Comcast Offers Help to The Pirate Bay, Fixes Connectivity Issues
Comcast Offers Help to The Pirate Bay, Fixes Connectivity Issues
Posted 05/12/2011 at 3:03pm
| by Ryan Whitwam
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We usually think of the relationship between torrent sites and ISPS as an adversarial one. In fact, Comcast was caught filtering torrent traffic a few years back. But when the Pirate Bay began having connectivity issues today, Comcast reached out to help them.
The Pirate Bay goes through some technical acrobatics to keep their servers obscured from the outside world, so it's not unusual for the site to be intermittently unreachable. But the site was gone for Comcast (and a few other ISPs) customers for most of the day. Comcast confirmed early on they were not blocking the Bay. Then they actually offered engineering talent to The Pirate Bay to fix the issue.
In the end, engineers tracked the problem to reverse path filtering in a Tier1 network called Serious Tubes Networks that the Comacst traffic went through en route to the Bay. "Comcast emailed our NOC about their users complaining about not reaching The Pirate Bay. We resolved the issue and TPB can now be reached from ComCast,” Serious Tubes Networks' CEO told TorrentFreak.
We have to say, this is surprising. It's counterintuitive the largest cable provider in the US would take notice of a shady site like The Pirate Bay going down. Apparently, Comcast does indeed care.
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trisk
May 13, 2011 at 1:02pm
ThePirateBay.org are hosted by PRQ.se and DCPnetworks.net, which are the internet servers in Sweden owned by Fredrik Neij and Gottfried Svartholm Warg, the founders of The Pirate Bay. They also own Serious Tubes Networks.
Here's the disturbing thing: Neij and Warg's company PRQ hosts and co-owns Nambla.org, a website that caters specifically to pedophiles.
http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/192076
http://www.thelocal.se/7504/20070605/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRQInternet hosting records for Nambla.org
http://www.robtex.com/dns/nambla.org.html#records
Wareagle
May 13, 2011 at 7:13am
Here, I see the usual disconnect between technical departments and management.
majorsuave
May 12, 2011 at 7:02pm
Counterintuitive?
The people that buy the largest (XXXMB/s with huge download caps) packages from Comcast are those that usually pay the highest price, and probably those that download a LOT of stuff.
No surprise Comcast wants them happy.
level1paladin
May 12, 2011 at 6:30pm
Only people who love virus' and cease & desist letters use Pirate Bay.
Joji
May 12, 2011 at 10:28pm
You just have to be smart when downloading torrents off Piratebay. Trust only the ones with special skulls and read the comments just in case. For the uploaders with no special skulls or anything, just make sure you know that that person is trustful, and read the comments as usual.
That's what I usually do. It's fact. Easy as that!! Basically, Blastadon's comment sums up everything on how to be safe on Piratebay.
Joji
May 12, 2011 at 6:12pm
Ohh... so that's why I couldn't access Pirate Bay on that day. I wonder if Pirate Bay would meet its fate like Limewire did. O_o
someuid
May 12, 2011 at 4:14pm
I bet they only did this to ensure they could continue to watch traffic for future copyright piracy lawsuits.
WarCrime342
May 12, 2011 at 3:32pm
I had this same issue yesterday, but my ISP is Verizon, not Comcast. However, when attempting to access TPB on my Verizon Wireless phone, everything was all hunky-dory. I'm a bit perplexed, but I can understand why that might be possible. Ironic, isn't it?
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