Slashdot Mirror
How Verizon's 'Six Strikes' Plan Works
An anonymous reader writes "With the 'six-strikes' anti-piracy plan set to begin in the U.S. soon, TorrentFreak has gotten its hands on a document showing how Verizon in particular will be dealing with copyright-infringing users. For your first and second strike, Verizon will email you and leave you a voicemail informing you that your account is involved in copyright infringement. For your third and fourth strikes, the ISP will automatically redirect your browser to a page that requires you to acknowledge receiving the alerts. They'll also play a video about the dangers of infringement. For your fifth and sixth strikes, they give you three options: massively throttle your connection for a few days, wait two weeks and then throttle your connection, or file an appeal with an arbitration service for $35. TorrentFreak points out that the MPAA and RIAA can obtain the connection information of repeat infringers, with which they can then take legal action."
If everyone runs their WIFI AP's open.
Can I place copyright infringements with Verizon to get people blocked? We all know that the MPAA and RIAA use their internet connections for infringement, so it should be no problem for us to throttle their access.
Somehow I bet that only a select anointed few will be allowed to make these evidence-free complaints against the rest of us.
Is a strike an accusation of copyright infringement? Or does it need to be proven?
Deep packet inspection, volume of data, targets and returned IP addresses... will a securely tunneled and encrypted connection to a proxy service thwart this monitoring - or will they simply use such as indirect evidence of torrenting, since the standards of such evidence are set by the MPAA/RIAA?
As for commercial proxies - how probable is it that such services are more-or-less instantly compromised - as in a visit from FBI agents conscripted to work for movie companies ? Whom do you trust to manage connections?
How does one pay for such connections, if the act of using a credit card automatically locks down your identity? Does the use of pre-paid money cards such as Vanilla work (if you buy them from someone who doesn't care much about taking your real name down)? I understand that many say they do not, but other posters have mentioned that one merely has to provide Vanilla a zip code on the registration page to make them usable to pay online services.
I'd do all the above just to watch Netflix. I'm that much of a bastard. We managed to use the postal system and phones for over a hundred years without a spy system reading our every word and listening to every call, and I don't see why we need to start now. Especially now that ATT is about to shut off the old phone system and go completely IP, which means the old laws mean nothing.
And for the generation who never knew privacy, I preemptively say: yes, it matters. It is sad you may never care or even understand why it does. Your are happy goldfish, exhibits in a zoo. Think about who is outside your bowl, watching. You've spent your lives being told to be afraid of strange adults and white vans - yet you let actual, secret versions of those kinds of people follow your every move and listen to your lives? Think about it. The creeps you've been told to fear your entire lives aren't really real, for the most part. The creeps who are locking down human existence, building the last and only secret police the world will ever need - they are real and they are here and you need to fight them.
... Having a Samsung phone is like having a nametag that says "hello, i'm a cheap fucker" on it.
Or maybe it says "I want a phone with a bigger screen than 3.5". Maybe is says "I want a phone with features I want rather than what Steve Jobs thinks I want"...
Karma: Bad
Sorry, but ads and drm are showstoppers. I much prefer pirated content, as it is packaged nicely with attention to the details I care about: good file size and codec, no extraneous content, easily archivable, and no buffering delays.
I agree. Because this would require them to provide evidence and a sworn statement under penalty of perjury.
As it stands, any unsubstantiated claim by anybody or any automated process seems to convict you in Verizon's eyes, and even to contest the claim costs you money.
Question: Do those making such claims have to put up money up-front?
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Yeah, because Verizon would never setup their FIOS routers with an easy to crack password by default that many people may leave in place. Never.
why you would use torrent freak when there is Amazon, Netflix, Youtube, Hulu, and dozens of other ways to get video online.
Torrent freak is a news website. I expect you meant bittorrent - or more generally piracy in any form.
I've got two problems with all those "legitimate" sources:
1) Privacy - I believe it is fundamentally unfair to require that a person's viewing habits be tracked in a profile in a database somewhere that he has no control over or even the right to see the contents of -- especially when combined with all of the other cyber-stalking that corporations do nowadays. Bittorrent at least only identifies you down to an IP address and other forms of piracy are even less trackable.
2) Copyright Business Model - I belive people do deserve to get creative works for free (both cost-free and freedom to tinker-free). That doesn't mean I think the creators need to work for free, I just think that a policy of digital scarcity neuters the potential of the internet to benefit humanity as a whole. We need to be working towards methods of compensation that do not rely on distribution fees, but as long as digital scarcity is a money-maker for the entrenched interests there is little incentive to explore alternatives. I don't think any individual pirate is going to make a difference in that regard, but in aggregate it can.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
If I pay for it, I expect it to be DRM-free. If the pirates can figure out how to publish a quality product, I'm sure the real distributors can do so as well.
My home media distribution injects weather/sports/gcal alert tickers into video streams that get sent all over the house. I've put quite a bit of time and effort and money into building a nifty system. I'm perfectly willing to pay for my content, but if you demand I use HDCP and disable useful features that my family has enjoyed for years, then you can go fuck yourself.
The current one. And the next one.
Schools are basically jails, and train kids to accept prison conditions - look at it objectively. Tracking devices in the phones. Recorded calls, recorded messages, emails. Soon, tracking built into the computers in cars, unkillable. Ebooks recorded, times, dates. Anything that flows in packets, recorded. Your movements, recorded, even if you ditch a phone and a car, 'cause cameras will watch you - and listen, too. The cameras and trackers and mics are shrinking, and with zero societal will to stop it, will be everywhere.
Yes, this generation. It starts in the schools, the acceptance of strip searches, phone tracking, drug searches, notebooks with cameras that watch the student... come on, the new crop of adults have been in jail since they were born, figuratively, and have been trained to accept it.
The next generation? Just keep exponentially increasing the surveillance, and the acceptance. Police states are not, historically speaking, unwelcome. People trade freedom for safety all the time, always have, if they are scared properly. The few who become bullied and targeted by the people behind the cameras and trackers are not interesting to people. "They" are by definition criminals, anyway.
I ain't afraid of evil bastards half as much as I am afraid of a population that doesn't understand what freedom actually means, and what they give up to be "safe". They has been zero effective backpush against this era, and it will get worse.
Because 5 dollars for every movie or episode of a show id like to watch will break me.
In other words, based on some undisclosed justification, you are entitled to all-you-can-eat entertainment.
Care to share what that reason is? Are you also entitled to free internet, free Office software, free MS SQL CALs, free vSphere enterprise licenses?
Well then sorry, you deserve to have your Internet shut off.
God forbid we pay money for things which have value
If it has ads and/or drm, it doesn't have value. The value was added by the pirates, who went to the trouble of removing those things. I'd be willing to pay them.
Yes.
You didnt share your reasoning, I was hoping to present it to our VMWare sales rep and ask if they could also hurry up with version 6, and perhaps deliver it with a free cake.
Where did you get the idea that one would have to do something illegal to be abused by this policy? One need only be accused, and that without any objective, public standard of evidence or significant opportunity to rebut, and no penalty for reckless or even deliberately false accusations.
Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.
since when is sharing stealing
Everyone on Slashdot seems hung up on this idea that because it's not a physical good, redistribution means nothing. That's just not true.
Let me try a different analogy...let's say my job is doing really awesome SAT (or whatever) training courses. I have spent a long time developing the course so I can deliver you a two-hour course that will help you ace your upcoming exam, and as a benefit I record it so that you can watch it again after I leave. You think it's a great course. You turn around and, because you think other people will want it, you send the video I gave you to all your friends in high school.
Did I lose any physical goods as a result of your "sharing?" Nope. Can I still give my course? Yep. Were some of your friends never going to sign up for my course? Absolutely! But were there some of your friends who might have taken my course if you told them it was great, but didn't send it to them for free? Yeah, probably. And that's where "sharing" becomes "theft" - if I wanted my training to be free, I would have made it free. It's my training and I should be able to say what it costs, whether it's a physical good or not.
"95% of all Slashdot