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Verizon To Throttle Pirates' Bandwidth
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."
If they catch you !!
I've got a way around this, but I don't want to post it here, lest it be targeted.
It's easy, but it costs money. I've never heard of someone getting sued using one, but that doesn't mean I'm confident enough to post my technique / service here...
1. Reduces traffic on their networks
2. Should reduce the number of inquiries from RIAA etc that they need to deal with, and the staff to do it
if they keep doing stuff like this, they will be shooting themselves in the foot, as people will switch to companies that arent.
I hope that the brighter pirates devise even more inventive ways to keep their privacy, perhaps that creativity will spill over into the more legal realm of the internet.
What are the chances that this will simply be used to target anyone who uses the bandwidth they paid for?
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
If they start throttling bandwidth and advertise they are providing certain speeds, or if they sell plans with certain bandwidth, then you should be able to demand a refund for bandwidth payed for but denied.
In other news, Verizon customer John Doe has declared his Web browsing history and related Internet activity to be a "work of art" created by him and subject to copyright protection. On Friday he announced that any company caught illegally downloading, storing or sharing his copyrighted work will be subject to throttling: a process by which he reduces his payments for their services to pennies per day.
Why isn't this a two-way street? If the consumer did this, Verizon would simply say he had not paid what he owed in full. But here Verizon is unilaterally deciding not to provide the service in full. Perhaps the consumer should have the right to charge the company late fees for services not rendered in full.
Time Warner Cable, another U.S. internet service provider pledging to tackle piracy, says it will use pop-up warnings to deter repeat offenders.
How, exactly, do they plan to accomplish this? Yes, obviously, they have the capability to do the ultimate "man in the middle" attack, but I have rather a huge problem with them analyzing my traffic and modifying it enough to intelligently inject malicious scripts into pages I view.
More to the point, ISPs keep announcing grand plans like this, but not mentioning how they plan to detect "pirates" or what appeals process they plan to put in place. And yes, I know we'll all joke and say "none, of course", but realistically, you don't just lose all your rights as a result of engaging in minor civil offenses against a third party. Hell, even serial killers still get their day in court.
with any luck, google will take this as a reason to expand google fiber more quickly and basically kick out the rest of the providers
"Begun the Clone War has" - Yoda
When they were just "common carrier" they can't be sued for things that goes across their network. Anyone know the legal implications of this?
Lawyer finds say 3000 educated Verizon subscribes, they then stop all illegal use of bittorrent (if there actually was any) and radically increase there use of legal bittorrent files (update WoW on 64 machines- sure, need to grab the latest Linux distros (all of them, and then seed like crazy!), absolutely; all 3000 of those subscribes sharing daily videos and journals with each other, also awesome- just for good measure they should use the piratebay to access the legal torrents.
Wait for a good number of them to be throttled for 'illegal' activity- and launch the class action suit for breach of contract slander, and whatever else can stick.
attorney: "the RIAA is threatening serious litigation if we dont crack down on piracy"
exec: "ok, we've been there before. what do they want"
attorney: "they want us to crack down"
exec: "done. tell them we will warn pirates and throttle their internet connection:"
engineer: "thats not really feasible or possible given our resources and the nature of the internet as a self healing..."
exec: "its a completely feasible way to solve this problem, i have complete confidence in its ability."
engineer: "how would you know??"
exec: "because the problem is a lobbying group, not a pirate."
engineer: "how do they verify it works?"
exec: "tell them to test from their phone."
Good people go to bed earlier.
ISP's aren't considered common carriers as I recall. They do have some protections but it isn't the same as common carrier protections and as one would easily conclude they don't have the same obligations either. I could be wrong though, as I'm running on foggy barely awake memory here.
Dear Customer,
notify yourself herby informed that you have used more than 15 megabytes of your download volume in a week. This has been monitored as pirating use of our great services.
Should you continue pirating your credentials will be sent to our share^h^h^h^h arm of^h^h^h^h^h^h you have to pay without reciving any content (not even great advertisements).
Your favorite Verizon
Computer/phone manufacturers installing piracy tracking chips on all computers? After all without a computer you can't pirate at all. What stop there, maybe have a Best Buy employee make you sign a No Piracy contract before you buy anything with storage that can connect to the internet?
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
And the link is 404
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
The Internet is still very much the wild west.
The equivalent of train robberies, bank heists, Indian raids, and muggings in the mining towns on payday are a common occurrence in today's online environment.
You and I may not think copying electronic bits is a big deal, but many corporations are ruthless enough to pursue a dollar anywhere. Never underestimate greed. The larger the corporation, the further away from reality sit its leadership, the more ruthless the organization becomes.
Big government isn't very effective in the new frontier. The early decades are always chaos.
Thus, corporations turn to their own methods for protection, enforcement, and collection of revenue.
If it's profitable, can you blame them?
History clearly renders our future.
The west was free. The west was lawless. Those who were weak, those who were greedy, complained, and plotted. The west was then tamed.
Freedom suffers at scale.
The more individuals that are granted freedom, the more likely some knot of individuals will coalesce around seizing freedom from others for their own selfish gain, returning humanity to prison. When you're out numbered and out gunned, what happens?
Seriously, because a bitstream of legal music may appear to be piracy (same bits) but isn't.
I trust Verizon as far as the next guillotine for their CEO and top execs.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
So how will they determine what's piracy and what's legit?
Heavy bandwidth/bt users are pirates?
Those who use thepiratebay are pirates?
The last few things I downloaded off TPB were legit promo albums given out by bands (one band: "Stockholm" is pretty good).
The last few linux ISO's I downloaded, also bittorrent, as well as a few FOSS games.
Wow and many games use BT for updates.
So how would Verizon determine whether I'm a "dirty pirate" or just a guy who makes use of technology?
We have seen all kinds of examples of some entity claiming ownership of a work they don't in fact own. What protects consumers from spurious claims? Good will of the entertainment industry? They don't have any. This kind of practice will make consumers turn against the entertainment industry and demand it be muzzled.
If you really want to do this (or anyone else you don't want folks to monitor), and you don't want to get throttled just use a TOR client to proxy your traffic. For Android, use Orbot. If you use iOS (flame suit ON), well, you have bigger problems...
How could you tell? More seriously, Verizon is simply too cheap to upgrade its network to handle more traffic (Here's a hint, Verizon. It's called a "mesh network: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesh_networking." Try asking an engineer instead of a marketing oaf or a bean counter.)
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
No, it damn well isn't elegant. The fact that you think so simply means that you haven't a bloody clue what you're talking about.
Those URLs of "known piracy sites" are the same URLs of sites that host significant amounts of perfectly legal content.
There are two scenarios that Verizon can follow:
- Invade everyone's privacy and inspect everything being downloaded, or
- Assume everyone who downloads more than a "certain amount" is "a pirate -- even when they aren't.
Whichever scenario Verizon chooses, it will be very wrong.
No, not "elegant" at all. Really, really bad. You really haven't a clue what you are talking about.
So the phone company now believes they have the right to: #1 - Police/observe what you do #2 - Judge what you are doing with no Jury or defense or proof #3 - Sentence you as guilty #4 - hand out a sentence of cut your internet access or re-direct you. If the government tried this people we go nuts. But I guess it's ok for a company.
and there is lots more money being stolen by hollywood music and movie companies by pretending hugely successful music and movies did not turn a profit. Where is a war on hollywood accounting?
The BBC are as biased as f**k, the phrase in the first line of the article
"who use technologies such as BitTorrent to steal copyrighted material."
You know who's side they're on when they use weasel words like that, and it's certainly not the license-payers side.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
I am not a crackpot.
Please don't use Tor for torrenting. Not only it imposes extra load on the exit nodes, it won't keep you protected for the reasons mentioned in that link.
They're there in their room. You're on your own.
who use technologies such as BitTorrent to steal copyrighted material.
steal/stl/
Verb:
Take (another person's property) without permission or legal right and without intending to return it: "thieves stole her bicycle".
How in 2012 are people still unable to distinguish between theft and copyright infringement and how does it get passed slashdot moderators?
Or so I thought. In 2007 they sent me two DMCA notices and shut off my internet twice in one week. The second time they said "if it happens again, we will revoke your account." I said go for it. I can always get high speed internet from one of the other 4 providers available at my house. I kept downloading and never heard from them again.
To me, the lesson of the story is that the ISPs are willing to hassle their infringing customers to the point of making their service slightly inconvenient, but as soon as you threaten to take away their $40/month, they back down.
So instead of telling them that they will no longer take their money in exchange for providing a service they will just stop providing service and keep charging them?
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
After all, the subscribers are being throttled, not prosecuted.
"I only punched you in the face! It's not like I murdered you or anything!"
But yeah, I don't see how punishing random people is an elegant solution. Anti-piracy schemes like this typically end up hurting not only the 'pirates' but also the people who don't infringe upon copyright.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
Apparently, judging from the article downloading is illegal. Only pirates do that.To see something like this go unchallenged in a Slashdot summary sickens me, but, well we all know what's really going on.
I think you are missing the point here. The Copyright Alert System is solely concerned with bittorrent peers, and, as I was able to get clarified via a question during the conference, only to seeders and not to leechers.
The actual monitoring will be done by Mark Monitor on behalf of the content companies. If they successfully leech identifiable content from a seed, then that seed's IP address will be passed to the ISP for CAS processing at the appropriate alert level.
The ISPs will not be doing any monitoring under this system..
http://isoc-ny.org
Sounds good then we can start VPN companies to protect their customers to do what they want like internet should be and make money off them.
Comcast may have more of a vested interest in stopping piracy as they are also a media owner (owning NBC) and the production companies that produce many of their channel lineups for things like Syfi... among others.
But on the flip side -- given the quality of programming on their properties -- maybe they don't need to worry so much about piracy...*cough*.. ;-)