TorrentFreak

Several UK Internet providers are blocking Pirate Bay’s perfectly legal promotion platform for independent artists. The Promo Bay website is currently being blocked by BT, Virgin Media, BE and possibly several other providers. A plausible explanation is that the Promo Bay domain is listed on the same blocklist that’s used to enforce the Pirate Bay blockade. However. the domain itself has never linked to infringing material, nor is it hosted on The Pirate Bay’s servers.

Today, BT became the last major UK Internet provider to block subscriber access to The Pirate Bay. The ISP has gone further than other providers since it also restricts access to the new IP-addresses added by the deviant BitTorrent site in recent weeks. Nevertheless, even these additional efforts were quickly neutralized. Immediately after the block kicked in Pirate Bay added a set of new IP addresses to allow BT subscribers access again – for now at least.

A trio of Court of Appeal judges are expected to give their ruling today as to whether a decision by the High Court supporting the controversial Digital Economy Act can be overturned. BT and TalkTalk, two of the country’s largest ISPs, had objected to the legislation claiming it breached EU directives. Today, however, they find themselves in a new controversy.

Following the High Court ruling ordering UK ISP BT to block Usenet indexing site Newzbin2, it was only a matter of time before that momentum was capitalized upon by the movie and music industries. Today a coalition of companies led by the BPI demanded that BT also block The Pirate Bay, either voluntarily or by consenting to a court order.

The parties were back in the High Court Friday in the continuing case of the MPA against UK ISP BT. The latter was previously ordered to block subscriber access to Usenet indexing site Newzbin2 on copyright infringement grounds, but yesterday an objection by a Newzbin2 and BT user was added into the mix. Question is, what effect will it have?

Last week, Usenet indexer Newzbin2 delivered on their promise of delivering a mechanism to circumvent the court-ordered blocking measures set to hit their site in the weeks to come. After releasing a second version of their encryption software in just three days and an OSX version in under a week, the site’s operators now say they are prepared to adapt their client to help other blocked sites stay online.

The operators of Usenet indexing site Newzbin2 have introduced measures to circumvent court-ordered web-blocking measures designed to render the site inoperable in the UK. Site staff aren’t revealing how the stand-alone software client works but some basic network packet analysis shows that it defeats ISP BT’s Cleanfeed censorship system by using a handful of techniques including encryption.