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Torrentz.eu Domain Name Suspended
First time accepted submitter S37Rigor Mortis (1601271) writes "Torrentz.eu, the largest torrent search engine on the Internet, has had its domain name suspended following a request from the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit in the UK. The site continues to operate under two alternative domains, and is hoping to move the .eu domain to a new registrar." Update: 05/27 12:53 GMT by T : That was quick; the site is back, "after the owners pointed out that its suspension was illegal."
hate replying to myself, but after proxying through my home server (on BT infinity), torrentz.ch is certainly not blocked. Way to go UK!
I did a search and if you are looking for copyrighted materials you can find them. But you find a lot of other stuff as well. Linux distributions, freely distributable music. Public domain materials etc. this is a search engine.
"GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 51230 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; Setec Astronomy)"
As I understand it, the Police of London is a very small, mostly corporate controlled entity with much less impact than they purport to have.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
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In case anyone reading this believes this ios hyperbole or some left wing rant, it is literally true. The companies in the City get to vote in proportion to the number of employees and so vastly out vote the citizens.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
civilian votes: 7.000
corporate votes: 32.000
Basically, corporations determine what the City of London Police's policies and priorities are.
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Going on... The City of London is often also called "the square mile" because it's a really very small part of the blob of the UK called "London". All of the London councils dwarf the City in both number of people resident and square miles covered. The rest of london has somewhere between 6 and 10 million residents.
The City has a population of something like 7000 people, yet has something like >5,000,000 visitors every working day. To some extent, it makes sense not to let 7000 people define the local government policy for so may visitors (just about all of whom work for one of the areas employers).
However, by the same token, those employers shouldn't be defining local government (or in this case, local police) policy. The City Police have asked for things like this before, and mostly been rebuffed, as seems reasonable, given who/what they represent.
As the GP notes, We the People have never been asked if we'd like this sort of thing to go on - but then we actually don't pay for the City Police directly, as it is really paid for by the Corporation of London, who are paid for by the businesses within it. Hence we have this fscked up setup where there's a (small) police force for hire by whomever pays the most. That wouldn't be so bad if they just stayed in the square mile, but sadly they're starting to see their remit as "the Internet" as well. We the People could argue that the actions of the City Police brings the actions of the wider police force into disrepute though, I guess (not such a bad idea actually, now I think of it).
The moral of the story is: If you receive an "official" communication from some police force or other, politely decline to do what they ask unless they can provide a court order. This will keep you out of trouble for longer than trying to be "helpful". Our judges might not be perfect, but for the most part they won't furnish the City Police with a court order for something as flimsy as this.
Most people have things they don't want to have freely available (child porn, for example) and prioritize suppressing them over free availability of other things, thus they shy away from free, anonymous file exchanges.
That's the problem with anarchy in general: everyone's free to do what they want, including things I don't want them to do.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
It's a very old arrangement actually, dating back to the middle ages. 'The City of London' is not the city of London, it's a medieval corporation whose territory encompasses a small stretch of the most expensive property in London, and whose constituents are not the handful of people that live there, but the medieval guilds and the big corporations that own property there.
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