Slashdot Mirror
Ajit Pai and the FCC Want It To Be Legal for Comcast To Block BitTorrent (theverge.com)
Nilay Patel, reporting for The Verge: FCC Chairman Ajit Pai released his proposal to kill net neutrality this week, and while there's a lot to be unhappy with, it's hard not to be taken with the brazenness of his argument. Pai thinks it was a mistake for the FCC to try and stop Comcast from blocking BitTorrent in 2008, thinks all of the regulatory actions the FCC took after that to give itself the authority to prevent blocking were wrong, and wants to go back to the legal framework that allowed Comcast to block BitTorrent.
Only apps can app apps, so appy Appcast should block LUDDITE software!
Apps!
I hear Obummer supported net neutrality. I can truly give thanks today knowing you two are reversing this and finally cracking down on these BitTorrent thieves.
Another win for the GOP against those deplorable democRATS!
Block all traffic except HTTP
As a bonus, if HTTPS is blocked then lawful intercepting will be much easier.
Are ports really necessary, because this sounds like it will just result in all sessions being routed over port 80 and a cat and mouse game of avoiding deep packet inspection.
When you have only 1 or at best 2 Internet providers available, you don't have competition.
Society's use of and dependence on the Internet has gotten to the point where the Internet needs to be a separate non-profit utility entity.
Comcast needs to go back to being a cable TV / entertainment company.
The fix will be VPNs to 3rd party proxies.
Or did they throttle it?
FCC Chairman Ajit Pai better should block Internet completely. Or reverse to dialup modems.
If Comcast acts like an asshole, it will be Comcast alone who gets fucked. The answer to "net neutrality" is still NO. We see right through the power grab.
If they repeal net neutrality I hope the state of NY decides to charge Comcast $1/bit for the traffic going through there.
I'm sure they would love to not have access to the transatlantic cables.
As a copyright holder, I've been very happy with Agit Pai so far. You don't have the right to steal copyrighted works, period, and this is the first step in securing intellectual property on the internet.
Serious question here. What's the difference between these arguments?
1. You shouldn't ban BitTorrent. It's just a protocol. Just because some people use it to steal digital content doesn't mean BitTorrent is inherently bad.
2. You shouldn't ban guns. It's just a device. Just because some people use it to kill innocents doesn't mean guns are inherently bad.
How does the article manage to make the jump from "The FCC does not have the statutory authority to manage computer networks" (which is true) to "Ajit Pai wants ISPs to block content" (not true).
The FCC's own 2015 Open Internet Order says it only applies to "legal" content anyways. Among other things, this excludes most BitTorrent traffic and gambling.
Title II also contains many compulsory provisions entirely incompatible with Net Neutrality, like censorship of explicit material.
If you want Net Neutrality, write to your representative and tell them the Internet is a Title I service.
Wonder what the public key field is for?
Tough break. Elections have consequences.
Our only hope is that these people choke on some dry turkey or stuffing or the citizens who really care about the constitution and bill of rights take whatever action they deem necessary to stop this injustice!
What Comcast et al really want is to hit up content producers for money so that people can access their content. Blocking Bittorrent closes a back channel that would otherwise allow content to reach users with Comcast and friends taking their cut.
I want to go back to the legal framework as was under Tom Wheeler.
You have a point & one I've seen happening in some malware in port redirectors routing communique they used before on "non-std. ports" to COMMONLY USED ONES like Port 80 (reminds me of SOAP in a way).
APK
P.S.=> I think your point is that adaptation vs. defenses etc. WILL happen - well, they DO & ARE happening... apk
I will be asking my government to protect net neutrality.
Best was is to force a public vote where by 80% of the population has to be in favour of the change.
Fortunately at this stage we still have a "government for the people, by the people" rather than one that gives way to big businesses interests over the peoples.
Ajit Pai and these corporations lobbying against net neutrality are like a particularly pernicious wart.
why does all of society have to get fucked because of one asshole?
People are losing their shit because of this, but not Twitter's announcement that they are planning to monitor users' off site behavior and weigh it against whether to let them stay.
This is why I can no longer get worked up about Net Neutrality. Comcast is not going to throttle small web sites unless they enter into private deals. Twitter, a vocal proponent of Net Neutrality, however, has no problem actively discriminating about who can use their platform.
So again, the people who like to use this XKCD cartoon can take their argument and shove it up their asses. Net Neutrality is looking more and more like a case of projection (in the psychological sense) by highly censorious people who are attempting a bait and switch that just so happens to line their pockets more.
What a few existing networks with near monopolies in some regions of the US saw as a law change to offer one less service they had to offer will be the opening to real competition.
A large telco, ISP might enjoy some short term profit in keeping its prices up and removing services.
With the new freedom to not support a services comes the freedom for anyone to now enter the ISP marketplace with more services.
Full support of more networking protocols will set a better quality telco and ISP apart from its low quality competition.
Deregulation will not allow for monopolies.
Consumers have the ability to select and pay for new providers that support any service wanted.
When one provider stops a service, other providers can step up with their own support.
When one service is block, better brands will rush in to sell their product in that opening in a new and very competitive marketplace.
Any provider can offer any set of services it wants. A provider can now enter the US market and sell any services it wants.
If the competition wants to stop a service, other providers can now sell plans that offer that service.
Net neutrality ensured only a few big telcos could offer networking services to all of the USA. With that need to comply with the US gov setting net neutrality, dynamic new services and products can now enter the US telco market.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
It's actually a good question. Bittorrent and guns are both tools that are enablers for crime. Banning the tool instead of the crime affects legitimate use of the tool by law-abiding citizens.
Here's the difference:
The law is supposed to allow as much freedom as is possible, up to a certain extent. It then puts up a wall even for legitimate uses once the chance of damage has gone high enough. You can legalize hand grenades for recreational use too, or how about selling plutonium for educational purposes. Plutonium doesn't kill people, people kill people. But at that point the chance of damage is so high, basically screw it all and ban it, even for legitimate uses.
This balance was moved with flights where sharp objects and liquids are banned.
On the flip side, a baseball bat can kill a person, and so can riding a bicycle without a helmet. But at this stage, damage potential is relatively small and personal freedoms are important. Instead of trying to put in a sliding scale for everything (bats of certain sizes, faster bicycles, similar to liquid amounts for flights), it's just better to leave personal freedoms be, because a cyclist falling or an angry person with a bat cannot kill dozens of people.
This is why knives are legal to own, hand grenades are not, and guns of different sizes/capacities is where that threshold lies. With this argument, I believe assault/automatic rifles, high capacity magazines have been proven to cause excessive damage compared to the rights and personal freedoms of wanting such firearms. This is in contrast to say bolt action hunting rifles with 5 rounds. And certainly illegally downloading movies and music which you most likely would not be paying for anyway (and impact the financial earnings of artists by a small amount), is far far away from this threshold.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
Under Title II it is allowed to block bittorrent. Title 2 is not net neutrality and it is foolish to push for it.
We are not going back to ISPs blocking bittorrent(when was that?), we are going back to the clinton rules that ruled they could not; in addition we now have ISPs being required to document if they are going to block ports or traffic.
Serious question here. What's the difference between these arguments?
1. You shouldn't ban BitTorrent. It's just a protocol. Just because some people use it to steal digital content doesn't mean BitTorrent is inherently bad.
2. You shouldn't ban guns. It's just a device. Just because some people use it to kill innocents doesn't mean guns are inherently bad.
This is what you get when you break the rules.
The existing net neutrality law was a) an overreach by a federal department that didn't have the authority, and b) didn't implement net neutrality, as normally understood.
Which is more important: fixing this one issue, or allowing federal departments to make rules outside their jurisdictions?
I love it when people bemoan how bad things are when this one narrowly-defined problem is thrown up as proof - positive proof, I say! - that everything about our government is bad.
Because it's *so* much easier to carp and complain than it is to a) draft a suggested net neutrality law, b) petition congress to pass that law, and c) bring the issue up during the elections.
We had a previous article about how the big players (Google, Facebook, and others) were bemoaning the loss of neutrality, that the "request for comments" wasn't a vote (and that 7 million bot entries with exactly the same text weren't considered significant), and how the internet is going to hell and a handbasket, but...
Your president did a whole bunch of crap moves that shouldn't have been done in the first place, including ordering the killing of American citizens without trial, making up immigration law out of whole cloth by executive order (contradicting existing laws), and political profiling by the IRS.
The real issue, beyond this “net neutrality,” is the Federal Communications Commission’s manufacture of authority to regulate the internet despite clear congressional instruction that the internet remain unregulated. In 2014, courts struck down the FCC’s 2010 self-aggrandizement under the 1934 Communications Act and 1996 Telecommunications Act, so the agency doubled down by writing a new rule that equated the internet with telephony.
That creative interpretation allowed the FCC to claim the sweeping discretion it had used to manage the AT&T phone monopoly throughout the 20th century. Moreover, while the FCC touts the regulation as ensuring that the internet remains free of censorship, the rule impinges on the First Amendment rights of internet-service providers.
This is nothing more than your chickens coming home to roost.
If you want this fixed, do it right next time.
he deserves a taste of communal vengeance for his arrogance.
What, we can't have real Americans in that job? Why do we have filthy muslims trying to take away our Internet? Piss be upon him.
If they start selectively blocking ports, then that will encourage people to use anonymizing services like TOR. Might as well let them force the hand of the people to make the entire Internet go dark. Let them bring their restrictions, we'll just turn the entire Internet into the Darkinternet. Oppression leads to motivating the masses, and I cannot see a better motivation for people to start anonymizing ALL traffic than Orwellian traffic restrictions. If everyone on the planet started a TOR node, we could finally overcome the adoption vs. latency/throughput issue and bring about the wild west of the 'Net once more! Let's go ahead and bow down to our FCC overloads for their supreme ignorance of cause and effect, and just let them cause the new digital freedom revolution. I for one will drink to this cause, cheers!
America was great in the '50s before the Internet, before the PC, before dropping the gold standard, before Apollo, before the civil rights movement, etc.
We must Make America Great Again!!! There will be a little pain while we roll back all of these things that destroyed the America of Our Great Leader's childhood, but everything will be much better in the end as it was in the beginning.
Taking away both bread and circuses is not a good idea
It's just an arms race, the moment you block BitTorrent someone makes a new protocol. You block that protocol too and they make a 3rd protocol that disguises itself as normal traffic.
Soon Comcast is gives up entirely, or gets in an arms race with the protocol authors trying to detect P2P traffic with legitimate traffic getting caught in the crossfire.
I stole this Sig
Hippies created the Internet, the PC, and Free Software. We need to get rid of the hippies. But don't worry, our hipster thought leaders the tech billionaires are already doing everything possible to banish hippies from society forever.
It will be interesting to see the mental gymnastics conservatives have to go through to defend this.
Give ISP the freedom to mess with your pipe. Nickel and dime you for opening any port that is not HTTP/HTTPS. That sounds like a great idea. Why haven't we been doing it already?
There is a lot of completely legal software distribution over BitTorrent these days. This guy wants to go back to the stone-age. He probably is deeply afraid of the freedoms network-neutrality gives to people and companies.
Well, the western world is in decline. Desperately keeping old business-models alive and blocking new ones is a traditional sign of that.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
This will just spur BitTorrent developers into developing something even harder to stop. I see this as a bump in the road to a truly uncensorable internet.
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
To quote Mal from Firefly- "If someone tries to kill you, you go ahead and try to kill 'em right back".
Self-defense, as well as the defense of others, are a perfectly legitimate example of killing somebody that needs to be killed. Of course there is nuance...
One of the best defenses to a civil suit for not blocking something that was used to cause harm is that it wasn't legal to do so. If you wipe out that defense by allowing ISPs to block ports, the ISPs gain a responsibility that turns into a liability, and the lawyers will do the rest.
Now that internet socialism is about to be gone:
https://fee.org/articles/goodbye-net-neutrality-hello-competition/
I can remember when the U.S. had a government.
GOP = Grand Old Pedophiles
There you go again being a fucking dumb cunt.
Shall not be infringed.
I'm sorry, but, "ABLOOBLOOBLOO REPUBLICANS STATES RITES" isn't a fucking excuse for shitting on the Constitution, no matter how badly you want it to be.
Is Comcast not currently allowed to block bittorrent?
Many ISP's currently block port 25. If bittorrent can't be blocked then why can they block SMTP?
While I love the idea of banners posted by content providers about this, clearly it has been proven that the FCC (politicians) are only listening to the ISPs (conspiracy theorist part of me says the bribes paid to politicians). Maybe its time for the content providers (Amazon, Twitter, Facebook, Google, Netflix, and throw in Cloudflare) to send a different message. In addition to the banners, why not slow down all traffic between the content providers and .gov to the 56k range?
This might drive home the point that while the ISPs and the .gov control the highway, its the content providers that own the service stations. If the FCC makes it legal to speed up/slow down traffic, then it sounds like it'd be perfectly legal to turn their own rules against them.
You were not allowed to read foreign newspapers , and books had to be approved by the committee. Radios were modified so only approved radio stations were received.
How many stars on the flag should we change to sickles today?
I am sicked by the resurgence of jack booted born-again Stasi wearing the stars and stripes, one hand listening to phones, reading IM's and SMS and recording your internet for amusement. With China and Russia and the UK trying to keep up. Easy to blackmail future opposition leaders etc.
The FCC has been infiltrated with communist thinkers and committee chairman.
Pity that both sides don't recognize the pure evil, and are freedom deniers.
Just a matter of time before they round up VPN users and put them into concentration camps.
Maybe if we get loud enough calling this guy Ajit the traitor to all that is good, someone will get around to saying "you're fired". ,it's not a partisan thing at all...
Think about it - if you're a pretty unpopular executive and someone under you is considered a total ass by a huge majority, and what they're pushing doesn't particularly butter your bread...why not fire them and get a huge boost in popularity overnight?
Remember when we all worried that Wheeler, being an ex cable co lobbyist (just like the current jerk) was going to screw us, but he turned into a hero instead? We probably can't hope for that in this case, but we can hope someone else takes action on it. Of course, this really belongs in Congress, but we know they are ALL owned,
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
I'll block comcast from my house. Hopefully everyone else will do the same. If there's no other internet providers, either move or download large files at work and use your phone for email etc.
They'll just move to using bittorrent over TOR instead. Then what are they going to do, block all the TOR nodes, too? Are we going to start burning books next? Fuck Ajit Pai, fuck Comcast, and fuck this whole Administration. They can all die in a fire.
yeah and its the government to blame for that. self imposed monopolies.
That's what chairman Pai wrote, that the Comcast and torrents issue should have been addressed under anti-trust and consumer protection laws, rather than the failed way they tried to it, which the court threw out due to lack of legislative authority.
His statement that what they did was a mistake is true almost by definition - the court threw it out. The "pages of legal arguments" the the Verge whines about is Pai explaining how the government could have regulated Comcast's behavior in a way that would stand up in court. The FCC isn't Congress, they can't make laws. They have to regulate within the framework of law that Congress passed, using the authority granted by Congress. The approach they tried wasn't legal and that's why the court threw it out.
Just migrate to RetroShare. It uses SSL so attempts to block SSL would block just everything.
Also, RS has self-contained chats and forums needing no browser so the deanon attempts via browser usual for TOR are expected to fail.
...the FCC is of course correct...legally if not particularly morally. The infrastructure has been built over decades with both public and private funding--it would be interesting to see what the percentage of each is--but assuming it's most likely private the FCC and the telecoms are correct. They built it, they own it.
If this is remotely a good thing? No. Personally I think the Federal government should compensate the various telecoms for the infrastructure as it would be a 'taking" in the public interest and make it all a utility.
Maybe it'll happen, maybe it won't. Taking private property isn't the answer, not without due process, no matter how good or righteous it might make one feel.
Ferret
Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc
https://torrent.fedoraproject.... https://tails.boum.org/torrent... and maybe https://www.techsupportalert.c...
Only complete idiot may believe that regulating internet is possible. As soon as you block BitTorrent or anything else, people will start using VPN access to some servers in non-regulated areas of internet via secure protocols and the only outcome is going to be extra load on DHS servers to decrypt that traffic only to find out that it pumps porno or other media crap. Comcast will continue to suck! Setting up BitTorrent to work only when VPN is active is question of 5 minutes.
It would be trivial to modify the protocol to avoid being blocked. Which is why all those threats about ISPs charging by website/service are not threats at all. ISPs can't block anyone's traffic. There will always be ways around it. Always.
See subject: I will NOT steal YOUR food - RoTfLmAo!
* Hahahahahaha...
APK
P.S.=> I'm not so cruel as to make you starve - you NEED the protein... apk
That's what chairman Pai wrote, that the Comcast and torrents issue should have been addressed under anti-trust and consumer protection laws, rather than the failed way they tried to it, which the court threw out due to lack of legislative authority.
Except the FTC would have limited powers of enforcement and would essentially be a paper tiger.
http://thehill.com/blogs/pundi...
His statement that what they did was a mistake is true almost by definition - the court threw it out.
The courts threw out the previous version but upheld the current version.
The FCC isn't Congress, they can't make laws.
And yet Ajit Pai is making up his own rules all the time. But just like the lie of “judicial activism”, the right is always fine with something as long is it’s for things they like. It’s always “activism” whenever they disagree.
Are we sure he isn't using a pseudonym?
He's apparently "political propaganda", but instead of being just a symbol we gotta eat it. He's an agit pie.
Boy do we ever have to eat it...
-
So y'all need to stop complaining about what you voted for. It is no secret at all that Republicans have been gunning to kill Net Neutrality, even when the country was dying in the grips of th e Kenyan Terror baby, and Acorn. it is a great opportuninty for the people they work for to make a lot of money. This is good.
You won, now enjoy the spoils of your hard earned victory.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
FCC's mandate is related to the promotion of Free Speech right?
There is certainly an argument to be made that free speech should allow a company to provide access to full Wikipedia, for free. Since the entire text of the whole English Wikipedia is 12GB, and a typical user won't read more than 0.01% of that. Figuring an average article size of 40KB, someone reading 75 Wikipedia articles per month would use only 3MB. Someone might certainly be able to provide a free wireless plan which includes 75 articles of Wikipedia access free each month, or have a wireless plan that costs $1 / month and has access to Wikipedia and similar educational sites. Those 3MB only cost the provider pennies. There is a free speech argument that someone should be allowed to do that, as a public service or otherwise. The organization offering this would probably also provide access to their own web site, of course.
On the other hand, 3MB is TWO SECONDS of video on pornhub. Providing access to watch pornhub costs the provider thousands of times as much as providing access to Wikipedia. If the government says "you may not provide free access to Wikipedia unless you also provide free access to pornhub", the practical effect is that they just made it illegal to provide low-income people with free access to Wikipedia. By artificially making it cost thousands of times as much, they prevent it from happening. (This isn't theory, this actually happened - the free wireless plan offering educational content was actually cancelled due to "net neutrality" requirements.)
There are of course counter-arguments, reasonable arguments to the contrary. I'm not expressing any opinion one way or the other about which arguments are best, but that's the first amendment argument. It's certainly a cogent argument.
Government employees shouldn't be doing that shit at work anyway. Just block those services to government IPs entirely.
See that "Preview" button?
And that was because SFTP wasn't invented until what year? Of course at the low level all communication over usenet was binary. A simple fork of the FOSS nntp server implementations could have easily included a more native binary file transfer workflow. But since residential ISPs did not treat their subscriber's nntp server traffic on neutral terms compared to their gmail client traffic, there was insufficient marketplace for such server applications, and they didn't get developed.
One of these days perhaps the waves of regulations drafted by people whose VCRs were blinking 12:00 at home (if they couldn't afford human servants) will get unwound and the basic ability to use an s/ftp server application on a general purpose computer will become as much of a thing as napster ever was. One of these decades I mean.
hashtag home irc server persecution in residential isp terms of service for non-'business class' plans
hashtag net neutrality never seemed to effectively protect the kind of traffic i wanted to use my access for so I'm not all broken up about this issue
Ok so some people use BitTorrent for illegal means, however it is also used for many other LEGAL means. I use it to get my Linux Distos that is the fastest way to download them. Also my paid legal backup system uses BitTorrent to transfer my 5TB of files to my 5 locations and keep my backup in the cloud. I use this backup system because it works very well and it is cheaper than others because they leverage BitTorrent. My multi camera video surveillance system at all 5 locations uses yup you guessed it uses BitTorrent to keep my video data off site for review as needed and also so I can view live video on my cameras on my smart phone no matter where I am. Next I use BitTorrent to sync my files from my office computer to my home computer and my laptop so I always have my current files. Unfortunately Comcast is the only internet provider in several of the places I have my business. So Comcast is going to cripple my legal use of BitTorrent because some people use it for illegal means. That's like making all cars illegal because some people use them to rob banks!!! Holy Crap, please Comcast don't block BitTorrent you will break 75% of how my business works!!!!
Bittorrent has never killed a person, much less thousands of people a year in the U.S. alone.
What else can you expect from a Hindu like Ajith Pai who follows a religion that is based on elitism and tyranny?
block my ass from getting raped by the feds and the megacorp internet providers and media companies?
It includes the nuance of the quashing. Obviously a lot of businesses people want to start are destined for quashing because the business world is a cut throat survival of the fittest kind of arena. Generally it's going to take a compelling new product/tactic to not get quashed by the big playas out there. What it is about in my opinion is being allowed to create a business that is not required to be dependent on any other business (beyond paying a reasonable rate for the utility-like service of shuffling data packets across their networks). But folks like Google and Microsoft and Comcast make it their bottom line to have as many new and existing businesses as dependent on them as po$$ible. They make their public policy choices accordingly. I fear that the FCC is little more than a thin veil for implementing the wishes of the big establishment corporations.
... then that would be a great argument
Is it true they're planning a biopic of Ajit Pai with the working title, "Scumdog Millionaire"?
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.
Somebody should do a cartoon - Ajit Pai the dot-head guy.
You may not be able to cast a vote, but you can still raise hell for your representative - question them through written communication, question them at public town hall appearances, question them during media interviews that have call-in time, question them through the press. Question their voting record as loudly as possible if they don't vote the way you would like, and get as many other people to question them too. Make sure they can't have a public appearance or media interview without getting asked your question.
They can either speak to your issue, or the story quickly becomes that they refuse, and people start asking why.
If Comcast are going to be allowed to block traffic because and is illegal then why shouldn't Comcast block traffic because ?
If Comcast were to start actively blocking some of my traffic and not other traffic then it would seem that Comcast is taking responsibility for DDoS attacks, hack attacks, phishing attacks, use of Comcast customers on botnets, etc.
The RIAA/MPAA may want this and it MAY seem like a good idea at first but I think Comcast doesn't really want to be actively responsible for deciding what Internet traffic reaches your home.
As always, think of the children: "My 6 year old saw a picture of a naked woman because Comcast let it through!"
Ajit Pai is trying to turn the internet into cable TV.
Why are you Americans putting up with this ?
The next block to your fix is throttling https / 443, and outright blocking OpenVPN connections using anything else. Yes, this is stupid, but it also allows Comcast to be able to shake down^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H offer "fast lane service" to more companies and content providers, all in the name of protecting intellectual property rights.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
in 3,2,1 ...
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Apparently it's legal to deplatform TheDailyStormer and prevent white nationalists (or anyone else) from riding in Ubers, finding dates on Tinder or booking rooms via Airbnb. Why should only some companies be forced to treat everyone equally?
The only way to stop a pirate with bittorrent is a good guy with bittorrent.
the bit torrent protocol to update/steam/distribute? what about the licenses that bittorrent inc have sold to the music and movie scene for their distribution....... there are plenty of "legit" uses for bittorrent and they get blocked too?
Look how many are faggot nazis.
Somebody please kill Agit Dotheadedcocksucker Pai. Send a clear message.
It's a pain in the ass and there's no percentage in it for them to do so. The real fight is with customerless peers dumping content downstream and Comcast not seeing a dime for their trouble.
I wonder if Linux, and companies using Bit Torrent legally could sue the FCC for damages if they were to try this bullshit. Furthermore, why don't they also block HTTP/HTTPS since most trackers are running websites? Just totally nuke the internet altogether - it's clearly all bad news!
people just lay back and enjoy the spectacle. I bet the majority of 'tech savvy' /. users who voted for the orange boi didn't see that one coming. So much for draining the swamp and promoting freedom.
sudo rm -r -f --no-preserve-root /
Is there only one amendment in your constitution?
Case law has clearly demonstrated that telephone and Internet communications are covered under Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Assembly, and Freedom from unreasonable search and seizure.
Absolutely no reason to artificially manufacture competing entities which will "let" you use the physical wires running to your house. Those are public infrastructure and should be managed as such.
Alternatively, I suggest you provide me with several competing governments to choose from and I'll pledge allegiance to the one which treats me best (that day).
When did Congress has the net neutrality act?
Pass the net neutrality act, even.
I hear people all the time talk about a military response on any communications company that advocates any type of censorship.
I don't recommend censoring any type of traffic, and examining any type of traffic could be spying and a violation of the CFAA
Soon customers in the US will only be able to connect to a preselected list of servers for Facebook etc.
But you will be able to buy access to additional IPs per MByte Traffic.
Oh, IPv6 rollout is solved, too, you will not need it.
Now that the front regulations are being tossed in the trash:
https://fee.org/articles/goodbye-net-neutrality-hello-competition/
> Nobody in their right minds would accept a free wired internet service that provides access to only one website.
Actually people DO accept free stuff. Millions of people even PAID for services that provided only limited web sites, not the internet in general. Half the people on Slashdot bought these services. (The other half apparently think the internet started a year and half ago, when the net neutrality rules went into effect.) These services had names like AOL, Prodigy, and CompuServe. Services that provide full, open access won in the marketplace because they are better, and people paying for service choose the open internet. People who don't buy internet service did in fact sign up for the free educational connection.
> (The net neutrality laws do not apply to wireless ISPs).
> this argument is so purely theoretical that it is moot.
I'm sorry but you're missing a lot of information. The government did in fact shut the service down. It's not theoretical, it happened about a year ago. It was a wireless service.
> By contrast, the things these rules were intended to prevent are not theoretical, and caused actual harm.
Certainly people supporting new rules had good intentions. Unfortunately good intentions are of little practical value. Damage done with good intentions is still damage done. Based on what I see these supporters saying this week, all over the media, what they seek to prevent is "your ISP is going to start charging you extra for Tumblr". THAT, my friend, is theoretical, not real. Shutting down the free wireless service that provided access to Wikipedia and other educational content is what actually happened. That's what's real.
All the paid posters and mods are out in full force this weekend. Wow, just wow.
Wait until you can't sell your copyrighted work through anyone except for a major ISP. They'll drop in a last mile cache for their services and anyone who wants to pay meaning serving their content up will cost them almost nothing. Meanwhile they'll charge you and regular legal content providers a fee, or they'll give you like a gig of "other" downloads and start throttling you after that.
Once netflix, amazon, google, akamai and all the rest of the content providers cost twice as much as services owned by the cable companies, they'll get shut down. Your cable companies will further integrate their video content offerings with their service/set top boxes and at that point they'll be able to start jacking the price up and injecting more and more ads.
I currently pay full legal price for all my content but if net neutrality fails I will never pay for anything again even if I have to download a nonstop 128kb trickle from a seedbox tunneled through DNS or facebook the comments section. If I can tunnel at 128kbps it's a whole season of content every single day. Do you know how easy it is to squeeze 128kbps out of legitimate traffic even on a 3rd world facebook only data plan. Or even ip over DNS on a cell phone that's not even activated? Two old cell phones and a linksys router for pirating and the cheapest internet my ISP will sell me for everything else. That's 4000 episodes of television a year. I'll get torrents from an RSS feed to a shit-teir VPS/seedbox and then DNS-over-IP to a few disconnected obamaphones.
Good luck fucko. I can't wait until you get a pittance for your content after the man takes his cut and I'm paying less than I do now. I can't wait to show everyone else how to do it too. Maybe I'll even offer it as a service just because of you.
Legal BitTorrent distribution saves distros' resources and is typically quicker than direct downloads.
So when a thief steals an Amazon package from your doorstep. Tears open the package a block away and then finds nothing that can be resold or used by themselves but take it anyway. That's not stealing in your definition?
Nope. Sorry. Better you stick with the "copying is not theft" argument.
Stealing based on the personal value of the theft between owner and thief is still stealing. And the previous property owner is the loser.
Public Service Message: It's the Holiday's!!!! DO NOT have packages delivered to your home. Even if you are there most delivery people will NOT ring the doorbell, so if you live in area with some population density you can kiss those packages goodbye!
Amazon seems to want only deliver to their Lockers now. So their delivery people do not ring doorbells.
Facebook is billions of individual "Skinner Boxes." And if you use it you are the pigeon!
How did you arrive at that conclusion from what I said?
Asssuming that theft means, simply, the unauthorized taking of something from someone, copyright infringement most definitely qualifies, because something is quite truly taken away by copyright infringement.
The fact that copyright infringers might not care about the perceived value of what they are taking away, or might even disagree with the notion that it was ever something that the copyright holder ever had is irrelevant.
Well, that's one way of dodging the fact that people aren't necessarily home at the time of the delivery.
When they used to use expedited post, it was no problem. If you weren't home, it would be waiting for you at the post office the next day, which in my experience was usually only a couple of blocks away, and not remotely out of the way when I am going home.
The nearest Amazon locker to my place is about 2 miles, and is nowhere near on my way to or from any place that I routinely go. (grumble, grumble, grumble)
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
You had to EAT YOUR WORDS vs. me Brockmire (Quagmire , lol - your name is mud) https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=10557875&cid=54347839/ & no I never said what you now say I did - learn to read, moron.
APK
P.S.=> Of course, you're DOUBTLESS just PROJECTING your own "StRaNgE" activities for all to see no doubt, lol... apk
A few (several?) years back, I downloaded a bunch of Linux distros via BitTorrent. To my surprise, the downloads took around 24 hours each to complete. Not long afterwards, I read that my ISP, Comcast, had been injecting fake hangups into BitTorrent transmissions. When the story broke, Comcast backpedaled, my next round of distro downloads took more like 15 minutes each, and the push for explicit rules mandating net neutrality took off in earnest. Those who cannot remember the past may be condemned to repeat it, but those who cannot remember what happened a few short years ago are just plain stupid.
higher rate for the same amount of bandwidth used versus a pornhub user.
I think I see the track you are taking here. The answer is that allowing ISPs to be in the position of deciding *which* Free Speech (be it wikipedia or pr0n) their customers are allowed to see removes the concept of Free Speech from the equation for that ISP. Which to my original point about that being part of FCC's jurisdictional mandate, means that the FCC would no longer be the legally appropriate entity to regulate such a non-Free-Speech internet access service provider.
(note- comment originally submitted but blocked by AC 10 comment limit approx 16 hours ago (long before current micro$oft darknet wikipedia headline, and now pornhub)
In other words, use an FOSS router doing QoS that is under the user's control? Check out the operating system called Linux. I'm sure FreeBSD can work as well on a general purpose computer. If you want something simpler, OpenWRT is a popular distro that can run on many inexpensive router boxes.
> Providing services is not speech. If it were, prostitution would be legal
That's an interesting topic. So in your opinion mailing out a pamphlet critical of President Trump isn't covered by free speech? Or is it covered if you send the pamphlet by mail, but not covered if you send it over the air, wirelessly? Or maybe it's free speech *only* if you're criticizing Trump, not if you're sending educational writing such as Wikipedia?
I can't imagine any way to say sending educational text such as Wikipedia to people who ask for it isn't free speech, without saying free speech is completely meaningless.
Packets are unlike guns in that while people who carry guns legitimately usually don't have to carry their guns across Comcast property in order to get to work on time, people who telecommute and live in Comcast territory do have to carry their packets across Comcast property in order to get to work on time.
Is there a difference between the ones that pay more for 'business class' service? One word friend- 'tethering'. Net Neutrality has always been at best a lovely illusion. A culture where >50% of highway drivers are violating speed limit laws and <1% face repercussions for their 'unlawfulness'. That is the situation here. The cops are too overworked and understaffed to want to deal with issues that aren't literally bleeding, and rightfully so. At this point, you just sit back and either accept the pervasive lawlessness and disrespect for authority it breeds, or you rewrite the laws so the average person is no longer breaking the law.
Auto-repair services- sure, you've got a point. Providing a 'blog on the internet with your periodic thoughts and references to the news and other media? Uh, yeah.
Legal BitTorrent distribution saves distros' resources and is typically quicker than direct downloads.
Don't worry about us. We know how to fork, then tweak some FOSS, put it on a different port, and call it something else like "DistributedFOSSDistributionByteBlaster". DFDBB. BFD. It'll be legal circus for a few more decades. Invest in popcorn.
There was a time in the not-too-distant past when the "net neutrality" rule wasn't in effect. So far, nobody has come up with any actual problems from that era that "net neutrality" fixed.
Some perhaps helpful links. https://plus.google.com/111504... which links to http://thegarrisoncenter.org/a... , and also http://knappster.blogspot.com/...
Ending "net neutrality" will not be the end of anything good. Dogs and cats will not be living together. There will be no mass hysteria. "Those people" will not suddenly start to want to marry your sister. Witches won't put a curse on you. And so on.
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.
> Well put, I see the same stuff you do .... NN Was never good for the internet. Only for content providers that want profit but no expense.
Well I didn't say that, and I support the CONCEPT of net neutrality. Modern network optimization is just so technically complex that it's almost impossible to write effective NN laws that don't have a lot of unintended consequences. That said, NETFLIX specifically DID drum up a lot of BS about NN when at the end of the day they simply didn't want to pay their bills like every other web site does.
I don't put any bad intent on NN advocates generally. It is, however, true that roughly zero certified network admins have supported any of the rules as written, because they accidentally have the side effect of requiring the network to work less effectively for everyone.
IMO they need to deregulate who can put fiber in the ground or on telephone poles to allow small and municipal ISP's to start and hopefully prosper. I remember in the days of dialup anybody could start a dial in ISP, if we went back to that model then we wouldn't have all the price gouging that we have today. Also with the deregulating of telephone poles, My idea would be they poles and existing wires are state owned(opposite of how I normally feel about the state) and anybody that wanted to pay a monthly fee, with a minimum speed/amount of traffic, to stop every body from just renting space on the lines and causing state massive paperwork.... Also a fee to run your own fiber and have unlimited use for the first say 5 years? and after that it becomes state owned, and you pay the monthly fee as everybody else does. Obviously there would have to be other limits set on stuff, like the number of lines to any given area and wot not. but remove the damn monopoly system we have today. As far as NN goes, it has done nothing to fix anything that is wrong with the internet today as far as I can tell.