Please read and respond to this article.
Consumers who illegally download copyrighted films, music or television shows may see their Internet speed reduced, access restricted or even suspended under an industry anti-piracy effort announced yesterday.
U.S. Internet service providers, including Verizon Communications Inc, Comcast Corp, Time Warner Cable Inc, Cablevision Systems Corp and AT&T Inc agreed to alert customers, up to six times, when it appears their account is used for illegal downloading.
[. . . .]
"We are particularly disappointed that the agreement lists Internet account suspension among the possible remedies," the Center for Democracy & Technology and Public Knowledge said in a statement.
[. . . .]
"We are confident that, once informed that content theft is taking place on their accounts, the great majority of broadband subscribers will take steps to stop it," James Assey, executive vice president of the National Cable & Telecommunications Association, said in a statement.
Link to original Reuters article.
This announcement as reported contains suspiciously few details. How, for example, will these mighty ISPs identify illegal downloads? Will they be checking the content of torrents for copyrighted music or video? If so, will they let audiobooks or ebooks slide? Probably not.
I suspect that it's going to be easier for them to do this nefarious job by compiling a list of sites they'll declare to be probable sources of illegal downloads. If I'm on the right track, whatever torrent you get from The Pirate Bay, Demonoid, et al will likely be assumed to be an illegal download for the purposes of this program.
And there's a very good chance they will tag well known file hosts such as MegaUpload and perhaps MediaFire and others similarly as probable sources of forbidden material.
This has the potential to be a bad thing, and to serve as paving the way to even worse things. I would really appreciate hearing from users here as to possible work-arounds, etc. Using torrage and magnet links mean you don't have to visit ThePirateBay.org to download, but do torrents still need to be initially uploaded to indexers like TPB in order to be propagated through the bit torrent system so that magnet and torrage links will work? I'm sorry to admit it, but I don't possess the knowledge to answer those kinds of questions. Hopefully some of you do.
Between the burden of Comcast's bandwidth cap [that I must begin coping with as of tomorrow] and this news, the outlook is seeming more than a little bleak to me at the moment. This could, conceivably put me out of business here, or at the very least require a major rethinking of how this blog works. Please let me hear from you.
8 comments:
About "Your ISP Has Volunteered to Start Watching You", I would like to recommend TOR to everyone who values Internet privacy, and this excellent program is open source. Here is the link: https://www.torproject.org/
Appreciate all your work!
potential vs reality has seemed to be the groundwork for decades, Potential by laws restrictions that never get enacted persay, but continually get upgraded, its nothing new, just finally reported sadly ages later...
i can only imagine the lack of hugs and kisses towards this... US goes Europe I suppose...
thats bad news man ! it's really strict over there in the 'land of the free' hey guys ? i'm quite lucky i got a rolling contract with unlimited downloads (although there is throttling between 6pm-10pm)wish i could help sebaygo or offer suggestions but i'm not that clever with computers. fingers crossed and hope some workaround is forthcoming.
would uploading the torrents via PROXY SERVER help hide your illegal activity? :p I use a proxy here in the middle east, and I know it allows me to bypass my ISP restrictions by fooling it into thinking I'm someone else from somewhere else.
Lol if everyone used a Proxy, they would have no way of knowing who's DL'ing what!
Many thanks to everyone who commented here! I do not know enough about proxy servers to see if that is a solution here or not. Any pointers to a good site to learn about them? I have read a little about TOR, but always thought that bit torrent was rather high volume for that service. Am I wrong?
Haven't been around in a while, as you all well know. I'm fine, I just get burnt out at times..
As for this ISP news, I'm not sure how this is working, that info is needed to form an accurate opinion. Cox had (or has) a 3 strike rule, but that's when they would get notification of copyright infringement and a cease and decist order.
Without knowing more on that TOR isn't a fail proof safety net. Sure it is a net though. At least it proxies (bounces) 7 times. But unless said data is transferred encrypted, both end users ISP's will still be able to see the data. That combines with possible exploits or weaknesses in the code, apparently bittorrent running could cause an anon security lapse. I hope Im right in the assumption that is patched.
They have apparent caught members of Anonymous group launching DDOS's and such. (or falsely imprisoned someone else) If that's true their TOR and/or additional security was comprimsed.
Either way, something I will have to learn more about, being with one of those ISPs
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