I like to read strange and unusual news articles...so I browse around the net looking for odd stuff.

Today I was blocked from doing so:

I just read some horrific news about Cogent (large backbone provider in the US) which routes most of our browsing and internet traffic, has started censoring certain websites (for some unknown reason-maybe court order?). They are black-holing (nullifying) IP addresses which route to website addresses. When you type www.someplace.com it gets converted to an IP address x.x.x.x and your request is sent along. So when I click a link to a website like disney.com it takes off across the internet to get my info. But if a backbone provider like Cogent is black-holing that address, nothing happens and my request just kind of dies along the way and I'm left staring at a busy cursor until it finally times out and says I can't get there.

Well recently Cogent started to block so-called "pirate sites" like The Pirate Bay, Primewire, Torrentproject , etc. claiming they distribute illegal content. I'm sure they do have links to content like movies and TV shows and music available that isn't supposed to be out there. Not saying pirating is right or wrong, just that it's being blocked. So are requests for Ubuntu which is legal to torrent. There are many other legit uses for torrents as well...like open source torrents for Linux like Ubuntu and OpenSuse and Fedora - all of which are perfectly legal and are meant to be shared.

Problem is, Cogent has blocked ALL access to these sites regardless of the content you want to download, whether it's a webpage of info or a torrent download. In school we learned that's called censorship...someone else is deciding for me what I can and can not search or download on the internet. I can't even go to these sites to READ about them - that's like blocking information about how to make a bomb. Bombs themselves are bad and illegal. But the knowledge of them should not be illegal. Take away knowledge and we might as well just live in caves and bash each other with clubs.

Today it's "pirate sites"...tomorrow it's porn sites....next week it's anti-trump sites...next year it's who I can vote for in a democratic election. Seriously...that's how it starts, censor something that most people don't care about too much and it leads to censoring important issues, a little at a time.

It needs to be nipped in the bud before it festers and grows.

But then maybe we won't have to...I'll bet these sites use ad sponsored revenue streams. Take away access and they lose revenue...companies don't like losing revenue...maybe they'll sue Cogent for cutting their revenue and we can have a free and open internet again...

For more info, read this LINK at TorrentFreak. Hurry up though, Cogent will probably block access once they learn of it so you can't read about their evil doing.

LINK = https://torrentfreak.com/internet-ba...-sites-170209/

PS - I tried to torrent KDE Neon but was blocked! NO WAY!!

Why is this relevant to KDE Neon? There aren't even torrents for it.

nalvarez wrote:Why is this relevant to KDE Neon? There aren't even torrents for it.

Not from the official source, but it's out there on torrent sites which is my preferred method to quickly download. HTTP takes half an hour or more to download, some larger files like a 1gig ISO may take an hour if the servers are busy. The same 1gig file via torrent takes but a few minutes. I don't like that someone has decided for me that some of these sites may be risky or have bad stuff on them. I'm an adult and can decide for myself what I want. I want Neon and I want it fast. But now I can't make that choice...

Looks like Cogent woke up and is no longer black-holing after some backlash in the media. Yay...net neutrality rules.