1) Detecting piracy is resource intensive. You have to design algorithms to detect infringement and you have to implement them in a way that can keep up with a respectable portion of your backbone bandwidth without significantly degrading performance for consumers.
2) File sharing protocols can adapt rapidly and will most likely make more and more extensive use of encryption. Distinguishing legal file sharing from illegal file sharing will only get more and more difficult. Even if there remain ways to detect infringement, this arms race with file-sharers will feed back into 1 in a big way.
3) As Neil Young famously put it, "Piracy is the new radio". Those who adapt to the "new radio" first will reap the rewards. Those who spend massive amounts of cash fighting the inevitable progress of technology will just fall behind.
What should these dinosaurs do if they want to stay competitive? Stop treating users of the "new radio" like criminals and win them over by providing a superior experience to what the pirates can deliver. e.g. Stop loading DVD's and bluray's up with annoying advertisements, anti-piracy messages, and warnings. Online stores shouldn't sell 720p videos or lossy music files when pirates are giving away 1080p videos and lossless audio for free. Above all, minimize the payment barrier. Make it cheap enough to feel like value is high and make it at least as easy and fast as pirating. In short, stop spending money to treat your customers like criminals and, instead, spend it to ensure that legal purchases are the path of least resistance to the highest quality experience.
People who torrent 24/7 just because they can are also resource intensive. I think there might be a real incentive to kick Joe Leecher out of one's customer base and keep people who only check their email.
I don't know how it's been going in the US, but I'm pretty used to seeing ISPs advertise their high-bandwith services towards downloading music, video and online gaming. They want to get the heavy users to pay a lot and then they punish them for being heavy users (not entering the whole piracy debate, just that they consume loads of bandwith - that they pay for).
It's a myth that Off-peak network usage is somehow a burden on landline ISPs. The only time they would be contributing to congestion and slowdown is at peak. But then again everyone is, and they're not some extra burden.
Exactly this. I pay Comcast $200 / mo for 105mbit. In part because it's retardedly fast (I do get the advertised speed generally,) and in part because I don't ever want to think about bandwidth limits or any of the other measures they enforce on people who aren't shoveling over forkloads of cash. If either of those things change, I immediately downgrade.
Ouch, Charter only charges $82.99 a month (with modem rental) for 100Mbps. Around the same time they introduced 100Mbps service, they introduced bandwidth caps. (500 gb/month for 100mbit service). Bandwidth caps @charter are a 3 strike policy.
I can get charter business @~$200 a month which is 100mbit service (no download cap, guaranteed uptime). Are you on some sort of comcast business plan?
VC: So what do you need this money for? Are you gonna improve your UX and distribution?
Startup: Oh no, we're just gonna use the UX and distribution our users hate. We need the money to lobby congress to pass laws that punish users who use competing products that do have better UX and distribution.
If you ever convince a VC with a pitch like that. Then you can say it's the best deal ever regarding cost/benefit for the RIAA. ;)
I'd be really interested in seeing a list of ISPs that have chosen not to sign. Even though I don't pirate, I would jump in a heartbeat if its feasible (e.g. I can actually find a non-signed ISP) and my ISP isn't on the list.
I left Comcast in Jan because of SOPA. This is just another reason why these 'ISPs' are a bad choice.
I live in San Francisco and chose Sonic.net because they don't cap or do any kind of traffic shaping. I did take a hit in my speed (from 20mb to 10mb), but their service is top notch and I feel good about where I put my money every month. Sonic's also been doing a fiber rollout in some areas north of SF and in one section of the city.
I won't ever go back to Comcast. I'm interested to see how this will affect people. Will there be an exodus from these guys for other ISPs that don't cap or police the line?
+1 in support of sonic.net in the Bay Area. They are total pros on everything from installation to customer service. Plus, they're building a last-mile fiber network in SF!
Speaking of the general public, how does Joe Smith know that Hulu's stream of "The Office" is legal but some other site's is not?
That's been my biggest question about streaming.
On one hand I can google "watch the office online for free" and end up on Hulu, it has ads, but it's free. If I look around I can see that I don't have access to all their content, but they have a subscription model that gives full access.
On the other, I can google "watch dexter online for free" and end up on MegaVideo (well, imagine you're four months ago). It has ads, but it's free. If I want to watch a lot of videos, I see that I can't because there's a daily limit, but they have a subscription model that gives full access.
As a user, I have no way to know that the first one is legal while the second isn't.
That being said, it's my understanding that at this point, this is what makes streaming a bit of an edge-case why mostly the website is charged, rather than the users. But that might of course change…
>As a user, I have no way to know that the first one is legal while the second isn't.
"Ignorance of the law is no excuse for breaking it". Bullshit, isn't it?
--edit: I'm not arguing this point. I'm just pointing out that not knowing the law isn't a valid legal defense, so not knowing which site was legal would not prevent a user from prosecution.
In this case, it's not about knowing the law or not, but about knowing which sites have contracts with the right owners.
I can access the laws that say it's illegal, but I don't have access to the contracts (or the absence of contracts…) that can confirm this or that site is legal.
That's what makes this question so interesting.
When you can download a bunch of songs and movies for free, by now you should know that something is up, the same way people get busted when returning from Mexico with a fake Chanel purse, because "common sense" should tell you that you can't buy one for $15, the same way you can't get full albums for free. (though, common sense is of course very subjective)
But the more the illegal sources look and behave like the legit ones, the more difficult it is to know what's going on. I would probably know because I would hear of the companies from TechCrunch or somewhere, but a random user wouldn't.
So I do wonder if that would be a valid legal defense. Similarly I don't know if someone that had paid a few hundred dollars in a legit-looking store in Asia for a fake but good looking Chanel purse could just explain it was in good faith…
There is a common law defence (known as the "proudman and dayman defence") which can be summarised as having an honest an reasonable belief in a state of FACTS which, if true, would make the act legal.
Note that ignorance of the law is no defence, and dishonest or unreasonable ignorance of the facts is also no defence.
>What kind of traffic inspection are these ISPs doing that would enable to identify infringement as it's happening?
As I understand it, there's no actual monitoring being done by ISPs. The monitoring is done by the record and movie companies. When they see a torrent of their content being shared, they record the IP addresses of everyone seeding that torrent and then send warning requests to the ISPs whose users are uploading. Those IPs then relay that warning to the actual users associated with those IPs. Once a user gets six of these warnings, the ISP is obligated to cut off the user.
At least, that's the way it was reported last summer, and that's how Ars Technica is describing the enforcement system now.
I work in information security, and while my company doesn't have the sophistication necessary to know exactly what data is contained in each and every packet that goes through the network (that's not what we do), I could give a "this is how I would decide" overview.
We've got pretty rudimentary tools at my job, but we can still see source and destination address (even through a NAT and proxy on our end), IP ports/protocol, time of day and speed of connection trends, and we can do small amounts of packet inspection (we grab the first 120 bytes of every packet).
With this data, I'm able to tell if someone is using BitTorrent vs Skype (they're both peer-to-peer UDP packets to random addresses, so finding the difference is key). I can tell where their information is being sent to. If the packet is not encrypted, I can see exactly what is being sent (the header data will show filenames being transferred). DNS data will tell me what site they've just visited, and packet capture will tell me what specific page they're on and what search terms they used on that site.) With an unencrypted session, it's as easy as piecing the domain name from DNS (thepiratebay.com) to the packet capture (http: 11:23pm March 15, "the office", /search/test/0/99/0) to the user (10.250.250.10) to the network flows (every few seconds there's another couple packets going out to or coming from a few dozen address across the world). Bam, we've got an infringing user.
Now granted, people will likely be using encryption. I don't know how the tools handle this, we don't do anything with it at my job. However, I would imagine the ISPs could do deeper packet inspection. I would imagine they simply don't care if your traffic is legal or not. They may assume it's all illegal and serve notice anyway. There may be an appeals process. As for the difference between Hulu and joe-streams-hollywood.com, I would imagine they have a whitelist of addresses.
TL;DR; I don't know, but I can make an educated guess. Best bet, encrypt your traffic but don't rely on that to save your ass.
This begs the question - is there a simple way to use DNS in a more discreet/encrypted fashion? E.g. direct requests at the localhost that will forward them over an encrypted connection to a DNS server outside of ISP, or even outside of the country.
Except on the other end of the tunnel. First you filter Internet on the ISP level, then you go after VPN providers…
Much more feasible (and cheaper) option would be to popularize something along the lines of OneSwarm[1], which falls somewhere between a regular, direct connection and a complete Tor style overlay.
IANAL, but from what I understand, a consumer is not guilty of watching illegally-duplicated media; it is whoever makes the content available who is breaking the law. So ISPs would only have to stop people uploading content.
This is relatively easy for P2P and streaming sites, but I don't see how you could ever hope to police "file lockers" like MegaVideo; users would just upload encrypted files (even just password-protected zip files) and distribute the password. If it starts to be a cat-and-mouse game, I expect offshore filelockers will start providing privacy-protecting features for uploaders, coupled with a lot of fun and games with DNS records.
how does Joe Smith know that Hulu's stream of "The Office" is legal but some other site's is not?
Graduated response is only for P2P, which is presumptively illegal. ICE/SOPA goes after pirate sites. Nobody goes after the users of pirate sites, so you don't have to worry about that.
I don't know if this was meant to be witty or what, but it has nothing to do with how ISPs actually (a) identify file sharing traffic or (b, orthogonally) determine whether users are pirating content.
I am always amazed at how incredibly smart people can be seemingly unable to connect freaking dots.
Sorry, tptacek, but this is 100% related. If you, or anyone on HN, is concerned about ISPs being able to sniff the intent/payload of your traffic, then you're fucking stupid.
Why? Because the NSA has been doing it for YEARS. Here is a MAIN STREAM story on their institutionalizing of this activity in Utah which is NO SECRET!
It doesnt even matter "how ISPs actually identify file sharing traffic" -- it is TOO late.
File sharing is a ruse, a red herring, who the fuck cares about file sharing. This is about TIA (total information awareness) they don't care if you file share!
They use file sharing and copyright to enact laws that make binary wiretap both trivial and legal.
They want to know EVERYTHING you do - and by claiming you are a criminal via file sharing, they can install stupid ass gateways in the last mile, which just makes it seem like they follow some due process - there is NO LAST MILE. THey have every single bit, already!
They have already compromised the ISP, this is just a scare tactic to keep out the fluff. The fluff are those would would think that their stupid file sharing is alerting the feds, such that they refrain from doing so.
So, in closing, what the NSA is doing, on mass scale, is FAR more pertinent than what you would think.
When was the last time you heard about ECHELON being used? Never? The thing about ECHELON is that it's like nuclear weapons — it's too important to be used against anyone less than a terrorist. So what do I care if the NSA is reading my Internet traffic and they're never going to use that information because they don't want to reveal that they have it in the first place or how they got it. It might not even be admissible in court.
They use file sharing and copyright to enact laws that make binary wiretap both trivial and legal.
I see no evidence of that (they seem to be happy with operating illegally), so you're just using this thread as a coatrack for off-topic rants.
I got hit with a dire legal warning in college from these anti-piracy-crusader guys. Apparently I had been heavily uploading Beyonce songs on Limewire. This was strange, as I have never used Limewire and don't much like Beyonce's songs. I had to go to some office and fill out papers to say that I was innocent, because someone made a completely spurious (and probably automated) accusation against me.
I believe this is the "6 strike" system. They agreed to do this last July, and it seems to go into effect a year later.
Also, I'm not so sure how "voluntary" this was, considering the Obama administration was involved to "mediate" the deal. My guess is the White House tried to pressure the ISP's into agreeing with this, though I wouldn't exactly call the ISP's innocent considering pretty much all of them now have their own content services, and it would benefit them to cut down on piracy somehow.
The equation is different for cable companies than it is for content producers. Cable companies (I'm including phone companies that provide TV service) are competing with the internet itself, in aggregate. They're thinking much longer term. If they can get people to make a habit of watching TV through them instead of the internet, they win.
I'm wondering on which planet cable is going to beat the internet. Presumably it's a planet where the people prefer inconvenience, cost and poor usability.
Cable is more convenent if you don't care what you're watching and don't want to be made to choose. It's optimized for passive consumption. Most people want a morphine IV drip, not a wine cellar.
If they can get people to make a habit of watching TV through them instead of the internet, they win.
Yup, but surely even a basic viewing session of Internet-based TV would convince even the dimmest bulb that they're fighting a losing battle to keep scheduled broadcast as the primary means of video consumption.
We sure are turning chinese fast. In the end, does it really matter what ideology underpins the censorship? Users say to themselves, "I have to be really careful not to even appear like I'm doing something 'bad' on the internet or I could lose my access or worse."
It doesn't matter where you got on the train or why, once it pulls into that last station, you're done.
I don't believe that that's intentional. If if was that might be better because we might have a chance at stopping it. Its an emergent behavior. The tighter control, even enacted for "good" reasons now, attracts the type that use it for evil later. It sucks because you can't fight the evil up front. You sometimes have to fight the good intentions now to prevent the evil later. That's an impossible political sell.
>> The tighter control, even enacted for "good" reasons now, attracts the type that use it for evil later.
Are you so sure that those good reasons aren't conceived by ill intented guys knowing what you have just described: It sucks because you can't fight the evil up front.
More commonly refered to as wolf in sheep's clothing.
In essence you've called out the fact that its the slippery slope.
In this case though its intentional. These structures affect the power structures, so the power structure will react to it in order to either minimize/control/remove its effect.
Sadly you have to play ball in a manner that shows that the power on the other end (the anti RIAA portion of the spectrum) has the ability to create/co-ordinate voters.
The RIAA supports its cause by spending tonnes of money to 'educate' legislators.
If you can influence their voting base though, that education is pointless, since voting power is far more important.
"There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized."
At what point will they lose their DMCA safe-harbor protection? Can we discourage them from actively policing copyright by suing them for copyright infringement?
This has already been going on as others have noted.
ISPs send email citing that X external organization representing Y media company says that you have been sharing Z content, then the ISP shuts off or redirects all web traffic from your location except that which is allowed to go to a webpage they specify in the email where you must acknowledge that you got their communication and will cease and desist. It is pretty Orwellian.
We all need to switch to mesh wifi internetworking as soon as possible. With some work, it could become a better solution than our current net, and there would be no monthly cost to an ISP, and no MPAA, RIAA, or government interference. Granted, there is value in rule of law and protection of adequate compensation for created works. But when Big Brother comes down on you and your neighbors, is that ok? These guys would have cuffed you for the cassette mixtape you made for your girlfriend in the 10th grade if they would have known about it. The longer you let the ISPs or the government rule the net, the less of a chance you will have to ever get it back.
I understand that you read about it on reddit, and they may have sounded quite confident and/or optimistic, but I assure you an internet based on wireless mesh and without ISPs would be completely unusable. Along with most ideas that sound anything like that. Whatever visions you have of a future pirate nirvana internet will have to include a bunch of pretty traditional looking fat pipes in the center of it all.
Actually, I didn't read about it on reddit, but thanks for thinking so highly of me. :) And there is no way it will ever get any significant traction as long as people dismiss it as lunacy immediately after it is mentioned.
People treated kids that programmed like socially disabled outcasts in the 1980s. Ten years later, many of those kids were making millions. Dialing into a BBS to communicate was a waste of time. Now almost every business has a Twitter account.
Mesh may seem stupid now, but when the current net gets locked down and turned into a "white" government-regulated net within the next 20 years, people are going to start connecting to the shadow "black" mesh net to share files. No, I'm not talking about mesh nets connected to our current net. I'm talking about a completely different internetwork. And if we wait too long, we won't be allowed to setup such a network, because it will be outlawed before it has a chance to flower.
I'm not saying there is a magic field of jellybeans that can replace our current net, although IPv6 may as well be that, as slow as it has been rolled out. But, to dismiss mesh as a crock is just plain lame.
It seems like you think wishful thinking is a replacement for actual engineering knowledge. The difference between your story and today is that in the 80's (and 70's) tons of real engineers were already using the internet, dialing plenty of BBS's, and already knew the Internet was going to be huge - and understood the science of how it would grow.
In contrast, the only people willing to suggest that a decentralized wireless mesh has the possibility of replacing the internet are people that haven't used one and have no rf background.
You do understand the difference between proving a technology exists and is suitable for localized high latency low bandwidth communication and suggesting that it's suitable to replace tier 1 isps that handle terrabits of data traffic per second, right? No one has ever suggested that you can't run a relatively small, localized, and centrally managed mesh network - those have been in use for all sorts of purposes for quite some time. What you're being told is that those technologies don't scale to millions of users, long distances or high bandwidth/low latency applications.
It's perfectly fine that you don't know a lot about networking or network management. Just stop telling people how they can replace the internet when you really have no idea.
If you don't want your ISPs or others sniffing your traffic user encryption. If you don't want the RIAA telling your ISP that you're pirating music stop putting your computer on a global list of computers that are offering to serve popular.mp3. It's a pretty solved problem.
"It's perfectly fine that you don't know a lot about networking or network management."
I am not suggesting everyone can use mesh now and magically you no longer need an ISP. I am saying that is where we need to go. And I started off many years ago learning how to design and manage networks, getting certifications, wiring my business with cat3 then cat5, managing routers and switches, and then I moved onto something more interesting- now I just try to protect HN from morons.
I understand that you get your info from CNN, but a mesh network will work. See the research into ant colonies for more info. There was a headline today about a neutrino network that would transmit directly through the Earth, for true point-to-point communication.
I understand that you read about a "a neutrino network that would transmit directly through the Earth, for true point-to-point communication," but you obviously didn't read the paper. Here it is. http://arxiv.org/abs/1203.2847 It's a proof-of-principle. A stunning achievement, no doubt. But it's hardly a practical option for communication, "The link achieved a decoded data rate of 0.1 bits/sec with a bit error rate of 1% over a distance of 1.035 km, including 240 m of earth."
We all need to switch to mesh wifi internet working as soon as possible. With some work...
"Some" work? There are serious problems with scaling mesh networks. Private citizens are not going to replace the internet backbone with mesh networks. The best we could hope for are low bandwidth metro WAN. That said, this is something we should put in place ahead of time, so we can turn it on if the government ever wants to black out media and internet access.
As far as combating this latest outrage, how about additional widespread encryption, so all the traffic is effectively on a VPN? If keys are distributed via smartphone networks, it will be hard for the ISPs to do things like mount MITM attacks. Combine this with some honeypots -- as mentioned elsewhere, have people engaging in legal sharing and sue the ISPs when they interfere.
Are US ISPs being paid to do this by the entertainment industry? If so, is there any transparency on this?
Why would the ISPs choose to do this with no legal requirement for it and strong restrictions in how they can achieve this now or in future any infrastructure business around it due to net neutrality and other regulator issues? This would directly alienate their own broadband customers...
Actually, the ISPs have incentive to play along! Under these rules, the ISPs will be able to throttle back peoples internet connections, which will save the ISPs money.
How does this mix with major ISPs offering VOIP bundles – what happens if they cut off your internet access and you are no longer able to call 911? Is there any potential liability there?
They don't actually cut off your network connection, they just filter it so that you can only reach a subset of their own addresses like dhcp, dns, trouble resolution website etc. I'm sure they just include the voip servers on that list. That traffic is often provisioned totally separately (outside of your commit, possibly to a separate mac) so that it might not be an issue in the first place.
That would only work if you're using their bundled service. If you were using Vonage for instance it could easily interrupt that. They can whitelist all they want but they can never get all of them.
yeah, but the third party voip providers all tell you that they aren't a replacement for a landline providing E911 service because of the (many) problems that can occur with an unmanaged pipe.
>I'm sure they just include the voip servers on that list. That traffic is often provisioned totally separately (outside of your commit, possibly to a separate mac)
But I don't use Comcast's VoIP service. And if they whitelist SIP traffic, well, people will just tunnel piracy over RTP.
Move to central Washington state, where you have a hcoice of a dozen or so high-speed ISP's across fiber......
This reminds me. I wonder if the change during Reagan/Clinton to pro-consolidation, anti-competition has anything to do with making an industry easier to control in this way.....
Unless everybody moves to freenet (or some other friend-to-friend network) you have to exchange keys at the beginning of every session with a peer. The ISP can see that, and MITM you. SSL/TLS gets around this with a central certificate authority that vouches for the public key of the other party. That's damn difficult if not impossible to pull off in a decentralized system.
It does not take a leap of the imagination to see how ordinary, law-abiding citizens might accidently be affected. Here is a hypothetical scenario of how things might play out.
People pirating music will be caught. These people will start encrypting their web-traffic to avoid getting caught in the future. Then coders like me who use SSH/SFTP heavily will be flagged as pirates too. Then my internet will be cut off.
Quite a while ago my ISP threatened to shut off my Internet as I had a port open for SSH. I suggested that they should be more concerned that they had admitted to either scanning my system without permission or snooping on my traffic.
That was enough to end that. Unfortunately I don't think asserting an expectation of privacy is enough anymore.
They might get a lot of false positives for people who just stream videos a lot from the web or something. But I think I know how they will propose to "solve" this later on. They will just "allow" content websites to enter a "whitelist", and as soon as that list gets big enough, just throttle everything else.
> People pirating music will be caught. These people will start encrypting their web-traffic to avoid getting caught in the future.
Which won't really help since they're being tracked by their peers, I don't think anyone is wiretapping random Internet users' connections to bust them for piracy.
I'm assuming he means hiding behind a VPN, which encrypts traffic and masks your IP. If enough people start using them, I suppose they'll be the next to feel the heat from the media-companies.
Well, if web policing is enforced by ISPs, it may give birth to the next generation of internet. I'm not kidding. I'm serious.
Let me explain. Today everyone has a wifi router. Imagine, one wifi router sending request to the next wifi router, which routes to the next router towards the destination. It is theoretically possible to reach the destination and get back. It may be a million hops. But, it is possible.
Today's wifi routers are designed to talk to CABLE or DSL. But they can be made to talk to a nearby wifi router also. If we do that the entire world will become one giant network. That would be the real internet. At that time, we won't need ISPs.
Today majority of traffic goes through ISPs. If this type of wifi routers come to existence, even countries like Iran cannot control internet.
Do you have any technical background in this area? The usability (latency) of such networks is ridiculously bad, and the whole idea is based on the assumption that the average guy will have a wifi router capable of supporting this new protocol. The bridge nodes to connect back to the global internet are also some easy points of failure. Not to mention that anyone stupid enough to not be using a VPN or HTTPS over such a connection will have their information leaked to a ton of cool hacker kids running a custom build of DD-WRT on their Linksys router.
I don't mean to be a buzzkill, but the way around the copyright cops isn't a janky 2.4 GHz "mesh network" using 802.11. It's going to require a lot more than that.
It is just an idea. You are right, the current wifi routers doesn't have capability. However, this is done by the backbone routers at present. If we go back to the 80s, the PCs of that time cannot handle the computing needs of a large website. However, today nearly all datacenters are run using PC hardware. In other words the business of big servers got commoditized in the early 2000s. In the same way, the big network backbone business will be commoditized at some point in time. The restrictions such as this, will only accelerate the commoditization.
The moment a provider throttles my internet based on "piracy" is the moment I begin investing all of my free time into making a free and invincible p2p solution.
What if you share an IP address with several other families? Does this imply that internet would be cut off to the IP address if it were found to be infringing?
What do you think? That the random guy assigned to this at the ISP would stop and investigate the issue? Maybe also send their best detectives to see if it was some random guy breaking into the WiFi from across the street?
They specifically used the words "web access," does that mean other ports are in the clear? I imagine port 563 may see increased usage.
Anyway, I've been considering a service to allow people to swap modems (i.e. cable -> DSL, or vice versa), to minimize switching costs. This move may make the idea more viable.
They specifically used the words "web access," does that mean other ports are in the clear?
That's engineer thinking, not lawyer thinking. Do you really think, just because packets went over port 9999 and, let's go further and say it wasn't even HTTP, that any attorney, judge or jury will even understand, much less care that it's not the "web"?
Lawyers are typically quite precise in their use of language (e.g. larceny vs. theft), so I was honestly curious if they were specifically targeting the web as opposed to the internet in general. The way I read it, it seemed intentional.
Yes, because those protocols will never be bought to trial.
This is about targeting the lowest possible hanging fruit that your average joe random idiot can click a big blue button and pull down the last version of whatever schlock big content is pushing out.
Some guy using a bitcoin purchased usenet account over SSL from a VPN through tor to a remote data dump and then grabbing the booty is never going to get caught in this net.
I'd absolutely bet on it. Short of outlawing encryption such a thing is flat out impossible, even then it's questionable due to steganography. And both of these ignore the fact that, and I want to repeat this for emphasis; These People Are Very Stupid (If You Want To Be Charitable You May Add "In-This-Area" Here).
Well, there had been laws treating encryption as weaponry, and forbidding it's export. So outlawing it for such uses, is not that far fetched. We've regressed a lot in a lot of areas since the nineties.
OTOH, VPNs are needed by companies of course, so they can't outlaw this kind of use. But it's not like they cannot poison usenet/tor et al, and catch guys this way. If they have their way, one can imagine a future that you're only allowed to VPN to a whitelist of addresses that you have declared beforehand for business use --or something of that kind.
Also, how about any "odd" pattern, like repeated high volume traffic, giving them "probable cause" to bust into your house and check for illegal downloads?
Attacks to expose your identity via tor already exist and there are accepted methods to avoid them, no default route etc so even if something you are running does manage to try to initiate a remote connection it will not get anywhere anyway.
Usenet is already a haven of scum and villainy as the saying goes due to being commonly used as a vector to distribute malware, people that are accustomed to this environment once again take plenty of precautions to reduce their exposure to these attacks. Another agency joining in on the poison would just be par for the course for our theoretical target.
The idea that a person would go to this extent to avoid detection and then not use deniable encryption volumes to stow their black data is somewhat crazy, even if you grant that someone downloading high volumes of data for illicit purposes is distinguishable on a probable cause basis from someone who just really loves watching a lot of online video or uses a high volume update channel operating system or runs a bunch of computers behind a single ip etc.
This really is asymmetric warfare terrain highly favouring the policed rather than the policing entity if you assume infinitely competent actors on both sides
Im from Mexico, and aparently these kind of things are already happening here. A friend of mine told me a few weeks ago that the cable company called him to say that he was downloading copyrighted material from warner and that he should stop or he would be cut off.
I get the impression that a lot of people who are "heavy pirates" are the types that simply wouldn't listen to music otherwise. I was into pirating music simply because I could... then I realized I never listen to any of it. Since then I rarely download.
I don't think its really that important for everyone to be able to get all movies, tv shows, music and stuff for free, but the fact that the internet is controlled by a fairly small number of companies does seem to be a problem.
To me its similar to general problems with over-centralization and/or monopolization in many areas. There is one water company, not very many large entertainment distributors, food production is handled by an increasingly small number of companies, electricity comes from one company, web search results mostly controlled by one company.
We should do a better job of using shared knowledge exchange formats to be able to get an accurate holistic picture, but at the same time I think things would be more robust and we would be more secure if production, distribution and control was generally much more localized.
I actually think that we should aim for producing water, electricity and food inside of individual homes/apartments or buildings, and also create alternative fiber, laser and wifi mesh networks for communications.
I don't agree with lumping the RIAA in with municipal water or electricity. Utilities can be much cheaper and more efficient with a local monopoly than if they were in competition. Imagine if water delivery was a free market: you'd have a half dozen or so companies pumping water to you, and unlike with rotatable Internet protocols, they wouldn't be able to use each others lines. You'd have to have the same amount of water lines run to your house as there were competing companies. Same with the choice of electricity: they can all use one line, but in the end it has to be traceable back to the one company who shilled out the watts for your benefit. Imagine if there were three or four competing power plants serving your neighborhood, all running at 1/3 capacity (plant efficiency doesn't scale down nicely).
No, utilities need to be monopolized for efficiency. With rotatable protocols though, you can trace who sent what to whom. That's where competition is a good thing. That's why local monopolies on ISPs are ridiculous, same with monopolies on content distribution.
Well then you get into the difficulty of actually achieving this. Lets take a mid-size metropolitan area, with a population density of 500 people per square mile. How does everyone in the apartment buildings generate their own electricity or pump their own water? And if a 1000-person apartment complex begins pumping water from directly beneath themselves, what happens when the water is gone? And where does the water go when it has been used? Where does the runoff from the streets go? Is there a water treatment plant, and if so, who resells that water? Or do we just keep pumping water from the ground in one area and dumping it back in another, until the ground is dry under the city?
How many solar panels would be on a building if everyone had to generate their own power? How many wind turbines? How many generators? Where would this space come from, and who would pay for it? What if those panels or turbines could not generate enough on one specific day? Is there a contingency plan?
Even if you think the current market of ISPs and content distribution is bad, don't delude yourself into thinking the Internet would exist without cities. With cities comes a need for utility management. If everyone had enough land to generate their own power and water, your Internet bills would be worlds more expensive and your control over entertainment products would be far less (what local bands will you see when your nearest neighbor is three miles away and there's no centralized location to perform?)
Let me know if I've completely misunderstood your statement.
I think the technical realities might not be as impossible as you assume. I don't know to what degree those ideals might be achieved, but I think those should be the aims.
I will raise holy hell for any ISP that blocks my transmission of avatar.MP4 across their ISP to my own device. If I own Avatar.mp4, the ISP's need to understand that I am sending it to my own device, or a device of someone who has "pair bought" avatar with me (we both split half the money to buy it).
If they get one thing wrong which they will, I'm going to piss and moan about it to no end. On the plus side, net neutrality will be gone, and ownership of the internet secured by the United States congress. I suppose it's better than falling into the hands of some other country, which will also lay claim to it. Let the Internet be divided into a million pieces with import duties for every bit and byte transmitted across an infinite number of versions of the internet.
This is how evolution works, a good idea grows too big, then it compartmentalizes and specializes. Most will suck, but some will be better, and the better ones will be on the receiving end of the goods and services of the enlightened masses. If we can promote freedom to choose which internet to live under, we should be ok to Stamp out the subnets that are used for enslavement of man in favor of the "more free" versions.
I'll preface this by saying I don't quite understand your comment. I'm not sure if it's a joke or what.
> I will raise holy hell for any ISP that blocks my transmission…
Raise holy hell in what sense? You'll switch ISPs? The other ISP has probably agreed to this, too, and that's if you even have a choice of ISP (I know I don't.)
So what's your next option? A lawsuit? What they're doing is perfectly legal.
Fine, so let's change the legal system… ahhh, you have two candidates to vote for, a democrat and republican. Which of them is the one that's going to do something about this, again?
>I will raise holy hell for any ISP that blocks my transmission of avatar.MP4 across their ISP to my own device. If I own Avatar.mp4, the ISP's need to understand that I am sending it to my own device, or a device of someone who has "pair bought" avatar with me (we both split half the money to buy it).
Like it or not, you can still be sued for that. You bought a license to watch the movie, not to copy the movie to another device. I'm not sure if there's a legal concept of joint ownership of the license to watch a movie.
It's not the ISPs that need to change. This is like raging to the states who voted to lower their max driving speed to 55 in the 70s. Yes, it was their decision, but they were heavily coerced by the federal government with stiff penalties if they didn't. I highly doubt the ISPs signed on to lose customers just because they believe in IP that much.
If I remember correctly, it was in 1979 (during the oil crisis, when the national speed limit was reduced to 55). While the speed limit was not the main focus, the oil crisis (and resulting economic crisis) was a huge political scandal. The price controls put on oil imports by Richard Nixon indirectly led to Jimmy Carter not being elected for a second term. Ronald Reagan campaigned partially on the platform of removing the "windfall tax" that Carter had implemented to prevent the oil distributors from artificially raising the price of gas at the pumps. Reagan said "A recession is when your neighbor loses his job. A depression is when you lose yours. And recovery is when Jimmy Carter loses his." Reagan won.
How does this relate to today? "No one" is losing their job or their house or their property because of the RIAA/MPAA. I put "no one" in quotes because obviously people are, just not the voting block at large. Should it be a campaign issue like oil was in 1973-1979? I think so. But we'd never see that until the largest voting group in the country decided it should be, and since the Internet generation still has 40 years to go until they reach senior citizen status, we're a long way out from that day.
> a device of someone who has "pair bought" avatar with me (we both split half the money to buy it)
Is this actually allowed though, or would the MPAA say you're breaking copyright despite the fact that this other person spent his or her money on it.
My understanding is that the license to view/use the file belongs to the account of the person who actually bought the thing, regardless of who else supplied cash for the undertaking. That could mean that while it seems obvious to you that the two of you share the ability to use the file, the reality might be much more gray (or you could just be outright wrong).
This is exactly the issue that keeps me from buying digital movies (other than DRM issues), and it's why I don't own a kindle. From a legal perspective, it seems like things that are easily and legally shareable with physical items, such as DVDs and dead tree books, aren't easily or legally shareable at all.
I can't download a book from Amazon to my Kindle and then, if she decides she also wants to read it, simply transfer the file it to my girlfriends Kindle as well. At least not strictly legally. We could share accounts, sure, but people break up, and even for married couples there is still a pretty high divorce rate. If we split, one of the two of us (legally) loses everything we've bought for ourselves on the shared account.
I wish that there were an easy way to manage multiple accounts on your devices, so that each person could have a shared, yet separate, account to maintain their own libraries. This is hard to do, I know, and it would require some form of DRM, which is unacceptable for well documented reasons, but we need to find some analog for the first sale doctrine and easy lending.
Even iTunes, with it's lack of DRM, bothers me. I could buy DRM-less music and load it onto both mine and my girlfriends MP3 players, but iTunes still adds a watermark of some kind to the file. That means that if something were to happen to the file, and it got shared, it's traceable back to me. That's fine, but I have no way to ensure that - if we were to break up - the traceable-to-me file gets destroyed from her device. It's a severely paranoid worst case scenario, and the odds against a negative result from a loose file like that are astronomical, but they're not zero, and that bothers me.
I'm a reasonably techie guy. I'm a programmer, I hang out on Hacker News, I keep up (more or less) with the latest trends, but the implementation details of digital media are so counter-intuitive to me that I still buy DVDs and dead tree books.
> Is this actually allowed though, or would the MPAA say you're breaking copyright despite the fact that this other person spent his or her money on it.
I don't see anything about "pair buying" in that article. I'm almost certain that if you and your friend split the cost of a DVD and then make a copy so that you can each have it, both the MPAA and the law see that as simple copyright infringement.
I will raise holy hell for any ISP that blocks my transmission of avatar.MP4 across their ISP to my own device. If I own Avatar.mp4, the ISP's need to understand that I am sending it to my own device, or a device of someone who has "pair bought" avatar with me (we both split half the money to buy it).
> During a panel discussion held for U.S. publishers today, RIAA chairman Cary Sherman said his association and a number of ISPs—including AT&T, Cablevision, Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and Verizon—will begin policing traffic to crack down on piracy starting this summer.
Interesting. I'm just waiting for the ISP's to get sued for breach of contract for throttling customers internet. If a neighbor (for example) logs onto router and starts downloading, I can imagine there'll be lots of false positives. And lawyers love false positives.
1) Detecting piracy is resource intensive. You have to design algorithms to detect infringement and you have to implement them in a way that can keep up with a respectable portion of your backbone bandwidth without significantly degrading performance for consumers.
2) File sharing protocols can adapt rapidly and will most likely make more and more extensive use of encryption. Distinguishing legal file sharing from illegal file sharing will only get more and more difficult. Even if there remain ways to detect infringement, this arms race with file-sharers will feed back into 1 in a big way.
3) As Neil Young famously put it, "Piracy is the new radio". Those who adapt to the "new radio" first will reap the rewards. Those who spend massive amounts of cash fighting the inevitable progress of technology will just fall behind.
What should these dinosaurs do if they want to stay competitive? Stop treating users of the "new radio" like criminals and win them over by providing a superior experience to what the pirates can deliver. e.g. Stop loading DVD's and bluray's up with annoying advertisements, anti-piracy messages, and warnings. Online stores shouldn't sell 720p videos or lossy music files when pirates are giving away 1080p videos and lossless audio for free. Above all, minimize the payment barrier. Make it cheap enough to feel like value is high and make it at least as easy and fast as pirating. In short, stop spending money to treat your customers like criminals and, instead, spend it to ensure that legal purchases are the path of least resistance to the highest quality experience.