(anyone confirm/deny this? i can't reach it from the house.)
Comcast Users Blocked From The Pirate Bay
• Ernesto
• 12/05/2011
http://torrentfreak.com/comcast-blocked-the-pirate-bay-110512/
During the last few hours reports have been trickling in from Comcast
subscribers who are unable to access The Pirate Bay website. Although there is
no sign that Comcast is actively blocking user access to the largest BitTorrent
site on the Internet, something is clearly not in order. The Pirate Bay team
have confirmed that they are not the ones who are blocking, and they’re
investigating the issue.
Starting few hours ago, Comcast subscribers began reporting issues with
accessing The Pirate Bay.
Although downtime is nothing new for users of the popular BitTorrent site, this
time around the connectivity issues appear to be affecting only a select group.
Several tests and numerous user reports reveal that Comcast subscribers from
all across the United States are unable to connect to The Pirate Bay. The
traceroute from Comcast connections stops at thepiratebay.piratpartiet.se, as
it’s supposed to, but The Pirate Bay website does not appear.
Further tests show that the blockade is not DNS related. What is actually
causing the issue is uncertain at this point.
Although there’s been a lot of talk about censorship lately, it seems doubtful
that this is an intentional blockade on Comcast’s part. That said, there is
clearly a mismatch between the Comcast network and The Pirate Bay site which
leaves access to the rest of the Internet unaffected.
TorrentFreak spoke to The Pirate Bay team who confirmed that there’s a
significant drop in visitors from the U.S. They are currently investigating the
issue to see if there’s anything they can do on their end.
When it comes to BitTorrent blocking, Comcast already has quite a reputation.
In 2007 TorrentFreak broke the news that Comcast was actively blocking
BitTorrent traffic. Comcast initially denied, but later admitted its
wrongdoings.
Comcast’s BitTorrent blocking fueled the Net Neutrality debates and eventually
resulted in an FCC investigation and various lawsuits. A class action lawsuit
was settled by the ISP who reserved a $16 million fund for affected subscribers.
In the light of all the previous legal issues it therefore seems unlikely that
Comcast has ventured out on its own to block The Pirate Bay website.
When there’s more information available on the current issues we’ll update this
article. In the meantime Comcast users can access the site through Anonymouse
and other proxies.
Update: It appears that a subset of Rogers users in Canada have problems
accessing the site as well, same with some Optus users in Australia. However,
this doesn’t appear to be as widespread as with Comcast.
_______________________________________________
Infowarrior mailing list
[email protected]
https://attrition.org/mailman/listinfo/infowarrior
