Slashdot Mirror
BT Starts Blocking the Pirate Bay
judgecorp writes "The UK's largest ISP, BT, has obeyed a court order to block The Pirate Bay, following similar moves by five other service providers, after complaints by music trade body BPI. The Pirate Bay says it can continue regardless through workarounds. From the article: 'BT has started blocking access to The Pirate Bay, becoming the sixth major ISP to prevent access to the file-sharing service. It follows blocks enforced by Orange, Virgin, Sky, TalkTalk and O2, after they all obeyed a court order made in April. BT, which has been in ongoing discussions with trade body the BPI over how it would carry out a block, had not been hit with such an order until this week.'"
Yes, blocking at the backbone level can be defeated. With freedom.
Face it, Bittorrent is P2P but TPB is not. It's fundamentally a single domain name bound to an IP addy, it's a brand; TPB only works because people know they can reliably type "thepiratebay.se" or some similar easy-to-remember name and it'll get referred. TPB can start playing games with different names and proxies and referrers etc., but this'll knock out 90% of the casual users.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
A prophetic summary of the comments to come?
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
I remember when ISPs provided free unlimited newsgroup access. Then they offered free newsgroup access through a third party with a data usage cap. Then they cut off free newsgroups altogether. Now there is something completely out of their control on the general Internet that they are trying to block access to. So much for the old wild west freedom of the Internet. Business and government interests are all so ready to curtail total freedom of information. I see a dark future full of censorship and paywalls.
'Gosh, now that it's mildly inconvenient to download things for free, I'm going to have to go to HMV for all my media needs!'
'If only there was another torrent site. But the internet couldn't possibly support TWO!'
'Wow, with all this extra money coming in from ex-pirates, we should begin transferring these extra profits onto THE ARTISTS!'
Or use Google to search for "stuffiwant .torrent" and the results will popup from Extratorrent, Isohunt, Kat, and such. There's even a .torrent search extension for Firefox. If people want to download it, THEY WILL...
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
Blocking -- or atleast trying to block -- Pirate Bay and similar websites is just a temporary measure, there's bound to be worse stuff coming. As I already mentioned on my Google+ - page about the recent confirmation of the Flame-malware being written by the U.S. government and the U.S. government basically saying they have the right to target, track, spy and eliminate anyone they want, anywhere in the world, at any time, and even using illegal means to do so is all right, and that no other country in the world has any say in that, it doesn't seem to me all too far-fetched that with enough lobbying from RIAA/MPAA the U.S. government will write similar malware that targets pirates -- both the ones posting copyright-infringing material and the ones downloading such.
Not a BT subscriber, but this proxy list works for all the other UK ISPs that "block" TPB.
http://194.71.107.82/
https://tpb.pirateparty.org.uk/
Small correction - BT hasn't been owned by the UK government since 1984 and the government sold their last shares in the company nearly 20 years ago.
Apart from that I agree with you.
The mirror they maintain at is yet another reason to get involved with your local pirate party. There website indicates that they can use assistance from UK residents who want to help with:
IT Team - Code
IT Team - Other
Campaigns - Design
Campaigns - Content
Campaigns - Local
Campaigns - Events
Campaigns - Candidates
Campaigns - Coordination
Campaigns - Newsletter
Treasury - Finance
Secretariat - Administration
Press - Pressteam
Leadership - Policy
Much Madness is divinest Sense --
To a discerning Eye --
Much Sense -- the starkest Madness
You have to admit, aside from the "Stupid ISPs," his post was pretty dead-on. Someone wanted this, and they are fucking morons, and people will get around the blocks to pirate.
Oi! It's going to be 30C this weekend.....
15C on Saturday and 15C on Sunday!
And that is... what? A sanity check? Oh the COURTS ordered it? So it must be fine and dandy?
Of course not. Welcome to the Moron Club. The courts (which do appear also to be a members of the Moron Club) do their work based on the laws passed and other previous judgments, making the lawgivers obvious members of the Moron Club too.
The fact is that:
1) The Pirate Bay does nothing criminal. They host no illegal material nor do they link to it. They host a list of hashes not derived in any way from illegal materials. They are just data that are useless on their own.
2) Blocking access to information is censorship in it's pure form. No democracy should allow any form of censorship.
3) Any block can be easily circumvented. It's nothing but symbolic and does more harm than good on every level.
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --
Meanwhile BT is a government-owned monopoly that took in 19 billion GPB last year.
Well that's three mistakes in one sentence. Well done! BT was privatized in 1984, over 20 years ago! They ran a lot of adverts trying to get small investors, i.e. individuals, to buy the shares. Although a lot are owned by pension funds etc now, there's still a significant percentage of stock in individual hands. So not government owned. Nor is it a monopoly; BT is actually separate companies under one umbrella. BT Openreach owns the poles, cables and exchanges, and provides access to all other ISPs and phone service providers at the same rates - including BT openworld, the ISP arm. They're heavily regulated to ensure access, and also have price caps set by the regulator. ISPs can either use the BT openreach DSLAMS in the exchanges, or fit their own.
Openreach for example, haven't got round to upgrading my exchange to ADSL2 yet, but talktalk and sky have both put their own in the exchange, so do offer ADSL2, and only pay BT openreach for rent of the copper line to my house - I don't pay BT directly at all, and the service is cheaper to boot. There's also virgin internet, our sole cable provider having bought up the others, who have an entirely separate infrastructure over about 60% of the country.
BT openworld is the largest single UK ISP because of its brand, but if you tot up the subscriber numbers of the top 6 (via ispreview.co.uk) they've got about 33% of that number; and there are many, many smaller ISPs that all have the same access to the same openreach phone lines and exchanges that the big 6 do. Note virgin, the cable provider, is the 2nd largest.
Finally, 19 billion? revenue is about £4 billion a quarter, but falling. Profit is more like £500 million a quarter, which includes all their sub-company profits.
If you were principled you'd boycott BT.
Why? BT are a private company providing wire and ISP services, same as the others. They have to follow court orders, just like everybody else. They were actually one of the people that fought the order hardest in court; but the judge has decided that he has the right to censor websites not in the UK, convicted of nothing in the UK, and that he can order private companies to spend their profits purely on the say so and to the supposed benefit of other private companies on the basis of zero reliable evidence, to whit Sony BMG, Warner Music, Universal Music and EMI.
If we should be boycotting anyone, if should be Sony BMG, Warner Music, Universal Music and EMI for their abuse of the legal system to require ISP censorship.
Or did you actually mean you just want us to boycott the internet because we must all be dirty pirates if we think blocking thepiratebay is wrong, and shouldn't pay for an internet connection but just send the money direct to artists for music we can't listen to because we have no method of downloading it any more?
Personally, I think you should use the pirate party's own proxy. I'd like to see the brouhaha when a political party that promotes civil liberties and digital rights has its website censored by court order.
Remember kids, it's all fun and games until someone commits wholesale galactic genocide.
how can it be considered censorship to block access to The Pirate Bay?
What!? Are you saying it's not censorship to censor an entire website?
Secondly, there is no censorship if an information provider refuses to publish all of their information.
It is if they're actively blocking the material. Under your definition, censorship doesn't even exist in any form. A religious website was blocked because someone found it objectionable? Not censorship. Completely okay.
I think your definition of censorship is pure nonsense.
Is it censorship for me to refuse to put my credit card number on my web site?
That information was never public in the first place.
If it were censorship then admission fees to cinemas would be censorship and they are not.
It's clear that you have no idea what censorship is. Blocking the content itself would be censorship.
I happen to be working from home today, so I'll spend a few minutes checking how they block TPB on the ISP O2, just out of curiosity.
WWW: I get a page telling me that the page has been blocked by court order
DNS: They return the correct IP address: 194.71.107.50
Traceroute: I get to thepiratebay.piratpartiet.se (194.14.56.2), but not all the way to the web server, on both a censored and a non-censored connection. This is probably because TBP filters out some ICMP packets, nothing to do with O2.
Ping: I can't ping the TPB server from any connection. (same reason as above)
So TPB have locked down their web servers pretty well. Makes things more difficult for me. I couldn't find any open ports apart from 80. So I'll do some more checking with the webserver:
No intersting headers;HTTP/1.1 403 Forbidden
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 1100
I get this page even when using the IP-address in the URL, so there is no Host: www.thepiratebay.org header.
Now let's do a traceroute on TCP port 80. First, I tried BBC, and I got some hosts outside of the O2 network, specifically:bbc-linx.pr01.thdow.bbc.co.uk . Now for TPB: The same as for an ICMP traceroute!! This is weird. It's clear that O2 are not proxying HTTP connections, at least not at the SYN packet, because the HTTP SYN packets get all the way to thepiratebay.piratpartiet.se (194.14.56.2).
OK so let's try to get the web server to leak some more information: I tried some different URLs and with "Host: 127.0.0.1", and just get the same "blocked" page. If you're on IPv6 you can have a look at the page at my local web server: http://blackhole.lan.fa2k.net/f/tpb-blocked.txt . Let's try a bogus request with telnet:[fa2k@blackhole ~]$ telnet 194.71.107.50 80 /
Trying 194.71.107.50...
Connected to 194.71.107.50.
Escape character is '^]'.
GET
HTTP/1.0 400 Bad Request
Connection: close
Date: Thu, 21 Jun 2012 12:57:00 GMT
Server: lighttpd
From the non-censored connection I get the same thing. Now I mistyped some HTML request into telnet, so I'm probably on some kind of list. Who cares, it's not illegal to be curious. Now let's try a valid HTTP 1.0 request with netcat:
[fa2k@blackhole ~]$ printf "GET / HTTP/1.0\n\n" > the-request.txt
[fa2k@blackhole ~]$ cat the-request.txt | nc 194.71.107.50 80
HTTP/1.0 301 Moved Permanently
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.4.4
Location: http://thepiratebay.se/
Content-type: text/html
Content-Length: 0
Connection: close
Date: Thu, 21 Jun 2012 13:08:22 GMT
Server: lighttpd
Neat! This seems to come right from thepiratebay itself. Maybe the blocking software doesn't understand HTTP 1.0. And no, "http://thepiratebay.se" doesn't work in a browser. It's a different server than .org, but acts in a similar way.
A HTTP 1.1 request without a Host: part is invalid, let's see what comes up when changing "1.0" to "1.1": a 400 invalid request, it seems to still come from TPB, as it has the lighttpd header. Supplying "a" as the host, I get the 302 again.
Ok, let's send a Host: thepiratebay.se header to the thepiratebay.org server:
[fa2k@blackhole ~]$ printf "GET / HTTP/1.1\nHost: thepiratebay.se\n\n" > the-request.txt
[fa2k@blackhole ~]$ cat the-request.txt | nc 194.71.107.50 80
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.4.4
Set-Cookie: PHPSESSID=bbaee8ec681c1399b35cd5dba2cb7a31; path=/; domain=.thepiratebay.se
Set-Cookie: language=en_EN; expires=Fri, 21-Jun-2013 13:16:08 GMT; path=/; domain=.thepiratebay.se
Expires: Mon, 26 Jul 1997 05:00:00 GMT
Last-Modified: Thu, 21 Jun 2012 13:16:08 GMT
Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate
Cache-Control: post-check=0, pre-check=0
Pragma: no-cache
Content-Type: text/html;charset=UTF-8
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Date: Thu, 21 Jun 2012 13:16