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Thanks To Encryption, UK Efforts To Block Torrent Sites Are Pointless (betanews.com)
Mark Wilson writes: In the UK, ISPs are required to block access to a number of big-name torrent sites — the thinking being that sites such as The Pirate Bay are used primarily for (gasp!) downloading pirated material. Despite the government's desire to control what people can access online, good old HTTPS means that people are able to very easily bypass any blocks that may be put in place. There are all manner of proxy services and mirror sites that provide access to otherwise-blocked content, but these are really not needed. With the likes of The Pirate Bay and Kickass Torrents offering secure, encrypted connection, accessing the goodies they contain could involve little more than sticking an extra 's' in the URL.
Adding an 's' won't change the name nor IP address of the website you're visiting.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
The TLS handshake passes the name of the host being connected to (for the purpose of fetching its certificate) in plaintext. So if a site isn't being blocked, it's just a matter of time before the ISPs close this trivial loophole.
The next step is to ask for a different certificate that is being used on the same IP, by hacking the TLS handshake to specify a different hostname in the handshake than it uses in the HTTP request it sends later. This will probably just annoy whoever ends up paying for the bandwidth, and the loophole will get closed eventually.
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
Good grief, we know this is Slashdot so reading TFA is generally scoffed at, but at least read past the first sentence of a summary. The Subject of my post says it all. It is trivial to set up a proxy so that customer => Cloud service which can't be blocked => TOR. If an ISP blocks a cheap Amazon node's IP they move the service to a different node/vendor. They can't block all of Amazon, all of Azure, etc..
It would take tons of manpower for ISPs to block and unblock addresses the the level needed to have any impact, and even then it's just whack-a-mole.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
...I mean, after all, as a school technology director, I've been playing that cat-and-mouse game with Facebook, etc. for 10 years. Block facebook.com, students figure out the "https" workaround...block all Facebook IPs, students use proxies...block all proxies, facebook.com now accessible w/ new IP address...neverending game of whack-a-mole.
And you just keep playing the game. As long as you make the efforts, you can say you're doing what you can, and that covers your back.
Surely all the naughty pirates with any sense have already signed up to a VPN for their actual torrenting, making ISP-level tracker site blocks completely irrelevant?
Strictly speaking, in the UK, something like the top ten ISPs are required to block these sites. All the others will happily let you access them.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
I'm so sick of most torrent sites nowadays. There's one I still use, an ExtraTorrent proxy, that is just about tolerable, but every other site I've tried over the past year is full of popups, popunders, redirects, etc. I've got popups blocked, adverts blocked, everything blocked that I know how to block, and still the sites are practically unusable.
When I read this story, just out of interest I went to the https version of the pirate bay to see if it worked. Clicked on the search box and immediately I had a full-screen popup, two smaller popups, and a text-to-speech reader (ffs!!) reading out a warning message about my system having been compromised and giving me a phone number to call.
And https? Please!
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Basically the media companies are going to say encryption is evil because people could use it for piracy, and the security assholes are going to claim encryption is bad because they can't spy on everybody.
Between the two of them they're probably going to convince idiot politicians to undermine all security to give them what they need.
Welcome to a work in which your rights and security are undermined by corporate rights, and people who are lying through their fucking teeth claiming to protect your rights and security. Sorry, but bypassing our rights and security isn't defending them, it's undermining them.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Do you control the DNS server? assuming you don't let your desktop zone connect to external DNS (or at the very least users don't have local admin and can't change DNS/hosts files), just have your DNS resolved override all facebook.com domains and point them at another IP. For shits and giggles you could even have an internal facebook-look-alike page that has some obscure maintenance message making it look like the issue is on FB's end, or just redirect them to hellokitty.com etc etc
Interesting, so basically, he plays whatever part is most convenient at the time. Sounds like someone the politicians must love.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Ouija board, or knock twice for yes?
(goes to Google)
Shit, really?
It's true I tell you, feller at work's next door neighbour read it in the paper.