Provider top level Cogent blocks Pirate Bay and other "pirated" sites

Cogent is the largest Internet provider in the world. This company was founded in 1999 and provides services such as access to the Internet, collocation, and transport of Internet traffic. In general, about 20% of global traffic passes through the networks of this company. The other day it turned out that a number of users of various Internet service providers around the world cannot get access to well-known “pirated” sites, such as The Pirate Bay and others. The request to the site did not go beyond the Cogent backbone network.



Backbone Internet providers, one of which is Cogent - an important part of the global Internet infrastructure. They provide global traffic from point A to point B. Accordingly, the backbone provider may decide not to pass requests to a number of sites. In this case, users of the most diverse Internet providers of lesser importance will not be able to access these sites even if the “native” provider does not block anything, since the Cogent network directly has more than 5,000 inclusions with various large networks around the world, including All known world virtual contents, including Russian ones.



All this fully applies to the "pirated" sites like Primewire, Movie4k, TorrentProject and TorrentButler. Cogent has been blocking user requests for these resources on its network for more than a week . The above sites work with CloudFlare IP addresses. IP - 104.31.18.30 and 104.31.19.30. Most users from all over the world have no problems with these addresses - access to them is open. But this is only if the traffic of these users does not pass through the Cogent network. In this case, access to the specified addresses is denied.

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The problem has already been noticed by users in the USA and Europe. Although it cannot be called large-scale, the fact of blocking raises a number of questions. As for blocking access, Cogent is really engaged in this. The company has a traffic route check, and the picture here is clear.







Sometimes, of course, mistakes happen, so TorrentFreak journalists have requested additional information from the provider. In particular, the question was asked: "Is it true that there is a lock, and if so, what are the reasons?" A spokesman for the company said that the problem will be studied, but in general such issues and solutions are not discussed with third-party companies and journalists. However, the representative of Cogent added that his company does not control the DNS records of the above resources.



However, these sites remain inaccessible from the Cogent network, so the answer to the question of whether the company itself blocks requests for resources is simple - yes. It is more difficult to understand why the trunk provider needed this blocking. Here you can only guess. Perhaps the cause is copyright infringement, requiring a number of copyright holders to block access to violator sites at the “top” level. According to representatives of The Pirate Bay, they already know about the problem and advise users who cannot enter the resource to complain to Cogent, hoping for a successful solution to the problem.



At the same time, all this can be solved without referring to the administration of the resource. Come to the rescue all the same VPN and Tor. It works well and the use of proxy servers.



If the sites themselves, access to which is blocked, will change IP to others, the problem will also disappear after updating the DNS records. But if the lock is entered at the request of the rights holders, then the new IP will soon fall into the "black" list. At the moment, it is known about such blocked Cogent resources as The Pirate Bay, Primewire, Movie4k, Torrentproject, Couch-tuner, Cyro.se, Watchseriesfree, Megashare, Hdmovieswatch, Torrentbutler.eu, Afdah. Movie.to, Mp3monkey, Rnbxclusive.me, Torrentcd, Moviesub, Iptorrents, Putlocker.com and Torrentz.cd.







Right holders have for many years been fighting with sites that, in their opinion, violate copyright by sharing this or that content to the public. With The Pirate Bay, copyright advocates have been fighting almost since the inception of the resource. The creators of the torrent tracker were once tried, fined and imprisoned. The Pirate Bay servers were arrested, domains were razdelegirovalis. Despite this, the site continues to work, although all these actions have affected its traffic - traffic has decreased.



Relatively recently, the yellow jersey of the leader of "pirated" resources received KickassTorrents. In the summer of 2016, its owner was arrested and divided into a number of domains related to KickassTorrents. However, already in December, the site earned again, the former team was engaged in its revival. "Most of the original team, including administrators and moderators, joined us ... - we are very pleased," - said the authors of the project.



It can be assumed that the right holders, seeing the failure of blocking individual sites with the support of local providers (operating in a particular country), decided to go to the backbone providers. If this is true, then, probably, after “Cogent” pirated resources, other top-level network operators may also begin to block.