Unfortunately, in the rush to censor content for the claimed good of some group or other, the unintended consequences of these systems usually take a back seat.

In 2008, the UK Internet Watch Foundation (a private company operating confidentially) added a Wikipedia page to their list with the result that all Wikipedia visitors from Cleanfeed-using ISPs used one of a handful of IP addresses, leading to user verification issues and bans.

Another example closer to home involves UK ISP TalkTalk. They offer their customers a filtering system already and TorrentFreak – strictly a news resource – is unavailable when customers turn on the option to block file-sharing sites.

Not all such consequences are unintended, however. The new anti-porn lists, which are opt-out, may end up instituting a block on torrent and other filesharing-related sites. The lists were announced along with a piece by Prime Minister David Cameron in the Daily Mail newspaper (which has plenty of sexually-charged content of its own), who had run a morality campaign on the topic for the last few months.

Torrent site blocking has been postulated occasionally and has been implemented in the UK via High Court orders, which have both over-reached and been easily circumvented. Site blocks in other countries have also been tried, mainly against the claimed “root of all evil”, The Pirate Bay, albeit with extremely limited success (seriously).

The lengthy and costly High Court approach may not be needed now though. Many torrent sites contain, to a greater or lesser extent, pornographic content, as well as more acceptable (but likely still to be blocked) ‘adult’ or ‘mature’ content. As such, we can only assume that torrent sites will be included initially or added later on.

This will be another blow against independent artists and creators who have leveraged the power of torrents to distribute content. And like all other attempts to legislate some personal interpretation of morality, it’s doomed to fail at its intended use, while creeping to the personal desires of those in charge, to the public detriment.

We’ll report more on how these lists impact torrent sites when more details become available.

UPDATE/Clarification 17:33 29/12/2012
While many commenters have pointed to this BBC piece about it being rejected, the piece was written about the rejection of an ‘opt-out’  system, and printed 4 days before Prime Minister Cameron’s Daily Mail announcement. In his plan, the system will be opt-in, and involve the ISPs in some form, but will have the default values (for people that just click through without reading) to turn on a basic level of filtering, if there are children in the house.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Many privacy-conscious BitTorrent users are well-aware of this kind of monitoring activity and take measures to remain anonymous. The preferred way for many is to use a VPN or proxy which conceals their ISP IP-address.

Another group of BitTorrent users prefer a free option in the form of a blocklist. These blocklists prevent a BitTorrent client from connecting to IP-addresses that presumably belong to anti-piracy outfits.

While these blocklists do provide some “security” they are not foolproof. Some anti-piracy groups are not recognized by the blocklist and therefore not blocked. This means that users who rely on them as their only means of protection are at risk of being logged.

In a new paper titled “The Unbearable Lightness of Monitoring: Direct Monitoring in BitTorrent,” researchers from the University of Birmingham try quantify this problem.

The researchers developed a methodology to detect which “peers” in a swarm are likely to be anti-piracy monitors. The research looked at 60 public torrent files and over a period of time they found 856 peers (on 5 subnets) that showed strong characteristics of monitoring agencies.

This data allowed them to compare their findings to the IP-addresses that are blocked by the popular i-Blocklist blocklist, to see how effective it is at keeping BitTorrent spies out.

Perhaps not surprisingly the blocklists doesn’t offer complete security. 69% of the IP-addresses of monitoring companies were blocked, but the other 31% were not. In other words, nearly one in three logging attempts bypassed the blocklist.

“Our direct monitoring analysis produced 593 peers (out of 856) that appear in subnets listed in the Anti-Infringement list. In addition, our analysis identifies 263 peers that, albeit displaying the same behaviour as monitoring peers do not currently appear in blocklists,” the researchers write.

“BitTorrent users should therefore not rely solely on such speculative blocklists to protect their privacy,” they add, suggesting that these BitTorrent users should add blocklists based on empirical research.

In addition to examining the effectiveness of i-Blocklist, the researchers also identified the prevalence of indirect versus direct detection methods.

In the past, indirect methods – where monitoring companies obtain lists of IP-addresses without connecting to the downloaders – have been heavily criticized. The main problem is that these lead to a high number of false accusations. For example, research has shown that due to shoddy techniques even a network printer can be accused of sharing copyrighted files on BitTorrent.

In the paper the researchers found that direct methods – where the anti-piracy group confirms that downloaders are actually sharing – are also widely used now. Their paper is first to provide evidence of direct monitoring, suggesting that monitoring companies are upping their accuracy.

For U.S. Internet subscribers the topic is relevant as the six-strikes anti-piracy scheme will be rolled out later this year. The Center for Copyright Information has yet to announce the names of the companies that will do the “spying” for the six-strikes system, and when they do it will be interesting to see what data gathering methods they use.

But whatever the answer, a blocklist alone is not going to prevent BitTorrent users from running into trouble.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

• Companies (Or organizations. I won’t repeat orgs. over and over) who are clearly involved with trying to stop filesharing.
• Companies which anti-p2p activity has been seen from.
• Companies that produce or have a stong financial interest in copyrighted material.
• Government ranges or companies that have a strong financial interest in doing work for governments.
• Legal industry ranges.
• IPs or ranges of ISPs from which anti-p2p activity has been observed.

The IP addresses added were 89.202.149.32 to 89.202.149.63, 89.202.157.88 to 89.202.157.95 and 89.202.157.128 to 89.202.157.159, according to this forum post on the NOD32 support forum. These blocked IP ranges contain many of the servers used to provide anti-virus signatures for NOD32. These were added to the blocklist for alleged anti-p2p activities. However, what kind of anti-p2p activity was taking place is unclear.

Bluetack administrator ‘m00re’ told TorrentFreak that the IPs were added because “someone noticed them on a torrent”. ‘m0nk’, another administrator later told TorrentFreak that he noticed an IP belonging to ESET on a private tracker’s movie torrent that he was on. “It was only 1 IP, but since they’re a commercial software company with a strong financial interest in copyrighted material, they go on level 1 regardless”.

However, ESET didn’t take too kindly to this disruption of its business. A representative from ESET tried to contact Bluetack, to see about the removal from the list. He later posted a screenshot of the discussion to the ESET support forum.

This was the same kind of attitude experienced by Ludvig Strigeus almost exactly two years ago, after utorrent.com was added to the Bluetack lists. Similarly by the Opentracker people, and the German Chaos Computer Club.

Based on the feedback from Bluetack, ESET added PeerGuardian to their anti-virus updates. Two signatures called Win32/PeerGuardian were added in update number 2894 on the 21st of Feb, with another 5 added in update number 2895 the following day. These updates identify the PeerGuardian application as malware, and offer the user the ability to deal with the ‘infection’. Those that do, have been unable to use PeerGuardian afterwards.

Phoenixlabs, which makes PeerGuardian, put out this statement in response. Their representatives would not comment further on the subject, referring only to the statement. Bluetack, on the other hand, have been very vocal about it. ‘m00re’ said “whomever the person/persons are that made the flawed decision to maliciously target a non threatening application like PG2 is clearly a moron.” whilst ‘firstaid’ suggested that “people call them and have them stop having their product remove PG2 from their systems.”

ESET defended the addition, “By blocking update and threatsense servers detection of PeerGuardian as potentially unwanted application is fully justified as it could disrupt normal operation of NOD32 and or ESS.”

However, ESET has now changed it’s mind, saying “We have reconsidered detection of PeerGuardian and it will be removed in the upcoming update. However, we will actively continue protecting our users from blacklists that contain the IP addresses (ranges) of our update servers and thus preventing our paying or trial users receiving updates and keeping their computers protected.”

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.