Orange blocks internet customers from visiting The Pirate Bay.

Internet service provider Orange have banned their UK and french customers from visiting the world's biggest bit torrent tracker The Pirate Bay.Since the end of last week Orange customers have found it impossible to use what is claimed to be the 25th most popular website in the world,receiving an error message that the site is not available.However the site is very much available but not to Orange customers.

My best guess as to why this has happened is that like many other ISPs Orange offer unlimited downloads with many of it's internet packages and are trying to limit the amount that subscribers can actually download by denying it's customers access to the most popular file sharing site in the world in case they should download more than Orange considers to be their fair share.

No stranger to criticism, in March 2007 UK consumer protection TV show ‘Watchdog’ held a survey which deemed Orange to be the worst ISP in the UK, with the most unreliable broadband service. The survey revealed that the company also had the greatest number of dissatisfied customers and, if recent reports prove correct, Orange are about to start accumulating a few more.

The owners of The Pirate Bay are no strangers to the courts and have successfully sued other ISPs in the past who have blocked their site and in this case I hope that they grab Orange by their company gonads,drag them into court and sue their asses off because this is clearly corporate thuggery of the worst kind.

And of course how do I know about this problem?Yes,you've guessed it I am an Orange customer and so have had the same problem as all their other users but if you are in the same situation as me don't panic because the problem is easy to solve.The solution is to access The Pirate Bay via a proxy server so that there is no direct link for Orange to detect and block.Simply google "free proxy"and you will find dozens of sites that you can use and there is nothing that Orange can do to stop you accessing your favourite tracker.

Worst of all,the last press release that I saw from Orange regarding this problem said,

"Our understanding is that Orange doesn’t block access to any sites other than those identified by the Internet Watch Foundation, that relate to illegal child abuse imagery. However, we’re looking into this and will update you again as soon as we can"

and so it would seem that they don't even have the guts to admit what they are doing.

Now what's that slogan I'm thinking of?

The future's bright,the future's...........hmm.


Have a great day,Lou Smorals.