
ISPs Now Monitoring for Copyright Infringement - joshfraser
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/02/copyright-scofflaws-beware/
======
betterunix
This is not even remotely a compromise:

"The plan does not prevent content owners from suing internet subscribers"

In other words, in addition to facing the risk of ludicrous damages, you can
have your Internet access disabled, hampering your ability to find and
communicate with a lawyer. Naturally, the Obama administration backs such a
plan -- the thought of people actually defending themselves in court never
occurred to them anyway.

"On the third and fourth infractions, the subscriber will likely receive a
pop-up notice "asking the subscriber to acknowledge receipt of the alert.""

Hm, if I did this to communicate with my neighbors, I might go to prison. Nice
to know that ISPs are not expected to follow the same laws I am.

~~~
lukifer
I'm curious what "pop-up notice" means. I expect they simply mean a DNS
redirect; anything more adds a whole new level of creepy (as if this plan
needed more).

On the plus side, it's a good time to be in the VPN business. :P

~~~
betterunix
I suspect that number of people using Tor to download their entertainment is
going to skyrocket. Good news for cover traffic, of course, but without more
exit nodes the network is going to be in trouble.

------
tomku
The headline is a flat-out lie. The monitoring is being done by content
owners, using publicly-available information from torrent trackers and other
peer-to-peer networks.

~~~
jonursenbach
[Citation Needed]

Everything I've heard about this is that the monitoring is being done by the
ISPs themselves, __not __the content owners.

~~~
tomku
Sure, straight from their FAQ[1]:

"Can this system see what sites I visit online?

No. There is no monitoring of any Internet traffic by ISPs. The identification
of alleged infringement is done by Content Owners on peer-to-peer networks
only. The Copyright Alert System applies only to peer-to-peer networks and not
to general Internet use."

There's a lot of misinformation going around, spread by people who probably
have good intentions but don't understand that by arguing against a straw man,
they're actually making it easier for their opponents to discredit them. There
are plenty of valid reasons to dislike this plan, we don't need to be making
up fake ones.

[1]: [http://www.copyrightinformation.org/resources-
faq/copyright-...](http://www.copyrightinformation.org/resources-
faq/copyright-alert-system-faqs/)

Edit: Fixed quoting.

~~~
wmf
_people who probably have good intentions but don't understand that by arguing
against a straw man, they're actually making it easier for their opponents to
discredit them_

That's what I think whenever an Internet lynch mob forms (TCPA, SOPA, etc.)
but somehow it never matters. There's hardly any backlash against the
hyperbolic scaremongering.

~~~
a_so_so_swordsy
sometimes i feel like thats the beauty and fatal flaw of our system. people
are gonna basically do what they're gonna do. if it benefits enough of us
(with relative/proportional amount of power) it'll happen but if it pisses
enough of that demographic off it will get stopped eventually.

------
xxdesmus
Here's an idea/concern -- for those of us NOT using our ISP's recursive DNS
what will this notification plan look like? My ISPs notifications (as in an
interstitial page) won't show if I'm not using their DNS.

Presumably if I'm using OpenDNS or Google DNS for my recursive DNS it's going
to be impossible to browse my interwebs if this ever happens. I'd need to
assume this might be the case, and then switch back to the ISP's recursive DNS
just to proceed through their acknowledgement page. Derp.

~~~
smtddr
Well, it is possible to capture and redirect DNS requests such that they can
send you to their "captive-portal" page even if you've changed your DNS
settings. On linux for example, something like:

iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -i eth0 -p udp --dport 53 -j DNAT --to 10.2.2.1

will send all your DNS requests to 10.2.2.1 no matter what your actual
destination IP was. If Comcast did something like this at their level, it
wouldn't matter what your router/modem DNS setting was. This is assuming
you're destination port is still 53.

~~~
wtallis
Does DNSSEC interfere with this? Comcast claims to have deployed DNSSEC on
their DNS servers. Can they deliver their redirect even if your resolver is
configured to validate DNSSEC records?

~~~
icebraining
Sure. They can't serve you wrong DNS results, but they can just redirect your
IP packets directed at some server to theirs.

Or to paraphrase the Matrix, what good is knowing the right IP of a server, if
you're unable to reach it?

~~~
tssva
DNSSEC doesn't prevent them from serving you false DNS results. DNSSEC doesn't
protect the communication between your resolver and the DNS server. DNSSEC
allows for signing DNS entries with keys.

Since a large portion of DNS isn't signed in order to function on the Internet
most resolvers with DNSSEC enabled will still allow results from domains which
aren't signed for instance google.com. The easiest thing for Comcast to do is
to return their false result indicating that the domain is not signed.

Since they can intercept all DNS traffic you send they could actually emulate
all the way up to the root servers and sign with keys they generated
themselves. This is probably overly complex but is possible and would allow a
false dns entry to be accepted even by resolvers configured to only accept
responses for domains which are signed.

~~~
throwaway2048
>Since they can intercept all DNS traffic you send they could actually emulate
all the way up to the root servers and sign with keys they generated
themselves. This is probably overly complex but is possible and would allow a
false dns entry to be accepted even by resolvers configured to only accept
responses for domains which are signed.

this is not how DNSSEC works, if it did work this way it would be trivial for
anyone to mitm it, thus render its entire purpose null and void.

Resolvers are preloaded with the dns root public key, that key signs the tld
root keys, which sign your registrars key, which sign your domain. There is no
effective way for comcast to spoof replies in this setup, as they have no
access to any of these private keys.

------
mbreese
_On the third and fourth infractions, the subscriber will likely receive a
pop-up notice "asking the subscriber to acknowledge receipt of the alert"_

I'm more curious about how this is supposed to work. Is my ISP going to
dynamically insert javascript into random webpages? I don't use any of the
infrastructure of my ISP, relying on my own email and DNS, so how exactly is
this supposed to work?

Maybe altering your IP address to a private block that routes everything to a
splash page (a la public wifi where you have to accept the ToS)?

------
LandoCalrissian
It will be great when all the problems of this start popping. I'm really don't
think the ISP's are going to invest very much in enforcement. It's going to
take a lot of time and resources that I just can't see companies like Comcast
investing much into it, they are way too bottom line driven.

On top of this you are going to have so many cases of people using open
networks to download torrents. They may claim that they will still shut these
connections down, but I really don't think they want to go through that PR
nightmare of every coffee shop getting rid of wifi because of stupid policy.

This is going to be loosely enforced at best, and most likely a complete
failure.

~~~
jpd750
hence what I was saying - how effective is the war on drugs?

Epic failure.

------
jpd750
This is about as effective as the "war on drugs"

------
vincie
We have open source software. Why not open source content? I do not have the
chops to do it, but I would like to see software/start-ups that helps me, you
and everyone else create content - muzak, movies, games, etc - free for anyone
to download, sample, modify, sell, give away, with open source styled licenses
- just like open source software. Like the linux ecosystem. Surely this is
possible? We the consumers of content, should create the content. I am tired
of being treated like a thief, although I have never stolen anything.

~~~
mehrzad
But we do.

Any type of editing software (open source or not) has some kind of "project
file." Trent Reznor was called the first open source musician because he
shared his .band files from Garageband.

------
camkego
How do I get my copyrighted material filtered? Can every reader of HN just
produce a random 1GB string of characters, and get it filtered on the Net? [It
is copyrighted just by authorship]

~~~
wmf
You have to pay DtecNet to track your content (if they are willing to deal
with you at all). But when you say "filtered" I have a feeling you may not be
clear on how the system works.

------
fnordfnordfnord
>>On a scofflaw's first offense.

If it's a first "offense", how can s/he be a scofflaw? And, shouldn't it be
allegation instead of offense? What the hell is wrong with this guy?

~~~
tzs
From the New Oxford American Dictionary:

    
    
       scofflaw |ˈskôfˌlô, ˈskäf-|
       noun informal
       a person who flouts the law, esp. by failing to
       comply with a law that is difficult to enforce
       effectively.
    

I don't see anything there that precludes a first offender from being a
scofflaw.

~~~
fnordfnordfnord
I think the word scofflaw implies repeatedly or habitually breaking the law.
Perhaps breaking the law in a mocking way. I guess it just depends upon which
dictionary you want to believe.

------
antimatter
On a related note, who do you guys recommend for VPN? I've been looking at
PPTP tunneling with <https://www.tunnelr.com/>

~~~
HoochTHX
[http://torrentfreak.com/which-vpn-providers-really-take-
anon...](http://torrentfreak.com/which-vpn-providers-really-take-anonymity-
seriously-111007/)

------
maeon3
And thus, the Government became a listening party to every data transmission
that will ever exist for the next thousand years. Voice, video, conversation.
The talk with your kids. Everything. We need to do something about this. The
internet is the future data transfer medium. It's the substrate we will be
using to think among ourselves. Our government is trying to get inside our
MINDS. By becoming our mind before the neurons have a chance to join up.

I'm just doing a little startup with me and my friends, I'd like to have a
website, or broadcast to everyone around the world, but I can't afford to
broadcast information to all the people like the big fat-cats who have paid
off the government can.

This is step 1 of 10 in turning the Global internet in a controlled apendage
of the american government, to be metered, spliced, diced, fast-laned, slow-
laned and policed. There will be "pay me money to use this part of the
internet" signs everywhere. And the taxes will be reasonable, at first.

The government will own the internet, and you will have to pay them dearly to
use it. Even when the internet is simply a data transfer between two
consenting adults that stand next to eachother.

The government then took a large step to becoming a God, omnipresent. Privacy?
Out the fucking window. Kthx

~~~
smokinjoe
Unless I've missed something important, please help me out in making the
connection between the strategy of monitoring torrents to "Government became a
listening party to every data transmission."

I've been doing what I can, but so far I've discovered no significantly new
monitoring techniques that are being introduced.

~~~
dontstealmyname
I can't remember where I read it (There were links I remember from 2 different
places, one post was on HN about this but it was all hear say and rumors to
grain of salt) that they want or are building a system like Watson to monitor
internet traffic because currently they have so much information that its
impossible to sift though it all.

Couldn't find it with a google, can't really remember any good key words, so
the site may have been a bad source (probably) I don't remember. What I do
remember about the article is how it was mentioned that it was a revival of a
plan they tried to implement back after September 11, but the plan was leaked
and there was enough public out rage the US congress squashed the plan. THAT I
remember had reputable sources, I remember checking that out on google.
Unfortunately I can't remember the name of the project to get you an article.

Maybe someone who knows what I'm talking about (mainly the later) could link
it?

Anyway we won't know what if anything extra they're doing until someone leaves
and blabs about it in 20-30 years time.

While I wasn't sure how true that was, I did throw it in the realm of
possibility because it sounded feasible.

But I wouldn't blame anyone for considering this more hear say and rumors. :)

