17-year-old student exposes Germany's 'secret' pirate site blocklist

https://torrentfreak.com/17-year-old-student-exposes-germanys-secret-pirate-site-blocklist-240822/

by isaacfrond • 2 years ago

521 228 2 years ago

_blk• 2 years ago

Given the secrecy of the list, the lack of court orders and little to no accountability, I'm very impressed to find "only" 104 main domains.

ulbu• 2 years ago

[flagged]

netsharc• 2 years ago

The use of clearing here means something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clearing_house_(finance) , i.e. an independent body so that copyright holders don't have to contact every single ISP, and ISPs just have to argue against the DNS blocks with a single party instead of many copyright holders.

fsckboy• 2 years ago

the site also links to various options available to the public to circumvent the blocking efforts. This includes switching to third party DNS resolvers

says what is blocked is at the DNS level; I guess that means not blackholing routing to the IP addresses

interestingly, the benchmark sites I use to conduct my censorship research are not even in their list?

treprinum• 2 years ago

I can confirm, they are banned but VPN or Tor can access them without any issues. So it's only to prevent normies from accessing them.

johannes1234321• 2 years ago

It's even simpler: Those blocks are implemented in DNS. Pick 8.8.8.8 or some other public DNS server and blocks are bypassed.

(And pick another ISP - it's their job to provide neutral net access, not mess with it, especially not mess with it without court order or something just by request of some private companies)

SoftTalker6• 2 years ago

Some ISPs prevent you from using other DNS. Comcast/Xfinity modem/routers for example.

marci• 2 years ago

I imagine a lot of the normies that got blocked trying to get to sci-hub didn't remain normies for long.

cocok• 2 years ago

"We all began as something else."

sulandor3• 2 years ago

true

it's an annoying precedent besides the tech-support labor of folks like us trying to fix it.

darreninthenet• 2 years ago

What's the betting that cuiiliste.de is added to the list next at the "request" of some anonymous rights holder...?

Retr0id• 2 years ago

UK ISPs block similar list-of-other-sites sites

thesnide• 2 years ago

I feel that some will feel a kind of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect soon

wkat42429• 2 years ago

Yeah I bet this is exactly why they didn't publish the list :)

Jun8• 2 years ago

Other than sci-hub they seem to be almost wholly sports and movie sharing sites (one site I saw had Nintendo switch games). Surprised that libgen is not on the list.

krtkush2• 2 years ago

I have a RPi 5 running as a Tailscale exit node in my parent's house in a developing country. The said country does not care much about what people download. qbittorrent-nox makes it very easy to download stuff by just using my browser. Plus, I have access to local, region locked streaming content and very cheap Netflix subscription.

killingtime74• 2 years ago

New Zealand?

d3m0t3p• 2 years ago

New Zealand, developing country ?

Brajeshwar• 2 years ago

I think Maharashtra, India.

slyall• 2 years ago

Actually in New Zealand getting into trouble for downloading is fairly rare.

The Studios and Music Companies lobbied and got a law passed but the ISPs managed to have the law include a small charge ($20 from memory) for each notice. So the Movie/TV people never bother sending any notices and the music people only rarely do it.

bloqs• 2 years ago

Is there a service to rent these?

veqq• 2 years ago

How much would you pay for that - compared to existing VPN solutions? You can find cloud hosts or server rentals in Bosnia, Colombia or wherever fairly easily.

fragmede• 2 years ago

A service like that would be worth a premiumize amount

everforward2• 2 years ago

This sounds similar to a seedbox, a server rented to do piracy so DMCA complaints and such are sent to your seedbox provider instead of you.

The seedbox providers are typically headquartered somewhere where they can just burn DMCA notices. The servers themselves are also often located in piracy friendly jurisdictions (the Netherlands used to be common, not sure what’s current).

They usually come pre-installed with a remotely accessible torrent client like Deluge, Transmission, etc. Also often includes other software like VPNs, Plex, etc.

You should be relatively safe using one. The server does all the torrenting, you just download the files over FTP so you never appear in the swarm directly. It’s also a huge pain in the ass for law enforcement because it becomes international quickly. You’re in country X, the server with its IP in the swarm is in country Y, and the company that has the rental agreement with the data center for the server is in country Z.

Anecdotally, I used to spend some time in the space and I can’t recall a seed box provider ever getting raided. I think they just generally don’t bother with folks technical enough to go that far; there are easier fish to fry.

sulandor3• 2 years ago

"residential proxy"

providing such a service (-network) is a popular monetization option for all kinds of useless crapware. this is very useful, but even more shady than regular vpn providers.

princevegeta893• 2 years ago

Netflix subscription - Netflix stopped access to streaming for accounts unless you're in the original country of billing. Are you streaming Netflix through your tunnel as well?

manmal2• 2 years ago

Why not, that’s one of the main use cases for Tailscale.

krtkush2• 2 years ago

Are you streaming Netflix through your tunnel as well?

Yep!

konstantinua00• 2 years ago

why was it kept secret?

marcosdumay• 2 years ago

To be fair, a public list of DNS blocking is guaranteed to work even worse than a secret one.

gsich• 2 years ago

it wasn't

wkat42429• 2 years ago

I'm really surprised this list doesn't contain any of the big names I'm using. In fact I've never heard of any of these sites.

I'm using many of the book sites and general torrent ones (I won't name them here), but none of these are on the list.

I also think the point is kinda moot because everyone doing torrents in Germany will already use VPN because it's only a matter of time before you get serious letters from lawyers there, demanding about 400 euro per move they've seen you download. ISPs always cooperate in giving subscriber info for each IP. Some lawyer firms actually specialise in this and go after downloaders on their own.

I wonder if they leave the big torrent sites out to provide income for these lawyers?

sudobash1• 2 years ago

Ot of curiosity, how does this work? If a site is over https, then the only information I would think the ISP would have is the subscriber downloaded from randompiratesite.xyz what seems to be a single X GiB file. They could see that the size roughly corresponds to FooBar.mp4 on that site (plus some HTTP headers). But this seems pretty unreliable. (Like what if someone was using a download manager to get multiple large files at once, using multiple download streams per file?)

I'm sure that you can get in plenty of trouble for downloading a ton of data from randompiratesite.xyz or whatever, but how the ISP determine the number of movies they've seen you download?

Semaphor8• 2 years ago

It's not the sites, it's torrenting. Without a VPN, they get your IP, and you are on the hook for "commercial distribution" (as clients also upload) unless you pay X00 euros.

leafmeal• 2 years ago

If they're also downloading or seeding the torrent, the learn the IPs of their peers, so they know you were downloading that particular file.

loeg5• 2 years ago

If a site is over https, then the only information I would think the ISP would have is the subscriber downloaded from randompiratesite.xyz what seems to be a single X GiB file

That isn't how torrent sites work. You visit site.xyz and download a .torrent file in the realm of 10s-100s (typically) of kB and that contains some metadata that a dedicated torrent client consumes. The torrent client connects to (1) some tracker via http (or https, but usually http) which may or may not be associated with the site the .torrent came from, to register as part of the swarm, and (2) any number of peer torrent clients. The actual data (X GiB) transfer comes from those peers; not the original site.xyz nor the tracker.

ISPs can observe DNS lookups / connections to site.xyz; tracker "announces" (that's (1) above), especially if they are http. And even the peer-to-peer traffic has a distinct protocol which is recognizable with packet inspection. But the main avenue for finding offenders, I believe, is just downloading the same .torrents for some specific copyrighted content and using the torrents' associated tracker(s) to enumerate swarm peer IP addresses.

Krasnol2• 2 years ago

They've been blocked because they became too popular.

I've heard from kinox from people I would have never suspected to be even capable of finding such a site.

Guess those people have been the marker.

Sakos3• 2 years ago

Probably been told about it by friends. Whenever I find a decent site, I pass it on to anybody I know who needs it. kinox used to be one of those sites.

Green-Man• 2 years ago

700€ per movie is a current rate, plus a couple of hundreds as legal fees.

wkat42429• 2 years ago

Yeah ridiculous. Only in Germany...

ThatMedicIsASpy• 2 years ago

nsw2u is something I've used when I wanted to look at the current state of switch emulation

imhoguy• 2 years ago

Sci-Hub domains are listed, that is big.

wkat42429• 2 years ago

What is that? I've never heard of it.

amelius• 2 years ago

And libgen?

rightbyte• 2 years ago

It wouldn't surprise me if not having access to Sci-hub is about as bad for research and academiaishnesshood as ... dunno... like really bad.

greensh• 2 years ago

i live in germany, cannot access Sci-hub via ISP's DNS

Sakos3• 2 years ago

I use and have used a large number of these. Many of them are primarily German streaming sites. Ziperto is a file hosting site, which you'd only come into contact with through certain kinds of direct download piracy sites. I'm not surprised you haven't heard of any of them, even though they are actually quite popular in some circles.

bowsamic2• 2 years ago

Yeah I didn’t know about this when coming to Germany and downloaded something without a VPN. Thankfully I was spared. But now I always use one with a reasonable good kill switch setup and forcing the torrent client to use the vpns network device

slightwinder• 2 years ago

I'm really surprised this list doesn't contain any of the big names I'm using.

This might be more a proof for this whole blocking-business actually working. kinox, serienjunkies and similar named domains were very famous and huge 5-10 years ago. Since then, they have been raided, sued, blocked, etc. So it seems they've been fallen in grace and awareness with their target-group.

gardenmud• 2 years ago

I actually kind of appreciate the laws there. It's sort of weird because it's one of those things where -- if you just use a VPN it totally negates the problem. Like somehow it's just "common knowledge" that you can do any of that with a VPN and you're risk free. It's this loophole that... you can't really close as a government without being completely authoritarian.

So it's not shocking that some might want to shut down VPNs or make using a VPN illegal (like, uh, North Korea, Belarus, Iraq, Oman, Turkmenistan... oof).

rrr_oh_man3• 2 years ago

Side note: (Very intrusive) Deep Packet Inspection is active and alive in EU ally countries Kazakhstan and Turkey.

cynicalpeace• 2 years ago

"Secret" and "German" in the same sentence makes your ears perk up

grishka• 2 years ago

DNS-based blocking? As someone living in a country with ever-increasing internet censorship, that's not blocking, that's a trivially ignorable gentle suggestion to not visit these sites.

pwg• 2 years ago

For 99.8% of internet users, DNS based blocking is a hard stop (for them).

For the remaining 0.2% who know how things work, they are a brief bump in the road to getting to the site they want to pull up.

redprince2• 2 years ago

The solutions are just a Google search away and easy to implement. If that stops anyone even slightly motivated I must wonder what they are generally able to achieve with a computer.

chgs• 2 years ago

Do you have any citation for those numbers?

When dns blocks were in Turkey using non isp servers was common enough for it to be graffitied

https://www.mic.com/articles/85987/turkish-protesters-are-sp...

bonoboTP4• 2 years ago

It's a hard stop because Germans don't really care so much. They are rich enough that they can just pay for a legal streaming platform or to just buy the movies and games. In actually poor countries where the price is a real stumbling block, people do figure out how to use the required tools. In Eastern Europe, usage of torrent is common knowledge among average people. Everyone has some friend or family member who will explain and install it for them and they are motivated to learn. It's remarkable how much better people become at computer skills once it's about getting access to your favorite TV shows, movies or games.

azernik• 2 years ago

The point is:

1. Cynically, for bureaucrats to be able to claim they're doing something about an issue the politicians care about, but which the bureaucrats think is a non-issue. 2. Less cynically, to take away plausible deniability for the torrenter about whether the thing is allowed or not.

sulandor3• 2 years ago

germany had really nice internet until a few years ago

but yea, it's very annoying

65102• 2 years ago

Besides my opinion about file sharing this scheme seems to bypass the legal system but pretends to be based on legal grounds. What we have here is [more] privatization of the legal system and bypassing democracy.

To state the obvious: If you have someone doing things you don't like in office you can vote them out and replace them with someone who doesn't do those things. This is already a slow and cumbersome process that may take decades to materialize.

Or does this provide a framework for implementing direct democracy? Have a website with law proposals that can be implemented in a privatized way, have the citizens vote for and against them then pressure corporations to implement them.

matheusmoreira2• 2 years ago

Copyright monopolists employ lobbyists. They basically buy laws which favor and protect their own monopolies and rent seeking. Voting does absolutely nothing to stop this trillion dollar industry.

65102• 2 years ago

Democracy is like Voodoo, it only works if you believe in it.

2-3-7-43-1807• 2 years ago

so many interesting new websites to check out ... LOL ...

pazimzadeh• 2 years ago

yeah I appreciate them putting this together

WhatsName• 2 years ago

My theory is that DNS blocking is chosen deliberately. There are more effective means of blocking, but if the bypass is just 5min work, those who care will bypass it and those who don't care enough will get blocked.

It's just after people get accustom to having a censorship infrastructure in place, it slowly starts spreading like cancer and gaining momentum...

mrinfinitiesx• 2 years ago

Openvpn / Wireguard service is preferable, but for free: https://github.com/DNSCrypt/dnscrypt-proxy

sudo apt install dnscrypt-proxy

sudo systemctl enable dnscrypt-proxy (or system service dnscrypt-proxy start|enable)

sudo mv /etc/resolv.conf ~/resolv.conf.bak

sudo rm /etc/resolv.conf

sudo nano /etc/resolv.conf

nameserver 127.0.0.1

#back up to dns over plaintext not recomennded if your dnscrypt-proxy service stops for whatever reason (enable in systemd, too lazy to write here)

#nameserver 1.1.1.1

sudo chattr +i /etc/resolv.conf

Always use DoH / DoT (DNS over HTTPS / TLS)

in firefox, settings -> DNS in search select Max protection choose NexDNS, make a NexDNS account for further privacy/setting up your local DNS restrictions like ad/tracker blocks

or use cloudflare.

Cheap VPS proxy:

on a VPS, do said dnscrypt-proxy

ssh -D 8080 -i ~/.ssh/sshkey username@vps.server (always use SSH key auth, no passwords)

in firefox, set up proxy 127.0.0.1 8080 select 'Use DNS through proxy' - can set proxy settings at OS level to use DNS.

There's some options for you. Tailscale works, haven't tried it though.

codedokode9• 2 years ago

Both openvpn and wireguard protocols are trivially blocked by DPI. Why do people make custom protocols today? Everybody should use something standard and indistinguishable, like QUIC, DTLS or TLS1.3, for their transport layer.

red-iron-pine2• 2 years ago

makes me think of the Harvard kid that called in a bomb threat via Tor -- and was the only one on campus using Tor.

so even though that stream was itself encrypted, it was trivially easy to track down that one guy and tie it to him.

lyu072822• 2 years ago

Correct me if I'm wrong but I don't think any ISP does DPI for mass censorship, that would be way to expensive

ignoramous2• 2 years ago

wireguard protocols are trivially blocked by DPI

There's at least 2 or more different efforts to make WireGuard DPI resistant. Ex: https://github.com/database64128/swgp-go

Interestingly, Cloudflare (and Apple?) have begun switching to MASQUE: https://blog.cloudflare.com/zero-trust-warp-with-a-masque

Everybody should use something standard ... like QUIC, DTLS or TLS1.3, for their transport layer.

Very common for anti-censorship tools (V2Ray, XRay, Clash, Hysteria, Trojan, uTLS, Snowflake, SingBox, Outline etc) to use these.

nine_k2• 2 years ago

something standard and indistinguishable, like QUIC, DTLS or TLS1.3, for their transport layer.

Exactly this does exist, search for xray / xtls-reality.

A node pretends to be a valid web site, with a valid third-party TLS certificate (like a CDN node serving that website), until a correct secret key is presented, then it looks like regular TLS-encrypted web traffic.

E.g. https://github.com/XTLS/Xray-core — most documentation, sadly but expectedly, is in Chinese and Russian, because these folks seem to need this most.

ordu• 2 years ago

Both openvpn and wireguard protocols are trivially blocked by DPI.

Not so trivially as it seems. I use wireguard from Russia despite their efforts to block it. It needs some tricks to connect, but it works. I believe that openvpn will work too with those tricks.

Everybody should use something standard and indistinguishable, like QUIC, DTLS or TLS1.3, for their transport layer.

Let them first learn how to block wireguard properly. No point to show them the full scale of the problem they face, so they could get more funding. :)

On a more serious note, it is whack-the-mole game, the idea that sounds like "everybody should use X" for some value of X is not a good idea. Everybody should look for their own way to bypass censorship, and they should do it with as much creativity and tech skills as they have.

jiiam• 2 years ago

Both openvpn and wireguard protocols are trivially blocked by DPI.

I don't understand why this matters, it's not like your ISP will ever block this kind of traffic since every company that has any form of IT department uses some form of VPN making it not only a legitimate kind of traffic but also quite common.

manuel_w• 2 years ago

sudo chattr +i /etc/resolv.conf

Why that?

BenjiWiebe• 2 years ago

That makes the file immutable - when your network manager tries to rewrite the file because you reconnected to your wifi, it can't.

ruthmarx2• 2 years ago

I don't see obscuring DNS queries as that useful when you just go ahead and connect to the server you wanted the address of directly anyway.

submeta2• 2 years ago

Will using NordVPN help? Anyone knows this?

3np• 2 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20368963

BLKNSLVR• 2 years ago

No, NordVPN sucks.

I can tell by the fact that so many sites with trash content sing it's praises.

The lady doth protest too much, methinks.

stuffoverflow• 2 years ago

Since you didn't get a serious answer yet... Yes, VPNs typically use their own DNS and NordVPN is no different. As far as I've seen, the copyright trolls in Europe always go for the lowest hanging fruit which are the IP addresses of residential users. I imagine IP addresses belonging to servers or VPNs are basically disregarded.

submeta2• 2 years ago

Thank you very much for the detailed response

mtron_• 2 years ago

Austrian Provider liwest is since many years very transparent about their DNS blocks. All of them are based on court orders / eu sanctions.

https://netzsperre.liwest.at/

slymax• 2 years ago

the regulator in Austria (RTR) publishes all the blocked domains across all ISPs with information regarding the legal basis for each domain

https://www.rtr.at/TKP/was_wir_tun/telekommunikation/weitere...

gustavus• 2 years ago

Just imagine how easy this pirate list could be turned into a "misinformation" list. Makes you think.

tamimio2• 2 years ago

Wait till you know that airplanes and landlords also maintain secret, unregulated lists.

silexia• 2 years ago

Sunlight and transparency are good. All attempts at secrecy should be eliminated.

mattdee• 2 years ago

save

janandonly• 2 years ago

I am shocked that sci-hub is on that list. Could this explain the economic and academic decline of Germany these last few years?

bowsamic2• 2 years ago

No? What a bizarre suggestion

nilsherzig• 2 years ago

How nice of them to collect this list of working piracy solutions haha

gverrilla• 2 years ago

torrentfreak.com is legendary

17-year-old student exposes Germany's 'secret' pirate site blocklist

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