Major UK ISPs ordered to block five pirate streaming sites

[HEXUS]

Hollywood studios worked with Netflix to get latest London High Court injunction.

Read more.

[smargh]

BT implemented additional blocking methods on 14 October at around midday which blocks sites behind Cloudflare. Prior to that I believe they were just observing DNS traffic.

I suspect they're now also looking at TLS SNI, but I haven't been able to test the theory due to being unable to find a browser/client which supports ECH.

Presumably they want Cloudflare to give the sites a dedicated IP because they know that browsers will eventually support ECH by default. In the meantime, ISPs would need to redirect less traffic to through their filtering hardware (which is presumably also used for LI), keeping costs down.

Dunno what they'll do after ECH is widely supported though. Presumably authorities are influencing browser makers to either delay or nobble it.

[blokeinkent]

BT implemented additional blocking methods on 14 October at around midday which blocks sites behind Cloudflare. Prior to that I believe they were just observing DNS traffic.

I suspect they're now also looking at TLS SNI, but I haven't been able to test the theory due to being unable to find a browser/client which supports ECH.

You sound like you know what you're talking about so i'll direct a question at you please if you don't mind? Will this blocking be effective against use of a VPN or the proxy URL's that tend to pop up when things like this happen?

[Tabbykatze]

You sound like you know what you're talking about so i'll direct a question at you please if you don't mind? Will this blocking be effective against use of a VPN or the proxy URL's that tend to pop up when things like this happen?

No, as long as as the VPN is encapsulating the traffic within a tunnel, to the outside (BT et al), the SNI and details will just be application (VPN) traffic between a source and destination. A halfway decent VPN will encapsulate all traffic including the DNS traffic so unless they're badly designed and leaking data outside of the tunnel and not stripping the SNI data, it should be fine.

[Ttaskmaster]

Surprised TPB and similarly frequent suspects aren't on the list... are they not still around, any more?

[Tabbykatze]

Surprised TPB and similarly frequent suspects aren't on the list... are they not still around, any more?

The official ones are dead but the mirror sites pop up and get blocked almost daily. I'm pretty sure there are standing orders that any TPB-esque site is insta blocked by providers as soon as it's verified.

[blokeinkent]

No, as long as as the VPN is encapsulating the traffic within a tunnel, to the outside (BT et al), the SNI and details will just be application (VPN) traffic between a source and destination. A halfway decent VPN will encapsulate all traffic including the DNS traffic so unless they're badly designed and leaking data outside of the tunnel and not stripping the SNI data, it should be fine.

OK. Thanks

[Bagpuss]

I must live a sheltered, ignorant life.

Whenever stories like this come up, I've never, ever heard of any the sites involved.

[LSG501]

So instead of fixing the reasons people actually pirate they just take the usual approach of trying to play whack-a-mole....the media companies will learn one day I suppose.

[kalniel]

So instead of fixing the reasons people actually pirate

Mandatory morality lessons for all citizens!!! Yeah I can see that working well

[AethersPhil]

So instead of fixing the reasons people actually pirate they just take the usual approach of trying to play whack-a-mole....the media companies will learn one day I suppose.

They do learn, then they notice how much money they are making and disrupt their own market in search of an extra buck.

iTunes massively reduced music piracy. Other companies noticed and then set up their own services, fragmenting the market again. Although I haven't heard of music piracy for years, so maybe this has reached equilibrium.

Steam reduced game piracy with its ludicrous sales. Now there's Steam, Origin, UbiPlay (Or whatever), Epic, GOG... Fragmenting the market again, and making piracy an easier choice.

Same again for Netflix. Started off well, then other companies smelled the money and carved up all the content in their own little fiefdoms.

[spacein_vader]

This is why I stick to the smaller ISPs. I don't use illegal streams but it stands to reason the government will issue blocks to any other content they seem undesirable to the big boys first too.

I dont trust the government (this or any other,) not to take advantage over what is deemed unacceptable.

[LSG501]

Mandatory morality lessons for all citizens!!! Yeah I can see that working well

According to research conducted by the companies trying to stop illegal streaming etc most pirates would pay for their goods if it was fairly priced and easily available in their country..... and to be fair this could be 'fixed' quite easily but as shown by the below quote the companies in charge are more focused on competing for a bigger share than working together to improve the overall situation.

iTunes massively reduced music piracy. Other companies noticed and then set up their own services, fragmenting the market again. Although I haven't heard of music piracy for years, so maybe this has reached equilibrium.

There's likely 2 maybe 3 main players in music these days, a good number to keep the prices competitive, the main difference compared with say tv shows is there isn't a huge difference with mainstream music between the itunes and say spotify, niche music is a little harder to get still. We'll just skip past the fact that it was (and still is in the UK) illegal to rip cd's when itunes was released.....

Steam reduced game piracy with its ludicrous sales. Now there's Steam, Origin, UbiPlay (Or whatever), Epic, GOG... Fragmenting the market again, and making piracy an easier choice.

to be fair most of us would chose not to run a 'games store' if we could lol I've got epic installed (gta online, which I wouldn't pay for but was ok for free) and it's just added a 'chat window' type thing with no way to disable it... yeah thanks epic, I don't have any friends linked to my epic account so it's completely useless. Steam isn't much better in all honesty. GoG isn't too bad a deal though, usually no drm, fair pricing etc.

Same again for Netflix. Started off well, then other companies smelled the money and carved up all the content in their own little fiefdoms.

yeah the biggest cause of pirating tv shows/movies is the new quest to break everything up so it's more like cable tv and increasing overall costs... yeah that's going to stop piracy 'Exclusives' and delaying a release in other countries doesn't help either in all honesty, you just need to look at game of thrones to see how regional restrictions and delayed releases spiked illegal downloads in the show.... people don't want delays with releases when there are things like twitter/facebook etc to spoil the show for them.

[Macman]

I'd quite happily pay for the legit services had it been fair... but as per, the consumer is forever being shafted due to greed.

I follow 3 different teams which requires 6 seperate subscriptions (Rangers TV/Sky Sports/BT Sport/La Liga TV/Premier Sports and NFL Gamepass) which I'm not prepared to pay the asking price. Sky alone would set me back £76 p/month

[philehidiot]

I stopped pirating stuff some years back. Now I can afford to buy software, I do and it keeps me above board for work. If I were to get caught, it would basically ruin my life in about 3 different ways having that record, so I just don't. I think with the more traditionally expensive software now being affordable, available on subscription or just have usable free alternatives, people don't tend to need to pirate.

I tell you what does make me want to pirate - DRM. The cure is worse than the disease. I've actually had more problems with anti-piracy stuff since I decided to go completely legal. It has ruined games, made software unusable (when they decide to shut down their activation servers despite people having the thing they thought they bought on a CD!) and routinely throws up errors telling me my laptop isn't HDCP compliant (it is and I have to restart my browser).

Compare that to just creating a secure environment in a VM and pirating all the media you want. It just works, you can pop films on a USB stick and watch them wherever and blah blah.

I recently downloaded an entire series from Amazon Video to watch on my phone when we went somewhere without decent internet. When we went out and my phone got a sniff of internet, it detected that the licencing conditions for that program had changed. I could still stream it if I wanted, but it disabled all my downloads... obviously I couldn't redownload anything as I found out when we got back to our internet-less cottage.

DRM has got so bad, I've even considered buying stuff on DVD / blu ray and then downloading the pirated version. Even moreso with games where I don't care about the multiplayer, but I don't want it kicking me off single player every time the internet coughs.

Utter madness. The fragmentation of streaming platforms and games launchers is just making it more and more hassle. So yeah, people will pirate because it "just works" most of the time.

[QuorTek]

the prices for these services they offer is ridicoulous... so it is understandable... if you got netflix.. you wont get extra benefits from other places.. and then you need Discovery's and Disneys... and whatever else friggen streaming service for X content.