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UK ISPs Resistant to Monitoring Users

Posted by Zonk on from the as-well-they-might-be dept.

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."

2 of 79 comments (clear)

  1. Traffic management by esocid · · Score: 4, Interesting

    "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.
    --
    Absolute power corrupts absolutely. indymedia
  2. But in practice, they're all for it by mrsmiggs · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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