TPG are Censoring my Internet
Well, Internet censorship in Australia has unofficially commenced.
To give some background, I’ve been a (reasonably) happy TPG customer for a number of years, That is until it rains, or for any number of reasons I have to call TPG tech support and sit on hold for 2 hours only to get connected to some idiot that’s sitting offshore in some call center reading from a pre-written script, telling me that I need to buy a new modem or install some sort of microsoft service pack on my mac..
Why do did I like TPG? It’s cheap and has no capped data allowance (for the particular plan that I’m on). This was before they restricted all of my access to port 80 of my favourite creative commons index, ThePirateBay.
And before you start saying that it’s my stupid self or my router or my firewall.. I’m not an idiot and I am probably more experienced at diagnosing network problems than the average Joe, having worked in the Datacenter & Hosting industry for many years now.
Here is a nslookup from my laptop:
JaekBook-Pro:~ jake$ nslookup thepiratebay.org Server: 61.88.88.88 Address: 61.88.88.88#53 Non-authoritative answer: Name: thepiratebay.org Address: 194.71.107.15
Here is an nmap scan from my laptop of thepiratebay.org’s resolving IP at this time:
JaekBook-Pro:~ jake$ nmap -P0 194.71.107.15 Starting Nmap 5.21 ( http://nmap.org ) at 2011-05-23 22:44 EST Nmap scan report for thepiratebay.org (194.71.107.15) Host is up. All 1000 scanned ports on thepiratebay.org (194.71.107.15) are filtered Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 207.79 seconds
That’s a bit odd, no ports appear to be unfiltered and open? Let’s try telnet’ing to TPB’s IP from my linux box (not my laptop) at home:
[root@nugget ~]# telnet 194.71.107.15 80 Trying 194.71.107.15... GET / HTTP/1.1 telnet: connect to address 194.71.107.15: Connection timed out telnet: Unable to connect to remote host: Connection timed out
And to confirm there’s no firewalls on that box:
[root@nugget ~]# iptables -nvL Chain INPUT (policy ACCEPT 0 packets, 0 bytes) pkts bytes target prot opt in out source destination Chain FORWARD (policy ACCEPT 0 packets, 0 bytes) pkts bytes target prot opt in out source destination Chain OUTPUT (policy ACCEPT 0 packets, 0 bytes) pkts bytes target prot opt in out source destination
And just to ensure that I’m not going crazy, Here’s a test from my (Australian hosted) VPS, telnet’ing to the same IP:
From Hosted-VPS (AU) -bash-3.2# telnet 194.71.107.15 80 Trying 194.71.107.15... Connected to 194.71.107.15. Escape character is '^]'. GET / HTTP/1.1 HTTP/1.1 400 Bad Request Content-Type: text/html Content-Length: 349 Connection: close Date: Mon, 23 May 2011 12:33:21 GMT Server: lighttpd
Now seriously.. Was the downloading and seeding of the high definition copy of “The Tunnel” enough to permit my ISP to censor my access to particular URLs? I hope not. You would think that some sort of speed shaping would be introduced… right? Or maybe a phone call to ask if my usage could be reduced.
What makes this a slight bit amusing, only because I know they’re idiots, is that even though access to the website is censored, I can still access the actual trackers. Additionally, I can still bounce my connection through any number of servers or proxies on the internet and download the creative commons & open source .torrent files I need.
