Slashdot Mirror
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."
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
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.
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.
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
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.
I feel your pain, but don't be deluded into thinking that pirates cause data caps
Verizon doesn't want to upgrade their network and supply the bandwidth they actually sold. Overselling is lucrative -- hence the data caps
Also, many providers are paving the way for selling their own streaming services (or partnering with one). Hence, it is nice to have strict caps and then say "oh, and OUR service does not count towards your cap".
People should buy digital content now that it is sometimes available in a convenient form. But don't think for a second that doing so will stop all this bandwidth cap bullshit. We need competition -- having multiple alternative ISP services available would be a good start. Over last decade, I usually had 1 choice available to me, sometimes 2 (cable and DSL).
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.