire point of defeating censorship in this fashion is to prove that as long as a connection can be made between A and B, and a connection can be made between B and C, then even if a connection cannot be made between A and C, it can still be routed through B. That's how the internet was designed to operate.

    Unfortunately, as more and more money is waved around with the demand that it not work this way, increasingly sophisticated technological solutions will have to be employed to maintain these links. At some point, thanks legislators being sock puppets for those wealthy interests, the only way to ensure democracy electronically will be to deploy tools that allow people doing things far, far, worse than downloading music to have effective anonymity and realtime communication.

    These commercial interests will be responsible for the widespread deployment of encryption, steganography, and analysis-resistant forms of communication that will allow terrorist, child abusers, and all manner of truly bad people to disappear into the shadows. The internet as it is designed now can effectively screen for those types of problems, because bypassing surveillance results in network traffic that is statistically different. Efforts by Homeland Security and other similar organizations worldwide can thus be seen as promoting terrorism, organized crime, and child abuse -- the very reasons they offer up for control of the internet. If they'd just limited themselves to those factors, we would have effective controls that caught just them... but when you're using such technology to catch hundreds of millions of people, and restrict their daily activities... some of them will design effective safeguards against such measures and deploy them via word of mouth.

    It's like the war on drugs: If they'd just kept it to truly harmful drugs like cocaine and heroin, those drugs wouldn't be easily accessible... but because they went after anyone who recreationally takes drugs, they made everyone their enemy... and no matter how wealthy or powerful your organization, you can't beat 100,000:1 odds.

    --
    #fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
  5. Re:why not just modify your host table? by kangsterizer · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Or not. It will become *accepted*.
    When that mean won't be technologically sufficient, since the blocking will have been *accepted* (we blocked for 10 years already! etc.) they will change the mean to be stronger.

    They're actually smart. It wouldn't work any other way. Smart but disgusting.

  6. Re:What a joke by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Hey now, heroin and cocaine are not dangerous. I take great offense to your post. Alcohol is far more dangerous than both heroin and cocaine combined, and there are so many deaths caused by alcohol it's not even funny.

    Heroin is actually a particularly weak opiate when you compare it to some of the other legal opiods that people are taking/abusing. Hell, even my prescription of Oxymorphone is 10x stronger than morphine and 4x stronger than heroin, yet it is perfectly legal to obtain by going to the doctor. Heroin gets a bad rap because it's cheap and that makes it a good choice for junkies. Opiates are actually pretty safe drugs to use. The only long term side effect is addiction, and there are no side effects that are detrimental to your health. It's just dumb kids and junkies that run out of their drug of choice, withdrawal for a few days, have their tolerance drop tenfold, and then inject their old dose that OD. Yes, the addiction part is bad and yes, they are extremely addictive, but after a week of not using them you return to your normal self. They are not "harmful" like you've been brainwashed to think.

    Cocaine is a pretty unique drug, but it's relatively safe as well. It's not an amphetamine, but it feels pretty similar. Kids are prescribed amphetamines like Adderall all the time. My GF has a prescription for it, and it is fun to take once in a while, but you would really need to take an absurd dosage to make it dangerous. Yet, millions of people are legally taking prescription meds that act very similarly to cocaine, and no one even cares.

    So, we have the general population like you who are brainwashed into thinking drugs are bad because the media/government told you so. It's sad that we legally prescribe essentially the same thing that you consider a "harmful drug" to people all the time and it's ok, yet when someone mentions heroin or cocaine, everyone acts like someone who uses those is some scumbag criminal. People are going to use drugs whether they be legal or illegal. People are going to share files on the internet, whether they make it illegal or not. It's the same principle at work. And you are applying the same brainwashed logic to drugs that the policy makers are applying to filesharing, and it sickens me.

  7. Re:why not just modify your host table? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    One where you eliminate the middle man and sell directly from artists to customers, thus preventing the RIAA et al from stealing from its artists. It's inevitable really.

  8. Re:Pfft. That's still the easy way. by Stormthirst · · Score: 4, Insightful

    While I agree with the sentiments of your post, there is one major problem:

    One of the biggest rallies ever done in the UK (total I believe around 2 million people) walked through the streets of London. We still ended up fighting in the Iraq War.
    Tony Blair decided that as "only" 2 million rallied, and the other 58 million "stayed home" it was a democratic decision, and that the 58 million were giving him permission to go to war.

    Conclusion: Parliament doesn't give a shit about rallies.

  9. Re:What a joke by dryeo · · Score: 5, Insightful

    A third of the population abuses alcohol, and most everyone has used it. If heroin and cocaine enjoyed the same level of use... let's just say population control wouldn't be an issue. The danger of a drug isn't based on how many people die from using it, but how many people per capita

    A hundred+ years ago Cocaine and Opiates (mostly morphine) were very popular, with quite likely 1/3rd of the population using one or the other. Coca wine was very popular amongst the upper class and morphine was used by many. You could go into any drug store and purchase them for cheap or if you were the Queen you used the expensive stuff. People did not die just like most people don't die of alcohol abuse but if you hang out in the right places it seems to be a killer. I've known a lot of people who have died from alcohol abuse and none who have died from any other drug.
    Most of the problems with both heroin and cocaine are caused by prohibition. Especially with heroin, you don't know what you're getting and if used to weak formulations a strong formulation can easily kill and cocaine has been concentrated to the point of being dangerous.
    Cocaine use amongst doctors used to be very common before the procurement procedures were tightened up and doctors would be prescribing morphine or heroin much more if not for the legal implications. Shit, my Aunt was given Heroin by a doctor in a hospital when she was in labour which would have been in the late '60's.
    It's the puritans that have pushed all the prohibition bs and have this attitude that if you need a crutch to get by then you're a failure. Personally I need a few crutches, the most addicting being my glasses.

    --
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
  10. Re:why not just modify your host table? by Lussarn · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I'd love to hear what business model can possibly compete with stealing.

    Broadband taxation? if you pay 50$ a month you can download whaterver you want, no strings attached. We pay for (although very cheap) anonymization services today to use the internet as we see fit, so there are actually people making money from copying. I would gladly pay tenfold to get out of the relative clusterfuck that is Piratebay today. Let's face it, PB is no Netflix in terms of usability. But the content industry isn't interested, they still want 25$ per movie using DRM which takes hours to circumvent if you need play them on anything not sanctioned by them, while PB is offering movies in formats people actually can play. The industry is protecting what your parent said an "outdated bussiness model". They need to change, their former and hopefully future customers already have.

  11. Re:If you want to unblock it the hard way by dkf · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Live Free or Die motherfuckers.

    By the way, if you need help seeing what this looks like:
    Ron Paul will show you the way.

    The people who are really serious about "Live Free or Die" cover themselves in petrol and set fire to themselves to protest against injustice and oppression. Ron Paul? He's just another politician, full of words.

    --
    "Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
  12. Re:How about by Intrepid+imaginaut · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Indeed, proxies and workarounds are treating the symptom not the cause. These challenges to our web freedoms need to be tackled at the source, politicians made aware that its a substantial vote-garnering issue, and the system itself made to do its job and serve the people not corporations.