No really. How can they tell if some machine is infected?
The ACMA run a program called AISI which is basically a honeypot network.
I know they monitor traffic
Not true, that is (at least for now) illegal in Australia under the Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Act, except when ordered by a court under the guidelines of that act.
Maybe they can just slow down the bandwidth on infected PCs so when the customer call because "the internet is slow" the ISP would have the chance to tell them why it's "slow". For those who don't care or can't tell, well, maybe nobody else should care for them either.
I'd really like to see this implemented worldwide if it's done right.
What we (I work for an Australian ISP) are doing is implementing a captive portal for customers with infected computers, which will allow us to stop them from doing damage without completely disconnecting their internet, and allowing us to provide them with all the information they need to clean-up their pc and take their account out of the captive-portal when they're done.
I used to work as a law enforcement liaison for an Australian ISP (now a Sysadmin at the same ISP) and we don't charge for law enforcement requests unless getting the information costs us a significant amount of money (i.e. retrieving older data from off-site backups) and we would never charge any of the child abuse protection agencies.
I doubt any Australian Internet provider would accept this lying down, we're in the game of providing Internet access not playing judge-jury-executioner.
The existing Copyright Infringement provisions are sufficient, the amendments made to our Copyright Act for the US Fair Trade Agreement a few years back added a whole bunch of increased action for Copyright owners and protections for ISP's if they follow the Safe Harbour provisions.
This includes a "Repeat offender" policy, so we're already required to take action against "Repeat Offenders", which is a nice vague term, leaving it open to interpretation, meaning we can enforce such a policy in a reasonable way without loosing huge numbers of customers and still protecting ourselves from legal action from Copyright owners.
As the person who developed and maintains the system used by Primus Australia to process Copyright Infringement notices I have seen a very poor record of accuracy from the agencies that issue Copyright Infringement notices. Some are worse than others, many claim IP Addresses were sharing infringing content on P2P networks when the IP Address was not allocated, and many result in customers identified by their IP/Time Stamp evidence and sent notices are responding claiming that they were not sharing the material in the notice.
Forcing ISP's to terminate their subscribers accounts for Copyright Infringement will not only result in loss of revenue for Internet providers, but will also result in many wrongfully identified customers being terminated who will of course respond by taking action against the ISP through the Telecommunications Ombudsmen on through the courts.
That said, we also get a reasonable number of positive resolutions to copyright infringement notices that are accurate, many customers receiving these respond to say that they were not aware that sharing/downloading such material through a P2P client was illegal and claim to have removed the file and P2P client.
Of course I'm sure many of both kinds of response may have been a complete lie, but the gradual reduction of infringement notices since we introduced the automated notification system indicates it must be educating customers to some extent.
In regards to P2P and network impact, we've done the numbers and the impact isn't so bad for us, we buy all our International data at flat rates but provide it capped to customers (shaped to 80kbps after the quota is exceeded) this keeps costs fairly low, the main issue is trying to get customers to do the bulk of their downloading in times when our international links are used the least, in the off-peak times, which can be archived to a reasonable degree through plans with generous off-peak quotas and limited peak quotas.
The main cost for P2P is peering with Telstra, who charge an arm and a leg for data both to and from their network, so if a Telstra customer downloads of a Primus customer seeding a torrent, it will cost us money. Most other providers however the peering data is (almost) free.
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You could place a few OpenMesh units around the area. http://www.open-mesh.com/store/
No really. How can they tell if some machine is infected?
The ACMA run a program called AISI which is basically a honeypot network.
I know they monitor traffic
Not true, that is (at least for now) illegal in Australia under the Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Act, except when ordered by a court under the guidelines of that act.
Maybe they can just slow down the bandwidth on infected PCs so when the customer call because "the internet is slow" the ISP would have the chance to tell them why it's "slow". For those who don't care or can't tell, well, maybe nobody else should care for them either. I'd really like to see this implemented worldwide if it's done right.
What we (I work for an Australian ISP) are doing is implementing a captive portal for customers with infected computers, which will allow us to stop them from doing damage without completely disconnecting their internet, and allowing us to provide them with all the information they need to clean-up their pc and take their account out of the captive-portal when they're done.
I used to work as a law enforcement liaison for an Australian ISP (now a Sysadmin at the same ISP) and we don't charge for law enforcement requests unless getting the information costs us a significant amount of money (i.e. retrieving older data from off-site backups) and we would never charge any of the child abuse protection agencies.
I doubt any Australian Internet provider would accept this lying down, we're in the game of providing Internet access not playing judge-jury-executioner.
The existing Copyright Infringement provisions are sufficient, the amendments made to our Copyright Act for the US Fair Trade Agreement a few years back added a whole bunch of increased action for Copyright owners and protections for ISP's if they follow the Safe Harbour provisions.
This includes a "Repeat offender" policy, so we're already required to take action against "Repeat Offenders", which is a nice vague term, leaving it open to interpretation, meaning we can enforce such a policy in a reasonable way without loosing huge numbers of customers and still protecting ourselves from legal action from Copyright owners.
As the person who developed and maintains the system used by Primus Australia to process Copyright Infringement notices I have seen a very poor record of accuracy from the agencies that issue Copyright Infringement notices. Some are worse than others, many claim IP Addresses were sharing infringing content on P2P networks when the IP Address was not allocated, and many result in customers identified by their IP/Time Stamp evidence and sent notices are responding claiming that they were not sharing the material in the notice.
Forcing ISP's to terminate their subscribers accounts for Copyright Infringement will not only result in loss of revenue for Internet providers, but will also result in many wrongfully identified customers being terminated who will of course respond by taking action against the ISP through the Telecommunications Ombudsmen on through the courts.
That said, we also get a reasonable number of positive resolutions to copyright infringement notices that are accurate, many customers receiving these respond to say that they were not aware that sharing/downloading such material through a P2P client was illegal and claim to have removed the file and P2P client.
Of course I'm sure many of both kinds of response may have been a complete lie, but the gradual reduction of infringement notices since we introduced the automated notification system indicates it must be educating customers to some extent.
In regards to P2P and network impact, we've done the numbers and the impact isn't so bad for us, we buy all our International data at flat rates but provide it capped to customers (shaped to 80kbps after the quota is exceeded) this keeps costs fairly low, the main issue is trying to get customers to do the bulk of their downloading in times when our international links are used the least, in the off-peak times, which can be archived to a reasonable degree through plans with generous off-peak quotas and limited peak quotas.
The main cost for P2P is peering with Telstra, who charge an arm and a leg for data both to and from their network, so if a Telstra customer downloads of a Primus customer seeding a torrent, it will cost us money. Most other providers however the peering data is (almost) free.
I guess that's all I have to say about it..