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Internet Backbone Provider Cogent Blocks Pirate Bay and Other 'Pirate' Sites (torrentfreak.com)

Posted by msmash on from the mass-outage dept.

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.

11 of 186 comments (clear)

  1. Cogent is shit by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Level3 should have nuked it when they were caught hot-potato routing in violation of peering agreements

    1. Re: Cogent is shit by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Thus begins the breakup of the free and open internet. No matter what you think of Pirate Bay.

    2. Re: Cogent is shit by ArmoredDragon · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Filtering on your own end is fine for security purposes, but we can't have peering broken or else the whole thing just won't work.

    3. Re: Cogent is shit by flink · · Score: 5, Insightful

      This is more like the road leading to the store being dynamited. Cogent should loose its common carrier status since they are now exerting editorial control over the contents of their network. Let them be liable for all copyright infringement they happen to route.

    4. Re: Cogent is shit by Rick+Schumann · · Score: 5, Insightful

      You're not looking at the Big Picture. If any backbone provider can unilaterally decide to disallow arbitrary traffic to traverse their network, then the Internet as a whole can become profoundly broken in no time. This sort of behavior sets a dangerous precedent for behavior for network providers at all levels. If you've ever been afraid of the Internet being broken up into 'walled gardens', then you should be afraid now, because moves like this from Cogent may set the tone for the future, emboldening other companies to take similar actions for whatever reasons suit them. This goes beyond frivolous things like, for instance, Comcast/Xfinity deciding to slow (or block) Hulu traffic because they offer their own streaming video service; what if, say, Wells Fargo Bank decides to pay a large ISP to slow (or block completely) access through their network to all Credit Unions? You might say "well, I'll just get a different ISP", but many people have no other choice of ISP. Since Comcast/Xfinity is a business, it can do whatever it wants. If there's no Net Neutrality regulation, then there's nothing to stop them. This is just one example; do you see the problem now?

  2. Hey cogent... by wbr1 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

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    Silence is a state of mime.
    1. Re: Hey cogent... by mmell · · Score: 5, Informative

      D'ya suppose the current FCC will even care?

    2. Re: Hey cogent... by Mashiki · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

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      Om, nomnomnom...
  3. Yawn, another day, another lame block by Zocalo · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

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    UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
  4. Nice subversion. by MMC+Monster · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

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    Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
  5. Re:Tor? by bigfinger76 · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.