UK ISPs Resistant to Monitoring Users

ethericalzen writes "An article from BBC News online states that ISPs in the UK are resistant to the government's desires for monitoring their users' data. The government seeks to have ISPs turn off the access of users who are 'persistent pirates'. The ISPs are citing technical and legal reasons for why they do not wish to do this. Legals reasons include surveillance laws which prohibit ISPs from monitoring a user's data unless compelled by a warrant. Technical reasons include an inability to accurately identify copyrighted material that is legally being transferred over p2p clients, and copyrighted material that is being transferred illegally over p2p clients."

Comments

Traffic management

[esocid]

"If you exceed that threshold we will drop your speed for five hours from when the excess is recorded,"

This is what happened at the university I went to. It only applied to your upload bandwidth but if you exceeded whatever imaginary number they didn't disclose to you, you would get an email and your bandwidth slashed for a day or two. I'm sure a percentage of this was due to people's computers getting hijacked by trojans/viruses because they insisted that you not connect to the network without having some sort of AV (if you ran windows) and would target specific IPs in the dorms that were either hijacked or simply uploading via p2p.
I'm not quite sure what would happen if any ISPs did that here since no one yet has any pay per usage service, although Time Warner is proposing something like that. It'll be interesting to see what effect, if any, the situation in the UK will have over in the US.

But in practice, they're all for it

[mrsmiggs]

Bargain basement ISP Tiscali have already operated a similar scheme in cahoots with the BPI, but it's all fallen apart because Tiscali want the BPI to pay for the privilege of sending warnings and chucking people off. The most intriguing part is that the BPI are doing the investigation and instead of monitoring the packets of each connection they are monitoring the known torrents and connections to those torrents, which is clearly a far more practical idea than monitoring all packets. The Register have the full story

Re:Didn't use the magic word!

[Chris Burke]

Uh, okay, well how about this:

9/11 TERRORISTS WITH US OR AGAINST US 9/11 THINK OF THE CHILDREN TERROR TERROR!

There, did that turn your brain off? No? Shit! Why does this crap only work in America?!

Re:Slashdot cheers the murder of suspected spammer

[MacDork]

ISP blocks trojan-infected machines back in 2003?

Um, actually, the headline reads "Swedish ISP Blocks Computers That Send Spam." You're assuming that they are trojaned computers and not voluntary installs of "Make millions working from home" bots designed to send spam, just like the submitter did. What we know with certainty is: ISP blocks computers that send spam. The rest is conjecture. And with that came plenty of cheers from the slashdot crowd happy that they were doing it with no regard to privacy.

I noticed you conveniently ignored the score 1 privacy posts I pointed out. I've provided what you asked and now you're moving the bar. Will you continue to move the bar until I'm required to collect signed affidavits from more that 50% of slashbots for you to accept what is blatantly obvious to anyone who has read anything regarding spam and P2P at this website? I don't think I'll jump through any more of your flaming hoops. I'm sure you have an endless supply.

Re:Lack of knowledge makes this a bitch

[ScrewMaster]

You're making the assumption that the government (any government) will bother with anything complex or intelligent (since lawmakers are rarely either, it seems.) All they'll do is decide what a "normal" Internet user should be allowed to do, and kick-off/arrest/imprison anyone that tries to do anything they don't think is acceptable. So that would include email (forced through the ISP's mail server, so that it can be properly monitored and recorded), browsing (only through government-approved ports and using government-approved protocols), VoIP (only if one's ISP offers such a service, so that it can be properly monitored and recorded) and maybe FTP. Then just pass a law which says that no-one can use any protocol or Internet-aware application without having prior approval granted by some "Bureau/Ministry of Protocol Management".

Problem solved, at least to the bureaucratic mind. And it would work, too, for the most part, if they made the penalties for non-compliance heinous enough.