Torrent sites inadvertently blocked by UK ISP

After the recent Digital Britain report which featured combating piracy quite heavily many users of Be Broadband would probably have been seriously worried when their broadband ISP began block torrent sites.

The blocking of sites like Mininova, Torrentz and The Pirate Bay by Be broadband would be likely to have caused many users a lot of concern.

The true fact of this situation though is that Be broadband was not the only provider to have blocked these peer-to-peer websites and all the providers that have done this did it unintentionally and were unaware of the situation.

The IP ranges that are used by a number of networks in Scandinavia are the reason for the blocking of these websites and the issue is being investigated according to a spokesperson for Be broadband.

The main issue at the moment is that many of the peer-to-peer file sharing websites have network servers based in the Scandinavia region, which is the area where this IP range issue is occurring.

It is likely that once the issues with the IP ranges have been resolved by either the affected broadband service providers or the companies managing the Scandinavian servers access to these websites will be returned to normal.

Although Scandinavian based file sharing server are unavailable most users will most probably find alternative file sharing services that are not based in this region and as such the disruption for most users is likely to be quite limited.

The downloading of illegal copyrighted material was covered in the recent Digital Britain report but it is highly unlikely that either the Government or service providers would outright block file-sharing websites without advised users in advance. There are a number of providers, however, that are considering serious restriction on user that regularly user file-sharing sites for downloading large amounts of material.

Source – www.techwatch.co.uk