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Cloudflare starts blocking pirate sites for UK users
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- xandrius 1y agoShouldn't surprise absolutely nobody, once you become the gatekeeper of the Internet, you're going to gatekeep. Now it's torrent sites and next it's going to be other things the party in charge doesn't like.
- heavensteeth 1y agoRight, it's only natural; they MitM 20% of the internet. Similarly, I struggle to believe they're not providing much of the data they collect to the CIA.
- anon191928 1y agoCIA front like snapchat with all on camera access. Nothing surprising
- gjsman-1000 1y agoAbout a decade ago, there were proposals for a "driver's license for the internet." Nowadays... I actually think it might be a lesser evil. Picture such an ID, if there were a standard for it, enrolled into your computer. If it were properly built, your computer could provide proof of age, identity, or other verified attributes on approval. The ID could also have micro-transaction support, for allowing convenient pay-as-you-go 10 cents per article instead of paywalls, advertising, and subscriptions everywhere. Websites could just block all non-human traffic; awfully convenient in this era of growing spam, malware, AI slop, revenge porn, etc. Website operators, such as those of small forums, would have far less moderation and abuse prevention overhead. Theoretically, it would also massively improve cybersecurity, if websites didn't actually need your credit card number and unique identity anymore. Theoretically, if it was tied to your ID, it's like Privacy.com but for every website; much lower transaction friction but much higher security. I think that's the future at this rate. The only question is who decides how it is implemented.
- 63stack 1y agoThis is so naive. Big tech would be the first to get various exceptions to train their greedy AIs. They would lobby so hard to lock down personal computers, just to make sure you are not tampering with your digital passport. Google would finally have their wet dream of locked down PCs that have no adblock. Politicians would be salivating at the idea of getting the real identities of dissenters, and religious fucks would finally have their way of banning porn and contraceptives.
- gjsman-1000 1y agoYou're assuming this isn't already in the works; I simply see it as we can make the standard now, or let the standard be dictated. We're already seeing it piecemeal, with Cloudflare supporting skipping CAPTCHAs on verified iOS and macOS devices; mobile driver's license enrollment options on iOS; age verification rollouts for websites with no-doubt people thinking how to streamline things; etc. I personally think we are one big cyberattack from the whole concept returning fast. One big cyberattack from governments (and people in general) saying they've had enough of the free-for-all status quo. This isn't a good place to be.
- 63stack 1y agoI'm aware that this might very well be "in the works", what's your point with that? Who is this "we" you are talking about? Are you going to publish a repository on github about what you believe is the ethical way to do this, and you expect Google to follow, or ??? What is this "one big cyberattack away" that you are talking about? Large sites get hacked all the time, and _nobody_ in power gives a single flying fuck. There are zero people held responsible for storing passwords in plaintext, or the admin password set to "123456" or passwords left as the default. Seriously, what are you talking about?
- const_cast 1y ago> You're assuming this isn't already in the works; I simply see it as we can make the standard now, or let the standard be dictated. The difference is we've grandfathered in a lot of older technology - x86, old desktop operating systems like Windows and Linux, old browsers, BIOS, etc. So the existing tools we have for censorship have to work around these existing platforms. These platforms were created in a time where user control was paramount and security was an afterthought. They often do not have the mechanisms required to lock down the boot loader 100% of the time, or give a verified boot chain, or make sure the display signal isn't being intercepted. Our DRM and censorship, then, is very limited. I mean, even with secure boot - I can just turn that off. I can just turn on legacy MBR BIOS mode too. What now? On other, newer, platforms, like your smartphone or smart TV, you'll notice the DRM is much stronger. Try changing out your OS on an iPhone. These platforms are ripe for the picking when it comes to censorship you can't circumvent. So long as these older platforms exist, the usecases must be supported. Sure, we can "streamline" things on DRM heavy platforms like iOS - but we need to keep a trapdoor. Who is going to alienate Windows? Or x86 as a whole?
- jasonlotito 1y ago> Shouldn't surprise absolutely nobody... ...because this is far from the first time this has happened with Cloudflare.
- kragen 1y agoIs it? When did it happen before?
- crinkly 1y agoYes centralising power was such a good idea. Well done big tech. Another footgun.
- theideaofcoffee 1y agoHow is this a footgun? Big Tech will protect Big Tech, it's only an advantage to have a service that will bend to their will. The centralization is the point.
- ndr 1y agoAnything centralized is easier to capture.
- crinkly 1y agoThe bit where we hand everything over and then take the consequences for doing so.
- dmix 1y agoEveryone opted to use Cloudflare, not just big tech. They now control much of the internet in a way that any nation state could only dream of.
- fnord77 1y agocloudflare is big tech now?
- pmdr 1y agoIt sits between millions of users and the websites they desire to visit, and if they're on the right network using the right browser, they won't even know it. It's #24 on this list https://companiesmarketcap.com/software/largest-software-companies-by-market-cap/ https://companiesmarketcap.com/software/largest-software-com... so I'd say it's big tech.
- jadams84 1y ago[dead]
- Havoc 1y agoJust when streaming site are turning extra crappy and user hostile
- gonzalohm 1y agoIs this because the torrent sites are using cloudfare on their end? If so, seems like a simple solution
- Retr0id 1y agoTorrent sites use Cloudflare to hide their origin IPs, among other things, so just not using it isn't an easy option. Easier for torrent sites to tell people to use VPNs.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- GoblinSlayer 1y ago[flagged]
- BobaFloutist 1y agoThat seems less plausible than other pirate sites, random asshole teenagers, or even streaming companies DDosing them.
- hobbitstan 1y agoFirst, they came for 8chan...
- josephcsible 1y agoThis isn't part of that slippery slope, since that was Cloudflare's voluntary choice, but this is legally required of them. (I do think both kinds are bad, though.)
- airhangerf15 1y agoCloudflare also blocked a popular Internet celebrity gossip site and actionably -defamed them in the process, and a popular blog, yet still has customers who run animal crushing sites (which is literally illegal content in many countries). Don't defend them. Their decisions are arbitrary and it's really sad so much of the web has chosen to use their garbage services.
- amiga386 1y agoPSA: UK users can visit all their favourite websites in Tor Browser. Just don't run your torrent client using the tor network. Thank you. You can also access 4chan, Tattle Life, and other nasty gossip websites that the UK nanny state wants to ban. And you can access the porn on Reddit and Twitter (though in some cases you'll have to make an account). And of course the "tube" sites work fine. After you've done that, as a UK citizen, please go to https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/722903 https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/722903 and ask the government to repeal their awful law.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- jchw 1y agoI don't actually use Reddit or Twitter, but I sometimes come across NSFW posts from links. I've found that old.reddit.com seems to allow you to bypass the filter(s) without needing an account. For Twitter, I tend to use the xcancel.com Nitter instance, though there are other Nitter instances that work fine. Bonus for using Nitter here, you can also see the latest posts from an account instead of the most popular posts, and see replies/interactions to individual tweets. Oh, and it gives you plain HTML. Reddit pisses me off so much that despite the fact that I don't even use Reddit, just so that my experience sucks less when I'm linked to Reddit or have another reason to lurk it, - I use the "Old Reddit Redirect" extension to force the browser to go to old reddit - I use the "Load Reddit Images Directly" extension to bypass Reddit's hideous image viewer that tries to load if your browser makes the mistake of having text/html in the "Accept" headers when opening an image in a new tab. (Dear Firefox/Chrome/etc: maybe stop doing that? If I open an image in a new tab, there is a zero percent chance I want HTML.)
- peterpost2 1y agoThe bypass via old.reddit.com stopped working today as well.
- Normal_gaussian 1y ago
- specproc 1y agoThe site suggests that VPNs may be effected. What's the mechanism here? Is this likely to cause trouble for all VPNs?
- grumpyinfosec 1y agorealistically blocking low cost personal VPNs / proxies is pretty easy. Any new servers they stand up are gonna get picked up by commercial threat intel services with an hour and then just blocked. Especially if the CDNs are working with the government. You could roll your own but wireguard/openvpn going to random hosting provider is gonna achieve the same thing if they are playing hardball.
- pjc50 1y agoThey're not playing hardball, it's all on a "will this do" basis, like the US state-level bans. They're certainly not going to start blocking random IPs in hosting providers, that's reserved for email spammers.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- johnisgood 1y agoThis is how I block VPNs for game servers: https://zolk3ri.name/cgit/schachtmeister2/about/ https://zolk3ri.name/cgit/schachtmeister2/about/. It could work for any servers. It is very easy to do so. It gives you a "score" of the IP address (README.md explains it) that connected to your server, and you can decide what to do based on that, for example in my game servers there are certain thresholds. It has been working great.
- instagib 1y agoDNS blocking via 1.1.1.1 is suggested. So, change to another dns. https://www.cloudflare.com/trust-hub/abuse-approach/ https://www.cloudflare.com/trust-hub/abuse-approach/
- JdeBP 1y agoYou <----> residential ISP <----> VPN endpoint <----> CloudFlare CDN <----> actual site The older blocks were being done by residential ISPs, so using a VPN (even simply with an endpoint inside the U.K.) bypassed them. One could obtain the same effect by having a business ISP instead. Now CloudFlare is also doing the blocks in its CDN, which means that it does not matter whether the ISP is business or residential, or whether a U.K. endpoint VPN is being used. All three end up talking to CloudFlare's CDN from inside the U.K., and that CDN is now blocking the content. The tinfoil hat brigade can rest easy. (-: They aren't detecting VPNs. They're just blocking things at a point that is closer to the content origin than all of the U.K. VPNs and ISPs, rather than at a point that that is further away than the U.K. VPNs are.
- Retr0id 1y agoPreviously, a convenient and low-latency way to bypass UK internet censorship was to proxy via a local datacentre - it's only the residential ISPs that are under pressure to censor traffic, commercial ones less so. But if the blocking is happening somewhere other than the ISP, this is less effective. A hypothetical TPB user might want to proxy via Luxembourg now (seems like the shortest hop to somewhere with sane legislation)
- trollied 1y agoYou didn’t even need to do that. Just needed an /etc/hosts entry for the domain.
- Retr0id 1y agoMy ISP (Virgin Media) does DNS filtering and IP-based blocking and TLS SNI inspection. So you have to use ESNI or domain fronting, which last time I checked my browser could not be easily configured to do.
- grishka 1y agoYou may have some success with DPI bypass tools we've been using in Russia for years now, like GoodbyeDPI and Zapret.
- arp242 1y agoIs that common for all ISPs or just Virgin? When I lived in the UK (already a number of years ago) it was all just DNS-based. Running my own DNS resolver unblocked everything. I don't recall which ISP.
- Retr0id 1y agoI think it's just Virgin doing the SNI stuff, but I wouldn't be surprised if others are doing IP filtering. I'm not sure if anyone's done a good survey of what the different ISPs are doing (it'd be an interesting project).
- chickenzzzzu 1y agoClassic mafia racket economics would claim that Cloudflare themselves created the botnet ddos problem so that they themselves could solve it, and now they have the power to do this, especially when governments ask them very sternly to do so.
- v5v3 1y agoClassic NSA tactics would be to setup a giant American Man-In-The-Middle company that most of the traffic of the world passes through.
- chickenzzzzu 1y agoAnd classic Washington Consensus tactics would be to manufacture a fake enemy to demonize in the media, such as Non-Western botnet makers
- pixl97 1y agoBeing that botnet DDOS existed before CF that's a pretty strong statement.
- a2128 1y agoThey existed before, but websites selling DDoS as a service were easier to track down and competitors would DDoS eachother. Cloudflare provided a strong layer of protection for everyone, including these DDoS websites, and took no action to take them down when reported
- slt2021 1y agobotnets are usually coming from residential networks due to infected hosts/IoT devices. if cloudflare were to host malware on their own IPs, it would have been trivial to see CF's steps. Unless you want to suggest that CF is developing and distributing sophisticated malware and making botnets across the world
- chickenzzzzu 1y ago
- sunshine-o 1y agoI came to the realisation recently that the free Internet only happened (in the West) because: - The Silent Generation, in charge at the time, had no idea what was this Internet thing about. - The US Intelligence community understood it was a powerful tool to operate abroad. - Nobody dared derailing the only engine of growth and progress in many economies It obviously got out of control and is very abnormal in fact if you consider how power really works. As of today, as a user of a reputable VPN, I am blocked from a lot essential websites or have to prove I am an human every 5 minutes, it sucks. Anyway we are one major cyber disaster away for our the state to switch from a blacklist to whitelist paradigm. A safer and better Internet for everyone. We will probably still have ways to access the "Free" Internet. It is gonna be fun, slower and might get you in serious troubles.
- pjc50 1y agoYeah, a lot of stuff only worked because it was a "subculture". That could no longer be sustained once the first Twitter President arrived.
- ajsnigrutin 1y agoThe decline of internet began way before trump, I'd say with the rise of facebook and everything moving on there (your local restaurant used to have a website, then switched to facebook only). Centralized power, centralized censorship. At approximately the same time, social networks became less social and more propaganda feeds.... so it went from a feed of content made by your friends for other friends (from complaints in status messages to photos of their plates) and moved to whatever crap they try to serve you now,...
- Dracophoenix 1y agoYou're forgetting that that the Internet was intertwined with the phone system at a time when the latter was the only reliable form of communication at both local and long-distance levels. Interference with the Internet would be interference with the international telephone system.
- 1y ago
- ryzvonusef 1y agoi thought people in the west used these things called seedboxes? basically computers in low risk countries like romania etc, download the torrent there, then copy the file over or something like that.
- ReaperCub 1y agoI have one of these. However it is connected to a VPN 24/7 in my own home. It can't access the net without the VPN being connected and I've checked for IP leaks. https://github.com/qdm12/gluetun https://github.com/qdm12/gluetun However at some point I will have a machine setup in a foreign country as a jump box.
- v5v3 1y agoAs per the URLs listed in the article, many people don't download movies nowadays. They stream them on streaming websites.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- tlogan 1y agoSo pirate sites cannot use CloudFlare. But isn’t that against their ToS? Im just confused - can somebody explain me this?
- pjc50 1y agoCloudflare used to have really open ToS and would host anybody. This included all sorts of far-right sites, and eventually they accepted that they were going to be held responsible for what their customers were doing.
- xtracto 1y agoPirate Sites are stupid. And the need for a Site is a stupid limitation of Bittorrent. People should use real distributed protocols like SoulSeek, Kademila or other similar file sharing protocols that do not require a website for discovery.
- throw123xz 1y agoSoulSeek still relies on central servers for some things. Every time they go down, people go to the sub reddit to ask what's happening.
- boramalper 1y ago> Pirate Sites are stupid. And the need for a Site is a stupid limitation of Bittorrent. See https://bitmagnet.io/ https://bitmagnet.io/
- Cu3PO42 1y agoWhile I don't think it's reasonable to blame corporations for complying with legal orders in the end, I don't see any evidence that they tried to fight it. I really wish they did.
- gpm 1y agoBlocking is the wrong terminology here. Cloudflare is not an ISP which fetches whatever you ask for from third parties. It's a company contracted by the web site owners to distribute their websites. It's much more accurate to say that Cloudflare is no longer acting as a host for pirate sites in the UK. The shocking part of this isn't that they aren't participating in that form of crime in the UK, it's that they're somehow able to participate in it in the rest of the world. And I say this as someone who thinks that copyright laws are largely unjust, preventing people from engaging with their own culture, but that doesn't make them not the law.
- pjc50 1y agoSee https://cybersecurityadvisors.network/2025/04/15/la-liga-blocking-of-cloudflare-ips-in-spain/ https://cybersecurityadvisors.network/2025/04/15/la-liga-blo... : I'm slightly surprised that this hasn't caught up with them too. It used to be important to stay somewhat "below the radar" when pirating, not creating an account at one of the largest internet services. But then anti-piracy enforcement is about money and going after soft targets.
- lambertsimnel 1y ago> It's much more accurate to say that Cloudflare is no longer acting as a host for pirate sites in the UK. I understood from the article that it was for users in the UK, not for hosts in the UK.
- gpm 1y agoThe implied parentheses were intended to be "(Cloudflare is no longer acting as a host for pirate sites) in the uk" not "Cloudflare is no longer acting as a host for (pirate sites in the uk)".
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- viktorcode 1y ago> Blocking is the wrong terminology here. This is geo-blocking, by definition. Personally, it's always sad when a company agrees to censor on their own merit when they don't have legal obligation to.
- pyb 1y agoWhy is Cloudflare providing its services to known pirate sites?
- v5v3 1y agoTo prevent a competitor popping up with a USP.
- throw123xz 1y agoIs the site illegal? If yes, where? And is CF required to follow the laws of that jurisdiction?
- papichulo2023 1y agoI guess renting a vps and setup wireguard should still work?
- v5v3 1y agoYes. And you can buy VPS using crypto.
- encom 1y agoUK is speed-running the Orwellian police state. They're already arresting people for Tweets, and logging "non-crime hate incidents" on your record, available to prospective employers.
- int_19h 1y agoThey have been speed-running for decades. Remember "anti-social behaviour orders"? Those were introduced in 1998. I think a better Orwell reference for this isn't 1984 though but rather https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/the-freedom-of-the-press/ https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel.... This is the essay that was originally meant as a preface to Animal Farm - and, ironically, was itself censored (by publishers).
- throw123xz 1y agoCan you quote one of the Tweets that resulted in someone being arrested?
- encom 1y agohttps://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/google https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/google Anyway, few examples of many: >A teenager who posted rap lyrics which included racist language on Instagram has been found guilty of sending a grossly offensive message. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-merseyside-43816921 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-merseyside-43816921 >A man has been accused of sending a "grossly offensive" tweet in which he claimed "the only good Brit soldier is a deed one" the day after fundraising hero Captain Sir Tom Moore died. https://news.sky.com/story/man-accused-of-sending-grossly-offensive-tweet-about-captain-tom-12529906 https://news.sky.com/story/man-accused-of-sending-grossly-of... >UK police arrest veteran because anti-LGBTQ post 'caused anxiety' https://www.foxnews.com/world/uk-police-british-army-veteran-arrested-anti-lgbtq-social-media-post-caused-anxiety-video https://www.foxnews.com/world/uk-police-british-army-veteran... >Officers from 37 police forces made 12,183 arrests in 2023 [over offensive posts on social media], the equivalent of about 33 per day. https://archive.ph/Yk6Bo https://archive.ph/Yk6Bo
- theodric 1y agoI wonder how long it will take their most loyal client state, Ireland, to implement mirror legislation. I give it a year.
- untoasted12 1y agoSetting my VPN to the UK or Ireland is blocking the sites for me. Mainland Europe is fine.
- theodric 1y agoWell that didn't take long! Truly, we are the least independent non-member member of the United Kingdom.
- GoblinSlayer 1y agoIt's truly United.
- KoolKat23 1y agoAre you getting a 451 error though? Think that's something else.
- untoasted12 1y agoYeah its the 451 error. It says: 'Unavailable For Legal Reasons What happened? In response to a legal order, Cloudflare has taken steps to limit access to this website through Cloudflare's pass-through security and CDN services within the United Kingdom. Find more information about the order, the party that requested it, and the authority that issued it here.' It's a Dublin VPN though.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- KoolKat23 1y agoThat's interesting suspect some multinational ISP's must be routing through their UK operations.
- moktonar 1y agoTime to make our own internet…
- RamblingCTO 1y agothere are so many approaches already tho. yggdrasil, ipfs, tor, freifunk, meshtastic, i2p (mixing a lot of things here, but there is tech out there). so much cool stuff, we just gotta use it.
- boramalper 1y ago> ipfs IPFS have content blocking already: https://badbits.dwebops.pub/ https://badbits.dwebops.pub/
- RamblingCTO 1y agowell it's a slippery slope. you exist in existing jurisdictions and I'd rather not host CSAM tbh
- boramalper 1y agoThey could've defined it as multiple filter lists for different kinds of content like uBlock does, but they chose not to. Therefore, anyone who (understandably and rightfully) want to block CSAM etc are now inadvertently blocking everything else that Protocol Labs disagrees with (e.g. copyright violation).
- RamblingCTO 1y agofair criticism then
- arresin 1y agoThis is not cloudflare’s job. Also, don’t they have bigger problems than this as country?
- 1970-01-01 1y agoThe Internet sees censoring as damage and routes around it accordingly.
- betaby 1y ago'The Internet' is not a thing and won't route anything around. Censured sites stay censured.
- kragen 1y agoNo, that was Usenet. John actually said "the Net", but he was talking about Usenet. Usenet routing does work that way, although it's vulnerable to spoofing. Internet routing basically doesn't work that way at all and never has.
- KPGv2 1y agoHonestly I really don't care if countries want to ban sites that obviously exist to facilitate breaking the law. Yeah yeah but muh linux isos. If they call themselves PIRATE BAY, EZTV, SPORTSCULT or whatever, and everyone who uses it talks only about pirating movies and stuff with a wink wink "linux ISOs" it's pretty clear why it exists. Visit others like ext.to and literally the entire front page is stuff like the new Superman movie, etc. You sound like a fool if you try to argue it's mainly for legitimate purposes. (Contrast with freenet and stuff, where if you've ever used it, you'll find most of the stuff there is people's boring ass personal webpages and stuff
- devmor 1y agoI think "block" is a misnomer here. Cloudflare has said pirate sites as clients - they are not (and cannot) block any pirate sites that are not their clients. The remedy is for those sites to no longer be patrons of Cloudflare. If an analogy helps anyone understand better - imagine you have a lemonade stand. You use your neighbor's yard to set up the stand for some reason (maybe since its closer to a main road, the why doesn't really matter). The city tells your neighbor that they will be fined if they continue to have a lemonade stand in their yard, so your neighbor parks their truck in front of the stand, hiding it from the street. In that analogy, cloudflare is the neighbor and your lemonade stand is the pirate site. You aren't prevented from selling your lemonade, but you can no longer freely use your neighbor's yard unless you want to direct people around the truck ahead of time.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- dlenski 1y agoIn my opinion, this article does a terrible job of explaining the technical mechanisms by which these blocks have been implemented, and the relationships between the entities involved. Trying to piece together the details, here's my undewrstanding: - Until recently, major British residential ISPs were blocking access to torrent/pirate/porn sites for their customers ("BT, Virgin Media, Sky, TalkTalk, EE, and Plusnet account for the majority of the UK’s residential internet market") - Cloudflare has recently been ordered by courts in the UK to block access to these torrent/pirate/porn sites - The reason that Cloudflare is involved is because many of these sites use Cloudflare as a content delivery network. A CDN is <waves hands> basically an application-layer distributed cache that sits between end users' web browsers and the origin HTTP servers that they're trying to access. - Cloudflare geolocates clients connecting to its CDN. It undoubtedly has many reasons to do this, besides just court-ordered geoblocking: these would include routing queries efficiently within its globally distributed datacenters, DDoS prevention, bot blocking, etc. - Cloudflare's geolocation techniques are, unsurprisingly, more sophisticated than just determining a country based on a client's IP address. If I've got all that right (do I???)… then the tl;dr is: It used to be possible for UK users to circumvent the blocks of these sites simply by using any VPN to acquire a non-UK IP address. Now the order to block these sites has been imposed on Cloudflare, which plays a critical role as an intermediary in distributing their content in a scalable way. For a variety of reasons, some of which end-users probably approve of and others not, Cloudflare uses more sophisticated techniques to geolocate clients. So "just use a VPN" is not enough to circumvent the blocks anymore.
- zalix45 1y agoIs this affecting anyone else in Canada
- kragen 1y agoThis is a big deal. We knew since the beginning that replacing the World-Wide Web with a centralized system would make it vulnerable to government censorship, however well intentioned Cloudflare's founders were. This is only the beginning.
- egorfine 1y agoDo I get this right that Cloudflare now decides for me which countries are allowed to see my content?