Comments on: UK ISPs Unintentionally Block Torrent Sites

By: Ash

Ash — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 05:27:42 +0000

I absolutely agree with Arpit the 1st comment!

By: CN

CN — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 12:12:22 +0000

O2 user.
Mininova has not been working all week, except for one day. Not working atm

By: M3Tz

M3Tz — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 11:34:03 +0000

o2 user
TPB or mininova was not working for me last night, working fine atm.

By: Beezle

Beezle — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 07:30:44 +0000

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.

By: Shaun Hughes

Shaun Hughes — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 04:52:48 +0000

Eztv + mininiva both blocked by O2. Torrentsnow still getting through.

By: Roof Rabbit

Roof Rabbit — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 02:44:21 +0000

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!

By: FEZ

FEZ — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 02:36:40 +0000

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….

By: Zab

Zab — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 23:28:23 +0000

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.

By: Sparkie

Sparkie — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 23:09:03 +0000

Be user here. Had no problem when this article was made, but this morning, TPB, Mininova and others are blocked. Everything else working normal

By: Fred

Fred — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 14:00:07 +0000

“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..

By: Fred

Fred — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 13:57:11 +0000

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.

By: Iron

Iron — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 10:55:28 +0000

Are Three mobile network now blocking torrent sites? I can’t access http://www.torrentz.com

By: y0 dawg

y0 dawg — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 22:45:58 +0000

what a pointless non-story

By: » Gli ISP inglesi bloccano alcuni siti BitTorrent?

» Gli ISP inglesi bloccano alcuni siti BitTorrent? — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 12:25:25 +0000

[...] Via | Torrentfreak.com [...]

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 07:28:44 +0000

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.

By: Jeff

Jeff — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 20:50:57 +0000

One of the sites I’ve been using to avoid this problem is zoomtorrents.com. They have 1GB direct downloads and aren’t blocked!!

By: LOL

LOL — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 17:22:06 +0000

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!…

By: Entertane.com

Entertane.com — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 12:29:36 +0000

Check out http://www.entertane.com for a new meta-search engine – faster, simpler – access to all your favorite torrent searches

By: mr x

mr x — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 12:20:06 +0000

47 am sure you have hit the nail on the head! you just know it ….

By: Harry

Harry — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 10:22:17 +0000

Ney Blocked for me:)

By: Da0xin

Da0xin — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 08:55:03 +0000

it’s been fine for me and I’m on Be, knowing them it’s just a temporary unintentional mess up, chill ;-)

By: prison planet

prison planet — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 08:21:31 +0000

and now the internet has lost free speech, it was good while it lasted people.

By: Paranoid

Paranoid — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 07:14:11 +0000

I bet this was just a temporary outage while re-routing the traffic to these sites via some monitoring network.

By: Gli ISP inglesi bloccano alcuni siti BitTorrent? - Commenta la tecnologia, la telefonia, i software

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 04:37:42 +0000

[...] Via | Torrentfreak.com [...]

By: manky goes to bollywood

manky goes to bollywood — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 02:12:25 +0000

cool story bro :)

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 18:47:01 +0000

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

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 18:43:33 +0000

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

By: JesusHatesLies

JesusHatesLies — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 18:30:18 +0000

Mind you a VPN does come in handy……lol.

By: JesusHatesLies

JesusHatesLies — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 18:26:08 +0000

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…

By: puser

puser — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 17:58:34 +0000

unintentionally yeah right :\

By: permanioa

permanioa — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 17:38:01 +0000

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

By: permanioa

permanioa — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 17:35:58 +0000

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

By: Mhmm...

Mhmm... — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 16:53:06 +0000

thank god you’re in india? dude you’re in India. No reason to be thankful.

By: Hom3r

Hom3r — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 16:04:08 +0000

broken pipeline? :O

By: Bob

Bob — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 15:50:35 +0000

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.

By: banky goes to mollywood

banky goes to mollywood — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 15:47:17 +0000

cool story bro :)

By: TerribleTony

TerribleTony — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 15:18:11 +0000

An experiment gone awry methinks.

By: Figment

Figment — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 14:58:24 +0000

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.”

By: UK ISPs Unintentionally Block Torrent Sites | AntiMatter's Blog

UK ISPs Unintentionally Block Torrent Sites | AntiMatter's Blog — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 14:53:16 +0000

[...] from: TorrentFreak var AdBrite_Title_Color = ’0000FF’; var AdBrite_Text_Color = ’000000′; var [...]

By: Figment

Figment — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 14:51:44 +0000

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.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 14:46:32 +0000

cool story bro

By: Lynx

Lynx — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 14:26:18 +0000

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!

By: r3loaded

r3loaded — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 14:12:36 +0000

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.

By: xploit

xploit — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 13:50:24 +0000

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…

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 13:40:38 +0000

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.

By: xploit

xploit — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 13:29:09 +0000

hey ernesto, that picture u used is pure genius haha

By: markie

markie — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 13:28:28 +0000

Could it have been a test to see how efficient it would be?

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 13:21:25 +0000

I can’t even access any of the non-torrent TPB sites, which some adds credence to the IP range thing.

By: Lexx

Lexx — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 13:16:47 +0000

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.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 13:15:25 +0000

Wouldn’t the old host file trick work?