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Project Free TV, YIFY, PrimeWire Blocked In the UK
hypnosec writes "The movie industry in the UK is having a ball, as far as blocking of sites allegedly involved in piracy is concerned, as courts have asked UK ISPs to enforce a blockade on Project Free TV, YIFY, PrimeWire and others. Getting a torrent or steaming site blocked in the UK is a mere paperwork formality, since ISPs have completely stopped defending against these orders. As it stands, a total of 33 sites have been blocked in the UK, including The Pirate Bay, BitSnoop, ExtraTorrent, Torrentz, 1337x, Fenopy, H33T, KickAssTorrents, among others."
Guess you'll have to pay for your entertainment, like normal people.
Personally I'm not a big user of these kind of services, but it's only a handful of the "big" ISPs who are doing the blocking. I prefer a more personal service so I use a small ISP which offers special geeky extras (full class C, reverse NS delegation etc) and they perform no such blocking. But even if I didn't it's trivial to bypass such blunt instruments.
The thin end of the wedge has become slightly thicker...
They've started blocking searches that can lead to kiddie porn, and thus accepted the linkage.
The next step in that is mandatory reporting of any IP addresses that does those forbidden searches. Having accepted the searches are bad, it follows that surveillance of this badness will be the next step. Thus they've accepted the surveillance principle.
Copyright lobby already wants Google to block all copyright infringements from search results. (and read the New Zealand Kim Dotcom indictment, it talks about 'selectors being tasked' i.e. PRISM talk, meaning spooks are now copyright enforcers).
Likewise ISPs blocked these torrent search engines as being equivalent to torrents and in turn equivalent to the copyright infringement, thus it follows that they'll keep being asked to block ever more tangential stuff. For example, sites that list torrent search engines. Sites that discuss torrent search engines. VPN sites, and so on.
These companies exist because the public allows it. The public is getting nothing but censorship out of the bargain, giving these companies carte blanche to do whatever they please to the internet. The world is caving to the slightest whims of an industry that we would survive just fine without.
When I suddenly realise that I'm using my 'Tor browser' more than my 'normal browser' to access the internet, as I'm increasingly suspicious of what the 'Great Firewall(s) of Britain' is filtering/blocking/modifying on the fly...
[And I'll probably be auto-flagged as a 'subversive' for both using Tor and making this comment..]
I don't know about the streaming sites, but I know the blocking of torrent sites has had little effect or the more (or less) tech savvy people who use them. People get around not being able to browse for their torrents by subscribing to torrent RSS feeds (for TV), and by using things like Tor if they absolutely need to browse the Pirate Bay or other sites.
The trackers are not blocked, and therefore the torrents still work fine.
Kinda pointless.
I just pooped your party.
I'm in the UK and I use O2 (currently being migrated to Sky).
I use a digitalocean.com droplet (virtual machine) to access these. I have the bottom end droplet which costs $5/month.
On this I install apache, php and phproxy (google it) and that is it.
I won't use the public proxies that seem to have popped up as they all have nefarious bits of crap installed in them or are very overloaded.
so what Google block's kiddie porn...
WTF does that have to do with the English Monarchy (via their corporate holdings) dominating its peasants
I don't even want to hear the English complain when they're living 1984 in 20 years.
First, it's not like they didn't have a novel warning them.
Second, they know their democracy is contingent on Royal perogative. They can find out who owns what assets. They can read where the Monarch's money went & how companies like **Royal** Dutch Shell and BP continue colonialism via different means to this day. They have basic freedoms. They should know better.
Third, Ireland & europe, and the USA would help them peacefully transition.
That's why this censorship happens...because English people aren't free.
Thank you Dave Raggett
Because only a trivially small proportion of the population cares. Few have even heard about these services.
If you care about free TV in the UK then you could start by not watching or recording live transmissions, and you then have no obligation to pay the TV license -- they only waste it on extra redundancy payments for senior managers, and politically motivated nonsense stuff like moving programming oop north.
I get by on BBC iPlayer delayed transmissions, streaming to my TV through Chromecast. Possibly ITV and Channel 4 have compatible streaming services, but sadly their programmes are not compatible with me.
Most ISPs have stopped defending against these orders and just add anything the BPI wants to their filters.
Some UK ISPs don't apply such filters. AAISP for example not only promises that it will give users 12 months notice should they ever decide to use filtering, but you have to explicitly select "unfiltered internet access" when signing up or you'll be shown the door.
The less I see, the less I buy.
I used to download entire runs of stuff like Babylon 5 and Stargate back then, bought the boxed sets when they came out.
We get very little TV exposure of newer shows on Freeview and I can't be bothered to kludge past the blocks so I don't even know what shows are out there worth watching.
I think the last thing I warezed&bought was Firefly...
I'm not going to buy a bunch of DVDs blind so there goes more sales...
We will see in a few years or even less if big content providers make more or less money than before in the UK. I'm of the opinion that blocking free content leads to discontent, less visibility, and ultimately less profit, because people will not want to reward what could be construed as oppression.
As I read the comments, it looks like people are missing a bet on what the practice that the cariers are doing can provide.
People are noting that techincally competent people can easily bypass the restrictions, and others are noting that the vast majority of the public is not sufficiently technically competent to work around it.
I'm reminded a bit of the drug dealer situation in most places. It's trivially easy for most people to find a supplier for nearly any drug that someone has an interest in getting. Most people don't go looking for them for whatever reason, but it's not because they don't know where to go, or at least if they thought about it a bit they could figure it out. The same is likely to be true of media content.
So, user George doesn't know how to get around these filters, but it's likely that one of George's friends does, or one of George's friends knows someone who can. If this ever became a significant issue, I suspect that people would set up secure chat servers (or even a https based site) where they let their neighbors know they can request whatever movie they are interested in, and through a bot on the server they get back a link to the file already downloaded, or to the file being downloaded, and they can start watching. The link may be to a torrent proxy that goes and gets the bits of the files from other people offering the same sort of a service, and none of the people providing this service actually have copies of the files maintained on their systems either. (Yes, that somewhat defeats the purpose of a torrent, but the idea is to provide a service to end users, not necessarily be a good torrent netizen.) To reduce the likelyhood that the person providing the service is adversly affected, he or she may require that the 'customer' run a torrent proxy on their system that the load of torrent traffic gets distributed across. Better operators will do something like build their software package to prevent spam bots from running on the customer's computers. That may even be all that the customer is asking for from the service provider, and the torrent operation may be going on completely transparently to them.
I know, that seems complex. But from an end user perspective for the movies, it looks like I log into a secure web server, identify the movie I want to watch, and get a link to that movie. I click on that link, and I start watching the movie. Perhaps George texts or IMs a movie title to Bill, who texts back a URL that George then enters in their web browser, or even follows right on their phone or pc.
In time a network of providers of the service will exist, or several networks. It might be done through something like IRC, and the various providers will check to see who's closest to the end user and get a link close to them.
You never know...
Trackers *are* blocked and taken offline all the time. That is, if there were any trackers left, most are gone. BitTorrent has different methods now to discover peers. PEX, DHT and LDP for peer discovery, Magnet links to replace .torrent files. You essentially can't block bittorrent without extremely "expensive" Deep Packet Inspection, essentially eavesdropping on every consumers internet traffic 100% of the time.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
I'm glad YIFY was blocked. No one deserves to watch such shitty rips.
There isn't one!
The public is getting nothing but censorship out of the bargain... The world is caving to the slightest whims of an industry that we would survive just fine without.
Then why is the geek so obsessed with his free comic book movie fix? The big budget Hollywood production?
The paying customer is the censor here and he is getting exactly what he wants: The final say on future productions and budgets.
The projects which will be green lighted because they are reasonably likely to be profitable.
The paying customer gets "Gravity" into the IMAX theater, the director's cut on Blu-Ray and malware free downloads and HD streaming through Amazon, Netflix and others. The P2P geek whatever scraps that can be swept off the table.
They are doing everyone a favor, blocking this low-bitrate crap.
One owns the other...
Steaming site? James Watt would be so proud...
Might go with A&A instead..
Come.in
Problem solved.
The biggest problem I have is that they are using the cleanfeed system (which was originally used to block child porn) to block these sites.
Problem solved.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
*This* Industry however is not necessarily the source of all entertainment. There was a time when the industry did not exist, but entertainment still existed.
The entertainment industry in the states dates back to Stephan Foster.
In 1850, P.T, Barnum paid Jenny Lind $167,600 in advance for her first American tour, plus expenses. That is $4,557,076 adjusted for inflation. The contract would be renegotiated upwards as Barnum's promotion machine built up steam.
There would be profits from sheet music sales, product endorsements and so on.
Barnum's share would come to about half a million good-as-gold tax-free dollars. In the first decade of the telegraph, The first quarter-century of the railroad, Everything essential is in place for the evolution of a mass popular culture rooted in professional entertainment.
This is a stupid waste of time. People will make hundreds of forums dedicated to simply posting the torrent file itself. Or people will resort to pastebin or something since it's a glorified text file. Blocking the torrent conglomeration sites is useless because the torrent file itself can be posted anywhere else. People can simply e-mail them to each other even.
Capabilities and patience are two things that software can be very, very good at, easily outperforming dumb non-technical layman humans.
When "Six Strikes" came out in the US, I responded by simultaneously "going dark" and automating. I now spend a lot less of my time on pirating stuff. And yet, I'm pirating a lot more stuff than I was a year ago. That's what happens when the bar gets raised: the harder they make it, the more powerful the tools needed. And using powerful tools doesn't require smarter operators. It's all just about pushing a button, and anyone can do that.
Every time they push the people, the peoples' computers push back harder, because it only takes one person to come up with a great idea that millions of people can use.
Dude, you totally don't get it. We used to buy they movies, back when the DRM (CSS) was trivial to break, allowing us to play the movies.
Then Blu-Ray came along. Playing bought movies (and digital cable, no longer compatible with standard tuners) became too much of a pain in the ass. Bittorrent (and some other things) solved the problem, by letting someone else go through all the pain-in-the-ass stuff, and I get the easy-to-work-with file. As a bonus, we save money that would have been spent on the purchases.
Add patches to mplayer/xine/etc which always work to play any Blu-Ray in spite of its DRM, without me needing to get updated key lists for every damn new release, and "buy the movies" could possibly be back on the table. Until then, though, I simply am not going to buy something I can't play. Furthermore, even if you give me what I'm asking for, I'm still going to resent the fact that laws like DMCA make it a crime to obey copyright law by watching a bought movie. What it really comes down to, is that as long as there's DRM, piracy is going to be the path of least resistance for consumers. DRM is the greatest threat to the IP industry, ever, and it's already wreaking plenty of destruction upon their profits.
If you're going to rant about how this block list is the debil, you're going to have to pick something other than sites that deal pretty much exclusively in stolen content to point out as the blocked examples.
No sane, right minded adult gives a shit that TPB and its related friends are blocked. Its expected. These sites are FOR THEFT OF CONTENT. Thats WHY they exist. Just because someone uploaded a Linux ISO torrent doesn't make them any more legit than the ice cream truck that sells cocaine on the street .... but occasionally sells an ice cream cone.
What the fuck is wrong with you people? Why are any of you acting like this is a bad thing? Are you seriously trying to say that these sites AREN'T for theft of content?
You need to save your crying wolf for when they block something that actually shouldn't be blocked. Raising hell when they block obvious ones that should be blocked just makes your entire point look childish and no one listens to you any more.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Why people want to watch mangled sound audio and the worst rips on the net is beyond me. I think its mostly people with shitty 2 speaker systems that like YIFY rips, but that guy is everywhere!
Every time I go to download a movie, I am cursing YIFY because his releases dominate! I think YIFY really works for the film industry and is releasing low quality rips on purpose.
-
see, Royal Dutch Shell is the 'Saxon' in the Anglo-Saxon aristocratic alliance ;)
Thank you Dave Raggett
Hello,
I just wanted to say that I'm on AAISP and it does not block anything. It does not use IWF filters, nor any blocklists as far as I know.
And most of the big ISPs that block stuff do that because of "gentleman's agreement", not because of explicit court orders. So basically they do it because they didn't have the balls to contest/refuse the requests by special interest groups.
And AAISP is the only ISP I know where you can get support via IRC channel. They do limit internet usage, but increasing your non-working hours limits is very cheap, and I never max them out anyway. Other than that, I'm very happy with AAISP. Oh, and they have IPv6!
--Coder
The really powerful monsters love the 'slippery slope' principle. It is the main mechanism 'TIPPING POINTS' are reached in all significant Human events driven by the 'will' of the people.
No-one in power in the UK cares about file sharing, and I really mean this. However, the media bodies in the UK are powerful, mouthy, run by really stupid, lazy and malicious people (no-one thinks the world owes them a living more than these guys). Given a nudge, these organisations will never stop pushing.
So, Blair creates a free-for-all mechanism of Internet censorship, rubber-stamped by the courts, eliminating access to a whole sector of the Internet. This sets up a fundamental principle in the minds of the UK sheeple. And, of course, the more sites the media lobby groups get banned, the more sites they want to ban in the future. They have stated bluntly that ANY site supporting ANY aspect of the process by which users have access to UNREGULATED (NOT illegal, NOT infringing) uploads MUST be a target for banning.
A few seconds of thought shows that Blair's phase one is to encourage a conventional corporate take over of the Web, so that site operators have a positive incentive to ban user comments and uploads as too 'risky' and 'expensive' to monitor, check for legality, and take responsibility for. Blair wants the 'user' created part of the Internet to follow the model of 'letters from readers' sections of old school newspapers. Highly vetted, highly censored, and frequently fake content written by members of the paper's staff.
Blair has his people dribble "RESPONSIBILITY, RESPONSIBILITY, RESPONSIBILITY" to the sheeple, to generate a 'guilty unless proven innocent by some corporate entity' mindset. Remember how the vile shills here always say "it isn't censorship if it is done by a company"? Well, Blair's Internet has EVERY point of access under the direct control of a corporation with a legal DUTY to oversee and censor user content BEFORE it is available to other users. Then, Blair educates the next generations of sheeple at his ACADEMY SCHOOLS (like US Charter Schools, but near universal across UK public education) to believe that any other form of Internet would be sickeningly irresponsible.
-You can't say what you like on the Internet, cos you might say something 'bad'.
-You can't upload what you like on the Internet, because you might upload something 'infringing'.
-sites that do NOT pre-check user-created content before granting wider access to that content are going to be illegal in the UK under the above two 'principles'
-corporate sites that take full legal responsibility for all user content will be the only sites legal in the UK, but these sites will represent the established mainstream media.
You already have Blairite propaganda sites BANNING user comments under every excuse under the Sun. What media outlet wants its vicious, bent, malicious editorial comment ruined by critical user comments beneath? Tech sites have been taking massive pay-offs to promote the dreadful (and NSA spying) Xbox One, and do not enjoy the negative responses of their users that call them. Are any of you so stupid that you do not see the conflict between user freedom and corporate interests?
However, some of the biggest, most successful new companies in the World have been formed on the back of mostly unregulated user content. There is a clash of ideologies that Team Blair is determined to win. Blair KNOWS the future must SEEM different to gain acceptance amongst the younger sheeple, but must, as far as possible, replicate the controls and restrictions of the past. Persuade sheeple that 'freedom of speech' means freedom to say anything that DOES NOT offend anyone, for instance- the principle brainwashed into pupils in Blair's Academy School system.
Anyway, the banning of file-sharing sites in the UK will soon move to the banning of all kinds of other Internet sites. And the vile shills who tell you this does not matter, cos you can always access such locations via proxies or VPN or Tor pu
http://mikew.github.io/ss-plex.bundle/
Go on, governments, movie industry, music industry. Keep on demanding everything you don't like be blocked. Contimue to mess with the Internet, making it less and less useful.
Go on and help us all discover that we can live without the Internet. We can always share CDs, DVDs, and memory sticks. And you cannot track them. We have shared hard media for decades, and you cannot do a thing about it. But just keep on messing up the Internet, and someday, you will find yourselves alone on it.
Has anybody noticed just how many modern western countries have censorship in place? Some of them are 'voluntary' (like in Canada) and the ISPs were pressured (ie threatened by fringe elements with a law to force it if they didn't implement it, as the groups had a lot of political muscle). The original system started out as something called clean feed (if I recall correctly) to prevent access to child pornographic web sites. That then expanded to other types of content. It varies from country to country although much of Europe has mandated it (written into law) and subscribed to this system. It's that system which is now being abused to censor political speech, disgruntled employees, whistle blowers, sites that groups like the MPAA don't like, and more.
None of these countries can truly be considered free. The United States surprisingly doesn't have such a system in place as far as we know although for all the bullying the US does it might as well. The country does censor although it does so by going after individuals and even companies (the executives/employees of overseas gambling sites, employees of file sharing companies, companies/people corporations don't like via legally mandated 'take down' notices, etc).
We need a decentralized project to clone Mozilla Firefox and tie in decentralized sites (maybe using Tor or similar). Something that isn't necessarily the Tor Browser Bundle. Just something thats quick and prevents effective censorship of the masses.
I guess that is sort of what the pirate bay's Pirate Browser was trying to accomplish to some extent.
I think the main difference between this project and the Mozilla Firefox project is that Firefox is too centralized to resist legal forces and this project would be such that you can't easily identify the authors and even if you do you'd have a hell of a time forcing each and every one of them to cooperate (ie due to the requiring of the cooperation of the majority to make changes). The Pirate Browser is still centralized to some degree or another although it at least resists that censorship via a hidden site (I assume) or similar.
Overcoming censorship of free speech of this variety is just like overcoming censorship in any other country, such as China's great firewall. Usage of VPNs and other proxy services are necessary.
Well, i now use http://yify.tv/ and its better because here i can watch the movies (yify torrents encodes) online.
Te quality is almost the same and all videos are uploaded in HD quality
I recommend use now Yify TV http://yify.tv/
No you see the porn filter got confused with yify, thought it was a misspelling and two f's were intended.
If i was to download 10 movies from yify a day would i get in trouble? The movies would be older dvd movies from 2012 and below.
I’m very happy to see that on this occasion both SolarMovie and TubePlus have been blocked by the UK’s major ISP’s. A quick browse of those sites reviles they allow free viewing/streaming of copyrighted material. I’m glad my taxes are helping to prevent illegal activities. I only wish that the site owners and regular users of these sites weren't so selfish. I’d rather my taxes were used to benefit the UK in other ways, rather than Policing society’s freeloaders. So in summary, don’t blame the UK Government, the Law Courts or the IPS’s. Blame the people who want to enjoy content they have no legal right to.
just b/c your company has some piece of paper saying it's a 'corporation' doesn't mean it's not controlled by **someone**
those people are the majority stock holders...**the Dutch Royalty**
you acknowledge yourself that the Monarchy still has a role:
OH OK...nothing to see here...move along!
everything I said is true, and reading between the lines of your comment proves it
PR commentors are the scum of the earth...
Thank you Dave Raggett