Belgian Court Orders Blocking Of The Wrong PirateBay Domain

from the the-trials-and-tribulations-of-the-technologically-clueless dept

This is fairly amusing. In the wake of a (not very amusing) ruling in Belgium that ISPs had to implement a DNS blockade of various domains associated with The Pirate Bay, some have realized that the court order failed to actually list The Pirate Bay's main site: thepiratebay.org. Instead, if you look at the details of the order, it lists out www.thepiratebay.org and a variety of other domains, but which all use www at the begining. However, TPB doesn't use www:

So obviously in defiance of that, people testing their dns servers go to the domain www.thepiratebay.org, except, thepiratebay doesn't have the www domain turned on. At one point it redirected to the main page at the url thepiratebay.org, now it doesn't probably because of negligence from the admins. What's interesting is that the court only ordered the block of the www subdomains so if an isp wants to make a fuss they should be able to avoid the penalties until a later ruling.

Of course, further showing the pointlessness of all of this is that TPB already set up an alternate domain, similar to when its faced challenges like this in the past. None of it seems to do anything to slow down TPB (in fact, it seems to help advertise it). Either way, it's yet another reminder of what happens when you have technologically illiterate judges making these kinds of decisions.

Filed Under: belgium, blocking, dns, technical illiteracy
Companies: the pirate bay