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.

Comments

Hey cogent...

[wbr1]

Do you want to retain common carrier status? Or do you want to be charged for every illegal piece of data flowing through your network? I am sure if you look hard enough you can find illegal porn, drug deals, terrorist communications, plans to commit crimes, insider trading.. etc.

Re:Hey cogent...

[jon3k]

Yes, they are common carriers:

The most controversial part of the FCC's decision reclassifies fixed and mobile broadband as a telecommunications service, with providers to be regulated as common carriers under Title II of the Communications Act.

Their bigger concern should be the exemptions provided to them under the OCILLA Act. If you argue that you're just a carrier and you can't block illegal content you're fine. But once you prove you CAN block illegal content then why aren't you blocking more of it?

Re:Hey cogent...

[Kagato]

All these companies were born out of the fact that Incumbent Local Exchange Carriers (ILEC) like Verizon couldn't cross LATA lines with their network. They had to pay third parties to do it. So, at one point most of these companies were Title II common carriers. Then Micheal Powell F'd everyone during the Bush Jr. era when he blew up Title II.

The question is does it still stand? I don't know if it's ever been tested. Most ISPs and Upstream Network providers operate as a common carrier because they want to be able to make the argument that they are a common carrier.

The only reason I could see them null routing the traffic is for DDOS mitigation. They can make an argument about overall traffic and network stability. But it's not clear if that's actually at play.

Yawn, another day, another lame block

[Zocalo]

Completely useless for anyone using a VPN with an endpoint that doesn't transit Cogent to get to Cloudflare, and even if that is the case you can *still* work around it since assigned IPs on Cloudflare are entirely administrative and almost any Cloudflare IP will work as long as you present a valid hostname and HTTP header. Add $blocked_site to your hosts file with a different IP (104.31.18.31 instead of 104.31.18.30, for example) and off you go.

IPv6 is working though

[Anonymous Coward]

Somebody forgot there's more than one protocol in the stack.

Nice subversion.

[MMC Monster]

Love how the article doesn't just mention Pirate Bay, but gave me the names of a couple other site I didn't know about as well as IP addresses for a couple of them.

Now I know more ways to get my torrents. Well done.