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Some Users Unable to Reach The Pirate Bay

torrentfreak.com

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Re: Some Users Unable to Reach The Pirate Bay

#52

Post by jpadvo »

Flagged as inaccurate -- can someone change the title? It started as a Comcast specific issue, but there is (1) no evidence it was anything aside of a glitch, and (2) it is affecting lots of non-Comcast users now as well.

Edit: this post has been flagged to death. I guess that works...

Edit: And it's back, with a great title. Unflagged. :)

Re: Some Users Unable to Reach The Pirate Bay

#53

Post by sp332 »

truthtechnician wrote: post #51

OH NO! I CAN'T DOWNLOAD MY PIRATED SOFTWARE AND MOVIES!

I have 157 torrents running. I have licenses for all of them. Well, except http://contemporary-home-computing.org/1tb/archives/2698 (an archive of Geocities) which I consider to be historical and, since it was posted online noncommercially anyway, I don't think it's hurting any content creators to torrent it.

Re: Some Users Unable to Reach The Pirate Bay

#55

Post by pyre »

jaysonelliot wrote: post #46
pxlpshr wrote: post #41

When are you guys going to wake up and use newsgroups? BitTorrent is a huge liability if you ask me. If you're caught and sued, it's for distribution — not downloading.

The first rule of newsgroups is you don't talk about newsgroups. I feel like they stay under the radar partly out of their mainstream obscurity. On a serious note, though, what do you know about the legal issues around downloading through Usenet? Have there been prosecutions or lawsuits?

For the most part, Usenet operators (e.g. EasyNews, GigaNews) would end up being the ones targeted.

1. Most of them seemingly don't keep any logs of who downloads what, so the most info they have on you is: address, name, credit card, volume downloaded per month.

2. All of the prosecutions thus far for file-sharing have been for distribution. The pre-BitTorrent lawsuits were over files shared on Napster, LimeWire, Gnutella, etc. The more recent lawsuits over BitTorrent downloads are due to the BitTorrent technology which has you uploading and downloading at the same time, thus by participating in a torrent you are aiding in the distribution of it.

3. In addition, some Usenet providers provide NNTPS connections, thus (virtually) eliminating the ability for someone (i.e. ISP) to inspect what you were downloading from the server.

4. It might be possible to get sued for downloading something from Usenet, but the likelihood of extreme damages awarded by the court is pretty small. The most likely reason that someone would be sued in this fashion would be to prod them into taking a $2k-$3k settlement offer to avoid the hassle (and cost) of defending the case in court. If someone were to battle such a case through court, it would likely turn out in their favor (though IANAL). Though the cost of getting to that point would likely be higher than the settlement amount. So basically, such cases would be even more like Mafia shake-downs than they are now.

Though, none of this speaks to the recent push to criminalize copyright infringement. I have no clue if that would only cover downloading, distribution or both (or what the penalties would be).

Re: Some Users Unable to Reach The Pirate Bay

#56

Post by ay »

joeybaker wrote: post #27
sp332 wrote: post #2

I'm on Comcast, so I can confirm that not even a ping is getting through. And I'm using OpenDNS, so it's not DNS-level blocking. But after the mess Comcast has been in for this stuff before, I kind of can't believe they'd try it again. I'm in a chat with a Comcast rep now, who claims that if they were blocking the page there would be a branded error message. There's just nothing. Maybe (hopefully!) this isn't what it…

Confirmed no access at 06:51 PDT, but was able to get through via a proxy server. By the way – the web experience is just that the page hangs. There's no 404, or 'server can't connect' or any other warning message. This type block is indicative of someone throttling the connection to the server. Likely Comcast hasn't outright blocked the site, they've just made the pipe so small that no one can get to it.

"pipe so small" - ironically, the symptom you describe are also indicative of the Path MTU problems. Not that this is necessarily the case, but I could not help but notice the wordplay.

The wireshark would show you the TCP three-way handshake successful, then the GET request would go out, get acknowledged, and then nothing.

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