"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."

Comments

Re:So, What You're Saying is...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

The fun that can be had

[TheP4st]

EZTV should have their DNS servers point to SKY's IP addresses and sit back and watch as hilarity ensues.

Re:There we have it

[blackest_k]

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.