Events / Ireland / News — 3 comments
01
Sep 09
As of today, Eircom have officially blocked and restricted its customers from accessing ThePirateBay, following a High Court order. An expected move from Eircom who recently agreed to a deal with the Music Industries in an attempt to protect their artists and their own public interests of course. Users who tried to visit thepiratebay.org this morning, were greeted with a friendly note;
“ACCESS TO THIS IP ADDRESS RELATING TO THE PIRATE BAY HAS BEEN BLOCKED”
The Irish Recorded Music Association (Irma) which represented the four big music labels secured the deal earlier this year, which forced Eircom to block the website. Other ISP’s of ireland have not blocked the site, and may be worth looking into if you’re getting a little paranoid about Eircoms love for censorship. Below is another piece from the page that eircom customers now see when trying to view thepiratebay.org
“On the 24 July 2009, an Order was made by the High Court requiring eircom to block or otherwise disable access by its subscribers to the website thePirateBay.org, its related domain names, IP addresses and URLs. The Court was satisfied that on the basis of the evidence presented by the record companies that the PirateBay website is a website that facilitates the exchange of copyrighted sound recordings without the consent of the copyright owners.”
Eircom have stated in an interview that they will not be be monitoring their customers online activities or sharing personal details with third parties.
Screenshot of blocked page,
Ireland / News — No comments
22
Aug 09
Eircom, Ireland’s biggest Internet Service Provider recently announced it would be blocking access to The Pirate bay. This came as a result of the agreement that was reached in January due to pressure from EMI Records, Sony Music, Universal Music and Warners. The original deal was to cut off customers found to be repeatedly illegally download music, on a three strike basis.
Another part of the deal, which wasn’t brought to light until now is that The Pirate Bay was to be blocked by Eircom upon request. This comes as yet another big shock to the world as an Irish company makes yet another big move in favour of the Music Industry and have thereby failed to protect their users privacy and agreed to the terms of these corporate giants have made themselves quite the unfavorable ISP.
With recent attacks to the company, taking down services and causing malicious havoc it will be hard to know what will happen now what the frustrated customers of Eircom will do in order to defend their rights. Clearly Eircom have managed to put themselves in a very bad situation and unless they plug all the holes before September 1st, it will be interesting to see the outcome.
UPC and BT have both refused to block the website and will be ready to face legal battle. An interesting point to see smaller companies making a stand for their customers.
“Should the rights holders proceed with their threat of legal action if UPC fails to block access to Pirate Bay, UPC has every intention of vigorously defending its position in Court.”
It will be interesting to see if customers will switch to other providers over this and if this will cause a lot of anger. Needless to say, The Pirate Bay may be the Internets biggest bittorrent site, but it surely isn’t the only one out there.
Events / Security — No comments
14
Aug 09
The first day of har started off to be a good one. I woke up to the sun shining down and classical music playing from nearby tents,which was a nice change from the favorable techno and trance that can be heard around the villages. As the morning went on, more tents went up and the remaining people arrived to either setup camp or join existing villages.
The har opening ceremony was kicked started by Koen Martens, political activist and entrepreneur, which of course we happened to miss. Food is more important… right? Thankfully all the main tents have live feeds of the talks so missing a talk is never an issue and they can generally be quite full, depending on popularity.
We attended the ‘rootkits are awsome‘ talk, which was very informative. Not my specific field of interest, but its worth looking into and the slides in pdf format can be found here. After the talk we bumped into some more Irish folk, which was unexpected and haven’t seen them since o.O . After some walking about we landed over at the Lockpicking Village and sat in at a workshop on Lever lockpicking. I had picked up my tool set from the Lockpickers village at the Chaos Communication Camp 07 so it was nice to put the tool set to use again.
The majority of the afternoon I spent in the Lounge, aka ‘The no shoe zone’. Where i finally setup a tunnel and got some material online. The laptop I am using is not exactly top spec so processing photos was limited to batch resizing. Camp rules say that taking photos around the camp isn’t prohibited so Its been harder to get as much photos as i expected.
A while later we discovered the GSM network that some kind folk had installed. With a simple registration system a few of us had our phones up and running in no time and offered us the ability to call each other from around camp. Saving us 40 euro on buying a DECT phone. The SMS functionality was a bit flaky and seemed to lag a bit but this wasn’t really important as call functionality was all we needed.
A talk on ‘Advanced MySQL Exploitation‘ provided some interesting time. It was well presented and showed some of the work in action. The slides for this talk can also be found here.
Har2009 Gallery
Events / Security — 1 comment
13
Aug 09
And so the fun finally begins. I am a day behind already, but trying to find a nice place to sit and get some time to write wasn’t easy. Not to mention trying to organize an ssh tunnel to somewhat secure my http traffic floating around a campsite full of hackers.
As I am writing at the moment I’m sitting in whats known as the ‘No Shoe Zone’, one of the best places at har to sit around and chill out to some ambient music. We arrived yesterday evening, pretty exhausted after the lack of sleep and partying in Amsterdam. But a few hours of sleep soon had us ready for more.
I was surprised to see the majority of people arriving yesterday. By 10pm the camp grounds had soon filled up. Organizers, Volunteers and village groups all put in a huge amount of effort and work to get the place finished. Food & Drink was already readily available with a nice bar setup beside one of the main lecture tents.
The evening mainly consisted of us rambling around har, stopping by villages to say hello and soak up the atmosphere. We ended up trying to resolve a power issue and following cables around campsites for quite some time. We then stumbled across a village that had a project which amazed us all. The ‘Beernary Counter‘. A proud project from the Geraffel crew. This nifty little project worked with an integrated system hooked up with an RFID card reader, which allowed the user with the card to log in, thus opening the vavle to fill a pint of beer. To Top it off, it stored the data in a database, keeping track of total consumption, comsumption per user and more. Something which us Irish folk found a little too fascinating that it got worrying.
More Photos and posts will follow soon. But for now I need to get some food 
Events — 2 comments
10
Aug 09
I literally setup this blog minutes ago as opposed to packing and getting ready for the week in Amsterdam and Har2009. I figured this was the perfect chance to spark an interest in blogging again and throw together some half decent material. Similar to Chaos Communication Camp 2007, I will provide daily coverage of the event and whats going on.
I will be traveling with my Nikon D40x & Dell Laptop along with 7 other people who will make the rest of the Irish Embassy at Har2009. We are flying out Dublin at 6am and will be heading down to the event Wednesday afternoon to soak up the pre-launch atmosphere and help out a little.
I plan on taking a lot of photos and giving you, the reader, an interesting read should you not have made it to the event. Check the link below to see the photos as i will add them day by the day.