UK ISP's to block Piratebay

www.bbc.co.uk...

File-sharing site The Pirate Bay must be blocked by UK internet service providers, the High Court has ruled.

The Swedish website hosts links to download mostly pirated free music and video.

Sky, Everything Everywhere, TalkTalk, O2 and Virgin Media must all prevent their users from accessing the site.

Well it was inevitable, although the like of Virgin media have said being forced by the court to do this doesn't solve the long problem. It is a shame though, Pirate bay does not always equate to piracy and piracy does not always equate to theft (although let's leave that discussion of that issue to another thread).

BT i believe still haven't made a decision, but all other UK ISP's are being forced by the courts to do this.

The point of this thread is basically that the UK government and courts are pandering to false or misleading corporate fallacy. An aging business model that refuses to adapt to modern times.

Not everything on pirate bay is piracy either, lots of shareware, freeware and public domain stuff too.

Now for the interesting bit:

I still believe in most countries (bar China and Iran) it's still legal to change your DNS server, effectively and legally making this whole court action pointless, fruitless and idiotic. Since the court ruling only equates to the ISP blocking the site - if you use a different DNS identifier, you are effectively doing nothing wrong or illegal

torrentfreak.com...

When your system wants to translate a website-adress into a numerical identifier, it contacts a DNS Server, which is basicly just a big table with all the translations in it. This is usually provided by your ISP, and will be the default one if you haven’t made any changes to your internet settings. For Telenet, these DNS servers look like: 195.130.X.X, for Belgacom, they are situated in the 195.238.X.X range.

What the recent court ruling forces the Belgian ISP’s to do (at risk of a hefty fine), is to simply stop answering to any requests for certain domains (e.g. ThePiratebay). This crude drawing demonstrates it. They may stop answering, or redirect the user to a page which explains why the site cannot be reached anymore.

Legislation is years behind the technology. Merely banning "Piratebay" means that any pirates are likely to just move to a new domain.

The only long term solution is for the content providers to make their stuff available easily and cheaply online, not charge £15 to see it at the Cinema, or close to £30 for a Bluray for bigger titles.

What did they expect? If you over price or restrict availability of an in-demand commodity, it encourages contraband and illegal behaviour.

PC games have got round the piracy thing, by and large, by making the games easily available and affordable. Some may moan about it, but Steam is a prime example. Often, their games are cheaper than the shops generally and they do frequent sales. Steam have said that even if they slash a game by as much as 75%, they can make more selling it at that price than the full RRP, as more people buy it.

Movies and music MUST also follow the same model. It is no longer even ethical that they try to charge as much as they do, given the huge profits they have and continue to make.

What I want to know is, why is everyone on their back? So many other torrent sites out there.

Originally posted by faryjay
What I want to know is, why is everyone on their back? So many other torrent sites out there.

This is true, but what do they censor next? This is corporate led censorship. What if the next corporations are the big pharma industries and they decide they don't want people knowing the benefits of remedies, herbs and natural treatments, or what if the court ruling paves the way for further censorship against sites like this or any other outspoken places?

Originally posted by stumason
Legislation is years behind the technology. Merely banning "Piratebay" means that any pirates are likely to just move to a new domain.

It at least helps against the majority of pirates: The cheap bastards who don't have any money but think it's their god-given right to get their hands on every movie, music album, video game and porn movie out there without paying because "we deserve it" (There are sadly enough of those ignorant, stupid pro-piracy threads around here on ATS). Those are the people who still use Torrents and such open Torrent sites. With Demonoid being down most of the time and Pirate Bay blocked i think it can help a bit.

I mean the big-time pirates who fill up Terrabyte Hard Drives every month with their pirated stuff don't even use Torrent, as it's a highly dangerous (i don't want to know how much spyware, trojans, worms and viruses are on the hard drive of such a 'i have no clue but i just downloaded the newest video game, yay' idiot), unsecure and open system

They are the Scapegoat.

They won't be dismayed by this, I am sure of it.

Meanwhile, I wonder how my torrents are doing back at home.

reply to post by faryjay

So many other torrent sites out there.

Exactly... what are they going to ban every single torrent site that exists and ever will exist?

Not only is it pointless because of the DNS thing mentioned by the OP, but it's possible to get the entire Pirate Bay Magnet Archive and search for torrents offline using that archive.

Torrent technology is invincible... and they can't stand that fact.

EDIT: Also worth noting is Tribler

Originally posted by faryjay
What I want to know is, why is everyone on their back? So many other torrent sites out there.

First step. More will follow. Take down the biggest and the small ones are easy prey.

I cannot believe the power Hollywood has. Of course this is just one example of corporate collusion. This is just out on the front page. Other examples we never hear about from the MSM.

Follow the dollars.

TPB is mostly just pirated stuff, lets be honest.
But the issue is the slippery slope. Target a specific and obvious website, such as TPB and thats fine, you killed an ant on a anthill, but if you make legislation to remove any website that has (potential) copywrite stuff, then you suddenly have nuked a continent in order to kill a anthill...there seems to be little middle ground..either do something almost ineffective, or do something so incredibly overreaching it could smash many legit businesses.

And this won't change piracy much...people will just use proxys to get to TPB (if they know how a torrent works, they can figure out how to go through a proxy to grab the torrent to begin with).

I don't know what the solution is...but I digress...TPB is used by many. I do think it will help a little. a very very little. Not really significant enough to even make a blip on the music industry's profit margain (frankly, youtube and audio capture software trumps any torrenting of music by far)

reply to post by mr-lizard


There are ways around this BS, you can use a proxy, ToR or a VPN like Ghost, found Here

To protect your privacy on the Internet and hinder site operators from tracking you down and clearly identifying you. To get access to uncensored websites outside your country, outside your office or outside your school resp. your university network. To get access to blocked websites or blocked content by circumventing geo, IP or other blockades. CyberGhost let you surf as an American, a German, a Dutch wherever you are. To guard a public Internet connection (WLANs, Hot Spots), so you can make payments or transactions without being spied on.

The entertainment industry is so effing stubborn. All they would have to do is offer the new release online, for a fee of course at the same time its released in theaters, if they did that Id pay.
I just dont like going to the movies, I dont enjoy watching a movie with 100 other people, some of whom are laughing, yelling, or talking on phones.

reply to post by mr-lizard

The point of this thread is basically that the UK government and courts are pandering to false or misleading corporate fallacy. An aging business model that refuses to adapt to modern times.
Not everything on pirate bay is piracy either, lots of shareware, freeware and public domain stuff too.

To put it into perspective if you ran a business that sold legitimate good but also traded illegal goods out the back, when law enforcement came they would shutdown your entire business. They are not applying some special internet rules here.

Originally posted by Juggernog
reply to post by mr-lizard

 

There are ways around this BS, you can use a proxy, ToR or a VPN like Ghost, found Here

The OP already explained a much easier way to do it. Simply use another DNS server instead of the ISP one. I would personally recommend the Secure Comodo DNS.

However, a much easier way of getting around the block is to simply change your host file (located at C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\host), because your computer will refer to the host file before it checks a DNS name server. Simply open the file in Notepad and add this line to the end of the file on a new line:

194.71.107.15 thepiratebay.se

You'll probably need to run Notepad as an administrator and then open the host file in order to edit it properly. These instructions work for Windows 7 but it may be slightly different for other Windows operating systems.

reply to post by ChaoticOrder

I would personally recommend the Secure Comodo DNS.

Ive never heard of that before, going to set it up in my router right now.

It's like Pi**ing on a forest fire ... pretty useless.
Since all this court action began years ago, so many more sites have started up.

Correct me if I'm wrong.

Yes the request from my PC has the IP directing it to Piratebay.
but
Doesn't the returned webpage also have the IP of Piratebay included with it? Wouldn't they also block the returning content? So no matter which DNS you use the returned content will be blocked.

reply to post by samkent


(I work in comms, but admittedly in Optical transmission not IP)

The way I understand it is the DNS resolves queries to translate IP addies into web addies, which is an application layer protocol. For sending packets back, they don't need to go via a DNS but simply forward to your IP address, which is a transport layer protocol dealt with via the routers that make up the network..

I might be totally wrong, however....

reply to post by stumason


Other way around. They translate web addresses into IP addresses.

One ip address may host a large number of web addresses (vhosts), which makes translating an ip into a web address, quite difficult, so they work by translating a web address into an IP address.

Also, how difficult this block will be to bypass, will depend on how they block it.

1) If they just instruct their DNS servers to return a false ip address for the web address, then changing your nameservers to independant ones (such as google's) will bypass the blockade. This is the simplest for them and the most likely method they are going to use.

2) They can nullroute all traffic to a given IP, that means if you request say www.piratebay.se, their DNS servers will return an IP address of 194.71.107.15, which is currently the correct ip. So when your browser sends a GET VHOST=piratebay.se / request to 194.71.107.15, their routers will route your connection to 0.0.0.0, instead of 194.71.107.15. This is actually a very difficult blockade to bypass. You will need a VPN or proxy, or something else that ignores their routing information to bypass this one.

reply to post by mr-lizard


Well its good these people are so smart to do that because they are only one of a 1000 such sites, and most of the stuff is also on youtube, so they should block youtube as well.
On a more positive note, chocolate rations are up 5 percent!