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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."
3. Reduces their profit margin as people move away from these services to ones that don't give a fuck whats on the wire.
4. Makes them liable for all the other 'bad' things their customers do. They have displayed they DO have the level of control needed to stop spam or other crap comming from their customers machines.
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.
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.
(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.
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.
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
What regulation that allowed viable competition was removed? As far as I am aware, both cable providers and telephone providers have been regulated as local monopolies for almost as long as the former has existed and since before I was born for the latter. Unless someone else is allowed to run the cabling/fiber there can be no real competition. The fact that there are no more than two options just about everywhere is a product of regulation, not a product of the removal of regulation.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
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.