Slashdot Mirror
Rightscorp Threatens Every ISP in the United States (torrentfreak.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Following a court win by its client BMG over Cox Communications this week, Rightscorp has issued an unprecedented warning to every ISP in the United States today. Boasting a five-year trove of infringement data against Internet users, Rightscorp warned ISPs that they can either cooperate or face the consequences. "For nearly five years, Rightscorp has warned US internet service providers (ISPs) that they risk incurring huge liabilities if they fail to implement and enforce policies under which they terminate the accounts of their subscribers who repeatedly infringe copyrights," the company said in a statement. "Over that time, many ISPs have taken the position that it was simply impossible for an ISP to be held liable for its subscribers' actions -- even when the ISP had been put on notice of massive infringements and supplied with detailed evidence. There had never been a judicial decision holding an ISP liable."
Patents expire in a reasonable time frame.
Sure, but they are granted without any reasonable level of review. I pushed a button to trigger a cross-walk signal on the way to work, today, and noticed two patent numbers on the button! Apparently, something about that button was so earth-shatteringly innovative that it warranted protection from competition for 20 years! Admittedly, the button was kind of big, and had a nice rounded feel to it. Maybe no one ever made a button like that before for the purpose of triggering a crosswalk signal.
As another Cox customer I can tell you that their recent transition to carrier NAT is a clusterfuck.
While my CPE is being assigned an IP address that is outside of RFC 6980 space I can't complete a inbound handshake consistently, as I do receive more than one SYN/ACK on the other end or don't receive any. It works only when I have recently sent a packet with that source port.
I also receive SYN/ACK packets from hosts I never sent SYN to. And because my router is configured to blacklist unasked inbound connections for an hour the first time, increasing it to 5 hours on repeated packet, or just outright permanently blackhole the source if it sends some nonsense as sending me SYN/ACK without me sending a SYN first, I can't open anything on the popular internet, like facebook, twitter, Netflix, news sites and such any more unless I purge my blacklist first. And it is quite unlikely that someone is trying to SYN attack popular websites and choses to spoof my IP, right at the time when they changed the last 2 upstream routers from me to have interfaces within RFC 6980 address space. My outbound SYNs now also at random times are not answered, but if repeated in a minute or two the handshake completes just fine. Before this change, my blacklist averaged around 15 temporary entries and grew with ~300 permanent entries in 6 months. Since this change, my blacklist has grown to 6000 permanent IPs within 1 week and the temporary entries average 300. I get around 20 packets per second inbound consistently without sending any outbound traffic (blocked and routing removed)
The only way that makes any sense is if they are either incompetent and have configured their NAT and assign the same non-RFC 6980 IP address they have assigned my CPE to other CPEs of other customers and I can only speculate that they are throwing some sort of anycast in the mix there as well, but the fact is that they are misrouting/misNATting packets - I get someone else's packets every now and then, and I'm sure someone else gets some of mine. Or, that they are doing that on purpose, trying to fool me, thinking that if I see a non-special address I won't get to know that I'm NATted, and they are trying to use the same address as both the local and the global side of the NAT. And as a residential customer I can't even reach a competent technical support who can understand my compliant.
I wish they weren't trying to hide the fact and putting in a complex setup and have just given me a plain 10. or 192.168. address, so I don't have to deal with this shit. I can live with a regular NAT upstream just fine.