High Court Orders UK ISPs To Block More Torrent Sites 133
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from TorrentFreak: "The website blocking phenomenon has continued today in the UK, with the High Court adding three major torrent sites to the country's unofficial ban list. Following complaints from the music industry led by the BPI, the Court ordered the UK's leading Internet service providers to begin censoring subscriber access to Kickass Torrents, H33T and Fenopy."
Unlike when the Pirate Bay was blocked, none of the ISPs contested this. They did, however, refuse to block things without a court order. Looks like the flood gates have been opened. On the topic of filesharing, Japan arrested 27 file sharers, using the recent changes to their copyright law that allow criminal charges to be brought against file sharers.
Re:How is this done? (Score:5, Informative)
Are these sites pulled from those ISPs' DNS servers? Do they block the IP address (which could easily be changed)? Non-Brits want to know.
Well when TPB was blocked a few months ago it definitely wasn't DNS(I use open DNS and couldn't access it normally). I think they must be blocking the IP address, easily negated by the various proxy sites that popped up straight away, and which still give easy access to TPB without the next need for TOR or a VPN or any such obsfucation techniques. The same thing will happen with this next round of blocks. The ISPs that grumbled the last time probably aren't bothering this time around, because they are aware of the fact that it won't really affect anyone other than having to alter a couple of bookmarks before carrying on as usual. I'd be willing to bet that there has been no decrease in torrent traffic since the Pirate Bay block, and there will be none this time either.
Re:How is this done? (Score:3, Informative)
"Cleanfeed". Built for blocking child porn, of course. Traffic to specific IP addresses is redirected to a deep inspection system.
Re:Im done pirating (Score:4, Informative)
They'll come around eventually, Spotify and other streaming services are now over half the music market in Scandinavia and HBO seems to have finally taken a whacking with the cluebat and introduced HBO Nordic, a streaming-only service that'll have new episodes within 24h of airing. Sure they could use a few more whacks with the cluebat, but it's a start. Give it another 5 years and I think it will have spread just like Spotify has. Movies will be last because they still manage to get people out of their chair and into cinemas for unskippable commercials and to buy overpriced soda and popcorn on top of expensive tickets, but if TV go streaming they will too. In any case, there's no reason to stop pirating. It's no surprise these services have launched where piracy is strongest and where the Pirate Party has made most progress, they're damage control. You just have to keep at it and drag them kicking and screaming into the 21st century.
Re:VPN FTW! (Score:4, Informative)
Its good for hiding your identity, it creates a encyrpted tunnel between you and the vpn, as you request data from the internet (say from bittorrent) that request is sent through the tunnel and through there server, effectively hiding your IP and your data from the ISP. You should use a public DNS, Google has a few and changing it can be a bit challenging for someone not understanding how it works, but once you understand it its easy. Lots of documentation on the web on how to change to a public DNS.
The downside is the data needs to travel farther and through extra hops, slowing everything down.
You want a VPN that claims to hold no logs, and some claim they dont but yet still do, airvpn has always impressed me and i have never had or heard of a problem with them, they also take BTC so your paper trail cannot be traced through say paypal. For pirating software, it will work fine and you would probably even be fine without changing your DNS, though id do it anyways.