Eircom block PirateBay.org – Internet Censorship

Posted by: Sean | Posted on: September 3rd, 2009 | 2 Comments

The beginning of internet censorship has begun in Ireland, with Eircom getting the ball rolling by blocking the Internet’s most popular torrent downloading site, The Pirate Bay. After recently losing a court case, Eircom have now been forced to block any domain that is currently hosted on the PirateBay server's or any domain that directs to the PirateBay ip address. The image below is what appears when you try to visit The PirateBay.org: The Irish Recorded Music Association (IRMA) plans to bring the remaining ISP in Ireland to court to try and get them to follow Eircom and block access to the site too. I wonder how long this ban will actually last, surely people do not want their internet censored, so if Eircom can easily block this one site, surly they will not hesitate in the future to block more.

Eircom blocking Pirate Bay, stupid idea

Posted by: Sean | Posted on: August 24th, 2009 | 0 Comments

Okay over the past few months there was a lot of war over The Pirate Bay and all of its illegal downloading issues. This really had and still has major record label company's all edgy. They are continuously asking Irish phone broadband companies to block there customers access to the Pirate Bay website.

So fair enough, a few months ago this might have been somewhat acceptable, they wanted to save money by stopping people from downloading illegally. Obviously this would cause a lot of controversy with people with freedom of information and so on.

However it has been fully settled now for a few months that the Pirate Bay has been sold to another company, and this company wishes to convert the illegal site into a legal one, perhaps by making people pay to download music albums and maybe in turn provide royalties back to the owners of the content.

I am sure the record companies are aware of this and yet they still persist on asking Irish broadband providers to block the site. It is a waste of time for them doing this. According to the 'Irish Times' ( Irish Newspaper ) Eicom have agreed to block the site from September on, whereas other broadband providers have refused to do so.

I think that the record companies should just sit back, at least for the moment and wait for the transfer of ownership to take place, and if it is changed to a legal site then there will be no need to go around hassling broadband companies. But if it remains an illegal site then fair enough try your best.

I personally think that it should never be allowed for someone to block you access to a site. If you pay for a service you should be allowed to look at what you want, when you want.

Save money on calls to UK with Eircom

Posted by: Sean | Posted on: August 23rd, 2009 | 2 Comments

Our current phone service supplier is Eircom, they seems to be the best, or at least the most dependable in many ways. Eircom do have many many faults, however whenever we switch to different providers we always end up switching back to Eircom.

We ring England a lot, because we have many relations over there :D . So after looking around on Eircom's site for a while, we came across a package which is added onto your account. It is called Eircom Talk UK.

The way this extra service works is that you are given an extra phone line, theoretically it is actually just the same line. There is no actual extra physical phone line added to the house. The way it works is through your broadband, if you do not have broadband then this service is useless to you.

When you order Eircom Talk UK, Eircom will send you out a new router, this will have extra ports on the back of it so that you can connect an extra phone line into it, then to set it up you just go into your router's setting as instructed.

It is really simple to set up, and then you can have two people talking at the same time on separate phones. With the Eircom Talk UK package you get 600 minutes of call to the UK and then it also allows you to call local and national calls in Ireland too. For all this you would expect it to cost a lot, however it is only €5 a month!

So if you spend more than €5 a month on calls to the UK and you are an Eircom customer, it is definitely worth your while signing up to this service. Eircom also have another package similar to this one, it allows you to call up to 20 international countries for 600 minutes for €10, the countries that are covered in that €10 price include UK, US and Australia just to name a few.

The reason i pointed this out is because a lot of people have never heard of this additional package. IF you want to find this package on the Eircom site go to just follow these few clicks: Go to Eircom.ie then on the left click 'Products & Services' then click 'Broadband' on the left then choose 'Broadband Talk' on the left again.