BT Blocking Private Torrent Sites? 80
An anonymous reader writes This weekend both BT and Sky implemented the new changes, making it harder for their subscribers to reach these sites. Interestingly, however, BT appears to have gone above and beyond the court order, limiting access to various other sites as well. Over the past several days TorrentFreak has received reports from several users of private torrent sites who get an 'error blocked' message instead of their favorite sites. These include the popular IPTorrents.com and TorrentDay.com trackers, as well as scene release site Scnsrc.me. IPTorrents and Torrentday are significant targets. Although both sites require prospective users to obtain an invite from a current member (or from the site itself in exchange for cash), they have over a hundred thousand active users. The error displayed when BT subscribers try to access the above URLs is similar to that returned when users to try access sites covered by High Court injunctions.
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oh what you mean like facebook?
Where child traffickers frolick like fucking lambs but the SECOND you make a controversial comment your account gets shitcanned.
thepiratebay.se (Score:3, Interesting)
Not that it's related, but for whatever reason today thepiratebay.se hasn't been connectable. Apparently for a lot of USA people.
If i can't download my stuff, i will probably have to go shoplift it. Ain't no way I'm paying the fucking media companies shit for anything. Black Friday is the best day for shoplifting, just saying...
thepiratebay.se (Score:2, Informative)
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I think most people would have posted that as an AC.
Aren't you a little old for that?
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Point taken.
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Down (Score:2)
Gotta be routing issue. Only after a few hops its reported as unreachable.
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Maybe not your best course of action, seeing that you have been caught probably 20 times [slashdot.org]
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http://proxybay.info/ [proxybay.info]
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If i can't download my stuff
Aren't you the entitled one? It isn't your stuff.
So what's the lawful way? (Score:3)
tpb.pirati.cz (Score:5, Informative)
great mirror, pisses all over virgin media block.
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Everyone in the UK should be using a VPN as standard anyway now. Between site blockades and illegal spying they are a necessary part of connecting to the internet here. Look at it this way, if you went to China you would want to use one, right? Well the UK is at least as bad as China.
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However, on the topic at hand: It's completely unacceptable for ISPs to be limiting what websites users can visit when they aren't legally obliged to. Not only is it an even more dangerous precedent than the current government restrictions but it makes a mockery of protecting them f
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VPN providers can and do share identity of their clients with the government.
What if you get a VPN provider in another country, will a Czech or Taiwanese based provider share information with the UK government?
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That might be fine in theory, but who knows in what agreements in the future those governments will engage in? Perhaps it'll even be secret and you won't even know it. I think tor is a better choice. It's distributed and not bound to any particular company or country.
Except TOR is bad for torrents. [torproject.org]
Besides this, the nebulous threat of some global co-operation over copyright enforcement is delusional to say the least.
If such a threat became credible, you'd just switch VPN providers to another country.
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http://piratebay.rocks [piratebay.rocks]
also works.
(obligatory grumble about the cash-grab of the many new top-level-domains)
Hmmmm. (Score:3)
Blocking access to websites when I paid for unlimited access to the Internet?
Sounds like a clear case of fraud.
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Doesn't stop them with a Supreme Court that will not hear cases involving price-fixing and fictitious advertising.
Buy a few state judges (Crapcast just finished spending over 30 million in the last election. How much over is Citizen's United out of our sight) and you can do whatever you want to people
Capitalism and monopolism are always synonyms given enough time and positive market feedback control.
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British Telecoms is an American ISP as well now?
Re:Hmmmm. (Score:5, Funny)
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SCOTUK (Score:2)
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Seriously, get the Alzheimer's test. That way you will know.
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Nah, just America. In Australia when they say 'unlimited' by law the connection has to be without any limit. So the only ones that post 'unlimited downloads' are the ones who oversell their back-haul and run like shite during peak times.
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The access is unlimited, what is limited are parts of the Internet.
No, that's part of the whole "safe harbor" thing. ISPs are not liable because they're job is simply to deliver the connection to the Internet. If they start blocking access to sites for this reason or that reason, then people are going to start holding them responsible when they don't block something else they don't like.
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> Blocking access to websites when I paid for unlimited access to the Internet?
See also literally/figuratively.
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Blocking access to websites when I paid for unlimited access to the Internet? Sounds like a clear case of fraud.
Your honour, I'm filing this case because BT refuse to allow me to download copyrighted material I've not paid for and which is being distributed without the holders permission....
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Your honour, I'm filing this case because BT refuse to allow me to download material that is in public domain or under permissive licence, like GPL or CC.
Fixed that for you. By blocking entire TPB BT refusing it's users access to thousands of legally shared torrents. And besides, TPB does not contain any copyrighted material or links to such material - only description and hash of such files.
BT? Sky? (Score:3)
BT? Sky? (Score:1)
No, youÃ(TM)re supposed to at least skim TFA, the very first words of which are ÃoeUK internet provider BTæ"
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That's what I thought too, and it wasn't making sense. "How is a protocol blocking a torrent site?"
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Re:BT? Sky? (Score:5, Informative)
BT: The biggest ISP in the UK. Former state-run monopoly phone company, long since privatized, but heavily regulated to prevent abuse of its unique position.
Sky: Another major ISP. ADSL service. Also provides satellite TV.
Re:BT? Sky? (Score:5, Informative)
To add further to the description of BT - a company split into three parts - BT Retail (the phone provider / ISP), BT Wholesale (who run the infrastructure and exchanges), and BT Openreach (who run the last mile infrastructure). It's supposed to mean they can't abuse their monopoly. As far as the customer is concerned, it means that reporting a fault might have to go through 3 companies and most of the time spent is the 3 companies passing the buck. They also like to charge each other and pass the cost on to the customer.
Phone lines cut out randomly [tek-tips.com]
I was present as he reported the findings to his Boss and I heard his Boss say "Can you make it look like their fault so we can still bill them?" He replied "No cos he is stood here listening and watched me fix it". This was followed up with an extremely apologetic conversation between me and his Boss where he claimed he was just Kidding!!! Yeah right...That sums BT up exactly
BT Retail is basically staffed by a bunch of MBAs, salemen and shit tech support (although their BTnet tech support is actually pretty good). BT Local business are a bunch of complete wankers and will [literally] cancel your ISDN30 and recreate it so they get more commission - this resulted in 36 hours of downtime.
BT Openreach - you're not allowed to speak to - but when an engineer does come out, they are generally professional and knowledgable. However, in the above case, they will fulfill BT Retails requests to cover their arses. In the above ISDN30 case, they pretended that the failure was due to a faulty NTE-2D (Fibre termination equipment) even though we had it confirmed that our contract had been "cancelled" the day before.
We have a 100Mb/s leased line with BT, which I have to admit has been pretty bulletproof - we've had about 30s of downtime in 4 years (but is also insanely expensive). Anyhow, when we renewed out contract I told them we wanted an IPv6 subnet, this was subject to a charge of £400 as they said they needed to upgrade our bearer. This was never done, so we complained, and they said they would have to charge us £3,000 - the normal installation fee. We pointed them to the contract we signed. Now, instead of sending out a bloke to update the router, or even send out a new router, they have:
* Spliced together 26km of fibre to the exchange.
* Installed a 3rd fibre into our office
* Provided a new NTU
* Provided a new Cisco 3xxx router
* Sent 3 engineers out to do all this
I spoke to one of the Openreach guys - he shrugged and said "that's the way they like to do it". I said "it's ok, we're not having to pay the standard installation fee, just sounds like a waste of time and money though". He also explained what the bearer was (confirming my assumption) and looked pretty confused when I told him BT Local Business insisted that it had to be upgraded to "carry" IPv6 packets.
Re: BT? Sky? (Score:2)
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Worse - if you're using the Internet, then significant chunks of the code and practices would have been developed at the UK's GPO (General Post Office), which became BT on privatisation in the mid-80s. Through the 1970s the GPO was intensely interested in the technologies needed to repla
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Ever thought about using your favourite search engine to look them up?
There are plenty of non-USA based readers here who have to do that whenever a USA-centric article appears (which is often).
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What the fuck are these things? Am I supposed to know software/brand/product/service names off the top of my head?
Yes. If they are central to the operation of the internet for a substantial portion of its subscribers, then yes, you are expected to know what they are, and lots of other things besides. You have to know the names of now-defunct corporations and even some computers and routers if you are going to speak intelligently about the internet. If this seems arduous, perhaps Slashdot is not for you.
Who cares what the hell they are blocking?? (Score:3)
Just find a way to circumvent it.. and tell the rest how to to do it.
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Well that's helpful. Wow, I bet no one thought of that. Thank you, magnificent one.
Easy enough to get around. (Score:2)
If they start blocking by DNS, go via IP directly.
If they are blocking IP directly, either go VPN or Tor.
If they block either VPN or Tor, they will be pissing off much bigger fish then tor browsers.
If they even managed to go this for long, how do you think it would take for a fed up programmer create a new non-centralized client setup for searching directly instead of a website similar to Limewire if not limewire itself.
Re:Easy enough to get around. (Score:5, Informative)
If they start blocking by DNS, go via IP directly. If they are blocking IP directly, either go VPN or Tor.
Running Bittorent over Tor is a bad idea [stackexchange.com]. As the linked article says, look at I2P instead.
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Running Bittorent over Tor is a bad idea [stackexchange.com]. As the linked article says, look at I2P instead.
But it would be fine to run your browser over Tor in order to get the torrent magnet link, and then use the "normal" network with your favorite torrent application to get the actual file ?
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I wonder when countries are going to start outlawing VPNs. "Conspiracy to commit cybercrime" or some bullshit like that.
Copy pasta fail (Score:2)
This weekend both BT and Sky implemented the new changes, making it harder for their subscribers to reach these sites.
What new changes? What sites?
If all you're going to do is copy and paste a couple of paragraphs from the article, at least pick ones that make more sense by themselves.
inneffectual Whack-a-mole (Score:3)