Finnish ISP forced to block access to ThePirateBay and other sites | Hacker News Reader

Finnish ISP forced to block access to ThePirateBay and other sites

arcticstartup.com

147 pointsvilpponen57 comments

From the looks of it, it didn't take long before it was used to take down something other than piracy sites:

"Update: Also, Piraattilahti.fi -address currently hosts just a video file casting criticism against the SOPA legislation in the US. How does this promote copyright infringement?"

Uh oh..

Seems we have a pattern for this in Finland. DNS blocking of suspected child porn sites went live some years ago. Then a researcher published critique on how it was handled (most of the blocked sites did not have any illegal material), and his site got blocked as well.

What? Seriously? When criticism like this is censored, you're no longer living in a "free and open" society.. Sorry =(

More on that issue http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lapsiporno.info

The childporn system in Denmark was used to something similar. The actual list of websites is/was hidden, but got leaked to wikileaks -- a large amount of those banned sites were simply (adult) gay sites that had pissed somebody of.

I am not sure, but I think the end of it was that the leak was blocked too (since it contained addresses of child porn).

Personally I guess they just didn't wanted to have to explain why they blocked a site for a Duck forklift renting company (to be fair, those were some sexy forklifts, they were less than 18 and they didn't have much clothing on).

The ministry of purity has determined that your website offends the invisible powers that be. It has been purified. Thank you for your cooperation. This decision may not be appealed or challenged or examined. You may not ask how this decision has been reached because if you do, you would be exposed to impure thoughts.

Just cancelled my Spotify subscription. Money talks.

Spotify is from Sweden though.

Sure, nothing against the Spotify per se. But it's the copyright holders and their lobbying that is behind these laws. If you want to send a message, stop using their services (or buying products) all together.

Unfortunately, giving them less money sends the message that they should redouble their anti-piracy efforts.

Which is going to push even more people to underground.

Another slippery slope argument from the libertarians. /sarcasm

It looks like the address used to be a proxy for thepiratebay.org, but was redirected at some point after 5 November 2011, as indicated by http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=fi&tl... -- note that the "Pirate Bay. Com" of the title is a mistranslation of the original Finnish "Piraattilahti.fi".

While ThePirateBay shares illegal material, uploaded by its users, there is a ton of legal material as well.

TPB doesn't share illegal material. They only host the .torrent and magnet files. They don't even run a tracker anymore.

Congress could not care less about "legal" or "illegal" data on the internet. HN seems to buy into the idea that Congress wants everything to be fair. No. they just got done bankrupting this country 30 times over via theft by taking the origional, they care not about fairness. Sopa is about a thumb of smite button for Congress. I for one will refuse to code up this mothership app for them. If you find yourself coding this up, half ass it or make a backdoor for the citizens when it gets abused. Absolute power corrupts and causes cravings for more power. child porn, terrorists, fairness are juse ruses to keep people distracted.

We don't need backdoors, since it won't work anyway. That's why TPB doesn't run a tracker anymore: they said it was outdated and had been replaced by DHT and peer exchange. You don't even need DNS for that.

European court of justice (ECJ) have already ruled that such blocking is againts EU rules and regulations, http://curia.europa.eu/jcms/upload/docs/application/pdf/2011...

So I guess that higher Finnish courts will follow ECJ's decision when they get this case.

I don't think the ECJ ruling covers DNS- or IP-blocks. To my understanding ECJ ruled against filtering that would require the service provider to look into the traffic that passes through its system.

Some more information from the press release (which is in Finnish): Elisa, the ISP in question, has has appealed to the Court of Appeal about the issue. They will not go down easily, that is certain. Moreover, Elisa tried to resist this decision in the past, when the initial order was issued in october 2011, but eventually were forced by legal officials to implement the restrictions.

How exactly does an ISP implement arbitrary blocks like this, anyway? Do they hard-code routes to override what their upstream ISP advertises?

(Also, isn't it odd that The Pirate Bay doesn't have any AAAA records? That seems like something that ISPs and governments have no experience with yet and hence would make it rather easy for experienced users to get around blocks. Their DNS server has an IPv6 address; why not www?)

They were ordered to do both IP-level and DNS-based tampering.

Any ISP will already have some IP-based blocking mechanism system in place for fending off operational emergencies such as DDoS. Router ACLs and null routes are common ways to do this. In fact ISPs in Finland are required to block SMTP traffic from residential customers by default (except to their own relay servers).

The DNS side they probably had to improvise somehow, possibly by just configuring their own DNS servers as authoritative for the victim domains.

Just tested and this does seem to be in effect. Quite surprised to see it in action here. Not that I support piracy but if websites can be shut down on basis of piracy, what stops them shutting them down on for any other reason. Lets hope this stays as a separate incident.

And I guess most people using torrents know how to use anonymous web-proxies, so this doesn't really block the site that efficiently. To enforce blocking piratebay they'd have to block the proxies too, and that would open up another set of problems. Lets now wait for the decision from the supreme court and hope they are sensible.

PirateBay is a search engine. Nothing more. It's really stupid to go after sites like this. There are multiple other "torrent sites" operating on the same torrents. You take one down, others are alive. Besides, to start a torrent you only need one hash[1] and working DHT. There are sites which only "host" this hash. On which grounds could you possibly take them down? Then there is another chapter - private trackers. So trying to block one search engine/tracker is really pointless.

And PirateBay itself doesn't even host any copyrighted material. Rapidshare, Megaupload and others do. But they have money.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnet_URI_scheme

There are sites which only "host" this hash. On which grounds could you possibly take them down?

The hash is wrong color[1].

[1] Was on HN a few weeks ago: http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23

The hash is wrong color

This reminded me of http://www.hid.im/

Do you really think that the people who want to blaock TPB know what TPB is? Or what a hash is? Or what the diffrence between torrent and a hoster is?

> PirateBay is a search engine.

I'm surprised that Google is still in business, honestly. Though they do block some content to comply with the DMCA, which helps their case.

if websites can be shut down on basis of piracy, what stops them shutting them down on for any other reason?

Nothing. Which is exactly why governments the world over are so happy to help the content industry: "piracy" is just another excuse to make mass-scale censorship widely accepted, because the scaremongering about paedophilia wasn't enough (the targeted websites were too small, public opinion didn't really notice them, and so the concept of net censorship being "normal" didn't really pass).

The same happened in Denmark in 2008. Sonofon, the second largest ISP, was also forced to do a DNS-block on TPB which led to a block by all Danish ISP. As far as i am aware of, it is only TPB and child pornography that is (DNS-) blocked in Denmark.

The same happened to TPB in Belgium: a list of domain names were blocked, but in response, depiraatbaai.be was created, which wasn't blocked.

Elisa blocks depiraatbaai.be, but creating a new domain name for TPB would be trivial.

DNS blocks are not effective.

In the Elisa press release they explain that they are actually demanded to block the DNS records as well as set of IP addresses (3 IPs). http://www.elisa.fi/ir/pressi/index.cfm?t=100&o=5130&...

Because adding another IP is so much more difficult.</sarcasm>

IP blocks can be pretty annoying for the hosting companies and network providers. You can easily end up in a situation where certain number of your (valuable) IPv4 addresses are blocked by different authorities over the world. Your other customers might not like the idea that their website is inaccessible for some people due to the fact that you are also selling capacity to torrent sites.

Same kind of thing has happened with email. Due to the way spam blocking works, the companies that provide email sending services have started to police the traffic themselves.

So torrent sites will switch to IPv6. They are already working with specialized providers anyway.

And then /64s or /48s become tainted.

And then people start automating IP spoofing on a mass scale, to make TPB look like a White House server.

It's an arms race that cannot be won by censors, because the entire infrastructure has been built on loosely-coupled nodes and technologies that can be encapsulated or mimicked.

The Chinese are getting closer and closer to a breaking point, as more people find out how the "real" internet feels like (either by travelling or by finding ever-easier tunnelling technologies); as soon as the economy slows down and people start grumbling, the gates will fall. It's sad that other countries are trying to go the opposite way.

IMHO the only good thing about this is that it fuels the development of safer and more resilient tools for us. Like Distributed DNS oder Distributed Social software.

http://distributeddns.sourceforge.net/ http://wiki.socialswarm.net/Main_Page

What is the legislation in Finland that supports this?

Also, it seems easy to circumvent...

There is none. Nobody cares.

Nobody cares because everyone will have figured out how to access TPB tomorrow latest. Elisa will fight the decision in court, but it's not like this would have an effect on people.

I meant there is quite little opposition against this kind of stupid decisions. Normal people don't understand what's so bad in banning IP addresses and censoring the internet. It's against child porn and piracy, would somebody please think of the children (and movie industry)?

But the courts ordered it? Surely they are using some sort of legislation to support the decision?

> But the courts ordered it? Surely they are using some sort of legislation to support the decision?

In Finland? Not necessary.

My guess is that they convinced the court that the general provisions of the civil code apply here. The details would indeed be interesting but I guess you'd have to understand Finnish to get them.

> What is the legislation in Finland that supports this?

It doesn't matter? What is the legislation in the US that supports robo-signing people's homes away? What did they recently care about your constitution when deciding that detaining US citizens on a whim, indefinitely, is alright?

What is the legislation that supports torturing Private Manning for months or years?

I was merely asking what the legislation was out of curiosity for what justification the Finnish government was using, and because the article said it was ordered by the courts. I never said I agreed with it or thought it would be ok if there was some legislation. I was actually surprised that there would be such legislation in Finland, which I had considered to be much more open than the US is.

The thing that is scary about the US situation is that they do take the trouble to create this sort of legislation (SOPA, NDAA, etc.)

Copyright law, naturally. It gives a right to the owner of the copyright (or in this case, his/hers representative) to make a claim for the removal of the infringing material.

The law text in finnish: http://www.finlex.fi/fi/laki/ajantasa/1961/19610404?search%5...

Some people say if SOPA will be implemented the big sites will just move BUT this just goes to show that there soon will be barely any places left to go.

use www.thepiratebay.ee in case your ISP is Elisa!

The number of seconds it takes for law makers to realize that this is some of the most powerful legislation on the planet Earth today is about a couple hundred.

The ability to crush ideas on a global Scale. Fox news would do everything in their power to augment their propaganda machine with this ultimate weapon of censorship.

Stop thinking about that citizen. Don't make me come into your home and install tazer devices in every room to taze you.

It is imperative that we keep a publically viewable updated list of these Blacklisted sites so that the censorship decisions at least can be challenged in court. We don't got due process, but it'll be like the wild west, when someone comes after your family, you don't call the police, you can get a group of your friends, some horses, ropes and trees and get yourself some justice.

This is a good thing, piracy is illegal. If there wasn't rampant piracy we wouldn't have to worry about idiots drafting up bills like Protect-IP and SOPA.

If you really believe that, you have neither understood basic cause and effect nor the entire problem of copyright in the digital age of unlimited sharing.

I think I was a little misinterpreted

> If there wasn't rampant piracy we wouldn't have to worry about idiots drafting up bills like Protect-IP and SOPA.

There's really only one way to interpret that.

Piracy isn't "rampant". Profits are up on pretty much every form of media out there. Every time an industry group whines about piracy, you can count on it being a complete pack of lies.

Lol I've gotten so many down votes. I disagree, and I wish people would leave room for discussion instead of being so quick to plaster me with down-vote bullets for what I think.

Piracy in my opinion is rampant. For example: You can go on the pirate bay and pirate the adobe cs suite, microsoft office, your favorite albums, your favorite movies, with ease. You are (if you forgot) supposed to pay for these things.

And this level of access is available to everyone with an internet connection.

I'm not talking about "profits", we all know big media makes enough money to stay afloat & some. But you can't make the assumption that everything is a lie.

I hate it when people go to extremes, and I admit that my claim may be assumption you don't agree with. :/

>I disagree, and I wish people would leave room for discussion

Discussion about what? You're "disagreeing" with things that are absolutely established and verified fact. Hell, they admit it!

Here's two articles from a half a second spent googling. I'm not making this stuff up!

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2008/01/oops-mpaa-ad...

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20111003/12283916184/former...

I absolutely can (and do) make the assumption that everything an *AA group says is a lie, because 1) They've done it multiple times in the past, and 2) they don't care about anything but their own interests.

And as far as "with ease" - you're forgetting that torrenting is still a fairly involved operation. It's accessible to anyone with an internet connection in the same way that programming is accessible to anyone with a computer.

It's not just click a link and download. It's more like:

1) Download and install a torrent client 2) Configure their firewall to allow the connections through 3) Browse a tracker site and select a file 4) Download it 5) Apply whatever cracks are necessary to bypass the copy protection 6) Do all of the above without infecting yourself with some form of malware.

Furthermore, there are at least two studies (and many more industry success stories) that suggest that people prefer the legal option when it's presented to them reasonably.

Reasonable meaning, a fair price (and don't give me any of that "free market" BS either, fair meaning non-insulting), no anti-consumer crap (because DRM inconveniences nobody but paying consumers.. bought a DVD recently?), and no draconian license terms (there is absolutely no good reason that I can't legally rip my DVD's to my computer for my own fair use)

There is no room for discussion or nuance on this matter. The RIAA/MPAA are a threat to freedom, culture and as a result, society at large. They've shown their willingness to lie to pass absurdly horribly legislation - why should anything they ever say be trusted again?

Sounds like someone has been watching Fox news.

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