It is sad, but I cannot read this blog post. The Dutch equivalent of the RIAA/MPAA, named Brein, sued two of the major Dutch ISPs for not blocking access to The Pirate Bay. Brein won the court case, and the judge required these ISPs to block The Pirate Bay starting yesterday.
Now I am met with this when visiting thepiratebay.se:
The Pirate Bay will reach an age of 9 years. Experiencing raids, espionage and death threats, we're still here. We've been through hell and back and it has made us tougher than ever.
The people running the site has changed during the years. No sane human being would put up with this kind of pressure for 8 years in a row. An insane hobby that takes time from our families, our work (sorry boss) and our studies.
What binds us all together is a strong belief that what we do is good. That it is something we one day can tell our grandchildren about with pride. People from all over the world confirm this. We read testimonials from people in Syria longing for freedom, thanking us for what we provide. We receive more than 100 visits daily from North Korea and we sure know that they need it. If there's something that will bring peace to this world it is the understanding and appreciation of your fellow man. What better way to do that than with this vast library of culture?
With this said, we hear news from our old admins that they have received a verdict in Sweden. Our 3 friends and blood brothers have been sentenced to prison. This might sound worse than it is. Since no one of them no longer lives in Sweden, they won't go to jail. They are as free today as they were yesterday.
But what enrages us to our inner core is that the system, the empire, the governments, are still allowed to try to boss you and us around with one law crazier than the other. Do you think they will stop with SOPA/ACTA/PIPA? They will not. Because you won't stop sharing those files. Because we will not stay down. Because no one can turn back time. Together, we are the iron that hardens with each strike.
In this year of the storm, the winners will build windmills and the losers will raise shelters. So flex your muscles, fellow pirates, and give power to us all! Build more sites! More nets! More protocols! Scream louder than ever and take it to the next level!
Often the filtering happens through your ISP's domain server rather than at a IP level.
The server might have e.g. *.thepiratebay.se forced to return an IP address then showing the blocking page.
The workaround is to use a DNS server outside of your ISP -- e.g. Google's 8.8.8.8 nameserver, or alternatively adding the known IPs to /etc/hosts (which might take precedence over a nameserver response depending on your configuration).
Unfortunately, they are filtering traffic to The Pirate Bay's IP adresses as well. This was part of the verdict, they have to filter the list of IP addresses (hosting TPB) that Brein provides.
Edit: I, as most other people here, are perfectly capable of setting up a tunnel. Most people outside these small confines aren't.
Not yet. That will change as soon as they deem it necessary. A lot of technical people are willing to explain to less technical people, and there are suddenly a lot of easy tutorials on how to circumvent the blocks.
Just like previous tries by Brein, the effectiveness of this won't last a day.
I'm at work at the TU Delft right now, which lets me access thepiratebay.se, but I might test this with my Internet connection at home to see whether it is blocked.
If it's censored at the DNS level, you can get around it by using an open DNS server rather than your internet server. If it is censored at an HTTP level, then you can get around it by using HTTPS. (Although I just tried this and thepiratebay.se uses thepiratebay.org's security certificate.)
But if it's censored by IP address, then the problem is much more pressing and you'll have to use a proxy. One project that I will shamelessly plug makes your traffic indistinguishable from HTTPS connections, but it gets to be a bit slow (read: use it for twitter and text websites and metadata files, but not for downloading gigabytes of stuff), it is at https://www.torproject.org/ .
Open question for other Nederlanders: Is there any political activity focused on dismantling Brein's censorship that I can join? Is there a Dutch-centric EFF?
They also filter traffic to TPB IP adresses. I am aware of the methods that can be used to circumvent such censorship. In fact, I could easily do it with my VPS.
But that is all besides the point, because the average citizen does not have the technical knowledge to circumvent blockades. They were shut off from a part of the web yesterday. And this is probably just the beginning.
BoF barely communicates externally besides preaching to the choir. Lobbying seems to be limited to relatively powerless left-wing opposition politicians. Getting broader support is exactly what they very much don't do.
And so far the result has been exactly what you would expect: we've been railroaded with measures violating privacy and limiting online freedom, with very little protest.
I don't claim to know the details, and I'm certainly not trying to defend them or something. But even if they're not as effective as they could be, every "bit" helps.
HN cannot be taken as a whole. You're attempting to say that because a lot of people on HN say "Google is evil" that when someone else suggests their free DNS server, this is some sort of hypocrisy.
I guess it's understandable to be frustrated at the anti-Google sentiment if you are a Google employee and don't see anything bad happening internally, but don't turn this into some "HN vs. Google" men-in-costumes-wrestling-around-in-a-scale-model-of-Tokyo battle.
Yeah, I know. I just wanted to make people aware of that contrast in a snarky manner. I think I succeeded :) :)
I'm not really frustrated with the anti-Google sentiment. Everyone hates everything, and I can accept that. It does bother me when people start hating things without really knowing why. (Evil, by the way, has very little to do with changing a privacy policy to be more readable or adding experimental features to products you like. Those are more unusual than anything else, and people react poorly to things that are unusual. Remember how the iPhone wasn't going to have any apps? It was the end of the world. Then Apple's experiment yielded results that said, "holy fuck, we need apps" and then everyone was happy again. The world evolves incrementally, and to move forward, sometimes you have to move backwards.)
Ah, they do IP-level block. Belgian ISPs were only mandated to perform DNS blocks (on ~20 domains) so a new domain name is sufficient to route around them.
It's probably worth noting that the third one you listed, HMA, was recently cooperative with a US investigation into Anonymous. You should check the log retention and other policies of whatever VPN you choose to make sure they are suitable for your activities. For example, if you are traveling in a country with restricted Internet access and accessing confidential information from your employer's network, you probably don't want to be using a VPN service that cooperates with requests that may be harmful to your employer.
Now I am met with this when visiting thepiratebay.se:
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/838/blokkade.png/
Internet censorship is now real in The Netherlands