Slashdot Mirror
Pirate Bay Blockade Censors CloudFlare Customers
An anonymous reader writes: The blockade of the Pirate Bay by UK ISPs is causing trouble for CloudFlare customers. Several websites have been inadvertently blocked by Sky because a Pirate Bay proxy is hosted behind the same IP-addresses. In a response, CloudFlare threatened to disconnect the proxy site from its network. Like any form of censorship web blockades can sometime lead to overblocking, targeting perfectly legitimate websites by mistake. This is also happening in the UK where Sky's blocking technology is inadvertently blocking sites that have nothing to do with piracy.
Arrgg!
So VPN's are a thing. The only thing I see their "blockade" of TPB doing is preventing customers from using the sites caught in the by-catch.
Much how most DRM exclusively harms paying customers while providing crackers with more knowledge and learning materials.
Would it not be rather ironic if Sky were to use the CloudFare CDN for some of their content, and therefore blocked themselves?
Blocking all of the sites served by a legitimate CDN is going a little far.
If you have The Pirate Bay as a customer to such a service, this is bound to happen. Why even bother if you aren't prepared to deal with it?
Is this just Sky blocking ineptly? Or is this an accidentally-on-purpose overblock to force CDN providers to voluntarily kick off torrent sites and refuse to do business with them in future?
The UK ISPs are paid by their customers connect to the Internet.
The UK ISPs are blocking connections.
There are no "pirates".
There is no "piracy".
There is only UK ISPs not allowing their Internet customers who have paid for to reach all Internet sites to not reach all Internet sites.
Shame on UK ISPs.
There is nobody else to blame.
UK ISP customers. Sue your provider.
E
I wonder what a judge would say if my business lost revenue due to ISPs blocking my website, regardless of reason. Would I have any traction regarding damages and other claims related to lost business?
I mean, if Sky prevented customers from entering a mall building just because there's a marijuana shop inside, I'm pretty sure I would be able to sue and win, and I don't see how blocking a shared server is any different.
If people would stop stealing from artists (disclaimer: like myself) than we wouldn't need counter-piracy measures and the internet would be fun for everybody again. But as long as people do not respect artists' intellectual property right (nah, I'm not stealing, I' just making a copy) these measures are necessary. Stop stealing and if you don't want to pay then make your own stuff. But don't steal mine!
Is this the internet version of human shield?
1. Host infringing site under an IP
2. Host a non-infringing site under same IP
3. Act outraged when both are blocked.
I am not saying blocking is right but there might be some "spin" going on.
I'm on Sky (moved unwillingly from O2 when Sky bought them out). Reading stuff like this makes me want to move away from them. I'd love to vote with my feet/take my business elsewhere/shove it to them/etc. The problem I have is that my broadband basically costs nothing (as long as you remember to ring them each year you can negotiate them down to almost nothing, especially if you also have line rental or TV), I get great speeds, great reliability, and I use the connection constantly; so I almost certainly cost them more money by being a customer than I would if I moved!
piracy is promotion
Old system:
Innocent until proven guilty
New system:
We have to make a example with this. Even if innocent people have to suffer for it.
The oligarch that reign on us are not very fair.
If CloudFlare is so concerned about it's other customers, it would have just disconnected the proxy's services and applied to have the blockade removed, not "threatened" to disconnect the proxy.
Any reputable cloud provider would disconnect any of their customers deemed to be hosting illegal content.
But no, they're going to strand their other customers rather than strike down the one customer that is actually causing the problem in order to score "political points" about ISP responsibility.
Feh. Whether you feel that "piracy" is wrong or not, it's clear that if the legal system is mandating the blockade of one of your customer's services, you should be getting rid of that customer, not whinging about how the blockade is affecting your other users.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
This is what happens when people that don't know how internet works gets to make decisions based on their flawed understanding.
Like any form of censorship web blockades can sometime lead to overblocking, targeting perfectly legitimate websites by mistake
Like any form of censorship web blockades can sometime lead to overblocking, targeting other perfectly legitimate websites by mistake
Cloudfare has long been the enemy of an open Internet. Anyone who has browsed the web with tor will curse cloudfare for their never-ending and evil captcha challenges.
Price can be used as deterrent to competition. That's one of the reasons some very successful products don't see their prices go through the roof: because their makers know the exact point at which to operate so as not to make it worthwhile for competitors to get into their business area.
Now, do we see a lot of piracy about everything? A: No. Why not? Because e.g. movies are powered by greed and the money involved is on the scale of millions -- enough to separate a slice and throw it at the lobbying dogs^H^H^H^H^H industry. Heck, they're trying to move entire countries to sign BS treaties to force these into using taxpayer money to provide services to movie distributors (Police and derived services, that is).
The only effective weapon against piracy and these greedy bandits is to watch movies from other sources and avoid that extortion game.
We should have a Gutenberg project of sorts for movies...
A couple large CDN's should block everyone in UK for a day or two, to show the government what tyrannical morons they are.
Cloudfare blocks Tor exit nodes heavily; you have to fill out a captcha almost every other page refresh. It makes it almost impossible to navigate a website.
That seems incompatible with your distaste for "kowtowing to the enemies of freedom" and trying to allow customers access to your books even if a government doesn't want them to have access.
Please help metamoderate.
kiss the public domain goodbye, obviously no one cared enough
I don't see the point of blocking The Pirate Bay. People can still access other torrent search engines like Torrentz, ISO Hunt and Bitsnoop.
Kindly do not equate file sharing with boarding ships and seizing booty and other such sundry treasures by force. Though corporate bullies who induce state representatives may not know the difference between sharing and force, the rest of us, including Slashdot ought to know better.
"SO we bide our time, waiting for a purer kick to bloom and the future is still bleak, uncertain and beautiful" -GSYBE
no legit company uses CloudFlare
These companies use CloudFlare services. Names I recognize include Reddit, eHarmony, Bain Capital, League of Legends developer Riot Games, Cisco Systems, Quicksilver, Y Combinator, NASDAQ Stock Market, Eurovision Song Contest, Massachsetts Institute of Technology, and Metallica. I've also seen CloudFlare services in use on Stack Exchange (the Stack Overflow company). If you can explain what you mean by "legit" and show how all of these companies fail tests for being "legit", I'll believe you.
CloudFlare blocks any IP address that sends an insane number of page hits in a short period of time
Then it blocks search engines and reduces the SEO of its customers' sites on search engines that aren't big enough to get whitelisted the way Google and Bing are.
CloudFlare was treating Amazon's web crawler bot's IP range as a potential spammer and showing it a captcha page for every result
If any other CloudFlare customer sees behavior like this, try whitelisting each smaller search engine on which you want your site to appear.
[CloudFlare's CAPTCHA] is trivial for end users to get around and thus is not a true block
Even for blind users?
If HTTP, inspect the host name. If HTTPS then the IP will be enough by itself.
HTTPS allows multiple hostnames on one IP address on any platform whose TLS stack supports Server Name Indication. This includes essentially every web browser in common use except Internet Explorer on Windows XP and Android Browser on Android 2.x. So if HTTPS, inspect the SNI header, as it's cleartext.
CloudFlare has been using SNI since Slashdot's previous story about CloudFlare expanding SSL support in September 2014. It became practical in April 2014 when Windows XP, the last desktop operating system in common use whose pack-in browser does not support SNI, reached end of extended support.
The second problem is that UK ISPs implemented the block sloppily instead of complaining, "The technology to implement the filter you describe does not exist" and not doing it
If compliance with a law is actually impossible, the only way for a company to comply is to cease trading and return the company's property to its shareholders. One company that chose this route was Lavabit.
I assume you've taken steps to contact the content creator
For a lot of works, the company that produced a work no longer exists. What are the standard steps to track down ownership of copyright in a decades-old work?
and try to find other means to pay?
Plenty of people have requested a copy of the film Song of the South on DVD or BD from Disney. I can't think of one case in the past couple decades where Disney actually sold a copy to the public.
I'll stand by you in at least calling for people to stop shitting on content creators.
I'll stop pooping on "content creators" once people stop using that horrid term "content creator" to refer to what the law calls "authors and publishers". "Content" connotes "something to fill a box" more than creative works of authorship, and "creator" compares authors to deities.
We should have a Gutenberg project of sorts for movies...
The difference between books and movies is that movies have advanced so far in storytelling techniques and production values since December 31, 1922 (the current public domain cutoff date), that there is little demand among the public for movies whose copyright has expired. The "classic films" are still under copyright.
I haven't read the British copyright statute, but both the U.S. copyright statute (Title 17, United States Code) and the English language version of the Berne Convention use "work", "author", "publisher", and "infringe" rather than "content", "creator", and "steal". Using the same terms as the law helps show that you aren't parroting the opinions of someone with a second- or third-hand understanding of what copyright really is. Perhaps I can try to overlook these terms, much as I overlook "could care less". But one thing I see on Slashdot and can't overlook is the use of "copywrite" to mean anything other than "creating the text of an advertisement".
I,too, am a content creator, and it's disrespectful at best and harmful at worst to pirate content. I don't care what words you choose to use to refer to it (copying, stealing, liberating, whatever), it treats the creator with a disregard to his well-being.
Deep Purple’s Concert Violates Deep Purple’s Rights
Jul. 7th, 2009 at 7:22 PM
The Russian Authors Organization (RAO), a collective right-management organization, sued OOO Yug-Art, a Russian company that had organized in Rostov-on-Don, Russia, a concert of Deep Purple, a legendary English rock band. RAO demanded from Yug-Art compensation for “unauthorized pubic performance” of songs copyrighted by Ian Gillan, Roger Glover, Steve Morse, and Ian Paice, on whose behalf RAO allegedly acted. The peculiarity of the case is that on the concert Gillan, Glover, Morse, and Paise (the Deep Purple members) performed their own songs themselves. Nevertheless, the court agreed that the performance was indeed “unauthorized.” RAO won the award of 450,000 rubles (cr. $15,000, or $1,000 per song). http://russian-law.livejournal...