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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."
http://3259460367
Who needs to unblock anything...
Using a proxy is too easy... using google search as a proxy is u83r 1337 and sooooooooo different.
The Pirate Party UK is hosting a mirror (or acting as a proxy, not sure which): http://tpb.pirateparty.org.uk/
-- Lattyware (www.lattyware.co.uk)
When I read "the hard way", I expected something at least as sophisticated as Tor, but this is just stupid. Their suggestion is to use Google cache and copy the magnet link.
Please.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
Having RTFAd, the "hard way" boils down to... use Google Translate to access it.
How the hell does that qualify as "hard"? Or even, really, different from a proxy? I was using that exact* trick in fifth grade to get around stupid school filters (fun fact: blocking any page including the characters "xxx" makes it *really* hard to write a paper on Roman Numerals).
I was expecting something at least involving Tor or the like, or maybe some weird hosts file trick. Something actually, y'know, interesting.
* technically, it wasn't the "exact" same trick, as I was using Babelfish - I don't think Google Translate existed at the time - but it's close enough
Only the larger ISPs are blocking it, it seems.
.torrent file: once you have that you can dwonload an upload with merry abandon. This means that the block is pretty much pointless: if someone knew enough to know TPB exists and has the small amount of knowledge needed to get and use a bittorrent client, then they are going to know how (or have a contact who can help them) to access TBP by proxy in this way. Or, for that matter, just find another source for torrent metafiles and tracker facilities.
The ISP I currently use (AAISP) are certainly not blocking it (see http://revk.www.me.uk/2012/05/blocking-pirate-bay.html for a blog entry oin the subject from one of the ISP's senior people), and no doubt many of the smaller ISPs are not either.
As (IIRC) TPB no longer runs a tracker at all and merely holds metafiles listing other trackers and/or distributed tracker links, this menas that all you need to get around the block is to use a friend's connection by proxy to get the
Is TPB really that relevant any more anyway? I've not been to any such site in many a moon so I might be completely out of touch, but I was under the impression that people were moving more towards private trackers and even ignoring that there are many small public trackers and aggregators available as alternatives. If my understanding is right and TBP is just a name that everyone knows rather than a site many people use, then this has as little effect as taking down napster: by the time it was taken down most people had other sources lined up anyway.
Off topic: while I'm linking to RevK, you might find his attitude and actions towards telemarketting amusing: http://revk.www.me.uk/2010/07/what-moron.html
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.
That doesn't work, they're obviously doing more than just DNS redirecting. Entering the IP address directly or via your hosts file still gets redirected to the block page. Good guess, and it would be nice if everything in life was the simplest possible case, but sadly it isn't.
Oh no... it's the future.
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.
They use Cleanfeed, BT's transparent proxy.
It was created to block child pornography. Now it's also used to protect outdated business models.
When it was just blocking child porn, I dare say most people were OK with it. Now it's going to add 'copyright censorship'; soon, who knows what? Political sites, hate speech. And it'll gradually lose support and the means to circumvent its censorship will proliferate and become commonplace, making it entirely useless in doing the job it was designed for.
They're idiots. But that's not news.
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. - Ambrose Bierce
If you want to unblock it the hard way.. Then you need to figure out how to take back control of your over-reaching 1984, police state government nightmare.
The hard way is to get involved and make real change and gain your Freedom so that you will never have anything like this proposed again.
Live Free or Die motherfuckers.
By the way, if you need help seeing what this looks like:
Ron Paul will show you the way.
Peace, out. Bitches.
Liberty.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is hardly Virgin's fault - they're following a court order.
In fact, they've been kind enough to redirect you to a page clearly stating that they were ordered to block the site, so that everybody knows something is up. Almost as though they want people to make a fuss about it. The obvious (and probably cheaper) alternative would just be to reject all connections to the IP, so people would assume it was a problem with the site, not their broadband.
Not affiliated with Virgin, and they're not even my ISP, but given the circumstances, I approve of the way they've handled it.