
Finnish ISP forced to block access to ThePirateBay and other sites - vilpponen
http://www.arcticstartup.com/2012/01/09/finnish-operator-required-to-block-access-to-thepiratebay-among-others
======
gizzlon
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..

~~~
bergie
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.

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

~~~
tomjen3
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).

~~~
maeon3
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.

------
sp332
_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.

~~~
maeon3
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.

~~~
sp332
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.

------
hpaavola
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...](http://curia.europa.eu/jcms/upload/docs/application/pdf/2011-11/cp110126en.pdf)

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

~~~
jpalomaki
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.

------
Ironballs
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.

------
jrockway
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?)

~~~
zurn
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.

------
Juha
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.

~~~
rplnt
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>

~~~
yason
_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>

~~~
rplnt
_The hash is wrong color_

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

------
neic
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.

------
ddfreyne
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.

~~~
Juha
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&...](http://www.elisa.fi/ir/pressi/index.cfm?t=100&o=5130&did=17727)

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

~~~
jpalomaki
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.

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

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

~~~
toyg
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.

------
jsilence
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>

------
rgrieselhuber
What is the legislation in Finland that supports this?

Also, it seems easy to circumvent...

~~~
white_devil
> 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?

~~~
rgrieselhuber
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.)

------
codesuela
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.

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

------
maeon3
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.

------
meanJim
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.

~~~
slowpoke
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.

~~~
meanJim
I think I was a little misinterpreted

~~~
Karunamon
> 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.

~~~
meanJim
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. :/

~~~
Karunamon
>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://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2008/01/oops-mpaa-admits-
college-piracy-numbers-grossly-inflated.ars)

[http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20111003/12283916184/former...](http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20111003/12283916184/former-
anti-piracy-investigator-explains-how-he-fed-police-cases-inflated-piracy-
stats.shtml)

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?

