Slashdot Mirror
UK ISPs Secretly Start Blocking Torrent Site Proxies
An anonymous reader writes "Several UK Internet providers have quietly added a list of new sites to their secretive anti-piracy blocklists. Following in the footsteps of Sky, the first ISP to initiate a proxy blockade, Virgin, BT and several other providers now restrict access to several torrent site proxies. The surprise isn't really that proxies have been added to the blocklist, but that the music industry and ISPs are failing to disclose which sites are being banned."
When will they begin to block general proxies, as they can be used to access blocked sites?
As a site is blocked, it adapt. Like TPB, it will move, change, and persist. You can't eliminate torrenting by attacking the practice - so long as there's a drive to do it, it'll find a way.
Only on
This is a surprise to anyone?
Attach torrent files as fake images.
block one, something else opens.. it's quite simple. instead of trying to find a solution for this, they should just deal with the root cause. make things more affordable could perhaps be one solution, eh? :)
Unless there's some law saying they have to disclose it why would they? Really, there's no surprise here. If you were running an ISP would you make a big deal of announcing all the sites your customers can't access on your service?
Install Opera.
Turn on turbo browsing mode (Icon bottom left.)
PirateProxy.net now working again for me on Virgin.
Never be afraid to ask. Wisdom must be gathered before it can be given.
The ISPs were ordered to block particular sites by the court, and they complied with the law of the land.
When attempting to access one of the blocked sites, the reason given for the block is clearly stated.
Although you may not like the BPI or their motives, nobody can argue that TPB's rasion d'être is anything other than contributory copyright infringement on an industrial scale; not with a straight face, at least.
So I fail to see any controversy here at all. Various sites have sprung up in an attempt to circumvent a UK court order, and the order has been broadened to cover them. ISPs have complied with UK law, as they are required to.
Yes, let's spin this into an "us versus the man" situation - how, exactly? That pirating the godawful shit the mainstream music and movie industries produces is now microscopically less effortless?
Please don't associate moans from a bunch of petty criminals with any genuine cause.
At the minute, they're locked into a futile game of whack-a-mole. It makes me laugh sometimes; the BPI have more or less veto power over the major ISPs in the UK and all they can do is flail around blocking a few sites and proxies. I imagine some bitter, humourless executive in the bowels of the BPI shaking his fist and screaming "CURSE YOU INTERNET!"
I say they're lucky, as I suspect in five years time they won't even be able to play whack-a-mole. What with censorship by various states, the NSA revelations and increasing authoritarianism, I think the next "generation" of P2P, web and messenger services are going to be anonymous. Tor we all know about, and I notice I2P shows a lot of promise. File sharing will likely be the first breakthrough anonymous application, but I2P supports far more than that and other services will quickly follow.
I think encrypted, anonymous services will essentially be game over for censorship.
Hi
I just attempted to setup a proxy on my dedicated server at a datacentre in France.
It was blocked instantly
Tried a few other things, also blocked instantly
Tried running the webserver on port 800 thinking perhaps transparent webproxying at the ISP level was blocking it
It wasn't.
Got someone in japan to try it, it worked, got someone on a different ISP in the UK to try it, blocked.
There's clearly some sort of packet inspection going on and anything that comes up TPB is blocked in the UK.
Make a reddit site and everyone post a link then vote them up or down and search what you want as the links go down new ones rise to the top.
>The High Court orders give music industry group BPI the authority to add sites to the blocklist without oversight.
So this means the BPI can freely censor any website they like without having to go to the High Court.
How long before Mega gets censored? How long before trackers get censored? How long before the Tor website's download links get censored?
“The court orders obtained in relation to The Pirate Bay cover not only the site itself, but also sites which have the sole or predominant purpose of providing access to The Pirate Bay. It would not be right to allow proxy sites flagrantly to circumvent blocks ordered by the High Court. We do not publish the names of proxies and it would not be appropriate for us to do so,” a BPI spokesperson said.
Well, if they expect VPN providers to block the pirate sites, they will have to provide them with a list. If they fail to provide them with a list, then it is crystal clear that they have no intention to have them block pirate sites.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
It's an open secret that about 75% of english-language TV worth watching, comes from the UK. I don't care how much the UK government works against the interest of its own citizens, but interfering with the cappers' ability to get their video to me, is anti-American. And Americans don't take kindly to other governments having anti-American policies. Fucking with me, is my government's job.
It's open season on Redcoats. PART 2, BIATCH!
This highlights that at present the torrent sites are a single point of failure for the whole torrent network.
If you say ‘just use a proxy if those sites are blocked’ then eventually all proxies will be blocked, to the detriment of everyone including people living under the rule of unjust governments who really need those proxies.
Torrents don't need trackers any more. The only thing the torrent sites are still useful for is getting a likely info hash given a file name. Previous p2p search systems have been prone to spam, but that can be fixed using authenticated lists and perhaps a web of trust. More problematic is that the sites that provide the p2p search program will become the next failure point. If the search protocol is open multiple clients may be developed, but that doesn't really help all that much. The number of developers interested is limited and generally only about a dozen will make it. And most people will stick to one: Remember Gnutella? When Limewire was killed, most nodes disappeared, search results went south, and then users of other clients left the network.
So for its long-term survival, the torrent network needs to be able to function as a kind of darknet, so websites listing search clients and the sites of those clients themselves are stored distributed on computers all over the globe. And this functionality must be built-in and automatic because otherwise no one will install it until it is too late.
I think that viewpoint is a bit too idealistic and disregards human nature. Humans have never been very good about reaching consensus and acting in concert. Just look at slashdot itself- imagine trying to get all the posters to agree on the same point and to take the same action.
Just off the top of my head, I can think of several likely responses you will get if you propose a boycott :-
- It's not too expensive.
- Developers deserve to be rewarded.
- I can afford it.
- I hate the price but I can't live without it
- Why do I care.
My point being that your suggestion of a boycott is impractical and is never likely to happen.
If they saw an actual decline in consumption based on their price then maybe they would wake up.
Or, they could decide that since there was no demand, they won't make it any more. Eg. "Sales of the last RPG we made bombed, nobody plays RPGs anymore. Lets keep pumping out Madden games instead".
What they don't realise is - once the net is stripped of free content that lots of people will leave it and their business will suffer.
They got the torrent sites blocked, job done.
Then they go to block the sites that are linking to the sites.
Doesn't that just prove that blocking doesn't work?
What would happen if proxies were set up on IPv6. Even though none of these 'top' UK ISPs offer native IPv6, customers could still access them using Teredo? I suspect that few, if any, of these ISP have the capability to filter IPv6 sites
This block only seems to affect the big ISPs like BT, Sky, TalkTalk and Virgin. Many of the smaller companies aren't part of these schemes and aren't being targetted by the court orders. Just switch your business to one of them!
Last week, I had a gaming itch to scratch and I felt like playing the XCOM reboot. It's available for £34.99 on the App Store and I was hesitant to buy it because I wasn't sure how it would run on my Macbook with an integrated graphics. It's always a hassle trying to get a refund for purchased software so I searched online for a demo to get a feel for how it would play. After some searching, I found that the demo was only available for the Window's version.
So I downloaded a torrent of the game.
To my surprise, the game ran well on my Macbook's integrated graphics chip. I spent a couple of hours checking things out, playing through the tutorials and just having fun with the game. I then shut it down, and proceeded to buy the game. screenie
The developers who made the port did themselves no favours by not releasing a demo. The lack of playable demo coupled with the asinine rules governing purchased software (no returns, wtf?) mean they would definitely have lost a sale. However, thanks to the availability of the cracked version I was able to check that the game ran fine on my machine which then led to a purchase.
TL;DR
Torrents help push sales. True story.
If something is too expensive then "DON'T BUY IT". by pirating it you only give them an excuse to provide more lockdowns and inflate the price more.
Game of Thrones pirated; HBO doesn't mind.
Also, those media companies are run by Techno-Luddites who couldn't manage their way out of a wet paper sack with a flashlight and a jackhammer, so no wonder they don't understand how to watch shows on teh intertubes without a cable subscription.
People pirate because it is easier than being legit. If it was easier to pay, many would.
Yeah, right.
http://tpb.ic0nic.de/ works fine over sky