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Internet Backbone Provider Cogent Blocks Pirate Bay and Other 'Pirate' Sites (torrentfreak.com)
Several Pirate Bay users from ISPs all over the world have been unable to access their favorite torrent site for more than a week. Their requests are being stopped in the Internet backbone network of Cogent Communications, which has blackholed the CloudFlare IP-address of The Pirate Bay and many other torrent and streaming sites, reports TorrentFreak. From the article: When the average Internet user types in a domain name, a request is sent through a series of networks before it finally reaches the server of the website. This also applies to The Pirate Bay and other pirate sites such as Primewire, Movie4k, TorrentProject and TorrentButler. However, for more than a week now the US-based backbone provider Cogent has stopped passing on traffic to these sites. The sites in question all use CloudFlare, which assigned them the public IP-addresses 104.31.18.30 and 104.31.19.30. While this can be reached just fine by most people, users attempting to pass requests through Cogent's network are unable to access them.
Level3 should have nuked it when they were caught hot-potato routing in violation of peering agreements
D'ya suppose the current FCC will even care?
Doesn't the pirate bay have a tor node?
Using bittorrent over the tor network isn't a great idea.
* It's very slow over tor. The tor network can't handle that sort of load. https://blog.torproject.org/bl...
* bittorrent leaks identifying information (your IP address is included in the bittorrent headers, and most clients pick a random port to listen on, which is can be found on the tracker and every peer; combined, they can clearly ID you)
* Due to aforementioned point, if you're using bittorrent over tor, and you're ALSO browsing the web over tor at the same time, an attacking exit relay can break the anonymity of some of your web traffic. https://blog.torproject.org/bl...
D'ya suppose the current FCC will even care?
The FCC isn't the only organization that this falls under. ISP's in Canada use cogent as well, and oversight falls into the domain of the CRTC. We also have net neutrality rules, cogent operates offices here and in turn is subject to Canadian laws.
Om, nomnomnom...
This isn't about using bittorrent over Tor; this discussion is about accessing TPB (the tracker), which is necessary in order to obtain either .torrent files or magnet links. Once acquired, the client can be run as usual (not over the Tor network), and Cogent's blocking will have no effect on that.
The backbones used to null-route and de-peer far more often. Frequently it was around spam. When one ISP had too much spam coming from their network, other backbones would cut them off.
Cogent themselves didn't route Telia traffic for several weeks in 1999. (Telia is one of the world's largest ISPs).
This stuff happened often enough at a MUCH larger scale than Pirate Bay, and the internet not only survived, it's even grown a bit since then.
For most content for most people on the globe it's actually easier to access pirated content.