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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.
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?
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'
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
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'
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.
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
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.
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.
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'
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 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
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.
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...
Since when has that helped anything? You're lucky to get a form letter back, and nevermind trying to get them on the phone.
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?