Slashdot Mirror
"Piracy Filter" Blocks TorrentFreak for 4 Million Sky Customers
An anonymous reader writes "Website blocking has become a hot topic in the UK in recent weeks. Opponents of both voluntary and court-ordered blockades have warned about the potential collateral damage these blocking systems may cause, and they have now been proven right. As it turns out blocked sites can easily exploit the system and add new IP-addresses to Sky's blocklist. As a result TorrentFreak has been rendered inaccessible to the ISP's four million customers."
TorrentFreak isn't a site that allows you to conduct piracy. It's a news site that posts content relevant to file sharing.
This would be like shutting down newspapers because they speak about other crimes.
I'm a Sky user in the UK, and I am here to post the text of the article:
"Website blocking has become a hot topic in the UK in recent weeks. Opponents of both voluntary and court-ordered blockades have warned about the potential collateral damage these blocking systems may cause, and they have now been proven right. As it turns out blocked sites can easily exploit the system and add new IP-addresses to Sky’s blocklist. As a result TorrentFreak has been rendered inaccessible to the ISP’s four million customers.
stop-blockedFollowing a High Court ruling last month, six UK ISPs are required to block subscriber access to the popular TV-torrent site EZTV.it.
The actions EZTV faces are not the first taken against a torrent site in the UK. The Pirate Bay, KickassTorrents and several other “pirate” sites have been blocked by previous court orders and remain inaccessible by conventional means.
However, over the past couple of days Sky subscribers noticed that the blocklist had been quietly expanded with a new site that’s certainly not covered by any court order – TorrentFreak.com.
Our site first became inaccessible on Wednesday night, only to be unblocked 14 hours later. However, about an hour ago it was again added to the blocklist.
The recent blocking spree is causing confusion among Sky subscribers who have no idea why TorrentFreak is longer accessible. However, we can confirm that the problem lies with Sky’s filtering software that is supposed to enforce the court-ordered torrent site blockades.
The owner of EZTV informed TorrentFreak that he used Geo DNS to point UK visitors to TorrentFreak’s IP-address. Soon after there were reports that our website had become inaccessible to Sky users."
EZTV should have their DNS servers point to SKY's IP addresses and sit back and watch as hilarity ensues.
"I have downloaded hundreds and hundreds of records, why would I care if somebody downloads ours?" Robin Pecknold
FYI this site is not a tracker or place to download torrent files; it's a new sites that posts articles, and only articles relating to filesharing.
you didn't read the article did you?
It was actually a bit of clever manipulation by a torrent site who discovered sky was automatically blocking other ip addresses the torrent site was listing as alternate site addresses. So they performed a little experiment listed the torrent freak site as a mirror and sky automatically put a block on that ip address. Thus demonstrating how Sky's automatic blocking is flawed and fairly useless.
Its a bit more complicated than that but summing up Sky thought they could automate whack a mole and instead managed to give control over blocking to the sites they want to block.
Torrent freak were informed and agreed to be a target before hand. I think facebook was also targeted but with little to no effect due to the number of addresses assigned to facebook its believed.
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