Major Romanian ISP Blocks BitTorrent Site
Written by enigmax on October 08, 2008Just over 12 months since one of Romania’s most popular BitTorrent trackers was raided by the police, Torrentbits.ro is suffering more problems. Customers of one of Romania’s largest ISPs, UPC, can no longer access the site.
More and more over the last year, we have witnessed anti-piracy lobby groups targeting ISPs to force them to either hand over the details of users they allege breach their copyrights, or, more clumsily, pressure them to block access to entire sites. The most famous recent case concerned The Pirate Bay, which was blocked by ISPs in Italy at the behest of the IFPI, who were then forced by a court to unblock the site again.
Now it’s the turn of one of Romania’s largest ISPs, UPC Romania, which is blocking its customers from accessing one of Romania’s most popular trackers, Torrentbits.ro. UPC has around 1 million customers overall, and according to reports received by TorrentFreak, it’s Internet customers no longer have access to the BitTorrent tracker, receiving a message in their browser usually reserved for sites that simply don’t exist.
Those accessing the site via a proxy or from another ISP receive this message:
Founded in 2006, Torrentbits.ro quickly became one of Romania’s most popular sites but in May 2007 it became the subject of a police raid, resulting in the arrest of the admins. They were later released.
TorrentFreak’s requests for UPC to comment on the site block have so far gone unanswered.
Thanks to Voor
Previously: Top 10 Most Pirated TV Shows on BitTorrent
Next: DDoS Attacks Force Norbits to go Offline
51 Responses
Just another cowardly action by the MAFIAA companies :(
In such a case, we should see if we can take up with another DNS server to get our job done… I guess changing DNS server work, as I had got that trick worked when my ISP blocked Youtube for few days. Here is a list of 30+ DNS servers for interested ppl.
http://www.techpavan.com/2008/09/25/free-dns-servers-access-blocked-websites/
crap site anyways no one will care
Can OpenDNS solve the problem?
Can OpenDNS solve the problem?
Sure, go http://www.opendns.org and follow nfos
Surely this can’t be legal. Romania is in the EU – perhaps this can be a positive influence. If the site is popular, perhaps there can be popular mobilization of some sort. Of course, this can only be seen as a continuation of a pattern that has been going on for a long time.
Roze
http://www.28chan.org/fs/ <- File-sharing discussion board
crappy tracker
@7
It is better to focus on the legal aspect of file-sharing as a while, rather than on this specific tracker and its merits. What is more important about this is not just the immediate consequences of this event, but the implications to file-sharing as a whole.
Roze
I’m a Romanian UPC customer, and it’s true I couldn’t access that tracker for about 3 days, but since this morning it’s working. I’ve spoken to other UPC customers in other parts of the country and for the filter seems to be still on… so who knows maybe they are removing the filter.
UPC does not have 1 milion internet subscribers in Romania, maybe 100k.
“UPC has around 1 million customers”
No one said anything about internet subscribers, learn to read… you must be a blogger.
just do business with neighboring country for internet
btw bit torrent is not the only way to transfer files
/me walks to border, hands buddy ….
torrents is for j3ws!
eLEee
Like others have pointed out:
If it’s only a DNS block, either use a different DNS server, or put torrentbits.ro and the IP number 86.55.19.90 in your ‘hosts’ file.
http://86.55.19.90/ should also get you there, if it’s only DNS that’s blocked, but might not work for anything but the front page because the site expects the browser to resolve torrentbits.ro to the same address, which it won’t as long as none of the two firstmentioned work-arounds are implemented.
romania is a poor country
I don’t know how but I can log in to the site from this isp.
I can’t, still blocked here. Maybe they are slowly letting people log in city by city.
the site looks fine at the moment, but as far as i know there aren’t popular romanian trackers (althou there were attempts); most romanian are idiots and spend their time on DC++ crap.
-UPC is not the largest ISP
-the tracker belongs to a competing ISP so that’s the main reason of the block, not some kind of legal issue
-there are plenty of well-known RO trackers, but just like there are people in the world that still use Internet Explorer, there are people that use DC++.
I cant stand people who say.. OH ITS A CRAPPY SITE WHO CARES..
Your gonna F*cking care when they target TPB, Mininova, btmon.. ect ect..
So stfu up about who cares, end this now while we still have a chance.
we should care about all trackers because the small ones will go first they easy targets.
have your say
http://www.VistaFuckingSucks.com
It was not blocked from the UPC.Nothing legal or unlegal.Just an unfortunate situation.Since this morning should be working.Happy sharing !
More pressure from the fascist government here in the us. Money and overreaching copyright law over human creativity.
I`m on UPC and it`s working now !
First that tracker belongs to the ISP named I-Link a provider with an obscure management and less to say that the internet connection via I-Link sucks / blows (or both).That crappy management that i was mentioning before filters the access to the resources maintained by them randomly without any reason today you can access the resources from I-link tomorrow you can’t.When a provider is ALLOWED by I-link to acces the resources placed in the data center owned by them but the clients from that provider can not connect to them the tsunami of lies starts and I-link starts accusing that provider of filtering.Less to say that UPC is big company providing triplay (internet, phone, tv cable) and belive me when i say that they have bigger problems and they don’t give a shit about filtering bitorrent DC++ whatsoever you name it.So that complaint about UPC filtering the access to TB is nothing but a shity lie.
aaa and i forgot to say that UPC has no peers with no provider and neither I-link has that’s why sometimes when in Frankfurt (yes you read it well – this is the point where the routes of the two providers meet) are made some changes those two providers clients can’t access the resources found in the other network.And less to say that UPC internet access sucks sometimes (sucks less then I-link) and this type of accident happens.
just get http://www.opendns.org
I’m on UPC and the site loads fine.
In my opinion this is just a connectivity issue between two different ISPs. This in NOT unprecedented.
Some background info: the internet offered by UPC is one of the cheapest in the country: 10 euros for a 10/1 mbit connection or 20 euros for 20/2 both with unlimited traffic. At that price something will go wrong sooner or later; there’s not a lot of profit. You just can’t have that 99.9 % uptime.
@31
there is the oponent of upc that is rds, that has 10 bucks for a land phone and inet connection,trust me the costs of maintaing a newtwork in Romania are quite low,because the country is poor,And upc has other services that top up the profit chain that is the tv sector,all revenues or concentrated on the tv provider sector of the company.
Inaccurate.
I did some digging through some romanian blogs and this is not true. It turns out Torrentbits.ro’s ISP routes the traffic through Germany instead of taking a more shorter route. There have been upgrades done to the nodes causing this downtime (for some people).
to 32, yeah, I might have exaggerated with that one.
RDS > UPC
UPC was also the WORST isp in our Country. They have great cable tv but the net is just.. horrible
As i know the TBS staff, they banned another isp from Romania (clicknet) so i wouldn’t be surprised if they also banned UPC. It’s either this way (probability of 55%) or UPC really did block the access to torrentbits.
i’m a UPC internet costumer from Ro and their internet service was always fine. i use it 24/7 whitout limitations or problems.
Romania is not a poor country anymore. It was poor 10 years ago but things have changed. You know the country has been communist since 1989 so it took time to get along to the other countries in economical terms. The internet prices are low because internet is not a rare thing to have there. Anyone has a fast internet connection in Romania because, believe it or not, it was one of the fastest growing internet market in europe. TV is not anymore the main focus for anyone. Just to put things straight: UPC is the worst ISP in Romania. They have good prices for bad services. If you compare their prices with their competition, you’ll think they are pretty high for what they’re offering.
Another failed TorrentFreak story
i have upc and im romanian and i CAN access that site….
Haha, TF, where were you when major romanian isp, I-Link, owner of torrentbits.ro tracker (yes, this tracker is owned by I-Link romanian ISP) filtered abusively without any reason what so ever, some other romanian tracker?
That was a nice story…when you were asking support from their staff, the simple answer was to forget the other tracker and just use torrentbits.ro ..
nice story, eh ?
This is fucking bullshit, we pay good money to our ISP to surf the damn Internet so it should be up to us to filtrate whatever site we want. It should be upp to the consumer and not to the ISP.
torrentbits.ro blowed anyway..
i’d like to know more about the nodes upgrade in Germany.
i have a connection from iLink and i get really bad pings all over Europe (>150ms). can’t play anything outside of RO atm :/
i don’t wanna call customer support because they’re only dumb bimbos asking me if the cable is plugged or other stupid shit. it would take a lot of effort to explain how the trace routing is crappin’ out after the 5th hop
Wow how sad, another ISP caves to pressure from four letter agencies. Sad indeed.
Jiff
http://www.anonymity.at.tc
the quality of upc,isn’t that bad it dependends on what network your connection is, on the upc newtwork on the old astral network that was bought by upc,withouth investing anything in it,hopes it will get better cause they will(are) lose(ing) lots of consumers.
For a while there I thought that **AA bullcrap started happening in our country too. Was really worried there for a bit.
Oh, and to the jackasses: Romania isn’t poor, it’s doing quite fine though most of the people inside could use a radical attitude adjustment.
I’m not Romanian but then fuck UPC up
it is because it is another ISP that host it “iLink” and UPC is loosing ground.
filtering at ISP level is always bad
Aahh TorrentBits .. admins are banning users on H&R without first warning them.. I hope they die soon :-)
It was a very good tracker romanian users. i managed to download with 10 MB/s max from them. It’s a shame users from UPC cannot login. Im from another provider and i don’t have this problem.
It’s not blocked.
Torrentbits staff is stupid and hosts their server(s) in places that often lack proper routing or have peering that’s enabled and disabled whenever someone feels like it.
UPC as far as I know never blocked any site, especially torrent sites.
Nothing strange, my fav tracker bans users from Romtelecom networks because of their low speed. On RDS we have 50/30 Mbs and people with Romtelecom just can’t keep up with us and can’t do ratio.
Bravo baietilor ca nu au stat in inchisoare si isi continua treaba. Bafta torrentbits!
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