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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.
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.
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
FTS:
Not TPB itself, but a proxy.
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.
If you really want to stop the theft of art and music, why not start with the megacorporate audio/video recording combines who profit from the monetisation of culture and the destruction of the public domain?
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
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!
I'm a content creator too, with significant copyrighted works. I've even used copyright threats to ensure I've been adequately paid. I also think Copyright is utterly absurd as it is. 5-10 years ought to be the max. The establishment has shown severe disrespect to the public by locking down culture indefinitely behind a paywall. It might be "stealing" in your eyes, or the law's... Ethically, it's sharing, with the same good intentions of every public library. I hope one day copyright catches up to morality. Our culture is owned by all of us.
I totally agree, but comments like this always get downvoted because on \. everything needs to be free. So don't even bother posting things like this.
But this is "on the internet". Everything is different "on the internet". Sense and logic don't apply to laws "on the internet". And human or citizen's rights twice so.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
And that's enough justification to allow shit like this to happen? Protecting your stuff is worth making others miserable or even lose business? A law that would make such a behaviour possible in the real world (like the aforementioned shutting down a mall because a head shop somehow got inside) would instantly be repealed and repaired to ensure that nobody else gets harmed.
But everything's different on the internet. Fuck, there really is no sense and logic in laws concerning sex, drugs and copyright. All of them seem to be governed by panic and knee-jerk reactions.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Not really. Besides, it's the prerogative of the person holding the rights to the work if and whether he wants promotion.
There are many justifications that I can't write a simple comeback to, but this ain't one of them.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
This is what happens when people that don't know how internet works gets to make decisions based on their flawed understanding.
Any reputable cloud provider would disconnect any of their customers deemed to be hosting illegal content.
Even if it's not illegal in their home country? Cloud providers wouldn't have many customers left if they disconnected anyone hosting content that was illegal in another country.
Do you really believe that if North Korea passes a law prohibiting web sites that mock their leader, CloudFlare wouldn't be a reputable company unless they disconnected any customer who had a site that mocked their leader?
Then provide a way for me to pay you.
I don't have a credit card. I don't use paypal. Etc.
But I have got a load of cash and usb sticks.
How can I buy whatever art it is you are making???
Exactly - I can't.
So don't blame me. If you don't want my money, I take my business elsewhere.
For this same reason Skype never got my business. I had money, they didn't want it, so they didn't get my business. And looking back now nothing of value was lost really.
You don't do business on my terms, you lose. Up to you.
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.
It is the "legal system" of one country that is mandating the blockade of perfectly legal content in most of the world. Even in America, where DMCA is king, the torrent site is legal and the copyright holders can request the removal of certain pages of it, not censor the whole thing. Whether you feel that "censorship" is wrong or not, it's clear that if one country is threatening your business (by threatening to decide what customers you can have), you should make a stand for it, as otherwise you'll have to start getting rid of your customers based on every other dictator's whims.
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
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!
I'm fine with paying for content. But the current prices are stupid and all over the place especially with older movies.
For example I can buy all 4 original ninja turtle movies as a set for $9.43. What if I want to stream it? Well, amazon
doesn't offer the first one all all. The third one costs $9.99 for SD which is more than all 4 of the other
ones combined and renting costs 2.99 for SD. Assuming I could actually rent all 4, it would be cost $11.96 which is
more for renting the movies than it costs to purchase the boxed set. But there are a ton of movies that aren't
available as streaming or worse randomly come and go. One of the main reasons that itunes beat out napster was
not because of policing but because itunes offers almost everything available for a reasonable price.
The movie industry needs to learn from the music industry. In some ways netflix and amazon prime are a detrement
to this where people are expecting a bunch of B grade movies for a fixed price. I would much rather see a service
that offers EVERYTHING but charges something reasonable like $1 per hour to stream new releases and 0.50 per
hour to stream old releases.
But I ask you, astute reader, if you feel that something is not worth paying for.... then why do you feel it is worth consuming?
Worth paying for is not the same as worth paying the asking price. I don't pirate films but I wish more content was available for a reasonable
price. It's annoying that many shows that could be watched for free with commercials when aired now the streaming services are charging
$2 per episode or more. I would rather have a version with commercials. Luckily though my local library has most tv series available for checkout.
I just wish my local library would start stocking movies too.
Perhaps, then, it is also reasonable to pay for n items out of x? (Not necessarily in the case of the shows you prefer to have commercials, but movies, for example.) That is to say, if you feel Hollywood movies are worth $2 rather than $10, buy one $10 movie for every 5 you watch?
I dunno, just a thought.
That's terrible reasoning. That's like saying if oranges are too expensive it's ok to buy one and
shoplift the other two. In an ideal world you could negotiate with the seller and you can a little bit
with redbox, libraries, etc.. but if you can't then you will need to do without. Like buying bananas
when oranges are too expensive.
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".
Do you really believe that if North Korea were to lose access to the internet CloudFlare would be wringing their hands about "all" the customers that couldn't access other services they host?
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
They could always provide server-side blocking so that the ISPs in the restricting country (UK in this case) couldn't access the blocked service.
The only reason broad and far-reaching service blocks are happening is that CloudFlare refuses to co-operate with the UK on the issue, forcing them to do the blocking at the ISP level.
Or are you saying that one should be free to provide illegal services to a nation over their own objections purely for one's own profit and convenience?
Cloud providers are not at the sole behest of the hosting nation's laws -- they have to consider where the customers of those services are as well. ONLY AMERICANS THINK OTHERWISE.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
So you concede that your claim, " Any reputable cloud provider would disconnect any of their customers deemed to be hosting illegal content." is bunk? If not, why would you reply without defending it?
WTF are you on about?
CloudFlare should be blocking access to the services based on the querying IP range, the same way that other sites perform GeoBlocking. It is the responsiblity of ANY company to comply with the law where they are servicing a customer base. Just because CloudFlare isn't a UK company doesn't mean it isn't to subject to UK law when servicing clients from that part of the world.
And if the service in question is deemed illegal, they have to be dropped or blocked. Seeing as CloudFlare appears too god damned lazy to bother with geo-blocking, they should be dropping the customer providing the service.
Period.
Only the fucking Americans think their law applies to the whole world.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
It is absolutely NOT the responsibility of a US company to follow North Korean law just because people from North Korea access their Internet services.
You're projecting when you say that, "Only the fucking Americans think their law applies to the whole world." You're the one arguing that a US company servicing US customers should follow the law of every single country from which they could possibly find their Internet site accessed.
That's a funny comment.
You ever hear of "Customer is King":
A customer does not want to be told what to do. It is he who demands, not the other way around.
You should be where your customers are because saving them the hassle and the bustle will make them more likely to patronize you.
If you don't want my money, then I am taking my business elsewhere. And by elsewhere I do not necessarily mean "piracy". I simply spend my money on something else or don't spend it all.
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...
Bullshit. When you do business in a country, you are bound by their laws.
Open your fucking eyes -- every nation on this fucking planet is insisting on that except the god damned united jackboots of 'murika.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
The EU is holding Google to task on competition issues. They've done the same to Microsoft in the past.
Every company doing business with Canadians is required to follow Canada's CANSPAM permission-collection process for sending business emails.
Google had to bend over on European privacy laws.
Companies are required to obey the law where their customers are. No amount of whining and bleating by "cloud providers" from the US or elsewhere is going to change that.
Hell, even the USG is demanding that Microsoft services hosted in Ireland be subject to US law for US customers.
And so it should be. It is the responsibility of a corporation to obey the law in the consumer market and in it's home/server nation.
I mean, seriously, are you trying to tell me that CloudFlare should be exempt from following UK law when servicing UK customers?
Give your head a serious fucking shake, man. The only companies even trying to fight that regimen any more are piracy sites and smaller American companies that claim they have a "moral obligation" to "fight for freedom" or that it's "too expensive" to meet the needs of their customer's legal systems. If it's too damned "expensive" to service a market legally, then you have NO business expecting to serve those customers at all.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
The main problem is here the ease of duplication. You have here a commodity where nearly all the cost of its creation is fixed. Per unit costs are negligible, and duplication of a unit is trivial. If you are allowed to duplicate and distribute the unit you paid for, depending on the total market there is actually the danger that the maker cannot sell many units, resulting in you having to pay for the total production cost, or market forces dictate that this commodity cannot be produced anymore due to higher cost than benefit.
In a nutshell, if you can copy as you please, people whose income depends on producing content will stop doing so.
We could now start a debate whether that would actually be a good thing when people start creating content (or, if you please, art) out of love instead of base desires like money. One thing would still remain, anything where production takes many years and costs lots of money will not be produced anymore. There would be no blockbuster movies and no AAA games. And yes, again, it's debatable whether that would actually be a bad thing.
What I can agree with is that copyright has gone out of hand. That's true. We're now at the insanity of the lifetime of the author plus 70 years. In other words, it's unlikely that the works of the Beatles, which were created half a century ago, will go into PD before I die. That's essentially copyright for over a century. Copyright originally was meant to give a creator an incentive to create, so he could recover his expenses and reap the rewards for his art. But where is the incentive if I can milk a single hit forever?
Original copyright was 7 years. And back then, that was pretty tight. 7 years was not a lot of time for an aspiring artist to get his book printed and sold. Some managed to get into a second issue and still earn royalties for that, but usually, especially for young artists, those 7 years went by VERY quickly. Back then it took a lot of time to get a book edited, printed and distributed. Advertising was WAY slower (and less efficient) than today, and by the time most people actually learned of the book and wanted to buy it, copyright was expired, other editors printed copies and the original author got jack.
And that's when copyright went bananas. Today, we have INSANELY long copyrights while at the same time the time from conception to distribution can be measured in days. Hours sometimes, even. That simply makes no sense anymore.
So I do not agree that I should be allowed to do "whatever I want" with the work. I should be allowed nearly everything, in this we can agree. I should be allowed to use it however I please, view and listen to it in whatever fashion I please and if I do not want to use it anymore I should be allowed and able to sell it. I should not be allowed to duplicate and distribute it, though, at least for a sensible period. The original 7 years sounded very sensible and I think reducing copyright to this 7 years would allow copyright to become again what it was meant to be: A tool to balance the interests of creators and consumers of content.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The big boys are repackaging and reselling our culture like they own it. They don't, and I see nothing morally wrong with people personally sharing meaningful culture that they care about.
From the way you describe it, it's at least 80 years too long, and the one time rule seems capricious. Patents are only 20 years and the sky hasn't fallen.