UK ISPs Consider VPN To Avoid Piracy Crackdown

Mark.JUK writes "Broadband internet providers in the UK are considering whether or not to follow the example of a Swedish ISP, Bahnhof, which recently put all of its customers behind a secure Virtual Private Network (VPN) in order to circumvent new European Data Retention and Internet Copyright Infringement laws. By doing this, it makes their logs less useful to outside forces (e.g. rights holders) and allows customers to use the internet anonymously. However, several UK ISPs, including business provider AAISP (Andrews and Arnold), have suggested that there may be better solutions than sticking everybody behind a costly VPN. AAISP's boss, Adrian Kennard, claims, 'something ISPs will be doing anyway, carrier grade NAT, will create a similar anonymity as there is no requirement to log NAT sessions.' Meanwhile, Timico's CTO, Trefor Davies, warns, 'It would be a pretty costly project for all ISPs to implement such a system. It would also bring with it risks – suddenly it becomes a lot easier for governments to start monitoring all your traffic because it all goes through a single point (or at least a few points) on the network.'"

Comments

Interesting

[Haedrian]

So the public don't like the law because they can get ratted out.
The ISPs don't like the law either

Why is there this law again?

Re:Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

Y'see, it is a very simple one, the reason why pretty much any other law hated by everyone is around: money from media companies.

Re:Interesting

[cs02rm0]

Money.

Re:Interesting

[Gordonjcp]

We don't have "jaywalking" laws in the UK. The whole idea that you can be arrested for crossing the street in the wrong place is as laughable as it is Kafka-esque.

Re:Interesting

[Eskarel]

There's a law because intellectual property is the only major export most Western nations still have. However unpopular this sort of thing is they're all far too afraid to risk losing that economic base, so they don't want to change the equation too much. Hence laws to preserve the status quo.

Re:Interesting

[FuckingNickName]

Well, sort of. See Highway Code rule 18. It is an offence to loiter on a crossing.

Which means you can potentially enjoy criminal sanctions for crossing where you should be crossing, but not for crossing where you shouldn't. And this, m'lud, is why I never cross at crossings.

(It's like those stupid pavement railings close to crossings. It just means you have to make the extra effort of jumping the railing or hugging the kerb on the road side until the railing ends, which is far more dangerous than if they weren't there.)

Re:Interesting

[rrossman2]

The funny this to me is:

Sean Hannity (can't stand him, but listen sometimes on my way home from work just to get mad lol) had Joe Lieberman on and had they talked about this and that. Two days later Hannity has two foreign people on talking about what's going on in Egypt, with each person having different views. He then asked the one if the current President of Egypt (or whatever that position is called) is a Dictator, and kept hounding the point. After the lady wouldn't agree or say, Sean said something along the lines of "well look, he had the internet shut off, which makes him a dictator".

Well if that's true, then Lieberman is a dictator for having come up with the internet kill switch for the US, as well as anyone else who agreed on the bill.

It's funny how one action someone else is evil and "makes someone a dictator", yet the same or similar actions else where are just fine.

It really makes me sick

Re:Interesting

[turing_m]

In conditions not suited for it, excess speed carries increased risk of accidents and death in accidents, which is one of the reasons speed limits are imposed and also ostensibly why they are enforced. By contrast, infringements on music and movie copyrights don't generally kill or injure people. (Insert Battlefield Earth joke here.)

Re:Interesting

[causality]

In conditions not suited for it, excess speed carries increased risk of accidents and death in accidents, which is one of the reasons speed limits are imposed and also ostensibly why they are enforced.

Consider that "exceeding the speed limit" and "driving too fast for conditions" are two entirely separate violations (the second is much more severe). The latter really does make sense as a safety issue. The former is a revenue generator for the state that has nothing whatsoever to do with safety.

Re:Interesting

[symbolic]

Exactly - and you see Obama crowing about the rights of the Egyptian people, but then you wonder - what would happen if the same events were occurring here? I'm willing to bet that Obama would be singing an entirely different tune. Further, the initial intent of the "kill switch" was to mitigate damage in the wake of cyber warfare. However, just like everything else the federal government has done in the name of "national security" since 9/11, it *will* be re-purposed for other non-defense uses.

Re:Interesting

[jonbryce]

"IP" isn't on the list, as it isn't a physical product that goes through Customs.

Take Apple for example. They go down on the list as an importer of goods from China. However, the design of their products and the software that runs on them is carried out in the USA, and their products go from China to all over the world. That is a major IP export from the USA.

Any side effects of NAT?

[TubeSteak]

I'm not all that familiar with the nitty gritty details of NAT.
Would a site like /. rate limit posts coming from multiple users behind a NAT?

IIRC, one spammer behind a NAT can get everyone else blacklisted.
Talk about havoc for that ISP's customers.

A VPN sounds like the smarter of the two ideas.

Re:Any side effects of NAT?

[TheLink]

They might also be considering NAT to delay moving to IPv6.

Re:Any side effects of NAT?

[Arancaytar]

The side effects of a NAT (not all NATs, but the IP masqerading one which has become synonymous with it) are that you lose the ability to accept incoming traffic. Pretty much all Peer-to-peer protocols depend on that in some measure.

Some can cope (I believe Skype has some server-based way of negotiating a direct connection between two firewalled computers, though I don't know the details), while others like BitTorrent keep some limited functionality (you're limited to connections you initiate), and still others (tor, probably - as a node, not a client) will stop working entirely.

Re:Any side effects of NAT?

[SuricouRaven]

IPv4 wasn't designed to use NAT at all. NAT is an improvised technique that allowed IPv4 to continue to grow far beyond it's original design specifications. Networking professionals do not like it, because it breaks a lot of protocols, but it's the only way the internet can continue to function right now. The alternative is IPv6, but that is a very expensive thing to deploy and would bring many troubles of it's own during the transition period. So the options are to either continue deploying NAT, which is cheap and reliable at the expense of breaking a lot of protocols and crippling the internet in future, or deploying IPv6 which will produce a far superior internet in five years but in the meantime result in customers asking why things arn't working properly. There isn't a business case for IPv6, because the RoI period is so long - the IPv4 internet isn't going to collapse just yet, though it will inevitably happen one day.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Why do people worry

[gmthor]

Why do people worry about wire trapping?

I've got nothing to hide. \end{cynical}

Re:Why do people worry

[Anonymous Coward]

"Why do people worry about wire trapping?

I've got nothing to hide."

Because, unlike you, they're aware of history and basic civil rights principles.

Why workarounds ?

[cdp0]

Instead of searching for technical workarounds, we should try to block such laws. Workarounds are just that, and sooner or later the law will workaround workarounds.

What will happen if encryption will become illegal for the general public ? Today this might seem far-fetched, but we are slowly giving in, and it might be a tad too late when we'll realize what we lost (and I'm not talking about the regular /. guy, but about the general public).

Re:Why workarounds ?

[Haedrian]

The people who want these laws are the kind of people who have enough money and influence to ensure that these laws stay the same way.

I mean, you saw the whole Net Neutrality debate in the US. It had misdirection on one side which triggered the American Native "I DON'T WANT NO GUBBERMENT" reaction.

When we're talking about media - you can expect to see commercials detailing how 'favourite artist' supports this law because it protects their music, how the world would be horrible without them. Then you have government lobbying (also known as bribes) and stuff like that.

If we had an infinite pool of politicians, enough floating voters and a way of determining who supports these crap laws, you'd see the world change pretty quickly. Not the case either.

At least you can rest on the fact that laws usually take ages to fix. So this 'workaround' is great until they patch the law up in a few years' time.

Re:Why workarounds ?

[zippthorne]

I mean, you saw the whole Net Neutrality debate in the US. It had misdirection on one side which triggered the American Native "I DON'T WANT NO GUBBERMENT" reaction.

The problem was the other side of it, that was salivating over all the possibilities to insert more government control into the legislation for net neutrality. You weren't ever going to get real net neutrality, you were going to get something like it, plus a whole lot of political meddling.

The outcome is predictable.

[SuricouRaven]

If any major ISP does this, then next legislative session some politician will just propose a law to make it illegal, on the grounds that it makes it impossible to track down pedophiles. The bill will pass on a unaminous vote with support from all parties, because no politician wants to be seen defending said pedophiles.

Hmm... carrier-level NAT would also make tracking people online next to impossible. Could we have finally found something that will convince non-technical types of the need to move to IPv6? 'Deploy the new protocol, or the evil pedos will never be caught?'

Re:Internet is not a curiosity anymore

[Chaonici]

I don't understand how you got from point A to point B in your post. Are you saying that because the Internet is quite important nowadays, we need to screw it up with overzealous copyright enforcement?

Also, two-tier internet

[Arancaytar]

With a simple DSL access, possibly using a push-based dynamic DNS service, you can become a server right now. You can even serve out of a local NAT by forwarding a few ports in your router. Without renting a server, you can host a small website, provide an FTP share, seed a torrent, and host a tor node. Particularly in the last case, many small users with their own computers are what tor thrives on.

If your computer has to share its global address with hundreds behind a NAT at the ISP level, this becomes basically impossible (just try asking your ISP to forward a port for you!). The internet will be split into two halves made up by the content providers who can afford a globally accessible address, and the content consumers who sit behind a glorified television.

Re:Internet is not a curiosity anymore

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you forget this part of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights?

Article 29

      1. Everyone has duties to the community in which alone the free and full development of his personality is possible.
      2. In the exercise of his rights and freedoms, everyone shall be subject only to such limitations as are determined by law solely for the purpose of securing due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others and of meeting the just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society.
      3. These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.

In other words, once you get your hoped for one-world government, your rights may just disappear in a flash if politicians decide the "collective's" rights are more important than yours. Enjoy!

Re:Internet is not a curiosity anymore

[FourthAge]

Not just some "one-world government". Any government.

Human rights declarations always have a term in them that says "the government can suspend this when it wants to". For example, the ECHR's article 2 prohibits the death penalty, but provides an exception for "action lawfully taken for the purpose of quelling a riot or insurrection."

But then, this is probably for the best, because as citizens, subjects or (more accurately) peasants, we have basically no power to oppose the government at all. The idea that some magical charter or declaration has granted us "rights" that save us from tyranny is laughable, a fool's hope for the gullible. The laws are always made by those who can enforce them, and we should always remember this. The ECHR does a great service by putting it in writing.

question about summary

[PopeRatzo]

I notice the summary mentions a VPN being "expensive".

What makes a VPN expensive?

I'm not trying to be a smart-ass, I really don't know the answer.

Re:question about summary

[Casandro]

It's no problem for you at home, as your small router surely can cope with a few megabits of data. However on the ISP side you will suddenly have multiple gigabits of encrypted data you need to decrypt. You need fast and therefore expensive computers for that.

IPv6

[Natales]

Or they could implement IPv6 using anonymous address interface identifiers as described in RFC 3041 to provide an increased level of anonymity.

In addition to that, IPSec encryption is a standard part of the protocol, so just by implementing it you get instant security. Older OSs could use a 4to6 interface that wouldn't break older apps that have not yet been updated to support the protocol.

IPv6 is much closer to be a reality now than ever before. It's about time that some ISPs start taking the lead on this instead of going the VPN or NAT route. It will happen any way and they could get some good PR out of it while addressing the issue they are trying to solve.

No!

[Nemyst]

Doing this will break so many things... On top of making people unable to be hosts (FTP, SSH, etc.) or to participate in certain P2P activities, it would also make it just about impossible to block offending users from websites. What exactly can you do about an idiot DoS'ing your site when his IP is shared by thousands?

Re:The outcome is predictable.

[MightyMartian]

Banning NAT and VPN would take down a huge amount of the infrastructure out there. NAT routers, from cheapo consumer-grade hardware right up to some pretty expensive equipment, is installed all over the place, and various forms of VPN are very prevalent in the corporate world.

What they might require is far greater detail in logging; packet types, translation tables, but man oh man, I cannot imagine the amount of storage you would need if you were a large ISP with hundreds of thousands or millions of customers. Imagine all those mobile and wireless data providers, most of which run behind NAT, having to store this kind of data.