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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."
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
What are the chances that this will simply be used to target anyone who uses the bandwidth they paid for?
Starts with a V and ends with PN?
PocketPermissions Android Permission Guide
I can do a triple back-flip followed by a double somersault and land on gracefully doing a handstand as finish without even getting a running start.
I just don't want to right now.
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
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.
Maybe not, but it would be obvious from usage pattern exactly what is going on. It would quickly be shut down.
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.
Google already bent to the will of the RIAA/MPAA. They might provide a little competition, but functionally they are unlikely to be any different.
Or starts with NET and ends with a FLIX? Seriously, its 7 bucks. At some point its going to be easier and cheaper to pay the content creators than to avoid being caught by the ip police.
Not when the IP vendors do not sell what you want to buy...
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.
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?
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.
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.
as someone who runs deep packet inspection on a few networks I can tell you a) it is pretty easy to tell what shouldn't be passed through and b) a little sand in the underwear bites - Throwing in some junk data in the right ratio can wreak havoc on an ssl encapsulated torrent connection. Send all you want over ssl but it will be throttled and so much garbage by the end you won't want to waste your time after a few days. I can also tell you it is pretty easy to block this even without deep packet inspection. Hint: dns tends to be required to get your torrent information in the first place, and it is pretty easy to send you a response from my dns server that looks like a response from your manually configured dns server. You won't know the difference and will just assume thepiratebay is down.
Get a web developer
And watch TOR grind to a halt under the load. TOR wasn't made to handle something like that. There are precious few exit nodes, as only those either very stupid or very dedicated to free speech are going to run them and risk being mistakenly accused of trafficking in child porn or hacking into the network of someone with serious money. An onslaught of torrenters would bring TOR to it's knees.
That sort of sounds illegal to me. If the ISP's start generating fake DNS responses or modifying packets, i suspect that they will be spending time in court. Not all bit torrent traffic is illegal.
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
Who needs to prove it? Googling "bogus piracy takedowns" gets six million results.
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.
Like VeriSign's Site Finder, offshots of which are currently operated by the usual batch of bad ISPs?
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
I can do a triple back-flip followed by a double somersault and land on gracefully doing a handstand as finish without even getting a running start.
I just don't want to right now.
Which is perfectly understandable, because this simple feat could get pretty complicated if you tried to post your comment with your wireless keyboard in the middle of it.
Ezekiel 23:20
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?
Insightful?! I'm a netflix subscriber since they were sending out DVD disks in bubblewrap padded envelopes. And yet I'm still reaching for pirate bay about as often as I use netflix. And I'll be doing it until there is a service that lets me download or stream absolutely *any* movies, shows, etc. the *second* they air anywhere in the world. Hell, I'm even willing to pay $300 per month for the privilege, not $7. And yet the entertainment industry continues to keep its head up its arse...
If you've got a better way to transport rutabagas, we'd all love to hear it.
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.