UK ISPs Unintentionally Block Torrent Sites
Written by Ernesto on June 18, 2009Customers of Be Broadband haven’t been able to get access to their favorite torrent sites for several hours, causing a widespread panic among BitTorrent addicts. With the government pushing for tougher anti-piracy legislation many feared the worst. They are safe for now though.
Earlier this week the UK government published the Digital Britain report where they introduced a whole range of anti-piracy measures. They will first try to lower the piracy rate by sending out warnings to those who get caught, but if this fails users’ access to “file-sharing” sites may eventually be blocked.
This might have been in the back of the minds of the Be Broadband users who found out that a variety of torrent sites including The Pirate Bay, Mininova and Torrentz were no longer accessible. It didn’t take long before they started to complain to customer support on forums, IRC and Twitter.
“Why are BitTorrent websites being filtered by my ISP?! Going through a proxy proves they’re up,” customer Andrew Mason hinted to Be Broadband on Twitter, and he was not the only one. Similar reports came in on the Be Broadband forum and the topic of the IRC channel said “Connectivity issues to Mininova and TPB and potentially other remote hosts for some customers”.
So has Be Broadband decided that torrent sites are a no go for their customers? Luckily the support team on Twitter was quick to reassure its customers that the truth is not as evil as it seemed.
“We’re not blocking sites but trying to get to the bottom of the issue now,” the Be Broadband team later replied, with a follow up message later. “On the access to torrent site issue: only certain IPs are experiencing connectivity issues to these sites. Our network team is investigating.”
Be Broadband gave out some more details on their forum writing “There appears to be an issue affecting some of our IP ranges accessing some networks mainly in Sweden and the Netherlands regions. Whilst a lot of the torrent sites may be hosted in this region.”
Since most of the popular torrent sites are indeed hosted there, this does seem to explain why the problem appeared limited to torrent sites only. And since they have many more visitors than most other sites hosted on these networks, a conspiracy is easily born.
Thus far the issues haven’t been resolved.
Previously: Collecting IP Addresses Illegal in Sweden
Next: European Countries Amp Up War on Piracy
67 Responses
Thanks god i am in india far far away from anti piracy groups !
What’s more likely is that they’re running a pilot, “how bad would be backlash be if we DID block all the torrent sites, let’s find out with a limited test.”
Hasnt affected my browsing and im with BE Broadband in the UK.
Sounds like they are putting the feelers out to see what happens. Ah think most peeps will use a proxy then a vpn service if need be. Blocking of sites will never work and peeps will not stop sharing. Its time the corps got their own tracker and be done with it!!!!!!!!
cool story bro :)
well I am with O2 and they are be there/be unlimited now and I have no problems..
All those sites are working for me. I’m on Be.
Nothing like the wrath of a woman scorned…
or the hordes of pissed of folk when you try taking their p2p “privileges” away :)
Yep, also with Be*; all fine here and has been all day.
ISP’s have no right to censor the fucking net, We pay for access to the internet, not access to sites deemed ‘Kosher’
Why does the fucking telecoms package not stop censors
wow what next mines ok just get a cloak sorts them seeing ya ip adreses
24 hours and no Pirate Bay, MiniNova or TheBox – IsoHunt and Demonoid okay though. Smells fishy to me!
Im on be* and im locked out Network Timeout’s coming from TPB and MININOVA….
I say, if it was an accident, big deal. Just be patient and wait for them to resolve it. I think it’s important to defend your rights as a p2p user, but it’s also important to not be a douchebag to people who aren’t directly and deliberately trying to infringe those rights.
Oh so well I live in Slovenia, where our companies are laying optic fibre (FTTH specificly for up to 1Gb simetricaly) knowing people will use extra speed for torrent and watching TV on computer without TV tuner(you can even watch channels that are locked otherwise. So they dont bitch about it coz they know everyone is using it, and noone would order highter package witouts acess to torrents.
Is there any way to prevent/petition the “anti-piracy legislation”?
Be* famously refused to interfere with filesharing activities when asked by anti pirate groups a few years ago. Currently pretty liberal thinking support community at be* forums also – not the usual corporate half hearted cluless nonsense.
However it is odd it is the torrent sites that are down – i can access other swedish sites……
You don’t *accidently* block an entire category of websites. They are not all on the same IP range, and they are not all hosted out of the same country, either
What this means is that Be Broadband is keeping a list of torrent sites, and they have a system in place to censor them at the flip of a switch.
But as others have pointed out, this seems like it was just a test run to see how their customers/teh interwebs would react. Hopefully there’s been enough of a shitstorm that they’ll back off on it.
weird…im on o2 BB…same infrastructure a BE and havent expieriencd anything
I’m on Be and the sites have not been working since last night. Rather annoying. And I always thought be was one of the more pirate friendly ISP (no p2p throttling for example), or at least less hostile ones. Let’s hope they get it fixed.
Wouldn’t the old host file trick work?
Also, why block just those three? There are loads more torrent sites out there. One of the biggest, Demonoid, is still connectible, as is Isohunt.
I can’t even access any of the non-torrent TPB sites, which some adds credence to the IP range thing.
Could it have been a test to see how efficient it would be?
hey ernesto, that picture u used is pure genius haha
I say if no other non-filesharing related site turns up inaccessible too then it’s looking less likely to be an accident at all. Anyone in the UK should know that this is coming to an ISP near you soon, so be prepared.
btw even though i cant access those sites or reach tracker, i certainly love the 1.3MB speeds i got through peer exchange (and few seeds on DHT) on a certain torrent, so even if they do *actually* block it in the future there are ways to overcome the problems…
I’m certain it was a trial to test reactions. Be don’t offer connections with 24Mbit down and 1.3/2.5Mbit up for nothing. They know their customers will be heavy P2P users, and hence profit from that.
Wow.. so and ISP can’t even have any technical issues that may involve Sweden or Torrent sites or they will immediately be ladled as filtering?
I’m not saying it wasn’t on purpose, but damn.. talk about a lynch mob! Put the pitch forks down for a few minutes and go experience life AFK!
cool story bro
Is this really an accurate quote:
“There appears to be an issue affecting some of our IP ranges accessing some networks mainly in Sweden and the Netherlands regions. Whilst a lot of the torrent sites may be hosted in this region.”
Because, frankly, it doesn’t ‘explain’ anything.
Dejargoned, the first sentence is nothing more than a non-specific acknowledgment of the problem: “some of our customers can’t access some sites.”
And the second sentence says nothing at all, as it’s not really a sentence at all.
Can you people talking about “IP range” even read English?
Be Broadband didn’t say that they inadvertently blocked access to some ranges of IPs.
They said that some of their broadband customers, in certain ranges of IPs that Be Broadband administer, are unable to access some networks “mainly in Sweden and the Netherlands regions.”
An experiment gone awry methinks.
cool story bro :)
Be have been great to me as a heavy user offering a truly uncapped 24mps service with no traffic shaping or peak hours etc, unlike the awful Virgin.net that I used to use.
broken pipeline? :O
thank god you’re in india? dude you’re in India. No reason to be thankful.
1) some be user ip ranges were blocked and not others
2) blocked sites tracerouted only 4 hops, the third and fourth of which were private ips in the 10.x.x.x range, seemingly within be’s own network
3) noone has provided an example of a site in sweden or the netherlands, other than a torrent site, which was not available
4) noone has explained exactly which region of the internet includes some sites in both sweden and holland, including thepiratebay.org, mininova.org, thebox.biz, filelist.org and eztv.it, was affected by the routing problems
5) noone has explained why these ip ranges were being routed differently to thepiratebay.org etc to other ranges within be broadband
6) it is not clear why such a ‘routing problem’ took over 12 hours to fix, if other be users were having there packets routed correctly
7) it is not clear that the five sites mentioned above are all in either sweden or netherlands
based on the above, this seems to me like one of two things:
* a test of torrent tracker blocking software
* a test of something else targeted at torrent users, eg tracker monitoring software, which went badly wrong
if you believe that this was unintentional, and it was a coincidence that these sites were affected, and that be know nothing more than they have said, then you’ll believe anything
if someone is able to address the points
sorry, i was going to say that if someone is able to address these points, and give some detailed explanation of how this has happened, then i will retract my accusations against be
unintentionally yeah right :\
Dont knock ‘Be Unlimited’…They do what they say on the tin…’Unlimited’
15-16m MBPS down …1.03mbps up..Thats what i get on average, consistant. Until i get fibre to the door this will do me…
Mind you a VPN does come in handy……lol.
Solutions:
- Tor + Privoxy + vidalia
- Osiris (Serverless Portal System)
- webproxies
- VPN’s
P2P is a great technology and is so great that even virus(Conficker) use it LoL
ps: I’m assuming that virus writers are smart people that can make a program that auto installs itself without any user input and run perfectly in millions of computers without as much of a hiccup on the other hand legal software have yet to catch up with all that confusing installation process that only the people in the know can understand LoL
cool story bro :)
I bet this was just a temporary outage while re-routing the traffic to these sites via some monitoring network.
and now the internet has lost free speech, it was good while it lasted people.
it’s been fine for me and I’m on Be, knowing them it’s just a temporary unintentional mess up, chill ;-)
Ney Blocked for me:)
47 am sure you have hit the nail on the head! you just know it ….
Check out http://www.entertane.com for a new meta-search engine – faster, simpler – access to all your favorite torrent searches
Don’t USE torrent sites then..easy then :) theres not just torrent sites where you can download music,movies,software..etc from…Use your heads people..GOOGLE..Theres Hint!…
One of the sites I’ve been using to avoid this problem is zoomtorrents.com. They have 1GB direct downloads and aren’t blocked!!
Shankey’s comment (~#15) about the new fibre cables in Slovenia was interesting.
Truth is, why else would someone seriously need that kind of speed (other than watching live TV or extreme BT usage)
—————–
As for BE Broadband, don’t they have CAPS?
Sure it’s fast as greased lightning for 5 minutes until you’ve reached your quota….
I wrote them of as potential ISP for this reason.
——————-
As for what went wrong with the torrent site access, unless someone has a friends at network support in BE it’s all speculation.
I wouldn’t put a blocking rule past the UK (little brother of bully US).
Taking the safe for the unsafe and using proxies for all my surfing. It’s not my ISPs business what sites I visit.
what a pointless non-story
Are Three mobile network now blocking torrent sites? I can’t access http://www.torrentz.com
Using Be and all torrent sites are working fine. Have never had any problems with p2p stuff using Be and often get a consistent 1.5MB/s or so when downloading.
“As for BE Broadband, don’t they have CAPS?”
No, they don’t have CAPS (or caps). Have downloaded at full speed for a few hours before with no problems..
Be user here. Had no problem when this article was made, but this morning, TPB, Mininova and others are blocked. Everything else working normal
BE user, didn’t have trouble when this was posted, just noticed a few hours ago I can’t connect to mininova.
The sites still there (checked with mobile phone and skyfire browser).
similar trouble with eztv. if it continues i’ll be switching isp. shame I really liked BE.
As of this morning O2 seems to be blocking the sites above, just a heads up for you. This happened to me a while back with black-cats.net an xbox game website – it was never unblocked after that. Could be the start of something bad….
Well, I’ve got Be Broadband and I can’t reach Mininova today. I just tried it from a friends host in NZ and it’s up, so I’m guessing this is the same issue.
Be have been awesome for torrents until now. I hope this is just a minor issue and they sort it out soon. I recently switched from Virgin Media to Be because they were fucking with my torrents so much. I don’t want to have to go ISP hunting all over again!
Eztv + mininiva both blocked by O2. Torrentsnow still getting through.
All back up now. Spoke to O2, who are pleadin ignorance, but blame in on portal work. Strangely selective outage though : EZTV MININOVA FILELIST THEBOX THEPIRATEBAY. Demonoid, isohunt, xtvi were not affected. Perhaps they are readying themselves for a blackout later or setting up ip monitors on these sites…worrying.
o2 user
TPB or mininova was not working for me last night, working fine atm.
O2 user.
Mininova has not been working all week, except for one day. Not working atm
I absolutely agree with Arpit the 1st comment!
3 references to this post
Responses are closed
All remaining responses will continue to be archived. Use the TorrentFreak forums if you want to discuss something.