05-05-2012, 06:00 AM
It's not so much the fact that they've blocked The Pirate Bay, it's HOW they've blocked it. The assumption was that the block would be DNS based much like the block BT had set up for newzbin, put simply they block the domain name but not the IP Address; This does not appear to be the case though. The simple solution would have been to simply change DNS provider from Virgin Media's own to OpenDNS or Google's DNS and that would effectively bypass the block altogether. That did not happen. The consequence of this is that it means Virgin Media are doing more than DNS filtering and indeed must be doing highly invasive deep packet inspecting in order to filter TPB. Sadly from this deep packet inspection it's only a short ways away from some of the strictest bandwidth shaping that could potentially block all peer2peer traffic, or any traffic VM deems to be too substantial that it's affecting their network.