Be broadband denies BitTorrent ban Be broadband has denied accusations from customers it is blocking access to popular BitTorrent trackers including Pirate Bay and Mininova. Reports that several trackers were unavailable began to emerge yesterday morning. The problems are understood to be ongoing. In the wake of the forthcoming anti-piracy measures announced …
After three or four months of absolutely faultless service from Be, I'm now getting three or four messages a week from them saying my Internet service will be unavailable from midnight through to about six am. Each time I am told it's for necessary improvements and this is the last time it will happen. So far these improvements have only be noticeable by their absence.
Any other Be customers getting these interruptions?
At the time of writing I'm having no problems accessing TPB or Mininova; but if they became blocked I would change my provider in a heartbeat to one which did not block them.
Is it me or has Be's quality of service been declining recently anyway? I'll have to see how things develop over the next few months and maybe consider changing.
Uh huh...
I was looking at Pirate Bay yesterday for erm... research purposes. No problem for Zen internet's users.
Routing problems my arse, do they think we were born yesterday? Who the hell has "routing problems" that prevents people accessing sites with certain content.
That sir, is content filtering being tested.
One of the reasons I chose Be was that they were one of the few with genuinely unrestricted broadband - yesterday The Pirate Bay, Mininova and TheBox were all dead (although isoHunt was okay)
Very suspicious but we'll just have to wait and see, if they do start restricting what I can access I'll go elsewhere.
I've had a bit of trouble getting to a few sites this morning. Guess when you know you're doing something wrong, it's easy to jump to conclusions.
Besides, Demonoid still works for me. Hard to see how they'd miss that one, if they were killing torrent sites. Still, jury's out I guess.
It seems fairly pointless for Be to try and block BitTorrent sites. Their Thomson/Alcatel routers regularly lock up because they can't cope with all the open sockets anyway, even when trying to download legal torrents (ie popular Linux distros). But at least blocking the trackers MIGHT absolve them of any legal responsibilities...
The one with the working ADSL2+ router in the pocket, please...
I've definately managed to download things without breaking the law. I don't use bittorrent much at all, I'm not a freetard, but when my CD player scratched two(well I thought it was my fault when the first one happened but a second deep scratch at 2.30 on both CDs?) of my CDs and made the first tracks unplayable (rest was okay though), I was able to find mp3 versions. And if that is illegal, lets face it, it really shouldn't be.
So anyway, I could argue it's a useful service that does good. Though I admit I'd be overlooking most of it's use.
If it was, they would do more than block the trackers, they would block the torrent traffic...
Let's see - Vuze says all's clear and has been.
@Mike Richards - Be often sends out repeated notices of projected service outages, when you get multiple notices, it is most likely still ONE outage from what I have seen. YMMV, but after a longish time with them I have noticed they tend to over-warn, and under-outage...
The Pirate, well, just because!
just a routing issue
"It appears the problem was with the routing to/from one of our Peers on AMSIX (Amsterdam internet exchange) affecting certain IP ranges.
This would have affected any sites who we connected to via that particular Peer, It may have also affected some other sides if they used that peer to route back to us.
They've confirmed that they've now fixed the problem so it should all be working again."
so you can all stop worrying now no blocking at all
we had a issue at work once and it affected a peering we had with the planet and people thought we where blocking US sites, just was sites hosted with the planet but got sorted out fairly quicky
I joined Be after they were acquired by O2 but when the old management and staff were still there. I have a long line but the speed was better than I expected and they were very reliable. they never slowed down in the evenings.
However, I understand that all the old management have gone since O2 launched the service under their own brand, and earlier this year there was a clear out of the middle ranking people, including the customer services people who listened to and engaged with the customers. There has also been a noable drop in the quality of service, though I won't say it's bad yet. I've got friends onto Be and they're finding it the same.
So I think Be is now well and truely being absorbed by the O2 mindset and it won't be long before O2 wonder why they offer the same service over two brands, with two sets of staff, and Be will disappear.
Shame, all the good ISPs fall apart in the end (Pipex, Nildram, Entanet, etc) while the bad ones hurple along year after year.
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