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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.
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.
Ok, but seriously. This will end up in cat/mouse, and the mouse will always get away. There is more incentive to share/steal/whatever-you-call-it than there will be to block it. Soon, all of these connections will be done over HTTPS, and mask all the traffic anyway.
You donâ(TM)t need HTTPS, any random port and self-signed certs using public key cryptography will work.
Iâ(TM)m actually glad they go after this than something worse like mandating all CPUs only run pre-approved code, with engineering CPUs licensed by these ass-hats. With encryption and tools like VPN, we can always solve this.
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?
Fuck everyone else, you got yours
Copyright infringement is not stealing. Educate yourself and come back when you understand the difference.
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
So what's up with these claims that the FCC is 'finally' going up against copyright-infringement?
Comcast already throttles all encrypted traffic.
You know, not all content shared by bittorrent is illegal.
Every quarter, I get an update email on a software package that I use which is actually distributed via bittorrent, because it lightens the load on the main server when everybody is trying to get the file at about the same time.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
They will block random ports and unapproved services unless you pay a premium. But WebSockets lets you effectively run a VPN between a server and the client PC. All the individual connections used to download images, video and scripts go through one permanently on and encrypted https connection.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
I might have read your book "I'm Always Complaining But Nobody's Listening". Actually I downloaded it on bit torrent and made copies for all my friends. Most of them said you should have gotten a real job. Sorry.
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.
Here is an analogy to explain why this is a big deal: the police can currently discourage crime by arresting offenders after the fact and interrupting crimes in progress, this is what ISPs can do now. The proposal would be like if police could stop crime by shutting down parts of town where crime occurs even though not all of the traffic through that part of town is illegal.
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.
Data is innocent until proven guilty - how can you possibly determine beforehand with encrypted communications? BitTorrent is only a protocol - and not a bad one for sharing any large file. Even beats http from one single user to another for reliability.
Barring the above rationalizations, copyright infringement can be thought of as theft on the grounds that copyright entails an exclusive right to dictate who may copy a work. Exclusive, by definition, means that nobody else is doing it, and so when a person commits copyright infringement, they are literally depriving the copyright holder of some measure of the exclusive control that the rights holder was supposed to have over that work. Obviously for any single unauthorised copy, the amount of exclusivity lost is very minor, but the cumulative effect of multiple unauthorised copies can still be substantial.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
You do realize you DONT have to use twitter, right?. Nobody is forcing you. But there isn't any completion for ISPs. We are forced to use certain companies. I have 2 choices. My old house I had 1 Choice. ShiT I had more choices in 2000 than I do now in 2017(AOL, EarthLink, compuserve, direct tv dsl). Something's wrong with that picture.
You know how many Twitter alternatives there are? Get a clue Man.
Before bittorrent, downloading linux distributions could take days, and it cost the distro money for the server load. With torrents I can download a whole distro in a few minutes! And it doesn't add to the costs of publishing the distro.
There is so much wrong with this I don't know where to begin, but your argument basically boils down to "the free market will fix it".
And there is more than ample evidence that that flat out will not happen.
There are still plenty of areas where there is only one provider, sometimes none. Cities that tried to start their own ISPs were sued and forced to abandon their efforts. There are more than enough dirty tactics employed by the encumbant ISPs to make it incredibly difficult for small ISPs to get off the ground, and eliminating net neutrality will just give the existing ISPs that much more power to crush emerging competition.
things which other people may not deem to have any value cannot be stolen.
If lawfully made copies of a work are not available now or in the near future, the work's copyright owner probably sees no value in making it available.
As long as there is no competition in the ISP market, they can do almost anything they want. We need them as much as they need us, but they know we don't have an alternative.
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
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.
Comcast is not going to throttle small web sites unless they enter into private deals.
Are you the CEO for Comcast? No? Then don't presume to state what they will and will not do. *Especially* when they already have a track record for pulling dirty tricks.
Your argument is so breathtakingly absurd it's incredible. So because Twitter censors in ways you don't like, you feel it is completely reasonable to hand the few major ISPs the ability to do the exact same thing, but to the entire internet? Do you know that ISPs have *already* done the very same censoring that you are so upset about, in the past before NN provisions were in place?
Do you even understand what Net Neutrality is?
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.
No, clearly you don't. And based on that statement, you're so far into left field that you're not even wrong.
The problem is you often have no choice in your ISP. If there were a dozen around to choose from, you could choose the one that offered net neutrality, and someone else could choose the one that offered a lower price (in exchange for advertising or something).
Unfortunately, we don't have that situation. ON the other hand, the obvious solution is to make it easier for ISPs to exist.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Comcast tries it and the demand for last mile municipal internet or for Congress to pass a law, which is really the way NN should be implemented anyway, will increase exponentially. Especially if Netflix and Amazon Video are smart and don't renew their non-throttle contracts with Comcast when they come up.
As a copyright holder, I've been very happy with Agit Pai so far.
On behalf of all of the internet, fuck you and the horse you rode in on. Your assault against the internet and the platform which you should see as an enabler in the name of a few bad apples should be met in kind. I hope you get what you want.
I hope your precious Agit Pai enables mega corporations to stamp on your little copyright. May you be screwed over in more ways than you're proposing to screw the common man. God speed.
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.
I wonder how they would enforce that, exactly. How can they even generally tell the difference between something that is not encrypted, and something that is encrypted but disguised as something that is not?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I'm not saying Congress couldn't pass a law, but they're also paid off by corporations. Financially it would be in their best interest not to.
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.
It did exist before he created it because everything existed before time, everybody created everything, and time machines get everything to every point in time.
i think iâ(TM)d kinda like to live in a world with the former usa disconnected from the internet for a bit. could be fun.
Talk about an apples to oranges comparison. What the OP is saying is if you have Comcast, most likely you can't get another suitable ISP this no competition. Mobile isn't a viable substitute. Satellite isn't a viable substitute. For many consumers, there isn't another cable company they could use and fiber isn't everywhere.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
I can remember when the U.S. had a government.
You mistake my question.... I'm asking how would they even be aware, for example, in what was apparently a plain voice conversation, that a supposedly unbreakable encryption was being used and it was not just two people communicating in a language that is not known to eavesdroppers?
The thing about unbreakable encryption is that it can always be masqueraded as something entirely innocuous that you just don't happen understand, or sometimes even something that you believe that you *DO* understand, while not actually having any real clue about what was actually being communicated.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
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.
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!
Like... recent history. Or even the present.
There are (many) instances in which a free market does not work, and when the free market fails the situation tends to settle into a consumer-abusive equilibrium.
You mistake my question.... I'm asking how would they even be aware, for example, in what was apparently a plain voice conversation, that a supposedly unbreakable encryption was being used and it was not just two people communicating in a language that is not known to eavesdroppers?
The thing about unbreakable encryption is that it can always be masqueraded as something entirely innocuous that you just don't happen understand, or sometimes even something that you believe that you *DO* understand, while not actually having any real clue about what was actually being communicated.
No, I understood your question. The answer is they won't be able to catch a lot of it. That's why they'll place something like a 25-year minimum prison sentence and hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars in fines on violators they *do* catch, along with a rewards program for anonymous snitches.
There are many crimes which are extremely difficult for the government to detect/prosecute. That's why many such offenses carry very heavy criminal penalties. Nobody wants to risk spending most of the rest of their life in PMITA prison if they *are* caught, over such an issue.
The other part will most likely involve hardware/chip/software companies forced to produce compliant hardware/chips/software that makes using unauthorized encryption methods more difficult. That's one of the areas where CALEA requirements can come into play to force compliance.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
Re "Cities that tried to start their own ISPs were sued and forced to abandon their efforts. There are more than enough dirty tactics employed by the encumbant ISPs to make it incredibly difficult for small ISPs to get off the ground, and eliminating net neutrality will just give the existing ISPs that much more power to crush emerging competition."
Big telcos got so greedy in the short term they just lobbied away their very best gov backed laws to block all emerging competition.
That was the real problem to low cost entry set by big gov regulation. Only a select few established telcos could say they had full "net neutrality" gov compliance and could use that as a way to block new providers.
With one less artificial regulatory barrier removed the US telco market will become more dynamic. New providers can enter a once restricted and over regulated market.
Small ISPs will finally able to get off the ground as they will not have to spend big on proving they are following gov regulation.
Cities can now build a network. Any network to any local standard. A network in the past would have to show support for net neutrality and only a near federally approved monopoly provider could offer that compliance.
Now anyone can build any type of network within a framework of local laws.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Given a network does not have to meet expensive federal "net neutrality" standards?
A walled community, any community with cash, city, group of people can set up their own modern optical "lines".
No more having to stay on network insulated with paper and protected by lead.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
you know BitTorrent over tor does not work. tor cant work threw udp witch most of BitTorrent uses these days. second thats just a stepping stone to blocking everything it will move to blocking ftp vpn unapproved http and so on.
Slashdot "Fortune" below the above post:
This is an unauthorized cybernetic announcement.
Oh, Slashdot! By George, you've done it again! LOL!
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
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
I have watched the news religiously. It is mostly covering Republican pedophilia and barely ever mentions a Democrat for more than a quick bit then moves on.
It's because the Democrats like Franken admit wrongdoing, apologize and take steps to make good. So the news story goes away. In Franken's case, his accuser accepted his apology. So there's no story any more.
Republicans like Trump and Moore just shout FAKE NEWS NEVER HAPPENED LIARS SLUTS THE LOT OF THEM!!! so the story continues and continues...
This will end up in cat/mouse, and the mouse will always get away.
Actually, no. The cat vs mouse analogy implies that while a cat is extremely adept at catching prey, mice are such prolific breeders that even a skilled predator can't exterminate them completely. While mice are oblivious to the fact their compatriots are being picked off, we humans aren't the same.
We can be bribed or threatened not to fuck with the cat. It generally works.
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DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
Exactly. And game companies like Blizzard use customized bit torrent clients to distribute patches/updates. It's a lot easier to push out an update to a few million users when those users pitch in to help out.
I refuse to sign
Yep I have had good times with Blizzard downloads maxxing 100Mb connection, especially for larger downloads. Reinstalling 16+GB of D3 when it had a problem was not an issue, less than 20 mins IIRC.
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.
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.
The rules were never put in action. NN was never implemented except on paper, so all this time you've been without NN.
If the rules were never put into action how can Ajit Pai then claim that NN was hurting network investment? Oh right, that’s because it was a lie.
World of Warcraft and many other products use BitTorrent for patches.
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...
-
Cite names please.
Otherwise you might as well be talking about muppets.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
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.
Government employees shouldn't be doing that shit at work anyway. Just block those services to government IPs entirely.
See that "Preview" button?
Comcast is not going to throttle small web sites unless they enter into private deals
By what reasoning? All logic suggests that they'd benefit most from a) charging websites to be accessible and b) blocking (or slowing traffic enough that it may as well be) websites that compete against either their own media subsidiaries or their paid "partners."
Twitter, a vocal proponent of Net Neutrality, however, has no problem actively discriminating about who can use their platform.
If Twitter blocks you from their platform, you can no longer use Twitter. If Comcast blocks you from their network, you can no longer use any platform. There's a bit of a scale difference in play there.
Small ISPs will finally able to get off the ground as they will not have to spend big on proving they are following gov regulation.
That's hardly a huge cost anyway, so its kind of a non-issue. In fact all the packet inspecting and traffic shaping equipment needed to intentionally break net neutrality tends to be more expensive than the "dumber" equivalents.
The biggest cost is getting the right-of-ways and laying the fiber. The legal side can take years (and being injuncted every step of the way by the incumbents, making it take even longer) and then the cost of digging up the ground, laying the cables and reconstructing the street/pavement/whatever you dug up for hundreds or thousands of miles.. that adds up fast.
Cities can now build a network.
I'm not sure how this follows. It may be one less argument the incumbents can use to block publicly-built networks, but they've got plenty more up their sleeves. In fact I can't think of any of these cases where the deciding factor was NN implementation (though I'm sure I don't know of every such case.) Most of the ones I've seen is either based on the city having a pre-existing agreement from decades ago that explicitly gives the incumbent a monopoly, or an argument based on some vague Ayn Rand-style BS about the government encroaching on the rights of private corporations.
Now anyone can build any type of network within a framework of local laws.
If they have a few billion dollars to blow with maybe a return on investment over several decades at best while fighting continual legal battles against the established players.
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!!!!
If you were to download a movie you had no intention of purchasing, you've deprived the copyright owner of absolutely nothing. They were never going to get a sale from you in the first place, and you have not deprived the copyright holder of their right to exclusive distribution (the copyright holder can still sell their IP, same as before).
However, since we're talking about BitTorrent, where anything you download is immediately shared with other users, you're facilitating copyright infringement by design (unless you're sharing files which can be legally shared, obviously).
If you snuck into Disneyland, they'd very likely charge you with trespassing - not theft of the admission fee. When you gain access to property, whether real or intellectual, without permission of the owner - you have broken a law, but it's not theft.
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DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
Another option which is presently available: Compete. Meet your neighbors, set up community-based networks (wireless, wired, or whatever works best), and perhaps set up links and routing between these networks
I've never heard of such a scheme succeeding (other than what I do, which is have an open wifi hotspot). If it worked somewhere, I'd be interested to hear about it.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Bittorrent has never killed a person, much less thousands of people a year in the U.S. alone.
... then that would be a great argument
They'd pass a law. It'd just be full of deliberate loopholes.
It's interesting to note that the Blizzard updater never mentions bittorrent, anywhere - even though it is a bittorrent client. I think they don't want to be too openly associated with a technology of somewhat sordid reputation.
Also, "maybe touched someones butt" is slightly different from, "police escorts had to be instructed to keep him away from preteens"
Impossible as they are entirely different categories of crimes. May as well try and equate speeding and arson, as they both involve property and breaking the law.
Downloading? I went to the store to buy mine.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
I smell a rat. That free educational access plan might well have been introduced precisely to bring up this argument against net neutrality. Same as our providers who started plans with unlimited Spotify access just around the time the discussion on net neutrality started here in the EU. It’s similar to cities whose budgets are cut (here they get money from tbe national govt): they never say they’ll cut overhead, but instead they’ll loudly proclaim they’ll have to shut down public swimming pools and libraries. It’s all politics.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Except that they are not proposing complete deregulation. The government continues to protect the Telco's from competition by giving them rights you cannot get as a new company, so even if you wanted to compete with Comcast, they get the right to hang their cables on public utility polls, your new company doesn't. They get easement rights to bury their wires and fibers through public AND private properly rent free, new company doesn't. If it were a true deregulation, the Comcasts of the world would have to negotiate and pay property owners rent for laying cables there. I would offer Comcast the same deal as they offer their customers, low price for 6 months, then back to ever increasing regular rates.
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.
Uh, it's so their buddy franken can keep his seat. The media has a well-known leftist bias.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
If the rules were never put into action how can Ajit Pai then claim that NN was hurting network investment? Oh right, thatâ(TM)s because it was a lie.
Yeah, he couldn't possibly have meant investment...like going forward...to that 'future' thing you may have heard of?...might suffer because of the usual investor caution around any big market changes. It *has* to be the worst possible interpretation because anyone who disagrees with your position *must* be evil and therefor everything they do and say is equally evil. No gray, only black & white. Right? That kind of thinking you demonstrate in your post is responsible for many of the worst atrocities, brutal regimes, and wars Mankind has ever known.
Congratulations on joining the 'club'.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
To be fair, Trump's whole administration follow a religion based on elitism and tyranny, and most of them aren't Hindi.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
As opposed to being totally happy with being associated with Warcraft which is basically the video game equivalent of crack cocaine.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
They won't lose any either, as their subscribers have essentially the choice between Comcast, and no internet service.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
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
if it weren't for bit torent, you would be out of work and we know there are no jobs in india.
Why do you think that option is available? There are countless stories about existing ISPs shutting down new competitors with the force of law, whether municipal or cooperatives or otherwise.
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?
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.
Well the problem with is our country has this thing where we frown on imposing grossly excessive punishments, otherwise we'd fight all crimes by just making them 25-life or execution. You'd have a very hard time getting simple encryption to qualify and not get thrown out as unconstitutional because it's insanely disproportionate to the harm inflicted. Now there's a few areas where we've got some batshit insane ideas about harm inflicted by the act vs. harm inflicted by trying to prohibit it, but I don't think using unapproved encryption is going to get there.
Little is not the same as nothing. Copyright is supposed to entail exclusive control over who can make copies, and by making an unauthorized copy, you are usurping some of that control (by definition, because "exclusive" means that nobody else is doing it), and literally depriving the copyright holder of whatever proportional measure of control that your singular unauthorized copy represents.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I believe I explained above how copyright infringement is theft... the fact that there happens to be a more specific name for what we call copyright infringement is no different than the fact that shoplifting is also a form of theft. The only real difference is that in the case of copyright infringement, it may be less obvious to people what is actually being stolen.
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We're talking about exceptions granted by the government. Corporate policies still can't legally violate the law.
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 /
No, not really (and even if there is an argument, it is moot) for multiple reasons:
In short, this argument is so purely theoretical that it is moot. By contrast, the things these rules were intended to prevent are not theoretical, and caused actual harm.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Like they did for the 25 years before the net neutrality decree?
When did Congress has the net neutrality act?
Pass the net neutrality act, even.
What net neutrality laws?
> get government to remove restrictions on local cable monopolies. once again government is in the way.
With the need to run your own wires, how is that going to work exactly? This isn't a "government" problem. This is a scarcity of real estate problem. Waving an anarchist magic wand isn't doing to do anything.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
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.
INNOCENT UNTIL PROVEN GUILTY.
The thing is, you have to accept that in some cases you are never going to have definitive "proof." There is not going to be HD video surfacing with surround-sound audio of Moore taking the clothes off a 14-year-old girl.
What you have is the weight of evidence and you have to make your evaluation on that.
At least five unrelated women have accused Moore - Women who have never met each other, all tell almost identical stories.
In the case of Corfman, her mother and her friends back up the story. Corfman is a Republican who voted for Trump. Court records show Moore and Corfman were at the courthouse that day. People who worked with Moore at the DA's office say it was common knowledge that Moore dated teenage girls. One girl has a high school yearbook that Moore signed.
On and on.
That is a lot of weight of evidence against Moore saying "it didn't happen."
Similar story with Trump - Unrelated women telling similar stories. And what further harms Trump is he lies constantly, so any credibility in his saying "It didn't happen!" is lost.
In the end it comes down to a simple question (with a difficult answer): Who do you believe?
The notion that they could actually *EVER* be caught assumes that a person using unbreakable encryption is otherwise using said encryption to avoid detection by the law on account of other activities they are doing which are otherwise illegal regardless of any laws about encryption. If they are not breaking any other laws, there is no reason that they would ever get caught because there is no reason to suspect they are doing anything illegal, as good unbreakable encryption is indistinguishable from innocuous communication that you may not actually understand.(and using certain types of encryption, an unauthorized person might believe that they do understand it, while in actuality the real encrypted message is something else entirely).
Either that, or a person would have to snitch on themselves.. because is is very possible that the only people who are even going to know about an unbreakable encryption being used at a given point in time are the sender and receiver.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
> 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.
72% of people agree with this policy, 15% disagree, and 21% can't count.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
So rape is now vagina theft?
When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.
Never mind that the Governor of Minnesota is a Democrat, and would appoint a Democrat to fill his seat. There's no need for the supposedly leftist media to protect a leftist when his replacement would certainly be a leftist.
...
The GOP, Fix news, and Roy Moore, on the other hand
Apples and oranges. I do not mean to make light of the seriousness of the crime of rape for a second here, but the clear difference with your analogy is that a woman that is raped typically still has just as much of her vagina after the crime as they did before it, whereas what is being taken from the copyright holder in the case of copyright infringement is something that they both a) definitely had before the infringement, and b) definitely have less of afterwards. That said, rape probably still could be thought of as theft of certain things, depending on the person. A theft of dignity, a theft of choice on who to have sex with, a theft of virginity perhaps, possibly a theft of purity from STD's... there are probably dozens more.
Again, it's not my intent to make light of rape here, nor to be insensitive to anyone who may have experienced or who may personally know someone who has. I only intended to refute the above remark, and illustrate how the vagina is not actually stolen (where one simply defines theft as any unauthorized taking of something from someone) in the case of rape.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
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!
Fuck face, you need to be prosecuted before you can be found guilty. You don't know shit. You are one dumb motherfucker. Do not breed.
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'
He doesn't eat dicks, he just does butt stuff. He just said so. See his subject.
Your parents failed you if you didn't learn stealing as simply, "taking something that doesn't belong to you without their permission".
But they're not. Not even remotely close. Just think about it for two seconds: if I steal your car that you have put up for sale, what have you lost: your car. You can no longer sell it. But what if I make a perfect copy of your car and start driving it - from thousands of miles away. You haven't lost anything that wasn't already in your possession.
Which is not to say that copyright infringement - a time limited right to exclusive duplication of works - isn't a violation of the law. It's saying it's not theft, never has been, and never will be. You don't go around insisting that arson is theft because it "deprives" someone of a possession, do you?
> 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.
Thankfully, I haven't done that since 1999.
Copyright infringement actually takes away a measure of the exclusivity of control that a copyright holder is supposed to have and amounts to some unauthorized share of that control going to the infringer. Whether the infinger has an sense of gain in this regard is irrelevant With arson, the arsonist doesn't gain what they deprive a homeowner of when they burn the place down.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
How many of these sex scandals have been reported in your news? If you haven't heard of them, you're probably watching fake news. http://www.dailywire.com/news/...
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Which is why it's called copyright infringement. Because you are infringing on someone else's time-limited right to the the sole source of authorized copies of a work.
Another easy test of this: go to any person or media company who's ever claimed to have been the victim of copyright infringement. Then ask them how much they reported to the police or their insurance companies for theft. That number is going to be zero.
Because copyright infringement is not theft. Never has been, never will be.
Sure. If you want to limit the bandwidth yourself, I'm sure your ISP will happily save themselves the effort.
I used the word "punishment" for a reason. It would not be done to improve the quality of service on their end. And yes there would always be a sweet spot to get the maximum transfer rate for the minimum amount of punishment.. but the vast majority of people are not going to be setting up their own FreeBSD boxes never mind setting up useful QoS rules and really never mind being able to figure out where the sweet spot is -- especially if the ISP is regularly tweaking their system and thus moving the sweet spot.
It's called, as you say, copyright infringement because you infringe on their rights.... but infringing on someone's copyright quite literally involves depriving them of the *exclusivity* that the copyright holder would have otherwise had. Kidnapping is a kind of theft too... Arson is a kind of vandalism... Forgery is a kind of fraud.... just because things happen to have a special name for them doesn't mean they are no longer specialized instances of something else.
In fact, the *ONLY* reason that practically exists to say that copyright infringement is not theft is so that people who don't care about copyright infringement are able to convince themselves that they don't need to feel guilty, as they would if they had supposedly *truly* stolen something (a variation on the "no true Scotsman" expression).
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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.
There is so much wrong with this I don't know where to begin, but your argument basically boils down to "the free market will fix it".
And there is more than ample evidence that that flat out will not happen.
There are still plenty of areas where there is only one provider, sometimes none. Cities that tried to start their own ISPs were sued and forced to abandon their efforts. There are more than enough dirty tactics employed by the encumbrance ISPs to make it incredibly difficult for small ISPs to get off the ground, and eliminating net neutrality will just give the existing ISPs that much more power to crush emerging competition.
So the free market gets the blame for not existing do to government regulation? That is sure convenient.
If you think the government cant filter encrypted and non encrypted packets, you need to research just how deep they have their grubby paws. So you know they ALREADY capture any and all traffic leaving or entering the US borders. They know what your IP is, They will know when you try to use TOR, And they will enforce it to set examples. Just like in a lot of the country, being in posession of a marijuana seed is still a felony. With a hefty sentence attached.
I'm suggesting that they wouldn't even necessarily have any reason to *know* that transmitted network packet was encrypted. Maybe its content was simply in a language that they don't happen to know... maybe it's actually steganographically encrypted (and fully indistinguishable to anyone who did not already know exactly what encryption technology was being used from a completely innocuous and unencrypted packet).
Even if they made it illegal to communicate on the internet using anything but 7-bit ascii and plain english, the steganography approach would remain open, and completely uncatchable unless, as I said above, the people sending or receiving snitched on themselves.
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> 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.
They could easily setup a filter to catch all known, and some suspicious packet types.. If they want to take it that far, believe me they will be able to enforce it. Packets are real easy to detect data type, Have you ever played with wireshark? You should check it out, its amazing the difference between clear text and encrypted packets.. But the fact of the matter is, if they outlaw encryption... we have bigger issues than NN. Don't fall into the category of "the sky is falling" we went the whole existence of the internet until 2015. And it was great! well, it started to suck once myspace became a thing... and facebook and twitter are not helping. I want the pre 2000's internet back... Even if I have to live with 1mbit internet and thats honest opinion right there... Mind you my hobby is computers and networks... Gigabit internet sounds great, but not if it keeps going along the path of the internet today.
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.
I'm going to assume from your remark that you don't know what steganographic encryption is, because if you did, you would realize that no amount of packet inspection on a packet so encrypted by a party that doesn't already know exactly what encryption is being used, and the algorithm employed will make it apparent that the contents of that packet are actually even encrypted in the first place, and not whatever innocuous content that the sender wished it to look like. This can, of course, be further layered inside of whatever protocols are ordinary for the communication, being completely indistinguishable to *EVERYBODY* other than the sending and receiving party from content they would have no evidence-supported reason to suspect of being completely innocuous.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Oh, i know what it is, I didnt acknowledge it because its not feasible for wide scale encryption on a network. and has a lot of overhead. It may work for a few pages of words.. but thats going to be about it.... try transferring anything worth a meaning that way and see how its not viable. Also the government has some REALLY good hackers on contract. If they want you, they will get you.. That being said, I see the end of encryption being the beginning of a civil war. I am against NN, but I am for Encryption. Our lives as we know it would halt without it. Almost as much as if we had no internet at all..
Did you mean to respond to someone else? What you posted has nothing to do with the topic in this thread.
By the way, dailywire is about as good a source of news as the steaming pile my dog left on the lawn this morning.
You presume that the sender and receiver are unwilling to pay the overhead for using such encryption. If they want to keep a secret badly enough, it's a safe bet that they will, especially if that is the only option remaining to them that still guarantees unbreakability.
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Yes you're correct, it comes back to ONLY criminals will use encryption, so the law abiding citizens will just have their data stolen and MITM bank attacks and wot not. Sounds wonderful. I can't wait!
Leaving aside the speciousness of the issue that only criminals might want to use such a sophisticated encryption, this is entirely independent of whether or not law abiding citizens have any justified use for unbreakable encryption that the other parties may be able to detect (but not decrypt), because obviously they do. My point is only that preventing unbreakable encryption is inherently impossible to be actually enforceable in cases where such encryption may be truly desired by the end users.
And, as you say, passing laws which outlaw unbreakable encryption puts law-abiding citizens at risk from their private information being obtained by nefarious parties, but worse, it does absolutely *NOTHING* to actually stop or help catch the criminals who are intent on actually breaking the law. This results in a net increase in the amount of work that law enforcement needs to do in order to mitigate harm to law-abiding citizens in this way, and more than likely represents a net decrease in the overall efficacy of law enforcement as the criminals they might have otherwise been hoping to catch continue to remain uncaught before they commit serious crimes, causing often completely irreparable harm.
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I agree with what you're saying. I was just pointing out from what i know personally, the governments length of reach in this situation. I for one will vote against any kind of encryption ban, not as a criminal as somebody that wants to keep my systems secure. But every american these days unwittingly uses encryption in their every day life. Most of the world to be honest. If unbreakable encryption is outlawed. It will be a field day for criminals, atleast once the master keys get spread around. but as we both agree the government wont know they're out because the same criminals would use unbreakable(so to say) encryption to share the information. I highly doubt we really need to worry about that anyways, I cant see that even coming close to making it into a law.