UK ISPs Secretly Start Blocking Torrent Site Proxies

An anonymous reader writes "Several UK Internet providers have quietly added a list of new sites to their secretive anti-piracy blocklists. Following in the footsteps of Sky, the first ISP to initiate a proxy blockade, Virgin, BT and several other providers now restrict access to several torrent site proxies. The surprise isn't really that proxies have been added to the blocklist, but that the music industry and ISPs are failing to disclose which sites are being banned."

Post them on twitter

[Anonymous Coward]

Attach torrent files as fake images.

and..

[houbou]

block one, something else opens.. it's quite simple. instead of trying to find a solution for this, they should just deal with the root cause. make things more affordable could perhaps be one solution, eh? :)

Re:Post them on twitter

[CastrTroy]

It seems like this would pretty easy. You can fit magnet links inside a QR code, and there's a million other ways you could encode the link into an image, perhaps even encrypting the link with a simple cipher to stop bots from autoblocking them.

Not ISPs, at least not at ISP level

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi

I just attempted to setup a proxy on my dedicated server at a datacentre in France.

It was blocked instantly

Tried a few other things, also blocked instantly

Tried running the webserver on port 800 thinking perhaps transparent webproxying at the ISP level was blocking it

It wasn't.

Got someone in japan to try it, it worked, got someone on a different ISP in the UK to try it, blocked.

There's clearly some sort of packet inspection going on and anything that comes up TPB is blocked in the UK.

Re:and..

[bloodhawk]

consumers are their own worst enemy here. If we want things to get more affordable we need to stop giving them excuses. If something is too expensive then "DON'T BUY IT". by pirating it you only give them an excuse to provide more lockdowns and inflate the price more. If they saw an actual decline in consumption based on their price then maybe they would wake up. Either it is worth the money and you want it bad enough to pay for it or you don't touch the damn stuff with a 40 foot pole, there is no valid middle ground if you want things to change.

Re:Block all proxies?

[AmiMoJo]

I don't know why this was modded funny because it is the logical conclusion of this process. The BPI and their American counterparts have been pushing for search engines to introduce copyright filters by default for years, blocking all torrent sites outright. Ideally they want a whitelist of approved sites to be returned when searching for anything music related. Rankings would depend on BPI fees paid, to ensure no indie sites get too popular.