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ISP 'Six Strikes' Plan Delayed
MrSeb sends this excerpt from DailyDot:
"Shortly, a new system in the U.S. will allow your ISP to give you gradually sterner warnings and possible punishment if you download copyrighted material. The Copyright Alerts System (CAS) — more commonly known as the 'six strikes' policy, after the number of warnings users receive — is coming. Soon. Any minute now. Really. But it's not here yet, even though several news outlets — including CNN — said the system would go online yesterday, Thursday. Speaking to the Daily Dot, a press contact for the six strikes system says: 'We do not intend to launch until we are confident that the program is consumer friendly. We expect our implementation to begin later this year, with each of the ISPs launching at potentially overlapping but different times.' ... The six strikes system is officially helmed by an industry coalition called the Center for Copyright Information (CCI), which was created by the MPAA and RIAA. It counts the U.S.'s five top ISPs under its umbrella: AT&T, Cablevision, Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and Verizon."
We do not intend to launch until we are confident that the program is consumer friendly.
It is, inherently, not consumer friendly.
Cox doesn't fuck around. I have their 50 Mbps package for $100 a month. I don't have cable. I don't get OTA broadcasts, because I've not bought an antenna. I do download about 2 TB of data a month between Netflix, Pandora, and others. I've never had a word said to me about it. They even give me additional bandwidth for the first few megabytes of a transfer when network congestion allows. They call this Superboost, I think. Works well when downloading a bunch of very small files that will be decoded and combined into a bunch of bigger files. They don't seem to care that their are effectively Superboosting the entire multi-gigabyte download.
Officially, your account is capped at 300 GB/mo. I have the 25 Mbps Cox package and they 'cap' me at 250 GB, although i make sure i never hit that high. They now show your usage on their website if you care to look. Internet Usage i think its called. Somehow i doubt you are pulling 2 TB/mo without hearing anything from Cox.
Good-bye
Either you're going to eventually launch it, or not. It will never be 'consumer friendly' since it's a blatantly anti-consumer move intended to whore out to an unrepentantly anti-consumer organization.
Just wait until they've done this to about two dozen decent programmers... they'll invent some new crypto protocol that makes bittorrent look like the redheaded stepchild of piracy... "You can't stop the signal, Mel." -- Mr. Universe
Already been done. It is called BTGuard and you can get it plugged into most torrent trackers for a small monthly fee. Lifehacker ran an article about it not long ago.
http://lifehacker.com/5863380/how-to-completely-anonymize-your-bittorrent-traffic-with-btguard
http://btguard.com/
Also, as outlined in the lifehacker article there are other solutions to mask the traffic from an ISP and there is no way in hell they can block some of them because they have much broader uses than just hiding your torrent tracking traffic. VPNs are way too widely used by so many businesses for telecommutes and other such, so it will ALWAYS be an option. And since (at least I think) it would be illegal wiretapping for them to capture your packets and decrypt them, there is not a damn thing they can do about it.