"Piracy Filter" Blocks TorrentFreak for 4 Million Sky Customers 122
An anonymous reader writes "Website blocking has become a hot topic in the UK in recent weeks. Opponents of both voluntary and court-ordered blockades have warned about the potential collateral damage these blocking systems may cause, and they have now been proven right. As it turns out blocked sites can easily exploit the system and add new IP-addresses to Sky's blocklist. As a result TorrentFreak has been rendered inaccessible to the ISP's four million customers."
There we have it (Score:5, Insightful)
This is why censorship of the internet is a fucking stupid idea.
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That depends on your point of view. I'm pretty sure there people/corporations/governments that do like it.
Re:There we have it (Score:5, Insightful)
Government officials usually have no real opinion on this due to a lack of understanding. They just act on lobby groups that are usually sponsored by Hollywood and other corporate interest groups.
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Was it ever?
Re:There we have it (Score:5, Insightful)
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It doesn't work because TorrentFreak is a news site. Unless the war on piracy declares even speaking about filesharing fair game as collateral?
Re:There we have it (Score:4, Interesting)
Um, hello? It's called "Let's not only block the thing we're against, let's block any mention of that thing as well". Sort of like what the Russian government seems to be trying to do the LGBT community there.
So, far from being "collateral damage", this means the (censorship) system is working just as intended.
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Which goes against freedom of speech as well as journalism's special rights... neither a good thing. This is going further than it was intended.
For the record I'm on Sky and the article is hosted on their domain... and I can read it. So it looks like Sky have noticed and restored access.
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Re:There we have it (Score:5, Informative)
you didn't read the article did you?
It was actually a bit of clever manipulation by a torrent site who discovered sky was automatically blocking other ip addresses the torrent site was listing as alternate site addresses. So they performed a little experiment listed the torrent freak site as a mirror and sky automatically put a block on that ip address. Thus demonstrating how Sky's automatic blocking is flawed and fairly useless.
Its a bit more complicated than that but summing up Sky thought they could automate whack a mole and instead managed to give control over blocking to the sites they want to block.
Torrent freak were informed and agreed to be a target before hand. I think facebook was also targeted but with little to no effect due to the number of addresses assigned to facebook its believed.
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I did read TFA.
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They also tried to block Facebook but it didn't work, probably because of the large range of IP addresses involved. It's a shame they gave up so easily, taking down a high profile site would have been exactly the kind of public shaming we need to make people see how stupid the whole idea is.
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Wonder what would've happened if they'd added Sky's DNS servers to the list.
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It doesn't work because TorrentFreak is a news site. Unless the war on piracy declares even speaking about filesharing fair game as collateral?
it's not collateral, it's the target. speaking of torrents is the target, even if the hashes weren't spoken on the site.
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Huh? It looks like it works: You can't access TorrentFreak.
If you bothered to RTFA*, you'd realise why you're wrong: the censorship is supposed to apply to an unrelated site, called EZTV, and has nothing to do with TorrentFreak. The owner of the blocked domain started adding the IP addresses of other, unrelated sites and at least one ISP started blocking access to those unrelated sites. With a solution as poorly implemented as this, it means a blocked site owner with an axe to grind could start blocking access to legitimate sites with very little effort.
It says
Re:There we have it (Score:5, Insightful)
This is to be expected of what I've come to call the "Corporate Internet".
Governments and corporations have inherited our tubes, and I think that by now they're pretty confident that it's going to be acceptable for them to control and limit the content that ordinary people have access to.
It's been like this for a while now; once you learn the ropes and (more importantly) learn to obey all the rules, you'll fit right in!
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Well, the USArmy and Universities put together the original internet, and Cern designed the web on top of it. Corporations, except for universities and a few other non-profits, were late-comers to the party.
OTOH, the original internet was specifically designed to avoid centralized routing. Basically, when power grabbers took over ICANN and were blessed by the US govt. the writing was on the wall. You shouldn't be surprised by anything that has happened since then...well, actually the existence of torrent
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Post the unpopular truth, get modded down. It's the Slashdot way.
Re:There we have it (Score:4, Interesting)
It explains why the Linux distros in my upload queue have had a lot less activity lately.
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This makes me think of Wrath of Khan (Score:2, Funny)
"To the last, I will grapple with thee... from Hell's heart, I stab at thee! For hate's sake, I spit my last breath at thee!"
Re:This makes me think of Wrath of Khan (Score:4, Informative)
Think you mean Moby Dick:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moby-Dick [wikipedia.org]
> Ahab ultimately dooms the crew of the Pequod (save for Ishmael) to death by his obsession with Moby Dick. During the final chase, Ahab hurls his last harpoon while yelling his now-famous revenge line:
"to the last I grapple with thee; from hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee."
Re:This makes me think of Wrath of Khan (Score:5, Insightful)
Kahn was quoting Melville; Kirk was his whale. And Star Trek is more known to most slashdotters than Melville.
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Kahn was quoting Melville; Kirk was his whale. And Star Trek is more known to most slashdotters than Melville.
If anything, I'm surprised that a person who watched Wrath of Khan or First Contact wouldn't recognize the quotes and parallels immediately. Even if your native language is not English and you weren't forced to read these classics, this is classic literature that's pretty hard to ignore. If anything I'd say that next to Shakespeare's work, Melville's right up there as "most quoted classical author in sci-fi".
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For the second time in less than a week, I get to pull out my trusty "Gee, you must be great fun at parties".
Thanks for that.
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Sounds like a quote from Moby Dick to me.
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In fifty more years, which work do you think will be best-known?
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Moby Dick. But Ahab will be a thorough-going villian, intent on destroying an endangered species. And Ishmael will be an "unindicted co-conspirator".
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Truly so. I look for a revisionist remake of Moby Dick somewhere in the near future to replace the 1956 Gregory Peck version.
Add DNS for "legitimate" sites (Score:5, Insightful)
If the blocks are applied to any IP address pointed to by a blocked site, maybe as a demonstration a blocked site should add the IP addresses of all of the major UK political parties, BBC iPlayer, Youtube, Netflix, lovefilm etc. If mainstream media sites get (automatically) blocked then perhaps the backlash might force TPTB into either removing the requirement to block or require the ISPs to use a blocking mechanism with less potential for collateral damage.
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There are certainly enough boobs on the UK party site to qualify for blocking anyway.
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They should block sky's websites from their own customers...
Re:Add DNS for "legitimate" sites (Score:4, Insightful)
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Unless there's a webserver on the same IP that people need to access, I'm guessing not a whole lot.
Are they only blocking port 80 (and 443)? I would expect them to block all ports, including port 53.
If you don't understand why blocking access to port 53 on your ISPs DNS would be a problem for most of the ISPs users, I think you need to hand in your geek card.
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If they were aiming for truly evil exploitation of automated blocking, they wouldn't block any of those. They'd get the DVLA tax disc renewal site blocked instead and, given the automatic fines now, you'd easily upset a twelfth of Sky's userbase who'd need to switch back to manual methods. Alternatively, you'd aim to block HMRC in late January and block the rare people doing tax-returns at the last minute...
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When you do malicious things to Sky's customers, wouldn't it make you just as or perhaps even more oppressive than the people already controlling their content?
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My post certainly wasn't meant to recommend that it should be attempted! It was intended to reply to the OP's comment that:
Blocking "mainstream media sites" would upset journalists more and get far more publicity. TPTB probably care more about their own sites being available a
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Depends on what happens.
If it merely means the site is unreachable, then well, not much (sites go down all the time). If it means you get a scary looking page that says "you've access a site hosting illegal materials" then conversations get started.
Blocking big sites that can do this can generate some buzz, and the worst part is, you can't really tel
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Your idea kinda works....
But:
1. What if the block filter is also blocking the IP address?
2. What if the block filter is scanning the HTTP 1.1 request header that will contain the line 'host: <blocked-domain>' ?
for your concept, I believe it's quite simple to configure a linux distro to be a DHCP server for your network that also does DNS and performs it's own querying of the DNS root servers, so your concept is totally doable technically, i'm just not sure how it well it would work in reality...
-Jar
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Might this [sourceforge.net] be what you're looking for?
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But the provider could trivially intercept and spoof DNS requests. Your plan needs three revisions:
1. Support DNSSEC.
2. Scratch the two-day cache, make it respect the TTL field as normal.
3. Except that in the event of no-domain or fail to receive a response to a query, return the last valid signed record regardless of TTL.
So what you end up with is a perfectly ordinary DNSSEC-complient DNS server, except that of a provider tries to block a domain this will keep on working regardless, at least until the host
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Exactly. Though I would put the BBC, Google, Faceb
The whole article in a post (Score:5, Informative)
I'm a Sky user in the UK, and I am here to post the text of the article:
"Website blocking has become a hot topic in the UK in recent weeks. Opponents of both voluntary and court-ordered blockades have warned about the potential collateral damage these blocking systems may cause, and they have now been proven right. As it turns out blocked sites can easily exploit the system and add new IP-addresses to Sky’s blocklist. As a result TorrentFreak has been rendered inaccessible to the ISP’s four million customers.
stop-blockedFollowing a High Court ruling last month, six UK ISPs are required to block subscriber access to the popular TV-torrent site EZTV.it.
The actions EZTV faces are not the first taken against a torrent site in the UK. The Pirate Bay, KickassTorrents and several other “pirate” sites have been blocked by previous court orders and remain inaccessible by conventional means.
However, over the past couple of days Sky subscribers noticed that the blocklist had been quietly expanded with a new site that’s certainly not covered by any court order – TorrentFreak.com.
Our site first became inaccessible on Wednesday night, only to be unblocked 14 hours later. However, about an hour ago it was again added to the blocklist.
The recent blocking spree is causing confusion among Sky subscribers who have no idea why TorrentFreak is longer accessible. However, we can confirm that the problem lies with Sky’s filtering software that is supposed to enforce the court-ordered torrent site blockades.
The owner of EZTV informed TorrentFreak that he used Geo DNS to point UK visitors to TorrentFreak’s IP-address. Soon after there were reports that our website had become inaccessible to Sky users."
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You're a Sky customer? Have you ever thought about changing to a different company?
The fun that can be had (Score:5, Informative)
Question: (Score:2)
How many Sky customers are reading the article?
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It's not a site that gives you torrents. It's a site that gives you news. And once we block information, the slippery slope just gets lubed a bit more.
Making information and getting it illegal is and was the hallmark of any and every dictatorship in history, from fascism to communism. Part of that right to speak is the right to listen, without, it's pointless. By that logic, even the Soviet Union had a freedom of speech, as long as you were alone and nobody would listen in. It just was not allowed to say an
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am i supposed to be surprised that it actually works? cause a piracy filter blocking a site focused on torrents isn't a huge supervise
What exactly is a "site focused on torrents", exactly?
Do you even know what you are talking about, or you are working as a guy operating filter in Sky?
Just block facebook (Score:2)
They are evil too, even more so.. that should get about 3.9 million of their 4mil customers pissed off.
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Plus it'll do a lot more to protect children than the government's porn-blocking proposal.
SKY customers being blocked (Score:2, Insightful)
SKY is operated (largely) by NEWS Corp aka Murdoch and Fox news
So CAN WE PLEASE HAVE A BLOCK ON the SUN Newspapers Website and FOX news -
That would at least be some positive achievement out of this shambles
I live in the UK and I see a totally inept, totally technophobic government try to work the 21st century with 19th century tools and mentality.
We have 2 little rich boys trying to run a country that is in a shambles because they don't understand anything - basically.
Oh and to keep the balance - the other
possible solutions? (Score:3)
Does anyone have any long term predictions or ideas about how we might work around this in a way that performs well and is more future proof?
FYI. EZTV is also blocked with BT infinity. And my VM at Bytemark cannot access either
my fear is that what happens when Microsoft or apple start putting pressure on the government to block things like cyanogen or the Linux kernel?
Re:So, What You're Saying is... (Score:5, Informative)
TorrentFreak isn't a site that allows you to conduct piracy. It's a news site that posts content relevant to file sharing.
This would be like shutting down newspapers because they speak about other crimes.
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Someone please mod that AC up!
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Re:So, What You're Saying is... (Score:5, Insightful)
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for now you can "opt-out"
but not if your at a coffee shop, cafe, library or public network.
the UK is now in the leauge of China, and Iran as far as internet access goes.
Re:So, What You're Saying is... (Score:5, Insightful)
the UK is now in the leauge of China, and Iran as far as internet access goes.
You might want to try that again.
I'm in China right now, and I've no trouble accessing either TorrentFreak or TPB.
(And no, I'm not using a proxy or VPN, just a bog-standard residential connection.)
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It is truly a sad day now that it seems that the UK censors the Internet more severely than even China.
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*facepalm*
He doesn't mean that the China censors torrents. He means that China censors at all. Try visiting facebook or twitter, or other websites where citizens can pick up dangerous opinions.
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I merely pointed out some facts. You're free to interpret them as you wish.
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Yes, it's a real bloody tragedy that your kids can't access Facebook in China, like they can in Canada [bbc.co.uk].
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An excellent comment, even if you slightly miss the point. Different countries will filter different things...which, actually, is the main hope.
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I did not miss the point.
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the UK is now in the leauge of China, and Iran as far as internet access goes.
Actually, China is monitoring and filtering UK's internet access. (Huawei) Welcome to you Chinese overlords.
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Don't, whatever you do, opt out. Your name will be added to the UK Pervert Database and the next time some poor soul is raped and murdered in your area the police will be rounding up anyone who opted out of the "pornography" and "weapons and violence" categories.
If you opt out of the "suicide and self-harm" filter you can expect a visit from an NHS mental healthcare professional. Seriously, I asked my MP about the filtering and told her not to use the example of saving a single life because it was flawed, s
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An American ex-pat I work with seems to have trouble with some of the most basic of computer problems, your stereotypical person of age who didn't grow up with computers.
Yet he has a VPN to a server back in the states so he can watch Hulu content without the stupid geobarriers. The word proxy and VPN almost already is a household word.
Re:oooh, big scary corporations! (Score:5, Informative)
FYI this site is not a tracker or place to download torrent files; it's a new sites that posts articles, and only articles relating to filesharing.
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TorrentFreak was featured on mainstream news outlets such as CNN, The Wall Street Journal, New York Times the BBC, the Guardian and the LA Times.
Which makes it seem like they are not a sensible thing to block. I've not visited the site for a great many years, but if you only object to the sites that you use being blocked then it's very easy for censors to creep
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I listen to NBC and get all the leftie info then tune in FOX and get the right's viewpoint. It makes the news interesting when you see it from both sides.
Re: Who cares? (Score:5, Insightful)
It makes the news interesting when you see it from both sides.
Notice how easily they convinced you that there were only two sides...
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It makes the news interesting when you see it from both sides.
Notice how easily they convinced you that there were only two sides...
I'm not sure which represents the greater tragedy--that, or the fact anyone could mistake NBC for being "leftist".
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Well there are two major political mafias. That makes two sides. Most media outlets support either one or the other. There are some fringe groups who can't pull enough votes to matter to the media.
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Yeah but....
I've now come upon two separate Windows 7 systems where the \windows\system32\drivers\etc (the etc) bit was suddenly now a hidden directory.
WTF??????
Is this MS getting into bed with the Gov and hiding the very place where you can 'fix' your system to bypass the filters....?
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Editing the hosts file on Windows also tends to result in antivirus software triggering. Understandable: Very few users these days have reason to edit the hosts file, but it's a very common target for malware (Redirect banking sites to pick up passwords, or redirect ad banner servers to those operated by the malware authors) so any editing of the file will be flagged as suspicious. A few times I've had Windows itsself revert the file to default automatically, but that was under Vista - I don't know if 7 doe
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It's not like that in Win 7.
Just to play devils advocate:
It also prevents you from using the HOSTS file as an adblocker (pointing adservers to loopback) on Metro apps. It's being sold as a "security feature".
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This time I was able to detect an APK "MY LEET HOSTS FILE YADDA YADDA" post after reading just the very first line.
Damn, I'm getting good.