Slashdot Mirror
Spain Outlaws P2P File-Sharing
Section_Ei8ht writes "Spanish Congress has made it a civil offense to download anything via p2p networks, and a criminal offense for ISP's to allow users to file-share, even if the use is fair. There is also to be a tax on all forms of blank media, including flash memory drives. I guess the move towards distributing films legally via BitTorrent is a no go in Spain." Here is our coverage of the tax portion of this law.
Isn't WoW patching done via P2P?
Also if you want to really push the boat out they've now made it illegal to play online games, since they work in a way you could argue is P2P in some cases.
I like muppets.
They have done something far worse than simply ban unauthorized p2p sharing.. they have made it a criminal offense for ISP's to merely allow it.
since every protocol on the internet can be used for unauthorized p2p sharing ISP owners must now either cease all service or go to prison.
This is a subtle but radical difference from what other nations have done, and it spells doom for all spanish ISP's
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
I believe the law only applies to copyrighted materials that you aren't entitled to copy;
Ummm, wasn't copyright infringment already a civil offence in Spain? So you're saying that they passed a law to make the civil offence of copyright infringment into a civil offence?
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
I think you missed the part where ISP's are obligated to block P2P traffic. Since an ISP cannot differentiate between authorized and unauthorized P2P traffic, they have no choice but to block the entire technology (or make a best case effort at least).
There are two types of sources in bittorrent:
* Peers are people who are both downloading and uploading.
* Seeders are people who have already downloaded the entire file and are uploading it out of the kindness of their hearts.
Peers will continually kill the connections with the worst download/upload ratio, meaning you will get virtually nothing from peers if you don't upload.
Seeders upload to anybody, though they _may_ be clever by avoiding uploading the same parts of the file more than once during a limited amount of time in order to maximize the amount of data that can be distributed between peers.
So in other words, if trhere are a lot of seeders you will get ok download speeds without uploading.
Try out fish, the friendly interactive shell.
Someone posting as anonymous coward should be less flippant asking for references. But I love shutting assholes up.
"I think it would be a good idea!"
Gandhi, about Internet Security
Together with a random port there should be no way to detect and thus affect the traffic.
The traffic analysis necessary to detect BitTorrent traffic is trivial; nothing else opens a large number of connections and starts sending data the way that BitTorrent does. Encryption has worked with some ISPs because they've only made a half-hearted effort to traffic-shape. As it currently stands, many users have a choice of broadband providers and will switch if their carrier is too aggressive, and in most cases it's easier to simply cap all of an heavy user's bandwidth than to waste the cycles trying to find the BT traffic in particular.
But rest assured, the traffic analysis is child's play. If ISPs want to stop BT traffic, encryption won't present any impediments.
Don Negro
Perl 6 will give you the big knob. -- Larry Wall
SSU. SSU introductions. Passive-active-passive peering. Double-ended passive-passive TCP sockets using a mutual introducer (so what if so few nodes can introduce; you only need one per hundred thousand or so). A distributed mixnet with partial restricted routes - a comparatively low number of peer connections to less restricted connections, to tunnel to a large number of peers using multiple hops. Hell, you get anonymity as a side dish to that. So does everyone else. Fuck it, make 'em full restricted routes. May as well add encrypted, protocol-masquerading steganographic transports to thwart application-layer traffic shaping.
Stuff like this is already well in development. Not everything has to use a thousand inbound and outbound TCP connections like Bittorrent, there are many different approaches to this sort of thing. Not to mention there are a lot of tricks in TCP. Some threat models see the ISP as malicious. Free speech ultimately demands anonymity, and the ability to be able to punch through any effective barriers blocking the protocol that allows that.
By the time they would successfully enforce such a thing, we would probably already have a fielded, very good way around it, and by then, it would be extraordinarily difficult - possibly computationally infeasible, given enough time and effort - to block, or perhaps even detect.
And remember, comparatively very few peers are in Spain.
You could just turn the upload of Spanish residential connections down to shit, like 32kbps or something, and allow only ACKs to bypass that limit. But there'd still be enough left over bandwidth from everywhere that *doesn't* legislate itself into the Internet Dark Ages to keep the stuff moving, and there are tricks on top of anything that has already been done, at that...