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Aussie ISP Scans Downloads For Copyright Violation
Steve Nakhla writes: "According to this article, Excite@Home has begun snooping users' downloads in order to find copyrighted or pirated material. Violators have their access cut off. As an Excite@home user, this alarms me. What exactly is their definition of copyrighted? Doesn't the New York Times copyright their online articles? Can I not view them any more for fear of violating Excite's policies?"
Time to switch ISPs aussies.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
Encrypt all communications!
(c) exi7, 2001. All rights reserved.
to watch the porn we download.
I want one of these jobs.
Je t'aime Stéphanie
it would be a bit of a pain, but nothing too bad. ftp servers would just contain the key when you log in, and irc people could just have the key displayed every min. or so.
nosy bastards oughtta leave me and my data alone!
Isn't this company in financial trouble? That sounds like a great way to make more money! Spend it on extra employment while cutting your customer base at the same time!
Berto
If Ma Bell was listening to my phone calls to see if I was committing a crime, I would simply get 2 cans and an extremely long string. There is no way this can be defended ethically: Because they provide you with a service, as a corporation, they can legally observe and log every detail of enery task you use the service to complete? While a nation's highways may belong to the federal government, they still need probable cause to stop you and "observe" what you have under the seat of your car, or in the trunk. This complete circumvention of probably cause is ludicrous. As stated above: Imagine if the phone company did this!
- If This Peace Is Fictious, I Shall Destroy It
didn't excite@home go under?
here in toronto, ive heard the same things happening to rogers@home. but its just an unsubstantiated rumour so....
-
The article says that this is Optus@Home, in Australia.
What ever happened to the rights of the people coming before the rights of companies? Has government become so weak that they cannot protect a company from being crushed by another because of those who use its services? Have companies become so much more powerful than the gorvernment that the word of the the people cannot be heard? Have the minds of the masses been so poisoned with anti-government claptrap that they cannot see that the government can set them free rather than imprison them?
Seems like they should have more important things to worry about that implementing stupid crap like this.
There is no way for them to tell if said copyrighted thing is actually allowed or not, such as the example of copyrighted documents, etc. Just cause it's copyrighted, doesn't mean you can't download it.
room101 -- how much can you stand before they break you?
(they always break you eventually)
I hate the new slashcode. Bring back my first post damnit!!!!
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
...is it any wonder they are going out of business? (I wanted to put a link but search was down)
This post is copyrighted by the_other_one.
You must purchase the right to read my posts or be cut off by your ISP.
My current rate is $200.00 CDN per character. Please email me the cash prior to reading.
134340: I am not a number. I am a free planet!
Puhlease.
Everybody knows what is copyright and not legally downloaded, and what's downloaded with the approval of the source.
You folks need to stop throwing up lame scarecrow arguments about getting in trouble with the New York Time for reading their articles.
You just look dumb to everybody.
I love the smell of Karma in the morning
Every
Probable
;)
- If This Peace Is Fictious, I Shall Destroy It
They're doing this to merely keep themselves clear of copyright infringement lawsuits.
That's all fine and good, but the way they go around doing it is wrong. From the article:
The users added that if an individual is breaking the law on the Internet, it should be treated in a similar way to somebody abusing the telephone system.
"The police should have to apply for a warrant and then present that to the telco to authorise monitoring for a specific person for a specific period," the reader said.
The people are getting upset with the ISP. Their ire should be directed at the real source of the problem: the copyright industry. It's gotten so bad that even ISP's are driven to the point of paranoia about copyrgiht infringement.
My question: Is it all worth it?
"I wouldn't call it policing, we're just trying to comply with the law and by highlighting the issue to customers, its putting us in a better position as acting as a responsible Netizen on the Internet," the (excite@home) spokesperson said.
It just makes feel all giddy inside when I see such corporate self-delusion. I really boggles the mind that someone could believe that cutting people's accounts off without warning is "highlighting" and that this action is even going to begin to put them in some "better position". I'd sure as hell be looking for a different ISP if I were using their service.
Hear that? Thats the sound of a giant toilet flushing your privacy down the drain (counter-clockwise).
http://windows.scares.us
Even Linux and all its components are copyrighted. I think it's very bad that an ISP decided to do laundry for the big copyright owners. Sad. And it may even increase the ISP's operational costs (imagine scanning all those downloads)...
Oh yeah, and how can I capitalize on this?
I've never been one to feel paranoid, but this kind of stuff creeps me out!
They can monitor my computer use at work... and now they are monitoring my computer use when I'm at home.
This just sounds like another case of innocent until proven guilty... Not even the government can monitor this kind of stuff without the proper warrent, but this corporation can. When exactly did the big corporations get more powerful than the government??!?
What ever happened to the right to privacy? How have we let things get to this point?
All newspapers copyright their content. However if they have it on their web site you can assume that you can view it. After all if they didn't want you to view it they wouldn't put it online. You can even save a copy for later. And you probably can email it to a friend. In fact many papers have an "email this to a friend" icon. About the only time you could have problem is if you put it on your own web site. In that case you should ask, or post a link.
Erlang Developer and podcaster
Time for all the warez sites to change over from ftp servers to allowing sftp transfers.
That way no one can tell what you're downloading because it's ssh encrypted.
I have one guess who is behind it: Micro$oft.
I've been seeing the posters all around NYC lately; in the subway, on billboards, etc. They've put a bug in peoples asses to pay for their software. Microsoft's catch phrase over the last few years has been "innovation", but now it seems to be "licensed". Hmm, I guess their stock price is hurting a little, eh?
Anyway.. its not like they don't have the right to pursue this stuff, but at the same time, you should have heard how they were pulling out every trick in the book to cover up a false charge to my co-worker's credit card. C'mon.. they've got enough money..
</rant>
Never hit your grandmother with a shovel, for it leaves a bad impression on her mind...
If there are any lawyers in reading, we need a magic document that has the following two properties:
1) It is an illegal copy of a copyrighted work
2) Reading the document violates lawyer-client privelege, doctor-patient privelege, or the DMCA, preferably all three.
For instance, the document has a copyrighted non-illegal trailer and the entire document is zipped using the password "password". By detecting the copyrighted payload, we can sue them for accessing the non-illegal trailer which was protected by the "PkZip" anti-circumvention device.
If we can find this piece of data and get an Excite@HOME user terminated for downloading it, we can prosecute Excite for reading it, preferably under the DMCA.
Suggestions?
"I wouldn't call it policing, we're just trying to comply with the law and by highlighting the issue to customers, its putting us in a better position as acting as a responsible Netizen on the Internet," the spokesperson said.
Did anyone else read this and see the word Nazi-an? "Comply with the law! Schnell! "
- JoeShmoe
-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
connections? I wonder how long before opening a secure (or any) connection to an address that contains copyright material will be considered sufficiently egregious for an ISP to castrate your service.
Does Excite@Home Aussie run a Beowulf cluster?
First of all, this is Australia, which has, if it can be believed, even more draconian IT-related laws than the US.
:-)
Second of all, WHOMEVER@HOME is going to be out of business in about a week, so no worries, right?
"I wouldn't call it policing, we're just trying to comply with the law and by highlighting the issue to customers, its putting us in a better position as acting as a responsible Netizen on the Internet," the spokesperson said. "
Ok, so does that mean I can give you a parking ticket, because I'm trying to be a good citizen? Sorry folks, enforcing laws is generally held to be 'policing'.
While they clearly stipulate in the T&C that they have a right to monitor the network, that IMHO at least generally means they can watch for abusive use (using too much bandwidth, or attacking their servers).
To my knowledge, standard practice in the industry extends this to monitoring their own network performance, QUANTITY of what people are up/downloading (e.g. bytes), but this wouldn't be news if they weren't trying to figure out what files you're getting and from where...
-- If at first you do succeed, try to hide your astonishment. -- Harry F. Banks
Here we go, it's only a matter of time before the virus scanners become copyright enforcers. However, there is something you can do:
Trust Microsoft Anti Trust?
http://www.anti-dmca.org
Take back the Net!
http://www.anti-dmca.org
We need to organize.
Would something like IPSec prevent this? When are we going to get to the point when all TCP/IP traffic is encrypted?
What else can be done to protect our right to privacy?
The FAQ states that comment shouldn't be rated based on whether the reader agrees with their content, but rather on their "presentation".
I think we need some system to make sure that these "rules" are kept monitored. Most moderators here on slashdot feel that like God's.
"Yeah, he's wrong here. I don't like atheist, so let's put this one on '-1'."
Learn to read the RTFM before moderating.
Isn't this a MAJOR invasion of privacy? I can't remember exactly, but I seem to remember that ISPs were told they were NOT allowed to do that to modem users, as it violates several privacy issues. You're required to get a warrant prior to initiating any snooping whatsoever. Just like the Telephone, they can't do that!
And besides, HOW do you tell what's pirated and what's not, from random streams of data? If I download 2 movies at a time, it's going to seem like garbage (a raw stream that is). And HOW do they know that it's pirated? How can they distinguish a pirated movie from a non pirated one? Similarly with data or music, how can you tell? What are they going to do, scan for patterns that might match? Get someone to watch all movie streams and listen to all audio streams? Think about how hard it would be to figure that out. Or are they just going to scan what SITES you visit, and then ASSUME you're pirating? This is crazy!
If God gave us curiosity
today must be a good day for copyright violations and piracy, becase the stories just keep comming in.
and to be honest, the cant be a good thing..
i cant seem to come up with a sig.
What's the status of privacy protection in Australia? In the U.S., at least, a telco can't drop "we can listen in on your conversations at any time to see if you're using the lines to illegally play your grandson exchange tapes of Johnny Carson" into a AUP, and then get away with "occasionally sampling" communications. Violation of the Electronic Communications and Privacy Act of 1990, among other things -- and clearly criminal.
Does Australia have similar protections? Is this a bunch of arrogant sysadmins thinking they own anything on their machines? I'd love if this were a case where someone like the EFF could go after Excite@home with guns blazing...
I'm assuming that the filtering is looking for specific data such as mp3's, avi's, etc. This raises the question, what about downloading snippits such as those on cdnow.com? Exactly how much of a song or video constitutes a copyright infringement?
horrible horrible horrible
Fine - I'll bite.
How do they tell the difference between a 1.5Mb low-quality version of a Bare Naked Ladies song and a 1.5Mb high-quality 30-second sample of the same song?
Last post!
"Doesn't the New York Times copyright their online articles? Can I not view them any more for fear of violating Excite's policies?"
In Denmark, whatever you produce (texts, images, lyrics) is automatically your copyright. You don't buy it, or have to specifically declare it copyrighted. Isn't it like this in the States?
-Kraft
Live and let live
Anyone else ever seen how the EULA's often include a clause saying that the EULA can change at any time and that you'll be held to the new terms? So if you sign up for service from an ISP for a year, non-refundable, and they change their Acceptable Uses policies, you can't back out of their service without paying the full price for your year's service? If you're paying monthly, isn't that like renigging on a business contract when they change the rules on you? But you can't call the contract null and void, even though the rules changed on you. Something smells to high heaven about that...
spying on people doesn't revenue bring. then again, it seems with this kind of behavior, they deserve to go [down] under.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
...than my six-year-old daughter's school district. They came home from their first day of school yesterday with an "Internet Agreement". In part, it states that "students are prohibited from downloading any copyrighted material."
All about me
I wonder if they will be monitoring email too. How about usenet? Will this be an across the board scan for "illegal content?"
I am curious how they can only scan for certain things. How the heck does this even work? Keep a log of what people connect to, and then check it out later?
Would this kind of activity even stand up to a court challenge?
Is that a real poncho? I mean, is that a Mexican poncho or is that a Sears poncho?
If they were really penalizing people for downloading all copyrighted materials, then you would get yanked for downloading GPL'd software, since it is, in fact, copyrighted.
Hey! Take a look at the bottom right corner of your page when you load slashdot! There is an OSDN copyright!
Really, I don't think any aussies who is doing anything legitimate (reading the NYTimes for example) has anything to worry about here.
I support any ISP for yanking connectivity of anyone for any reason. It's the ISPs right. Maybe they don't like you because you don't take baths (sorry RMS).
What is disturbing is that the ISP in question is actively monitoring it's user's online transactions and actions. That, in my OP is a violation of privacy.
Excite@home could give a rat's ass about "copyright violations." What they really want is a way to get rid of people who use a lot of bandwidth, and an easy way to do it is to scrutinize their high-bandwidth-volume customers and find an excuse to terminate their service. Copyright infringement is a convenient excuse.
This allows them to save money by not expanding their infrastructure.
Historically, US companies would have considered this an awful idea. US ISPs have often taken the line that they are simply access providers, and should not be expected to inspect everything that goes across their networks. This is what's usually referred to as "common carrier" status, and it's what prevents people from suing the Post Office for delivering a porn magazine to a child. (Note - IANAL, but I don't think the companies have been particularly successful in claiming common carrier status.)
The problem is that the second you start spot-checking clients data, you have essentially abandoned your status as a common carrier. In for a penny, in for a pound, as the saying goes: once you start checking, you're obligated to check just about everything to make sure it complies to the law.
This is in Australia, where I'm sure the law is quite different. But now that so many access providers are tied to media production companies, how long will it be until ISPs in the US start pulling the same kind of tricks?
Everyone and everything should start using weak encryption to transfer data of any kind.
The computational power required to break weak encryption would render it basically impossible to monitor data transfer in real time. It also obscures the conversation such that it makes it extremely difficult for the monitoring agent to be able to tell what part of the sampled conversation should be analyzed offline to determine if the data is copyrighted.
/. could lead the way be providing an https://slashdot.org/ URL that uses a low bit rate certificate to obscure all data to/from slashdot. The more people that do this and the more P2P (likely a significant target) that integrate weak encryptioni, the more difficult of a job Big Brother has.
But it is policing! What they're doing is no different from a cop sitting by the side of the road catching speeders. The only difference is that they're also bypassing the rest of the legal process by deciding your guilt and then punishing you by shutting down your account.
Just because some dippy spokesperson "wouldn't call it policing" doesn't mean it's not!
-- Brett
on the case!
This doesn't sound like "normal course of business" under US Code Title 18, Sec. 2512. Oh #$@& it's Australia. Well like I was saying, bust out the IANALs.
If you need text styles to communicate then you don't have a message.
Where I live, residential customers and businesses have two options for cable modem service, which is fabulous for a town of 20,000. The first option is provided by the city public utilities dept., which has run fiber rings throughout the town, and then coax to the curb. The city then contracts with local isps for residential service. The other option is the local cable company, which has contracted with @home to provide service. Each costs about $25 a month, although the bandwidth is with the city service, not surprisingly (I can look out my window and see the fiber node nearby).
:)
The biggest difference is less obvious: people I know who are using the @home get constant scans (not just one or two ports, either) from IP addresses which resolve themselves to something like portscan022.foo.home.com (obfuscated to avoid implicating the cable company, which I believe to be innocent to this activity). When I look at my logs, what do I get? A chron job from the city DHCP server polling every five minutes on port 68. And a bunch of port 80 requests from who knows where
What don't I get? Why on earth @home seems to think it's ok to portscan its customers like they do. The article seems indicative of just how paternalistic they are: "We are the arbitraters of what you can and can't download. If you are running open ports, we need to know why. What? You don't like it? Read the (revised) terms of service, dodo." I consider myself lucky to have the option of broadband without @home as a provider. It's apparent that most people don't have that choice. We all know what happens when a monopoly goes unchecked.
political_news.c: warning: comparison is always true due to limited range of data type
I have been an @home customer for several years now, and have found out the hard way that they enforce rules that aren't quite in their Acceptable Use Policy I have been repremanded for uploading over 500 megs in a 24 hour period. I don't remember reading anything about that in the AUP. Recently they filtered port 80 and 25 without any warning when they have specifically stated that they would not filter these ports in the past.
February 23, 2002:
Due to the large percentage of people involved in the trading of illegal software, or "warez", Excite@Home's recent termination of customer's accounts has led to it's revenue dropping a staggering 25% over a period of less than 6 months.
"We saved ourselves a lot of lawsuits and headache with this new policy, and will continue to enforce it as long as these laws exist." a spokesperson for Excite@Home said on Monday.
The spokesperson then went on to sell his stock in the company. When asked for comment, he said "I just want to check out other companies. This has nothing to do with the 25% drop."
Obviously, this is just a brilliant strategem with which @home hopes to stave off their impending backruptcy.
I have no idea how it's supposed to work, but I'm sure alienating your current customers when you're already near-broke it really a good idea. Somehow.
well if you are worried about them snooping your packets don't use their "high speed" proxy servers. they are a big waste of garbage and you do not get stuff any faster, you are on a broadband connection.
i use rogers@home and i used to use their proxies but not now i have no use for them and i configured myself statically when i ran windows many moons ago because their dhcp servers would go down a lot or they would kill my tcp/ip stack when trying to renew the ip. when i switched to linux, since it "wouldn't support" dhcp i had myself configured statically and their was my "firewall" problems as well.
but if you really want to switch isp, some of them such as videotron in quebec and dsl.ca charge you for bandwidth use and i'm sure there are other ones around the world too
As an American Excite@Home user, I am greatly dismayed to read this. Although this is only in Australia, the company may soon implement the same policies here. Scanning downloads is a clear violation of people's privacy, whether the law says so or not. Excite@Home might as well be using backdoor trojans.
I download games on a fairly regular basis, and I truly only view them for about a day, and if I like them, I buy them. If not, I delete them. Thus far, I've bought roughly 20 games I've downloaded to preview. If I didn't have that chance, I never would have bought them at all. I certainly realize that I'm part of a tiny moral minority. If Excite@Home starts banning people like me, it will probably hurt the game companies. People like me won't buy because we never became interested, and people who downloaded without paying will probably just never buy the game.
This is like mall security confiscating your car for shoplifting so you can't get to their mall anymore. When people are more and more expected to have internet access for various stuff that's possibly work related or of real-life importance, getting your Internet access cut off is a death sentence. This system needs some accountability for wrongful service termination fast.
I guess this means that the Small Local BBS users will se a resurgance in use. Lord knows I don't want every one of my emails to my wife read. :-)
So you no longer need a consent of one of the parties or a court order to intercept communication? Thats interesting news.
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
Regardless of whether or not Excite@Home has the authority to monitor their networks for copyrighted materials, it seems obvious to me that they're only going to monitor their network for selected copyrighted materials.
My guess is that Excite@Home is going to patrol for copyrighted works by major record labels and movie studios, leaving your average copyright holder in the cold. Because essentially everything has a copyright attached to it, they're going to have to make a judgement call as to which works they're going to patrol for. If you want to find out what those works are, I'd follow the money trail.
This just in: excite@home licenses technology to communist China to filter "copyrighted" (uh'um right...) material.
Another step towards big brother watching over our shoulders?
Money talks, as long as people continue to support the ISP's and companies who love the DMCA, they will continue to ignore those of us with valid complaints against the DMCA, etc. Our goverment is no different... if you want a senator to listen to you, you should be prepared to shell out some cash.
I say its time we boycott providers and companies with ties to things such as the DMCA and absurd patents. The same goes for those who dislike Microsofts business practices. If you want a company to listen to the voice of the people, they need a reason to. As long as the cash is flowing in, they wont change.
Face it, democracy is dead. The time has come to wage war and fight back for our freedoms.
What I'd like to know... is when did Austrailia become a haven for paranoid fascist bastards who can't mind their own damn business?
:)
Don't they know thats our job as Americans? We don't need any help thank you...
Geez, I mean
Can
any
reasonable
nation
invade,
violate,
opress and
restrict
everyone
like Australia?
"The cost of freedom is eternal vigilance." -Thomas Jefferson
DUMP Excite@Home NOW and tell them why, then go out into the big crazy world and find service providers that respect your privacy. Sheesh, it's like newborn babes out there...
I heard that Verizon had turned this down saying they cannot keep track of everyone. Looks like some ISP's are going to monitor people. I would find out if your does...before you are behind bars.
... to decide that it was illegal and in the mean time [insert large corperation/government agancy here] would continue eavesdropping and suing/arresting people. Got to love the US justice system.
Now would be a good time to start using and donating to Freenet which provides anonymous communication and is immune to censorship.
Find a good external shell of some sort with SSH and pass any illegal software through it. Or find a good SSL HTTPS proxy for downloading from web sites. Let them try and sniff that.
Nic
If they can -afford- to hire someone to read through the scans, they'd be lucky. If they can then afford any lawyer fees in suing anyone, tell the directors to stop borrowing off their moms.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
we're screwed. Current governments were never set up to protect against giant corporations. Religeons were the former enemy of freedom, and govts were designed accordingly. Who will come up with the next design?
The article really talks more in terms of illegal content than Copyrighted material.
So it wouldn't be a problem to download New York Times online articles.
sorry.
Where are the 5 ye-old-internet-revolutionaries boys that started Excite in a garage?
I'm really sorry about all this news!
-=-=-=-=
I know life isn't fair, but why can't it ever be un-fair in MY favor!?
im pretty sure that what theyre doing isnt legal...invasion of privacy or something like that. They don't have the right to snoop into people's privacy like that
I think it's about time we hit these bastards in the pocket book. Don't buy, rent or go to the movies until they back off. One month of no income and they'll go cryin' to their mommies.
Because the ISP is planning on scanning users at random to see if they download something they shouldn't, will they also be scanning uploads too? if they do it seems they'll be wandering into liability territory.
Where's Dr Lawrence Godfrey when you don't want him...
I work for (run) a small town ISP. We sometimes fear the large national ISPs with their advertising budgets. But things like this just make me feel good.
We care about our customers. We fought to get each one, and do our best to keep them. I remember what it was like to be a subscriber. So, I run things now as I would have liked them to be run when I was on the other side.
We log when you log on and when you log off and what IP you were assigned. That is about it. I don't care what you do out on the net. But if you cause trouble and someone complains to us, then we take action.
Of course broad band is a little different, you can cause a lot of trouble quicker than with dialup. We are just now deploying broad band fixed wireless. I would like to keep running things the way I do now. I hope my faith in our customers isn't misplaced.
Why not have the phone companies randomly tap into conversations to make sure that noone they are providing service to is doing anything illegal? Or! Or maybe they could provide this as a service to spouses who suspect that the other spouse is cheating on them! *OR* maybe any info they happen to accidently 'hear' while tapping into a non-violating call they could sell that information to advertisers! Or...
"1984" was ment to be a warning, not a guidebook. You hear that Kim Jong-il!? BushCo?!
I wish they equally militant about terminating their own spammers!
As detailed in this Salon article mentioned a couple /. articles back, the DMCA requires ISPs to take steps to stop copyright infringement when notified by a copyright holder. ISPs are forced to act as enforcers for the copyright industry, solely on the authority of a complaint.
They probably scan for the word "cOpy*" This is why I was not able to post my views on /. as my ISP's scaner is cutting me off everytime I type the word.
PS: my views on this issue are "c0pyrighted" - so I can't share them
Karma stuck at 50? Add 2-5 inches.. err.. 2-5x Karmas Count to your pen1es.. err.. Karma all naturally and private
Technically, in the USA anything and everything your write is copyrighted. This very reply, under copyright law is copyrighted. You don't have to file an paperwork to the feds either. This is just another example of liberalism and selvish, money minded attorneys wanting more of the economic share of the world.
Since when do providers have any right to look at my data. I am just glad I live the the USA. At least I can keep my guns and used them to defend myself and family. Compared to Australia, where the guns were taken from the people, with a result of over 70% increase in crime. What's next down in Aussie Land. You won't be able to go out in the sun with violating a law. Wait, it is already against the law to let children outside without hats and sunscreen.
Wake up people, the world is under attack by these leftists that want to make the world a happy, single-minded society where the world government knows best. Freedom seems to be a foreign conspect to too many people in the world. We are already under control to more laws that contradict each other. Next thing you know, Communnist China will be killing girls in other countries to prevent population regeneration.
Remember why the USA was created? Keep get away from government overcontrolling our lives. Well, that has not gone so good. Excite, AOL or any other providers does not need to mingle in the policing of private communications between any two or more persons.
MormonBoy, many wives, many children.
$ ftp ftp.lotofmp3files.com
Connected to ftp.lotofmp3files.com.
220 ftp.lotofmp3files.com FTP server (Version 1.1.214.7 Thu Aug 10 09:57:38 GMT 2000) ready.
Name: joe
331 Password required for joe
Password: ******
230 User joe logged in.
Remote system type is UNIX.
Using binary mode to transfer files.
ftp>
ftp> get NewKidsOnTheBlock-StepByStep.mp3
local: NewKidsOnTheBlock-StepByStep.mp3 remote: NewKidsOnTheBlock-StepByStep.mp3
200 PORT command successful.
666 NewKidsOnTheBlock-StepByStep.mp3: This file contains copyrighted material, your internet access is revoked!
221 Goodbye.
^NO CARRIER^
$
I agree with the reader: if Excite@Home suspects that there is a copyright violation, they need to *go through the proper channels* -- not arrogate the law unto themselves. A corporation -- being comprised of unelected people, and, thus, being neither democratic nor representative -- is *not* the government, and shouldn't think of itself in that manner.
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.
(c)
Krispy Cream is people
--CTH
--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
I'm curious, if they are snooping me and see that I'm sending and/or receiving a file called 01-Metallica-Black_Album-Enter_Sandman.mp3
that is really just a renamed text file foobar.txt
that contains directions to grandmother's house, does that mean they'll turn off my access?
"Life moves pretty fast. You don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it." Ferris Bueller
The real issue that nobody is talking about is licensing. Yes, the New York Times and/or the original author holds copyright on all of that stuff. However, under the conditions for access to the NYT website they have granted you license to access that material online. They have not granted you license to download (read this as "save") and redistribute any of their IP.
It seems the real problem for Aussie ISPs is to identify the original source for anything served through them and to go after the account owners who allegedly violate copyright law.
My office has been taken over by iPod people.
Oh yeah, and how can I capitalize on this?
Become a lawyer or a cop. Either that or get ahold of proof that Hillary Rosen, Jack Valenti, or any politician has a stolen version of windoze at home, or nabbed a copy of photoshop and M$ office from their office so that their children can do better at school. Then either blackmail them, or put it in a safe deposit box. That should work better than Johnny Cochran.
I am suprised the establishment is still trying to enforce this stuff. Before you know it they will start releasing the non-violent drug offenders so they can put people who couldn't afford to go to the movies in prison.
A message posted on a public newsgroup service from Cable & Wireless Optus, which half-owns Excite@Home, said its network security team would investigate claims into activities such as downloading protected movies and "immediately terminate" a subscriber's account without any prior warning. I'm afraid that this will be very confusing for Excite@Home's customers. If they don't give them any warning before terminating their connection, thousands of Excite@Home users won't know that their connection is down because they were pirating copyrighted material... they'll just think it's an average day of the week, and wait for it to come back up. Damn them and their crappy, over-priced, barely existent "service".
My boss just said: "That's australia who gives a shit". Well it'll start giving ideas to other companies. Frankly it just plain sucks and I can't wait till i win the lottery and pay for my own T1. HA WHOSE GONNA STOP ME NOW!
I'm afraid that this will be very confusing for Excite@Home's customers. If they don't give them any warning before terminating their connection, thousands of Excite@Home users won't know that their connection is down because they were pirating copyrighted material... they'll just think it's an average day of the week, and wait for it to come back up.
Damn them and their crappy, over-priced, barely existent "service".
OK. So now Excite@Home has decided to be responsible for the content that you, the user are transferring over their hardware. Well, make them fully responsible. If you catch your 13 year old child downloading a copyrighted porn video, surely Excite@Home with their monitoring should have caught that fact and stopped him from this illegal act. Does this mean that since they are monitoring content over their servers, any content that does slip by can be used as a case to sue Excite@Home themselves? Most ISPS (at least American ones) indemnify themselves from this sort of prosecution by not monitoring the content which goes across their network. They are not responsible for said content.
If Excite@Home deigns to take on the responsibility for your content instead of washing their hands of it as other ISPs do, let them take full responsibility. They should lose the immunity that other ISPs have from what their users are doing/downloading/posting/viewing/etc..
$$
A little background.
Broadband internet access in Australia is essentially handled by a Duopoly. These are Cable and Wireless' Optus Communications and the partially privatised Telstra corporation.
Telstra is the new incarnation of the original government run telecommunications provider. It has an enormous fixed line and mobile market share . This is a legacy of it's longstanding monopoly position.
Having said that, it was - up until a few years ago - a fully government owned and run monopoly. Coverage of the Australian continent is very good and the infrastructure is extremely sound.
Prices were enforced through regulation which also enforced a minimum quality of service.
Partial privatisation of Telstra combined with market de-regulation was supposed to bring the benefits of competition.
Optus Communications was one of the new players.
Telstra was allowed to maintain control of the infrastructure including the local loop.
Competitors were forced to pay exorbitant rates to provide access to fixed line customers.
Mobile communications required the construction of parallel infrastructures. Ditto for cable infrastructures which was constructed over the last 3 years. No cable existed prior to that time. (Frankly we didn't miss it all that much.)
The big 3 mobile providers are Telstra, Optus and Vodafone. Pretty much all of the others rent network access from one of these three.
Broadband access is limited to the cable infrastructures of Telstra and Optus. The only ADSL provider is - you guessed it - Telstra, since they control the entire POTS infrastructure.
Other broadband providers are either extremely regional and limited or rent capacity from one of these two.
So, you have a choice. Both companies advertised unlimited broadband access. Both companies have reneged on such deals and the telecommunications ombudsman and the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission don't wish to pursue them.
Since they're a duopoly, there's nothing to stop them from pulling any stunt they want. Their 'unlimited' broadband connections are simply fast pipes for web browsing, nothing more. Download on the Optus network are capped at 10 times the average daily download.
So you can download 400Mbytes/day on Optus@Home.
Telstra is even worse. The cable and ADSL data rate is capped to 512K/128K and you're now limited to a download of 3G/month.
You read it right. 3G a month on a broadband connection.
Oh, at around $100/month too. Roughly US$50/month. This is on a 12 month contract after paying setup fees of $350.
This latest move by Optus is a stunt designed to try and cap their broadband expenses. Basically the company is going down and is trimming costs prior to looking for a buyer.
Currently they're trying to sell themselves to SingTel, but one of their satellites is also used by the Australian Defence Force for signal intelligence. Naturally we're rather concerned about the Singapore government spying on us should they get their hands on Optus.
The Federal minister for telecommunications is a luddite who spends most of his time scheming to sell the rest of Telstra off so he can make himself a fortune.
Since privatisation, quality of service has declined, prices have risen and rural areas have suffered. Telstra barely answers to the government now, a fully privatised organisation doesn't bear thinking about.
Essentially we're in broadband hell. Just be thankful you're not us.
The connection providers are increasingly the same company who create the content that's being pirated. You expect they should stand by doing nothing when they can take action?
In the old days of a few years ago, the internet was still a largely lawless frontier. Now that it's gone mainstream, some of that frontier conduct isn't going to work anymore.
Laws must be fitted to the society/culture they are intendted to govern. The internet needs to be a legal jurisdiction if the several hundred million people who use it regularly are to get along, conduct commerce, communicate, etc.
It's no longer the time to flaunt the existing laws by circumventing them with clever hacks. It is now the time to reform the law so that it works for the people.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
...I checked my browser settings.
Though I live in germany and have nothing to fear I have to got through my settings:
- Yes, I connect through a proxy, so the IP address is unuseable for the MPAA
- Yes, junkbuster is active and sending only the information I want to send
- Yes, the rest is filtered by my firewall
Best thing, really, that it will be very difficult to track my IP address. All tests state that my IP address is either 127.0.0.1 (haha) or the address of the proxy of my provider.
Maybe you should check imedeately if you ISP offers the same service to you...
You found a sword: +4 damage, +5 moderator points
We have to face it: the world is going to be full of (mostly baby-boomer) reactionaries for some time. Jaron Lanier was probably all too correct when he predicted a society in which all thoughts, ideas, and communication are owned and monitored.
This is precisely what Orwell was trying to warn us against, but when you've got a generation of people who were raised to believe in solopsistic selfishness, then the spirit of I-got-mine will inevitably rule the day.
Property is always more important than freedom, right? Hey, that's my idea! I own it! Give it back! Pay up!
I, for one, welcome our new Antichrist overlord.
Maybe they should spend their time and money trying to not go bankrupt as opposed to trying to get rid of their customers.
Everybody knows what is copyright and not legally downloaded, and what's downloaded with the approval of the source.
That's what I was replying to. The original story is about an ISP scanning for copyrighted material. An AC stated that everyone knows what is legally downloaded, and I pointed out that there are a lot of situations in which the ISP will not know the legality of the downloaded material.
Last post!
Optus@Home has clarified its position on piracy, saying it will not be actively monitoring customer internet traffic. Rather it will respond only to complaints lodged with Optus by copyright owners, Optus@Home chief executive Chris Chapman told Australian IT today.
But Chapman stood by his company's stance against piracy, saying he wants it to play a responsible role in copyright protection.
"It's a fair cop role - not 'cop' as in an active cop, but we're prepared to work within the co-operative framework," Mr Chapman said. "We will not walk away from copyright piracy issues if it's brought to our attention. It's a reactive but responsible role, not a proactive role."
Chapman defended Optus@Home's right to spy on customers if it needed to, saying users were making a 'happily convenient analogy' with the regulatory requirements for tapping a voice telephone service. "As long as we're acting responsibly, we have the right to respond to copyright infringement." he said.
stuff
Technically, nearly everything you download on the Internet is copyrighted. For example, if I download gcc, that's copyrighted by the FSF.
I assume they're talking about only protecting the copyrights of big corporations that have made a lot of noise about having their copyrights violated. This has nothing to do with protecting anyone's rights, it has everything to do with making their big business cronies happy.
Big business is never happy unless they're ripping someone off. After all, anything less obviously does not maximize profits.
You know - ya send prisoners to penal colony, then 100 years later they turn it into a f*cking resort/exotic holiday destination.
GO figure.
Your ire should be focused directly on the people who flaunt the copyright laws. We should be self-policing, We should make sure that content creators are paid what THEY expect to be paid for their work, or NOT enjoy the fruits of their labor. Piracy(and for all of you pedantic morons out there, piracy is defined as copyright violations, and has been for decades) is rampent, and until it isn't we have no legs to stand on claiming OUR rights are violated, as every day creators rights are being violated. For every single person that gets their ISP shut off for 2 weeks there are literally THOUSANDS of copyright violations going on.
If Excite@Home Australia is going to randomly snoop on downloads for copyright-infringing downloads, on the reason that they're trying to comply with the law, can I then assume they're also occasionally snooping to determine if someone is downloading or uploading child pornography to/from IP addresses they control?
If not, why does Excite claim it can take responsibility for actively halting one illegal activity while allowing another to continue? Or does Excite Australia decide to take action based on "pressure"?
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
This is obviously only intended for things like games and software pirating. If you don't do that you're safe. Now calm down. And no, it's not a breach of piracy if you agree to it in the liscence agreement (and, of course, you read it, right? when you clicked "I Agree")
and then they put pressure on ISP's to have the user cut off if the material isn't removed. This service is offered to the recording industry. Copyright.net browses the file sharing tools to harvest IP's, and report to ISP's. and I 'think' that DCMA forces ISP's to respond and take action. They're grabbing data from your hard drive to verify that it's copyrighted.
Having the ISP tap your line to snoop packets when you share your music collection on port 6346 seems silly.
"The Most Fun Possible on 4 wheels" is at SunBuggy in Las Vegas
Check us out at ScaredCity(?tm?), our hideout, until we take over from these guise. we'll never scan you for ?copy?right? violations/infringemeNTs. in fact, we welcome them, even if they are not copied with 100% accuracy.
I think it was Zimmerman (of PGP fame) that said something to the effect, that sending unencrypted email was like sending all of your mail on postcards - bills, credit card numbers for orders to Sears, love letters, etc.
I am beginning to think that stuff like this makes for a case that ALL http traffic should be https traffic. Could today's hardware handle that? There probably would be a market for SSL accellerator hardware in such a world.
I swear by MacOS X. Although I use to swear *at* MacOS 9...
Doesn't the New York Times copyright their online articles? Can I not view them any more for fear of violating Excite's policies?
Oh please... That statement is just dumb. Of course on-line periodicals don't fall under that because the copyright holder allows you to download it. They are simply scanning for Warez, Movies and Mp3s (which I don't agree with but for you to compare those to the New York Times is just ignorant)
There's much stuff that's bad about Germany (I should know it, I am German), but one thing I love about this country: The "Datenschutzgesetz" (Data Protection Act).
No ISP here is legally allowed to monitor my data. The only one who would be allowed are the executive forces (police / law enforcement), and only if they had found out about me doing illegal stuff before.
They need to know about any illegal activities before - then I can be monitored.
Two Worlds - One Sun [Spirit]
Switch to what? We have two monopolistic broadband cable providers in australia.
One of them scans peoples downloads (Optus@Home) and the other restricts everyones data to 3GB a month or 100mb a day, including all internal data (Telstra Bigpond).
When there is a viable ISP to switch to, i'll let you know...
We should offer what we think the content is worth. If the offer is turned down, we should not be tasting of the fruits of their labor.
I don't know about you, but I think CDs and videos are overpriced. And we all know that the majority of the revenues go not to the content creators, but to the intermediaries. What we need is a way to directly compensate content creators, bypassing (and making obsolete) the intermediaries. It won't make the thieves disappear, but it will benefit the real artists a lot more.
Mail? Put "slashdot" in the subject to pass the spam filters.
Optus@Home needs to realize that what they are doing isn't right. Don't just sit there, contact them!
You can find their support webpage here or you can contact them directly at optushome.support@cwo.com.au
Voice your opinion.
long live the Internet.
d@
I used to install cable modems for AT&T @Home, and in my spare time one day I decided to read the entire user agreement included in the startup kit every customer got. It was pretty revealing and oddly Orwellian in its wording. They basically tell everyone that they have the right to: 1. maintain stats on people (i.e. what content you view and when), 2. monitor their network traffic on each individual node and each individual host, 3. record data on their customers in order to 'provide consistent and valuable service that appeals to @Home users', 4. use that data internally and with 'select AT&T partners' to provide bla bla bla. People never read all this crap and they count on it, even though it's right there in their faces. So basically AT&T @Home can monitor your transmissions, sell your data or give it to another branch to let the marketroids decide what to sell to you in various ways. I don't think they have the right to sell your email address but your browsing habits, yes. @Home, where implemented properly, is a damn fine system, but AT&T is still struggling with the concept of being a big ISP. I imagine that in Australia, hell, the world over where @Home is involved, users get pretty much the same agreement detailing what rights they have. Oh well.
The DCMA could be our friend here.
Since the traffic that is going to you contains a TCP header that contains your destination (your IP address), that traffic is intended to be recieved only by YOU. Any interception of this could be seen as an attempt to circumvent your digital security.
Anything that your ISP, or anyone else for that matter, gets as a result of sniffing traffic that was not intended for them is a violation of the DCMA.
Do you have any links verifying your increase in crime claim? Not to mention the hats and sunscreen...
I believe this is just an attempt to limit the bandwidth to their customers. Here's another article which talks about limiting their customers bandwidth.1 0/ A36682-2000Oct6.html
http://it.mycareer.com.au/communications/200010
It's stupid shit like this that makes me want to throw my computers out the window and become a construction worker.
They won't slow down their servers to decompress the stuff.
"Look at me! I'm jumping on a dead whale that's being torn apart by sharks! I bet I could touch one of those sharks when it chomps into that blubber!" -- yeah, and people think Americans _can be_ stupid.
Check it out here.
fialar
Something to think about...
@home will go out of business soon, taking your acoount with it...
I do not know why you people think that you have a legal right to privacy when you use an private ISP.
If you read ANY TOS, it specifically states that you cannot use their service for any illegal acts (such as stealing someones IP, which, believe it or not, is still illegal). The TOS also states that they can use any and all methods to monitor and enforce these rules, up to and including revoking your account and handing over evidence to the proper athorities.
This is obvious, straight-forward, and well spelled out in the contract/service agreement that you have with your ISP.
My question is, what makes you think that that you EVER HAD this privacy? Anything other than wishful thinking? Just because enforcement of these laws are lax, doesn't mean that they will never be used.
Having your ISP read your stream is unethical, and possibly immoral. Too bad, though, because we are not a world of morals or eithics. We are a world of laws.
Donut
When the broadband industry was young, there was no peer to peer at all. People read email and web pages, occasionally using FTP. You could get away with 200 customers per T1. Then Napster happened, the business model got blown all to shit and broadband was not longer profitable. This is an attempt to TOS the people actually using the most bandwidth. Copyright is the excuse. Encrypt your stuff and don't worry about it.
Carpe Deez
and yet you responded, stupid fuck. who's pathetic now?
How are they monitoring this? Are they only monitoring logs from their own servers? Are they scanning tcpip streams? If they are scanning? Is that legal? (Wiretap laws etc..) If they are scanning logs from their own servers, why are they providing the files in the first place?
I hope you used a spill chuker.
here the corporations own the copyrights for 75 years after we die
Officially, in the United States, your heirs own your copyrights for 70 years after the end of the calendar year in which you die, and copyrights on works of corporate authorship last for 95 years. In practice, because the copyright industry lobbies for (and gets) a 20-year copyright term extension every 20 years, we have perpetual copyright on every work first published on or after January 1, 1923, except for certain works with defective notices or pre-1964 works whose owners did not renew their 28-year copyrights for an additional 67 years. International copyright is worse: for example, the British government is free to enact a specific perpetual copyright on Peter Pan. Please read my writeup about the Sonny Bono Act for more information.
and the patents last for centuries as well.
No. Virtually all patents last no longer than 20 years after filing, period. Congress rarely grants extensions on individual drugs' patents.
Will I retire or break 10K?
If a private company can justify snooping on internet traffic in the name of "being a responsible Netizen on the Internet", imagine what the FBI might try to get away with using Carnivore.
This reminds me of the old specious law-enforcement argument: "hey, if you've got nothing to hide, what do you have to worry about?"
This has gotta be an illegal policy in the U.S. Perhaps the law's different Down Under.
Sure it's a massive problem. You need to find people willing to create a cloud with you. There have to be exit points in the cloud where people with less snoopy providers route packets in and out. The larger the cloud, the more difficult it would be to eradicate it through legal means. You could have services entirely inside the cloud that could not be reached from outside it.
I've been going on about building one of these for ages, but haven't seen much response here and haven't found many people willing to set one up. The backbone of the cloud needs to have high speed connections, and going through it WILL be slower than a direct connect. Having to trust the people running the cloud is another issue. Ideally the PGP "Web of Trust" would apply.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
How can they define piracy? I know I am parsing words here, but it is important.
There is no way for them to determine if the data I am recieving is a violation of a copyrite; There is no way for them to know my agreement with the copyright holder, or if my use of the copywritten material would be under fair use of the copyright.
A real example from last week - I found that my DVD software disk was scratched. I cold not reinstall the software. I have a friend that also has the same software. He "rar"ed the contents of the CD, and I downloaded it from his FTP server. I still held myh orginal key. I decompressed the archive and installed the software, using my software key. All legitimate use. Not a copyright infringement. Not piracy.
So now then, how does this look to the drone in sector 7G at @Home? He sees that I am downloading RARs of a popular DVD title. His conclusion? Piracy. A wrong conclusion indeed. Over reaction from Slashdotters? No. Even those that play by the rules get burnt by this.
This seems a related idea to the case of Godfrey vs. Demon in the UK a while back?
That case raised a number of important questions in UK law for the first time, regarding an ISP's status as a publisher, and hence the extent of their responsibilty for content they carry. IIRC, the court found against Demon on the basis that Dr Godfrey had notified them of the offensive postings and they then still failed to remove them.
However, this immediately leads to the conclusion that an ISP must, for its own safety, immediately remove any posting about which it receives a similar complaint. This is obviously subject to abuse through false claims by parties upset by a genuine and legitimate post. If the original poster could then also sue, on the basis that an ISP removed their material without an appropriate reason (big question there), then an ISP is left in an untenable situation, where they have to decide immediately and without judicial support on the legality of any post about which they receive a complaint. Oops... :-(
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
They are going to look for and suspend the accounts of users who download "pirate software or copyright material."
Dude, all software under the GPL is copyrighted! As such, it sounds like Excite@Home is gonna start suspending your accounts if you download it. (Yeah, I know, not really, but these people have *got* to be more carefUl about how they state things. Copyrighted does not equal "illegal to copy". It depends on the license (never mind things like fair use).)
Does anybody know *how* they're going to decide if a given download is verboten? What are their algorithms?
The world has gotten out of hand.
-Rob
WHY are they wasting money doing this? Also, this kind of activity SCREAMS security hole, ripe for abuse.
Not good. And this getting out among the enthusiast, who are the EXACT people to buy broadband, can't help their chances of avoiding File 13.
=== The price of freedom is eternal vigilance
They are in trouble in the US not in australia - in australia they belong to Optus@Home - Cable and Wireless Optus - the second largest carrier in the region who are owned by singtel - one of the regions biggest telcos - they have plenty of money and a massive userbase - they are the only reliable cable service - i use them and get speeds approaching 6mb/sec - so please i ask you check facts before posting.
Amreican companies are not the only ones in the world - our economy is not in the toilet - the US's is.
I refuse to argue with Anonymous Cowards - if you want a discussion get an account....
They wonder why they are almost out of business?
Talk about pirating, what do you think the Shareholders and the people they 100,000,00.00USD to?
Pathetic.
Wasting time doing things your customers will hate your for is not he way to trailblaze new business. The DMCA, RIAA and MPAA and Macrovision, the BSA, and well everyone and evrything else that fixates on us like Orwell 1984 is lame, and will hopefully become deprecated.
I hate soliciting companies that define what is good and bad.
Oh well.
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Legalize the constitution. Think for yourself question authority.
Could someone tell me what @home does? I know the local cable company owns the cable, not them. What exactly does @home provide? Can I call my cable company and ask them to find another ummm...whatever the hell @does for them?
I'm totally confused. The more I hear about @home the less I want anything to do with them, but there isn't much I can do. The local switch is DSL ready but everytime I try and get DSL the tests always fail, probably sub-standard phone lines.
Salon is running an article right now, Fingered by the Movie Cops, http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2001/08/23/pirat e/index.html, that addresses the same issue here in the land of the Fee. No proof provided as of the writing of the article, yet they were guilty in absentia. We ought to start a grass roots movement to get us some sort of protection that holds us to be proven guilty of a crime, not just assumed so. Oh, right, never mind. :( This is not what I spent 20 years in the military defending.
You must be the change you wish to see in the world - Ghandi
How are they even going to tell what I'm downloading? Are they going to pick ip packets from transit to my machine? How are they going to idenitify them as copyrighted?
How are they going to tell if I'm sending to myself (another machine in Germany maybe... linus backup plan?). I believe some materials give you the ability to make as many PERSONAL copies as you'd like.
Why don't we just end piracy in its tracks! Only let the gov't and businesses (Free Software companies don't count!) access the internet in any way. Everyone else gets a webTV.
The problem with the internet is that no matter how you are connected now a days... there is always someone higher on the bandwidth wagon than you telling you that this and that traffic is not allowed.
Who is watching the watchers? And are they lawyers with teams of paralegals looking up every copyright? There must be trillions!
I personally know OF an @home employee (don't bother asking the 5W's) who serves plenty of copyrighted materials from @homes own server machines! He's made plenty of friends in the company from around the country, and is always bragging about their little network. ("47 1337 servers all over the US, most on OC3 backbones..." note:this is a waste when they could be hosting a distro or something!!)
Finally, I want to ask... who is going to make sure while they are snooping they don't get my passwords? FTP isn't very secure... and not all shells (work or personal) use SSH. I'm not ULTRA-paranoid about security - I report to dshield and use encryption when I can among other things - but sometimes your only as secure as the 'other side'.
It's like people using a proxy to log into pr0n or personal ftps... and having their passwords stolen because it was logged.
I know this is in aussie-land, but I think there is plenty of ISP's doing this here in the USA. Hopefully this isn't going to be tolerated. Even the guilty have rights, believe it or not.
Get your Unix fortune now!
Just two days ago, my cable provider (the one in question) dropped the following groups from their news server:
alt.cracks
alt.binaries.cracks
alt.cracks.phrozencrew
alt.2600.cracks
etc.etc.
Anyone think that this is just a co-incidence?
Lucky for me there are heaps of news servers left open by mistake...
Yep,
no more linux downloads for you bad boys. Who do you think you are? Downloading copyrighted software without paying for it! Indeed!
a nony mouse ~;-)
I'd be seriously referring this case to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) because this represents a violation of my privacy. Your own ISP is collecting information about your internet access without your prior knowledge or permission (granted the more technically adept have already guessed it by now by looking at their access logs, but I'm also talking about the people who don't know). Yes, I know that other services have doing the same thing for years but it is easier to prevent an external company, that exercises no influence over your ISP (eg. Gator), from collecting personal information without permission.
Now IANAL, but unfortunately there is no specific legal protection for this kind of activity (at least not in NSW) under the Privacy and Personal Information Protection Act 1998 (NSW), as the principles in the Act that must be applied in the collection and use of personal information (see Section 10) only apply to the public sector and are still subject to exemptions.
Your best bet would be the Privacy Amendment (Private Sector) Act 2000 (which amends the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth)), as this adds conditions under which the private sector can collect personal information. It's also a Commonwealth Law, so that the Act can be applied to cases all over the country (although in most cases, the courts tend to follow the lead of NSW). One big caveat of this amendment is that this still could possibly allow Excite@home to collect information if "the collection is necessary for the establishment, exercise or defence of a legal or equitable claim" (see Schedule 3, 10.1(e)). But the way things are going for Excite@home at the moment, lawyers would probably be the last thing on their minds.
If you're serious about putting a stop to this, then try your government privacy body (in my state, it's the Office of the NSW Privacy Commissioner). More letters to these people (particularly now as it's close to an election) would help all of us stand up for our collective rights.
----------
When the pin is pulled, Mr. Grenade is no longer our friend.
I am an Optus@home cable user and received the email stating the changes to the T&C's a few days ago.
/. so far appear to be by people who have only read the headline and summary and not by actual Optus@home members. Optus is not proposing to scan everyone's traffic looking for copyright infringement. They have just reserved the right to scan traffic relating to a particular person IF a complaint of copyright infringement has been made against them.
Optus@home is a joint venture between Optus (2nd largest Australian telco) and Excite@home Australia. Optus provides the pipes, Excite provides the content and menus.
Most of the comments on
You'd have to be doing something pretty stupid as a home user to be spotted by ARIA (Aust equivalent of the RIAA) or MPAA. I've only ever seen them go after people who are commercially selling copyright infringing works. The little guy doing some file trading for free is just too small a fish and there are too many of them.
So in reality, whilst I definitely don't agree with what Optus@home is doing by scanning any individual's network traffic without a court order, this situation is not as bad as everyone seems to be making out.
Optus@home designs its network to be used by residential customers. If you want to run a business and make money off the net, you shouldn't be on Optus@home. Go and find a commercial network and free up the bandwidth for the rest of us.
*Cough*... Telstra broadband users would be crying at that last statement... On Optus, we already get data transfer volume limits six times higher and transfer speeds up to sixteen times faster! */Cough*
So if you are an Optus@home user, I recommend that you don't lose any sleep over this warning unless you are distributing pirated software for profit over the network (ie. charging people hard currency for it).
Does any post regarding Australia have to have every /.er jumping to unfounded conclusions??
e /0 ,3811,2668089%5E442,00.html
Optus@Home are NOT I REPEAT NOT scanning downloads. All that was sent out was a warning regarding breaches to the terms of service. ie If the ISP is advised that illegal activity is going on by the copyright holder, they will investigate it. JUST LIKE ANY OTHER ISP JUST ABOUT ANYWHERE.
Do you Americans not have ISPs that have taken down material in response to requests from copyright holders?
Go and read:
http://australianit.news.com.au/common/storyPag
or
http://www.whirlpool.net.au
Christ this fucking site is going downhill quickly.
I currently subscribe to the ISP in question. They have recently clarified their stance on piracy. They're not going to spy on users internet usage - they will only cut people off if they recieve a complaint from the copyright holder. So, in short, we're safe unless we're stupid (or just plain unlucky) enough to be caught.
...this is getting out of hand
Good Post but a few errors
You Said:
Mobile communications required the construction of parallel infrastructures. Ditto for cable infrastructures which was constructed over the last 3 years. No cable existed prior to that time. (Frankly we didn't miss it all that much.)
I say :
Nope under privatisation Telstra had to allow usage of the network infrastructure for most systems - this was before cable was thought of so each vendor ran their own (and fibre links and mobile etc)
You Said:
Since they're a duopoly, there's nothing to stop them from pulling any stunt they want. Their 'unlimited' broadband connections are simply fast pipes for web browsing, nothing more. Download on the Optus network are capped at 10 times the average daily download.
So you can download 400Mbytes/day on Optus@Home.
I say:
I am an optus at home customer and i pull down 600-800 mb a day without problems - they average it out over a 14 day period - so if you have a light day or 2 your are covered - i have gone over 1gb a day and never got chipped - they work an average cutting out the top and bottom 5% - it not as bad as non customers point out.
you Said:
Oh, at around $100/month too. Roughly US$50/month. This is on a 12 month contract after paying setup fees of $350.
I say:
Optus@home - Contract Rate - 18 Months @ $75AU a month (if you have cable tv and phone thru them its less - i pay $53 month - Non Contract rate - $65Au month
Installation is $199 or less if you buy your won cable modem
Telstra( my brother is an ADSL Customer) $75AU/Mnth and a $250 Install fee - plus their service does not work (he hasnt paid for it in 6 months and they havent asked him too until they get it right)
You Said:
This latest move by Optus is a stunt designed to try and cap their broadband expenses. Basically the company is going down and is trimming costs prior to looking for a buyer.
I say:
They have a buyer (see below) and thats not the reason - they are doing this stuff to appear like a nice corporate citizen to the Singaporean Govt - you know they have a major stakeholding in SingTel and they are a right wing and repressive gov
You Said:
Currently they're trying to sell themselves to SingTel, but one of their satellites is also used by the Australian Defence Force for signal intelligence. Naturally we're rather concerned about the Singapore government spying on us should they get their hands on Optus.
I say:
Watch the news or read a paper - this has been resolved and the sale will go ahead - the spying thing is bullshit as the Defense Department uses encyrpted code - they 'control' it in that they maintain orbit and data transfers - its a sealed system - they have the equipment for satellite monitoring and the govt contracted the service to save money - it is a contract that can be pulled so this is non issue
You Said:
Since privatisation, quality of service has declined, prices have risen and rural areas have suffered.
I say:
Grew up in the country and my family lives in the far west of QLD - this is load of crap the oppostion parties and vested interests would love you to listen to - prices have not risen that much but they have a bit as the GOVERNMENT no longer subsidises the services and it costs money to provide them (shock horror). Alternative carriers wont go in there as it does not make economic sense without govt help - we are talking about small numbers of people with huge infrastructre costs - whos going to pay for it - no company will spend billions on a commercially unviable system (think about what happend to iridium) Do you live in the country ?
You Said:
Essentially we're in broadband hell. Just be thankful you're not us.
I say:
Optus at home customer here and i dont live in hell, i have an excellent service and its fast - the fact is that in life you get what you pay for - this is a country with a 18 million population spread across a large land mass, these services are expensive to provide and thus it costs money - you can point at the US and say they have cheap access - they have 350+ million people - thats a lot more customers.
And dont forget the other vendors out there with cable and ADSL - I-hug, Burst net, etc (do a web search)
In closing i offer this comment (lifted from whirlpool)
Why is broadband so damn expensive?
While the price could come down a bit further, it's not really all that expensive. Given our exchange rate, we pay similar prices for broadband as people in America.
Australian users have to absorb the cost of building cross-pacific pipelines like the Southern Cross Cable (http://www.southerncrosscables.com/), which is in itself over 30 thousand kilometres of multi-core fibre optic cable. Even after the pipeline is built, Australian companies have to pay American networks for the ability to "plug in" to the internet.
Dial-up internet can be more costly than you think. You could be paying anywhere between 20 cents to one dollar per day in phone calls (that's between $6 and $30 per month), not to mention the cost of line rental for a second phone line, something that most regular internet users need when using dial-up.
I suspect you are a dial up customer who cannot afford broadband but check your facts OK - other than that i think you made some good points.
I refuse to argue with Anonymous Cowards - if you want a discussion get an account....
Surely to prove copyright violation the company holding the copyright would have to prove in court that a particular file was in violation of its copyright.
So I don't see where the ISP comes in to all of this.
Aussie ISP Scans Downloads For Copyright Violation
:)
---snip
Doesn't the New York Times copyright their online articles? Can I not view them any more for fear of violating Excite's policies?"
fwiw, they are scanning for copyright _violations_, not copyrighted material.
Still what they are doing here is pretty brave (and somewhat demeaning to their customers); you purchased a high-speed connection from us, therefore on that evidence alone we have reason to believe that you are up to no good.
Funny thing is they are probably right; anyone want to guess what tiny percentage of high-bandwidth users don't use that connection to illegally retrieve copyrighted items?
Take your business elsewhere. When they have banned 100% of thier users they'll go out of business.
Why are you all looking at a UK site for news on an Australian issue?
e /0 ,3811,2668089%5E442,00.html
Why do all Slashdotters instantly overreact with anything to do with Australia?
Why don't of you go and read this fucking article:
http://australianit.news.com.au/common/storyPag
or visit http://www.whirlpool.net.au
Nowhere EVER in any of the releases from Optus@home did it state that they were scanning downloads. All they are going to do is act in response if a copyright holder complains about infringements, which is WHAT ANY OTHER ISP JUST ABOUT ANYWHERE ALREADY DOES.
They're in damage control mode now. Saying they will only monitor traffic after a complaint from a copyright holder. However, it's still not clear if such a complaint can only lead to investigation of an individual user, or if it can lead to blanket monitoring of the optus network for that complainers' content.
Instead of cutting off the user, why not make @Home liable, for providing access to the illegal material, in the first place.
I'm sure, if they have the hardware/software to monitor each user's downloads, then they might as well as *erase* the hyperlinks from the web pages,before the user can view it.
- bhatti
Call me geek ?
DAMNIT! That means no more pirated copies of the Crocodile Hunter episodes! I knew they were on to me!
Section 1 is called "illegal activity":
1. Illegal Activity1.1. You must not use the Service for any activity that violates any local, state, federal or international law, order or regulation. Prohibited activities include, but are not limited to:
Posting, disseminating or in some cases accessing material which is unlawful. This includes material that is or would be classified RC or X and includes material that is or would be classified R where a restricted access system is not in place. Such content includes but is not limited to: material containing detailed instruction in crime, violence or drug use; child pornography; bestiality; excessively violent or sexually violent material; real depictions of actual sexual activity; obscene material; and content hosted in Australia which is classified R and not subject to a restricted access system which complies with criteria determined by the Australian Broadcasting Authority (ABA). For more information about the regulatory regime applying to online content go to www.aba.gov.au
Disseminating material which violates the copyright or other intellectual property rights of others. You assume all risks regarding the determination of whether material is in the public domain.
Pyramid or other illegal soliciting schemes.
Any fraudulent activities, including impersonating any person or entity or forging anyone else's digital or manual signature. If you do violate it
9.1. Optus is not obligated to regularly monitor your usage of the Service. However, in its efforts to promote good citizenship within the Internet community, it will respond appropriately if it becomes aware that you or someone with access to your Service has violated this Acceptable Use Policy or the Customer Terms or you or someone with access to your Service, has used the Service in an inappropriate manner. Although Optus has no obligation to monitor the Service, Optus reserves the right to monitor (and request Excite@Home to monitor) your bandwidth, usage or content, to identify violations of this Acceptable Use Policy; and to protect the Optus@Home Network and other users of this Service.
Who asked them to begin monitering?
There's no indication of whether this is a responsibility under law or whether they have chosen to do this. I note that the policy has not changed since September 2000.
James
http://whirlpool.net.au/article.cfm/444
I'm sure that all the optus@home pirates tune into that newgroup all the time!! Thats a great way to pretend that you've announced something important.
Shouldn't they be informing everyone via email about them graduating from cop school?
Also, something thats interesting is their response, they believe they'll be "reactive" rather than "pro-active". Snooping is snooping, no matter how you do it. Thanks Optus!
http://australianit.news.com.au/common/storyPage/0 ,3811,2668089%5E442,00.html
the harder the proprietary software is to get hold of, the more success open source / free software will get.
so this will lower the windows activity, cause less users will get accustomed to the software as it become more inaccessible than before.
which leaves the software that you can access to be the stuff that the masses can get reach the easiest.
a win win situation I would say. when it comes to OSS over PS. but also I am concerned with the fact that no system is bullet proff unless it does not have only two simple different choices to sort. one way or the other way.
They confirmed they will not be actively monitoring customer internet traffic. They're just handling complaints about their users, just like every other ISP already does. They are not scanning downloads for copyright violations as the article title suggests.
Nope under privatisation Telstra had to allow usage of the network infrastructure for most systems - this was before cable was thought of so each vendor ran their own (and fibre links and mobile etc)
Isn't that what I just said? Optus and Vodafone had to construct parallel mobile network infrastructures. Optus had to lay their own cable. Telstra had to "allow" access to the POTS infrastructure but did so at prices that made fair competition impossible.
I am an optus at home customer and i pull down 600-800 mb a day without problems - they average it out over a 14 day period - so if you have a light day or 2 your are covered - i have gone over 1gb a day and never got chipped - they work an average cutting out the top and bottom 5% - it not as bad as non customers point out
I know the system, however I really wasn't going to bore our American friends with the gritty details. It averages out to around 400Mbytes/day. That's close enough for me. And it's very bad for a company which advertised unlimited broadband access then reneged. That's a breach of consumer law.
You Said: Oh, at around $100/month too. Roughly US$50/month. This is on a 12 month contract after paying setup fees of $350.
I say:
Optus@home - Contract Rate - 18 Months @ $75AU a month (if you have cable tv and phone thru them its less - i pay $53 month - Non Contract rate - $65Au month
Telstra( my brother is an ADSL Customer) $75AU/Mnth and a $250 Install fee - plus their service does not work (he hasnt paid for it in 6 months and they havent asked him too until they get it right)
Telstra ADSL is over $100/month unless you're preselected with them, in which case it kicks back to $89. I know because I have it.
You Said:
This latest move by Optus is a stunt designed to try and cap their broadband expenses. Basically the company is going down and is trimming costs prior to looking for a buyer. I say: They have a buyer (see below) and thats not the reason - they are doing this stuff to appear like a nice corporate citizen to the Singaporean Govt - you know they have a major stakeholding in SingTel and they are a right wing and repressive gov
Who also doesn't seem to believe in copyright? Singapore is a pirate mecca. No, this is simple cost cutting as they only look at the accounts of people who have high download usage. Have a look at the article and read between the lines. It's fairly obvious.
Grew up in the country and my family lives in the far west of QLD - this is load of crap the oppostion parties and vested interests would love you to listen to - prices have not risen that much but they have a bit as the GOVERNMENT no longer subsidises the services and it costs money to provide them (shock horror). Alternative carriers wont go in there as it does not make economic sense without govt help - we are talking about small numbers of people with huge infrastructre costs - whos going to pay for it - no company will spend billions on a commercially unviable system (think about what happend to iridium) Do you live in the country ?
Mobile prices are simply unbelievable. They're by far the biggest proportion of Telstra profits. Cost of service has not risen yet Telstra has just slugged us with an extra $30/year for line rental. Care to explain how costs *haven't* risen?
And by what logic do you determine that having a non-government subsidised telecommunications carrier is a good thing? Ye gods man, it's infrastructure for goodness sake. Why do you think we pay taxes? Merely so the government can spend $300 million/year on 290 politicians? Don't be absurd. We've already paid for this infrastructure, it came out of our taxes.
And by the way? Vested interests? What vested interests? You mean Liberal party mates being thrown contracts by Government ministers?
I say: Optus at home customer here and i dont live in hell, i have an excellent service and its fast - the fact is that in life you get what you pay for - this is a country with a 18 million population spread across a large land mass, these services are expensive to provide and thus it costs money - you can point at the US and say they have cheap access - they have 350+ million people - thats a lot more customers.
That's nice except it's a complete furphy. The broadband services I refer to are only available in limited, densely packed urban areas. Of course these are no more expensive to wire up than any typical US city, so your argument is null and void.
Second, these services are not expensive. ADSL uses existing infrastructure with clever DSP algorithms at either end. Intra-continental bandwidth is ridiculously cheap as the packets can dart across a variety of transport layers.
I'll grant you this. Telstra is clearly incapable of running a network, they just don't have a clue. However, this is their own problem.
And dont forget the other vendors out there with cable and ADSL - I-hug, Burst net, etc (do a web search)
Oh please. Everyone else out there is either heinously limited in the service they're offering or prodigiously expensive. There *is* no broadband competition in Australia, there's just a Duopoly.
In closing i offer this comment (lifted from whirlpool) Why is broadband so damn expensive? While the price could come down a bit further, it's not really all that expensive. Given our exchange rate, we pay similar prices for broadband as people in America.
That'd be nice except the service is not true broadband. It's narrowband dressed in broadband clothing. Most US DSL and cable companies don't impose 64Kb/sec bandwidth limits and time-based download limits. You can argue till you're blue in the face, but there's simply no justification for capping intra-continental bandwidth, it doesn't cost the providers a red cent. Unused bandwidth isn't a commodity you can save and sell later on, it just goes to waste.
Australian users have to absorb the cost of building cross-pacific pipelines like the Southern Cross Cable (http://www.southerncrosscables.com/), which is in itself over 30 thousand kilometres of multi-core fibre optic cable. Even after the pipeline is built, Australian companies have to pay American networks for the ability to "plug in" to the internet.
We don't absorb it at all, Southern Cross Cable is a private consortium which onsells bandwidth. It's a purely commercial venture.
As for the cost. You can bet it's not the 19c/MByte that Telstra likes to charge. Not by a long shot.
Dial-up internet can be more costly than you think. You could be paying anywhere between 20 cents to one dollar per day in phone calls (that's between $6 and $30 per month), not to mention the cost of line rental for a second phone line, something that most regular internet users need when using dial-up.
Well you had me up to this point, but every time one of you idiots trots out this mantra I know I'm talking with a Telstra or Optus stooge. You guys can't resist poking dial-up in the eye every chance you get. Oh well, another conversation wasted.
Oh, and I've had broadband for 18 months. First cable, then ADSL.
I don't know about your ISP but @Home, and many of the operators that offer @Home don't allow VPN, or anything like it(eg:VNC, PC anywhere). Supposedly the software establishes a portion of the bandwidth that is reserved for the user regardless of whether or not they use it. I don't know if this is true, but it would pose a problem for both users bandwidth(if true). It's still likely to not be allowed by many ISPs.
obviously dripping with knowledge about Australia
repressive governments have a tendency to be left-wing. don't bring your personal political preferences into a discussion about provacy violations.
The first thing I did when I got my @Home cable modem was to bypass their proxy server and connect 'direct'. No only does it speed things up, but it makes monitoring more difficult. They could still do monitoring at the gateways, but I'm betting that they don't since most people don't know enough to bypass the proxy.
If monitoring worries you, use Freedom from Zeroknowledge Systems. It encrypts everything from your computer on out, and routes your connections thru one or more proxies so that the other end has no idea who is connecting to them. It won't handle all protocols, but those that it does are secure against snooping.
http://australianit.news.com.au/common/storyPage/0 ,3811,2668089%5E442,00.html
It is bad enough to have your communications sniffed by a company but when that company is owned by a foreign government the word spying springs to mind...
Im not a telstra or optus stooge - i have never spoken to you before i simply disagreed with some of your comments or offered other explanations - i dont comment on Telstra mainy as i have to deal with them at work and they suck - whilst i have optus at my home but they dont - the choice of carrier is up to you. This argument pisses me off more than i can say - if you dont knock something then you must work for them - its used everytime someone defends MS in any way and its an invalid and irrantional argument.
Dail up - lets see why i poke it in the eye (and i had it for 5 years previous to this) it sucks - 56k is a pathetic speed for anyting more than basic web surfing and email.
This country runs 3 years behind in Broadband and high speed access (mainly due to Telstra) and if we start accepting 56k as OK then we will never get change
As for the narrowband - Bandwidth costs money - if you think you know it in this area work in corporates - I am and MIS manager for a global company and run a Win2k AD worldwide lan link, every mb we send costs money -(i am also responsible for Voice Comms by the way and have just renegotiated contracts on Mobile and fixed line costs - i can comment on this area) -whether this is an oncharge or not is irrelevant - the owner of the cable (southern cross) has to recoup the cost so they sell the usage on to the carriers - they can then charge what the market will bear (i think 19c a MB is bullshit but i dont use Telstra at home so i wont comment on your choice)
ADSL in this country is a mess - Telstra cant deliver a working service and we at work contract with another company for DSL for our remote sites and homew workers - this is a constant and painfull headache.
Mobile prices have nothing to do with connectivity in rural areas - you have to run transmission towers every 10-15km to maintain service and they need cabling into them and power etc - forget mobiles (and do some research actually we have some of the cheapest mobile rates in the world and handset costs are on par with a population as small as ours is)
And as for running broadband to remote areas - OK i dont know what it costs per mile to run Broadband trunks (and it has to fiber optic as the current links WONT support the dream of ADSL) but i think you could safely say its more that $10000AU per KM when you take in manpower, digging cable lines, legal costs, surveys, etc etc not to mention all of the equipment and exchange upgrades, servers etc to end on it, so you think about this - my family lives 800km from Brisbane where i am, thats by road, but if you take that and work it out thats Au$8 Million for that one stretch alone - not you wold be running it into a population base of 8000 people - thats a cost per person of $1000 per customer NOT counting the last mile to the home and the installation of service etc etc - and that covers them only - not the regionals - so how do you ever make it a viable financial concern ? tell me as i and many others would love to know.
The government spends $300 million a year on 290 pollies - well that works out to AU$1 million per Electorate per year - it has to cover wages, staffing, admin costs, travel, etc etc - thats a non issue and it obfuscates an issue - thats the sot of crap we see here all the time - and it means that people can just attack the pollies and not even make a suggestion to fix it.
Delivery of service costs money - someone has to pay the bill - when you talk rural australia that means delivery of service across a huge territory - you can do phone service with sattelite (as Telstra does) but its not cost effective - you cant deliver broadband cheaply this way however (latency etc etc)
No more expensive to wire - yep thats maybe true (its not but i wont waste time pointing out why) Do some research on city areas and population sizes in the US and here and densities - australian cities are more spread out and this requires more cost per mile - thats why the argument is fallacious - and the urban areas in australia are the only ones with sufficient population density to support it - 95% of the australian population lives within a 1 hour drive of the coast and over 80% on the eastern seaboard.
Optus at home is a good service - check their customer satisfaction ratings then ask a few people in the industry who know what they are talking about - Telstra screwed up ADSL and cant be bothered fixing it (i suspect an announcment on something else soon)
Southern Cross cable can charge what they want as they own the lines - This is a business NOT a charity - and unfortantely so can Telstra - and dont start with the PSA or Allan Fels - they seem to have staff of 3 blind mice and an aged labrador so i dont expect much from them.
The duopoly is crap - the reason most of the other ISP's dont have coverage is backing - it costs money to do this stuff and they dont have it - thank the Dot.com feeding frenzy - no one wants to invest in telcos and isp's (and not to mention the way ISP's go broke so often) and on the back of One Tel and 3G who can blame them
I was trying to be nice till you called me a stooge - thats a weak argument - check your facts and then think about it next time you lower it to that level - i dont dismiss things beacuse they dont fit with me - i take them in and look at them.
I refuse to argue with Anonymous Cowards - if you want a discussion get an account....
respressive govts tend to be left wing ?
a few examples
Chile - right Wing military
Argentina - right wing military
Singapore - right Wing
Indonesia - right wing
sri lanka - right wing
Afgahnistan - religious BUT right wing
Pakistan - right wing military
And some more from history
WW2 -germany - right wing
" -italy - right wing
Ditto spain
You know this is the myth the US spreads - that to be repressive you need to be left wing - its crap taught in your schools - or is it the fact that the above countries are seen as right wing and thus anti communist and thus worthy of us support ?
Lets see who gets US aid packages (including military aid) SIngapore, Pakistan, Chile, sri Lanka and indonesia until last year. (the other might i dont know)
Singapore - a country that arrests you for smoking in public, brooks no opposition to its policies, practices public floggings etc
The fact that it is also a huge source of piracy is neither here nor there - its simply not an issue as ou have no rights to free speech, freedom of assembly, free trials etc.
Think about what you are saying next post
If they intercept the images that a person downloads from a pay service - or the text articles or whathaveyou, does that mean they are illegally accessing that service?
I mean if I pay good money to access a porn^H^H^H^H^H pay news service and receive the benefit of that service, how can they legallly be allowed to (presumably) gain the same benefit from that service without paying for it?
Why, that ought to be illegal...
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
Well since singapore (SINGTEL) owns optus now, thats just typical of their bahaviour then
Anyone? I imagine the easiest way would be to scan their proxy server logs, so don't use their proxy servers.
:wq
To play devil's advocate here for a moment:
When you sign up for an ISP's service, you're agreeing to pay them money in exchange for permission to use their computers. In return, the ISP dictates the terms under which those computers can be used.
If you don't like the idea of someone reading the information you send through their machine, then don't use their machine. Nothing compels you to use @Home; it's not a monopoly like the phone company.
(Well.. telcos are a monopoly in Canada, I'm not sure who owns the lines in the states)
I'm surprised at the number of people who expect complete privacy and anonymity when they send their information to a computer whose purpose is to associate what you're downloading with who you are.
Am I the only one who heard Roxette to sing "I'm gonna get blitzed for some sex"?
This has nothing to do with copyright. Optus has experienced major problems with bandwidth. They recently forced users into a 3GB monthly limit. Since most downloads are movies, mp3's, and software, this is a very effective way (theoretically) to cut bandwidth costs. Now users will be downloading redhat images instead ;-).
God i hate people who dont visit this site every day - check the post from a few days ago regarding this - Optus bought excite@home Australia outright and they DO NOT HAVE MONEY TROUBLES !
Hey maybe they're just looking for MP3s and paid programs and games and such? They can't seriously be looking for NYT articles or what you think?
Maybe someone at Excite@Home knows that definition. Call them and ask and you can ask about NYT articles and their policies too.
Preserve old classics: copy your collection onto all hard drives.
Just try to do that in New Zealand and the media + customers would be down on them like a ton of bricks.
"Optus@Home has clarified its position on piracy, saying it will not be actively monitoring customer internet traffic. Rather it will respond only to complaints lodged with Optus by copyright owners, Optus@Home chief executive Chris Chapman told Australian IT today."
I have optus cable & their AUP is less restrictive than Telstra's (The only competitior in the market). Our downloads aren't at a capped rate & the service by all reports is more reliable.
Since the CEO has now qualified his statements & they aren't proactively checking downloads, I don't see a problem. Australian law makes ISP's liable for their users activities. If I was running the show I'd be keeping track too. Yes the law is wrong, but given that it stands I think this is the best way for them to approach it. Follow up on complaints from copyright holders.
You know it's really about time for every web site to start using port 443 instead of port 80. And use sftp instead of ftp. To the hell with nosey ass isp's.
I got a beer, want some? To bad.
The journey is better then the end.
@Home just announced they can't run a tight enough ship to remain listed on the Nasdaq. If I was an @Home user, I'd be looking for another ISP anyway since they're probably not going to be around in a year.
and let them feel what you think about their snooping.
Once again time to mention JAP, which will at least take care of HTTP.
Unluckily, it`s still under development and servers are scarce.
I understand the invasion of privacy concerns, but aren't there other ISP's in Australia? I mean, it seems to me the best thing for those folks to do is to vote with their dollars and give business to other ISP's that won't invade their privacy. Excite@Home is about a hair's breadth away from going out of business, anyway.
The best answer is to hit a business with odious practices like this where they live. Hit them in the wallet. If enough people start switching ISP's, you can bet they'll back off on monitoring people's downloading habits.
--
"And that's the world in a nutshell -- an appropriate receptacle."
-- Stan Dunn
Very simple. They would not. You will be the one to prove you did nothing wrong. As it was shown in the DMCA case, current society is OK with passing a law that allows to prosecute a person because Copyright Mafia wants so. And there are real stories of people with their internet access terminated because RIAA sent the ISP a letter that stated that their IP was noted in trafficking "illegal" content. No questions asked, no person contacted, just immediate access cutoff. If you want to have your internet access alive, you would be the one to sweat and get all the proofs that your content is legal. Internet is a nice place, full of freedom and new possibilities, isn't it?
Alternatively, you can just terminate your relationship with that ISP. If there is any other ISPs that are yet sane, of course. And if they won't be sued out of existance by the RIAA.
-- Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes.
...are belong to us?
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Are you talking about US copyright law there, or Australian? Australian copyright lasts for fifty years after the death of the author.
GROGGS: alive and well and living in
Yes and I've come to depend on my spill chucker far too much. Such are the evils of the technological age. Unfortunately, there are many out there like me, who can't spell worth a damn, so with this in mind it would be great if CmdrTaco could put hooks in to 'aspell' os a similar mechanism into /code so we don't end up publicizing our inability to spell worth a damn.
--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
Don't worry , Excite@home is doing us a favor. By pointing out weak spots in our download encryption methods they are going to help us become more secure.
In all honesty , it seems to me that Excite has become just another hacker rendering 'security assistance' where it wasn't asked for.
I have the 'Metallica Black' CD. It's a legal, store-purchased CD. A while back, I wanted some MP3s of those songs. The copyright act says something to the effect of, if you have the rights to listen to that music, (ie you bought the CD), then you can download that music. Well, me downloading the songs that I already had the rights to listen to from the internet is not illegal. I personally found it easier to download the music than to tie my computer up for a few hours ripping it myself.
How do they know that I'm not downloading music that I am allowed to download, or even yet, what if my copy of 'The Sims' (I know, don't laugh!) stopped working. I should be able to download another copy off the net, and since I have the right to play it, then I should be able to get another working copy to replace the one that doesn't work. How would excite@home know this?
THEY DON'T, AND THEY CAN'T...
This type of action shouldn't be allowed for the same reason someone can walk into Waterbeds 'N Stuff and buy a bong. This is the reason: If it has a legal use, then it should be available to the public. Downloading software off the net (Including Napster, although the RIAA doesn't agree) shouldn't be any different.
And they said zombies weren't real!
from www.whirlpool.net.au:
"Optus@Home has clarified its position on piracy, saying it will not be actively monitoring customer internet traffic. Rather it will respond only to complaints lodged with Optus by copyright owners, Optus@Home chief executive Chris Chapman told Australian IT today"
They apparently have no intention of 'monitoring' the traffic, just react to 'complaints' - just to clear it up some.
at one time the consumer would never had to stand for this. they could have switched service. now, all broadband junkies are at the whim of their cable providers. this is a thorougly unhappy situation.
to never visit Australia with my dollars.
Why should this news surprise anyone? Excite@home is a soulless corporate vampire. They'd be selling popsickles if Bomb Pops were all the rage instead of the Internet.
I wonder when the consumers of Excite@home are going to tumble to the fact that Excite is chewing away at their individual bandwidth, byte by byte?
Yes, you get blazing fast speeds, but don't watch streaming videos for more than 10 minutes in an hour, or they'll throttle back your connection. Yes, its 'always on', but that means your neighbors are SHARING your bandwidth, especially at peak times.
Pornography? Watch out; Excite@home has no qualms about sharing information about what you download with local (or federal) authorities.
You can surf the net at high speed, unless you go to a site which isn't on their favored list, in which case bandwidth to it is throttled back.
How long does it take to get Excite@home to support their product? Some credible horror stories say that they take as long as six months to repair problems.
You get what you deserve, when you buy from outfits like these.
It is, but remember: all along, you have had to assume that it's happening anyway. There's never any telling who is listening in on your connections, and you should never trust The Internet. You've never been able to take privacy for granted. That's one of the reasons stuff like https, ssh, etc were invented. And if you're using these things (correctly), it is virtually impossible for your ISP or anyone else to snoop your traffic.
So use crypto if you don't like this. I say again: this has been a risk all along. It's just that someone is admitting it this time.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I was expecting changes with the singtel takeover of optus. Though, hasn't the takeover just been approved, and not actually happened yet? Even still, changes this fast. I dont think the takeover has much to do with this.
From the ipsec manpage in FreeBSD:
DESCRIPTION
ipsec is a security protocol in Internet Protocol layer. ipsec is defined for both IPv4 and IPv6 (inet(4) and inet6(4)). ipsec consists of two sub-protocols, namely ESP (encapsulated security payload) and AH (authentication header). ESP protects IP payload from wire-tapping by encrypting it by secret key cryptography algorithms. AH guarantees in-tegrity of IP packet and protects it from intermediate alteration or im-personation, by attaching cryptographic checksum computed by one-way hash functions. ipsec has two operation modes: transport mode and tunnel mode. Transport mode is for protecting peer-to-peer commuication between end nodes. Tunnel mode includes IP-in-IP encapsulation operation and is designed for security gateways, like VPN configurations.
So, yes. IPSec will secure things. But you still have to look at the amount of users who have trouble finding the website they want, let alone setting up IPSec. Even still, for every remote IP address you wish to have security when downloading from, they have to configure IPSec at their end. So, that means you wouldn't just have to secure your connection to opennap servers, but also users on the opennap servers you want to download from. But I'm sure, there are also many other examples of how IPSec could be effective, but would also be a pain to configure for large amounts of IP address, some of which dynamic. Maybe what were looking at is the rewriting of some protocols to support secured connections & transfers, as this would be an easier task of just installing a secured client/server, instead of having to setup IPSec. Though, IPSec is good in cases where you have a remote system that you want all communications to be secured.
I might do a little work on securing lopster & opennap with OpenSSL to support secured logins & transfers, when I could be bothered. It could be interesting. I'm sure an implementation of this would take time for people to start using, though.
This would actually be illegal in the UK under the data protection Act 1980, which makes it a criminal offence to pass on or receive any personalised data to a third party without the data subjects (your) permission.
Also as an aside most Internet download's because they are for personal use are covered by fair use and are perfectly legal and proper, in any country.
So if this was to happen in the UK the ISP and the RIAA would be breaking the law.
The inevitable is happening.
The existing distribution networks
are trying to limit or control the uses of this
new distribution network, because if they do not,
some will surely wither to a shadow of their former size/importance/income (lobbying ability).
Limit? An ISP customer is dropped
because he's accused of uploading copyrighted
material? Ever hear that one back in the usenet
pre-web days?
Control? AOL Time Warner? MSNBC? An ISP,
content provider (policeman), and a dessert
topping.
Who's in control of the distribution
system now? One thing is certain: it
will never be you.
6zs
Tunneling PPP over SSH is pretty straight forward, and it doesn't seem to generate any chatter unless the connection is actually in use. SSL on all web servers would be a big step in the right direction , too and is damned easy to set up. Generating and signing your own certificate is pretty easy too, though web browsers need a more granular trust mechanism in order for that to work really well.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?