Anyone with even a passing knowledge of how piracy works knows that going after specific sites is a giant game of whack-a-mole
Gary Marshall for TechRadar on BT being ordered by the High Court of Justice to block access to Newzbin2, a site largely devoted to sharing illicit copies of files, as reported by the BBC and others. This is an unbelievably fucking stupid decision. Marshall:
It’d be funny if it weren’t so serious: anyone with even a passing knowledge of how piracy works knows that going after specific sites is a giant game of whack-a-mole. But there’s more to this than piracy. Blocking copyright infringement sets a dangerous precedent.
The people who want to access Newzbin2 will be able to find workarounds, so piracy won’t be affected to any great degree. But it’s that second point that’s most important here. UK law now has precedent for ISPs to be compelled to block sites deemed to be infringing copyright, censoring content due to the demands of a corporate entity. What next? BitTorrent? YouTube? Anything the media industry and government decides people shouldn’t have access to? That might sound alarmist, if it wasn’t for the Tory-led UK government already considering a national firewall.
The “child porn only” filter has already been used to stop anyone in the UK editing wikipedia (although they later claimed that was a mistake) and to ruin access to virtually every file sharing site (on the grounds they could potentially be used to distribute it).
Care to guess what they’ll shoe horn in now they’re allowed to block sites supposedly infringing copyright, despite the fact the specific site in question hosts literally nothing infringing itself.
It should also be pointed out (although consider this acedohtal) to me by ISP staff that ISPs have to sign up to the IWF block list in full and have no access to the list, they cannot see what is being blocked.
You should also no that if something is blocked you do NOT (or didn’t a year ago) get a “This is blocked” message. What you get is a standard internet “Error 404” error, which is actually supposed to mean “Page not found”. So you literally cannot tell the difference between a page that genuinely doesn’t exist and something which the government (through an agent and/or the courts) has decided you can’t see.
Of course I, and I dare say our beloved host here have trivially easy access to ways to bypass said list, but a world where the only people with access to the whole internet are the technically gifted is not an especially compelling one. Nor is a world where I have to “test” every 404 just to make sure it really is one.
Also I can’t spell anecdotal.