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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
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.
Silence is a state of mime.
Someone puts a chain and lock across the front door of a business. But the place has a backdoor down a poorly lit alley that is still open and accessible, so IF PEOPLE KNOW ABOUT IT AND KNOW HOW TO GET THERE they can still get in. Do you think the blocked front door will cause some, maybe most, visitors to go away instead of looking for another way in?
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.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
If they start blackholing IP ranges just because of "infringing content", it's not much more to assume that they will start blackholing VPN providers, porn, non-backdoored services, inconvenient "alternate facts", the competition of their corporate friends, "undesirables", or indeed anything else that they want to. Best part of all is, it's all the blocking they could ever want, and it's not the government doing it but a private company. So there's no threat of lawsuit to reverse the policy as it's not a first amendment violation.
The citizenry needs a decentralized network NOW if we are to preserve freedom of expression, and association on the net. Guess we could start adhocing the APs, that would be a start. (Better yet someone produce an AP gateway that routes traffic to other gateways. With a passthrough for the central net if it can't find the destination on the citizen net.)
VPN may not solve that. It really depends on who your VPN provider's ISP is. The only sure way around this is by using tor.
..or maybe start with saner copyright law in the first place.
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...
Somebody forgot there's more than one protocol in the stack.
No, it won't.
Instead people will ask on board and will be pointed to the backdoor.
The internet treats such things as damage and simply routes around them.
Well, to use a car analogy, there is road construction near me right now. The businesses on the other side of the construction are significantly closer than the ones in the other direction, but I still prefer to avoid the hassle of dealing with the special twists and turns to get to my preferred places, and instead go to the farther ones since they are easier to get to.
Fact - people are lazy animals, and if you put obstacles in front of them, the vast majority of them look for the path of least resistance, even if it yields an inferior result. Blocks like this one aren't designed to block everyone, just make it painful enough that a large number won't hassle with a workaround, and because of human nature, it normally works.
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.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
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.
TPB isn't a tracker. It is just a source for torrent files. The torrent files contain a list of trackers. These trackers maintain an active list of who has what part of the original file.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
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.
Posting to undo bad moderation.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
For most content for most people on the globe it's actually easier to access pirated content.