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Verizon To Throttle Pirates' Bandwidth

Posted by Soulskill on from the arrr-me-hearties dept.

another random user sends this excerpt from the BBC: "U.S. net firm Verizon has declared war on illegal downloaders, or pirates, who use technologies such as BitTorrent to steal copyrighted material. Verizon has said it will first warn repeat offenders by email and voicemail. Then it will restrict or 'throttle' their internet connection speeds. Time Warner Cable, another U.S. internet service provider pledging to tackle piracy, says it will use pop-up warnings to deter repeat offenders. After that it will restrict subscribers' web browsing activities by redirecting them to a landing page. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which campaigns for digital freedom, is highly critical of the imminent campaign, saying: 'Big media companies are launching a massive peer-to-peer surveillance scheme to snoop on subscribers.' ISPs will be acting as 'Hollywood's private enforcement arm,' it added."

3 of 224 comments (clear)

  1. Why I stick with my local telco VDSL by Cito · · Score: 3, Informative

    I've had it when it was plain adsl at 1.5 megabit down in the late 90's all the way to now vdsl with 20 megabit down. They still offer newsgroup access free with all their accounts, and ability to generate emails at will up to 20, then you can delete ones not needed and recreate sorta as a anonymous email service of their own.

    every year or so they claim on dslreports forum that they'll never keep logs more than 1 week for legal purposes mainly to do with child porn, and they so far have not responded to letters from antip2p companies like mediadefender, claiming they get trashed.

    Now things may change in future, but there is no bandwidth cap and it's truly unlimited, I know according to DUmeter, adding upload/download together I used 418 gigs last month and average 317 to 422 gigs per month, most of it is torrent traffic seeding and downloading. And never got a letter or even bothered.

    I always tell people stay the fuck away from cable and big name dsl like at&t and stick to local telco services, local landline small companies most all offer dsl2plus to vdsl services and are much much better than cable.

    No bandwidth caps, no filtering, and no bother, true freedom at least for now.

    I've been pirating since 1996 though when I cut my cable tv off. Starting on newsgroups and IRC old "fserve" bots for television episodes and movies.

    Now it's torrent RSS downloader on the seedbox connected to my western digital WDTV Live plus box on my tv.

    I definitely support local telco's cause most ignore the bullshit of the big isp's, hell my isp even sent out letters letting customers know they will not be taking part in this "6 strike" shit and marketed as if it was a cable only problem so it keeps their customers from wanting to go to cable.

    great marketing move imo

    1. Re:Why I stick with my local telco VDSL by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Informative

      I've been pirating since 1996 though when I cut my cable tv off. Starting on newsgroups and IRC old "fserve" bots for television episodes and movies.

      Now it's torrent RSS downloader on the seedbox connected to my western digital WDTV Live plus box on my tv.

      Allow me to be the first to say, FUCK YOU.

      No, seriously, fuck you. It's assclowns like you who think "ooh I has interwebz I can download anything I want" that are ruining it for everyone else. I'll download a TV episode or three that I may have missed, but gimme a break. All these years of all of us bitching that there is no viable paid option to support, and now that we're starting to get them, dipshits like you wave around your e-peen like downloading everything in sight is some badge of honor. No, what you accomplish is to end up proving the douchenozzles in the content industry right. You get used as a statistic to "prove" that everyone is pirating everything.

      End result, data caps and packet snooping so it's a pain in the ass to download ANY large amount of data because we're automatically assumed to be dirty pirates. So to end with: FUCK YOU.

  2. Re:Makes sense for them. by jythie · · Score: 3, Informative

    (4) might be a real concern, but (3) is not. In the US, very few areas actually have any competition. The regulation that allowed viable competition to exist were removed so even even urban areas are unlikely to have more then 2 options, most areas will only have 1.

    But yeah, (4) might come back to haunt them.