Customers of British ISP Sky Blocked from Accessing TorrentFreak

The four million customers of British ISP Sky are reportedly unable to access piracy and copyright news website TorrentFreak.

Sky hasn’t blocked the website on purpose. Instead, TorrentFreak has actually been made inaccessible by EZTV.it, the popular torrent site that’s being blocked by six UK ISPs in response to a High Court ruling.

So why would EZTV want to block TorrentFreak? Well, the torrent site didn’t do it on purpose.

EZTV used Geo DNS to redirect its UK visitors to TorrentFreak.com. However, a flaw in Sky’s filtering system makes any website that’s added to EZTV’s DNS inaccessible to customers.

For research purposes, EZTV even attempted to add some of Facebook’s IP addresses to their DNS. However, it didn’t work, possibly because of the wide range of IPs.

“It appears that Sky’s filtering system blocks any and all IP-addresses that EZTV adds to their DNS. This essentially means that EZTV, or any other blocked site, has the power to render entire websites inaccessible to Sky subscribers. Luckily we were the target and not Google,” TorrentFreak noted.

Furthermore, EZTV’s owner highlights that there’s no hack involved. He simply wanted to see how the blocking mechanisms set in place by British ISPs work.

It seems only Sky is using the buggy filtering system, since the news website can be accessed by the customers of other ISPs.

Unfortunately, Sky isn’t in a hurry to address the issue, TorrentFreak says. However, EZTV will remove the website’s IP addresses from its DNS to allow users to access it.

This incident demonstrates that the opponents of such blockades were right to say that the filtering systems might cause collateral damage.