
New Anti-Piracy System to Hit U.S. Internet Users on Monday - uptown
http://www.dailydot.com/news/copyright-alerts-system-launch-six-strikes/
======
UnoriginalGuy
Game of Thrones (the most pirated show of last year) comes out in March. Still
not for sale at any price unless you have a cable package AND one of their
authorised ISPs (plus $18+tax/month).

Maybe companies like HBO should update their business practices to something
roughly compatible with 2013, instead of trying to legal threat everyone into
submission.

If they sold it on iTunes, YouTube, or Hulu+ they'd convert tons of pirates
into paying customers. People want to give HBO their money but HBO literally
won't take it...

~~~
dangrossman
HBO knows it's 2013. It's built a Netflix competitor. They have the whole tech
stack for subscription internet streaming running and proven. They're signing
10-year content deals with exclusivity agreements that simultaneously give
them a future catalog to rival Netflix while locking Netflix out of acquiring
the same top-quality content. HBO has all its ducks in a row, it's playing the
long game.

All they're waiting for is the tipping point in consumption habits. Today,
most of their subscribers are paying $17+/month via bundling with cable TV,
and every major cable provider in the country is heavily advertising them for
free. The moment they can go independent and accept subscribers without going
through a cable company is the moment the trickle of people dropping cable TV
in favor of internet media turns into a tide. It's not today. If they split
from cable today, they'd lose free advertising to hundreds of millions of
people a year, and they'd likely earn far less per month from each subscriber
they pick up.

~~~
darklajid

      HBO knows it's 2013. It's built a Netflix competitor.
      They have the whole tech stack for subscription internet
      streaming running and proven.
    

I guess (failed to find how I can check it so far) that this is again US only.
Of course we're talking about a US anti 'piracy' law, so that kind of makes
sense. But the GP still has a point: Making content available, in a reasonable
way, would make people like me shell out a good amount of $currency (in this
case, USD?) to get access.

I love a couple of TV series. In Germany everything is dubbed (Yeah, Sheldon
Cooper sucks if he talks German.. Don't even get me started on Dexter, who
sounds like the most uninteresting guy ever on the German show). I'd love to
pay for timely access to good content, in its original language.

All of Netflix, Hulu (and, with the disclaimer that I couldn't check yet,
probably HBO as well) play that braindead, stupid 'Not in your country' game.
Which isn't 2013 and something I have problems to accept since the 90s.

~~~
watmough
The service is built, but does not work, _unless_ you already have a cable
subscription, even in the US.

There's no way, to the best of my knowledge to legally watch Game of Thrones,
besides buying it on DVD/Blu-Ray or actually subscribing to HBO (and using
that subscription to watch it on-line).

~~~
dangrossman
You can stream past seasons on Amazon Instant Video and iTunes.

------
windexh8er
These types of systems are highly susceptible to fog of war style mitigation.
I'd like to find out who's providing the hardware behind the DPI.

Having worked for a subsidiary of Comcast (250k subs) within the past few
years I saw a handful of closed door meeting with the FBI and a few locked 'Do
Not Touch' racks. The US government is spinning out of control in overreach
with regard to the Internet.

Whoever wants to fund an open access network with user protection and security
as its core competency feel free to reach out. We'll seasoned network and
security engineer waiting in the wings...

~~~
dangrossman
Are they doing DPI? Or are they just responding to the notices they've always
gotten from 3rd parties about infringement on their network with these
educational/throttling responses instead of merely passing on the notices. A
graduated response system need not involve new surveillance. Most of the
notices were from movie studios and record labels hiring companies that
participate in torrent swarms, produce logs of all the peers sharing pieces of
the torrent with them, then send out notices to the ISPs associated with those
IPs.

------
EGreg
LOOK MA, NO GOVERNMENT!

With SOPA destroyed by the combined efforts of giant internet companies and
internet users calling their congressmen, Hollywood was able to engage another
group: ISPs.

Note: this is done completely without government. It is one of the best
illustrations to date of what I was saying, about nannies curtailing liberties
being possible even if government doesn't do them.

To all libertarians that single out the government for special thrashing, I
have a question: doesn't this show that wherever power concentrates, you will
find stuff like this. Government is just an example. We always knew they
didn't need the government, just all the major ISPs.

~~~
nitrogen
This absolutely was _not_ done with no government, but was created as part of
a partnership put together with the direction of the White House.

Also, there's no reason for a libertarian not to oppose concentration of power
in anybody's hands, whether it's government or corporations. Let's let this
thread focus on the issue at hand instead of derailing it into another fight
between different quadrants of the political plane.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
> _a partnership put together with the direction of the White House_ //

I'm wondering when the people of the USA voted for this in their great
democracy?

OT:

As an outsider USA politics appears more and more about satisfying corporate
desires and very little about government by the people and for the people.

------
carbocation
This violates my perception of my ISP as a dumb pipe.

I want to pay a fair price (whatever that may be) for an internet service
provider that exists only to connect subscribers to the internet, at
reasonable speeds near their advertised rates.

~~~
wmf
Try business class service.

~~~
Ao7bei3s
...and at a reasonable price? Too much to ask?

~~~
wmf
Business prices seem to vary a lot. I've heard $20/month more in some cases
and 4x more in others.

Also, once consumer broadband becomes capped, business service will probably
be cheaper than paying overages.

------
digitalengineer
Well, here come the Dark Nets: _"The RetroShare network allows people to
create a private and encrypted file-sharing network. Users add friends by
exchanging PGP certificates with people they trust. All the communication is
encrypted using OpenSSL and files that are downloaded from strangers always go
through a trusted friend.

In other words, it’s a true Darknet and virtually impossible to monitor by
outsiders._ <http://retroshare.sourceforge.net/>

~~~
wmf
Translation: The system is hard to use, has little content available, and
downloads slowly when you can find something to download.

~~~
digitalengineer
True, but for a lot of people it is a new technology. I expect darknets to
grow, perhaps helped by social media. That will also bring more content. Most
VPN's will happily provide the police your real IP... I first heared about
Darknets from tech-guys in France, where they have a "3strikes and you're
offline" law, compliments of Sarkouzy. Any French guys here wish to chip in?

------
acabal
This strikes me as a scary first step. The whole "re-education" spin is extra-
scary; if I had a kid who downloaded something and was exposed to this kind of
treatment, I'd be pretty loudly wondering who Comcast thinks it is to be
"educating" my child with its propaganda.

What can we as techies do to combat this? How can we add a layer of encryption
and anonymity that's so dead easy that it becomes ubiquitous?

~~~
dmix
VPN software, even setting up tunnelbrick on OSX is pretty easy for techies,
but I imagine it can be pretty tough for newbs.

It'd be nice if there was a one-click type of process. Maybe where the
credentials are transferred via web service using a login auth from the
desktop client?

The technology for anonymity is there and adequate, just needs some proper UX
design and user education.

~~~
rdl
Running a p2p protocol like BitTorrent over a VPN is pretty horribly
inefficient. At that point, I'd just use a seedbox and download my final
product over https (optionally on a VPN, too)

~~~
thefreeman
You don't even need to use https to transfer to from your seedbox to your
home. They aren't scanning the content of your transfers. They just have
people collecting IP's from public (and probably various private) trackers,
which they then distribute to the ISP's.

------
cjh_
I really wish business practices would change to meet this demand.

I recently came across crunchyroll [1] which has a huge amount of japanese
animation available to watch online 'for free' if you can put up with ads, or
you can pay $7/month to have ad free (as well as higher def).

What I find really awesome is that for many shows it is available online an
hour after it is shown in japan (this is for paying members, free members have
to wait a week).

I apologize if this seems like nothing special to you, but living in New
Zealand I can _really_ appreciate sites that are both affordable and don't
lock me out because of my region.

[1]<http://www.crunchyroll.com/>

~~~
creamyhorror
Crunchyroll is a unique case. It started out as a typical pirate video site
that basically streamed and profited off anime fansubs, then later managed to
go legitimate by licensing anime from Japanese studios (presumably because it
had a large audience and the studios decided to experiment with streaming to
the international market). It's a one-off occurrence that I don't think has
been duplicated by any other site since.

It'd be great if more pirate streaming sites started up and became legitimate,
but it's unlikely to happen so easily with content owners who are more
protective of their copyrights (e.g. US studios/channels). They'd probably sue
instead of discuss licensing terms.

Hulu and Netflix need to go everywhere, but content licensing by region will
always stand in their way. Here we're stuck with high-priced cable TV packages
that I don't find appealing, and Amazon's ebook store isn't even available.

~~~
cjh_
I wasn't actually aware of their history as a less-than-legitimate site, I
guess that helped with the chicken and egg problem of content and audience.

Region licensing is definitely one of the big killers, I find it odd (read:
sad) how companies can buy _all_ the rights to a product for a region, and
then not do anything useful (at least not to me) with it.

------
goostavos
I'm not familiar with how that side of things works, how will they
differentiate between legitimate torrent traffic, and traffic which contains
pirated material? The video says that you'll be able to challenge alerts
_after_ you've received them, but is throttling pre or post that alert being
filed?

Legitimate use from about an hour ago: Downloaded a fan remix album of some
video game music (A torrent is the method they give on their website for
downloading). Will that activity result in any kind warning flags?

Is this something that services like hidemyip circumvent? Or is it different
since, I assume, my actual IP is visible when torrenting?

~~~
1337p337
Agreed; a link that discusses what it actually entails would be great. Or does
no one actually know, outside the companies that implemented it?

------
adventured
Welcome to fascism. Where corporate-government interests strictly control
everything (Verizon and AT&T = US Government, since they've been granted
government monopoly protections, they are in fact an arm of the Federal
Government).

~~~
D9u
As exhibit "B," I list the granting of immunity to the above TelComs for their
part in the domestic surveillance program(s.)

[http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Effort-To-Scuttle-
Telecom...](http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Effort-To-Scuttle-Telecom-
Immunity-Push-Fails-90284)

------
mehrzad
Obviously this is ridiculous, but I find it just absurd.

 _Who are the ISPs to tell their customers what is morally and legally right
or wrong?_

Are we not allowed to have a reverse method where we penalize the ISPs for
their crimes? Of course not.

Guys, this is Hacker News, the breeding ground of entrepreneurship. One of you
may to (for lack of a better buzzword) disrupt the ISP market. At least we
have Fiber hopefully coming soon.

------
api
Personally I see this as another overbilled project on the part of the snake
oil DRM industry to part content owners from their money. None of these
schemes work long-term, as there are tons of different strategies for
defeating them.

~~~
maqr
They don't even work short-term. In fact, this gives users the means and
incentive to figure out how to pirate without it being visible to the ISP.
Imagine you're a clueless user that keeps getting alerts about torrenting.
Maybe you get a VPN or switch to a private torrent network, or whatever
technological next step you need to take. Now the alerts stop and you're
pirating safely (or at least, safer).

------
tbeseda
Seems like an automated version of current practices. "Owners" join a network
of peers for a specific piece of content, and alert the ISP about offending
IPs; ISP sends notices. Now it seems all this can happen automatically.

~~~
samkline
It sounds like a lot more than just notices: re-education videos, slower
connections.

[https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/11/us-copyright-
surveilla...](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/11/us-copyright-surveillance-
machine-about-be-switched-on)

------
james4k
All of these guys aren't just ISPs; they're in the cable TV business.
Conflicting interests, really.

------
tomp
This is quite awesome... maybe encrypted P2P networks will finally take off!

~~~
gizmo686
Encryption has been the default setting in most bittorrent clients for a while
now. The fundamental problem is that no matter how good you encryption is, if
some simply attempts to download the file themself, they can see what IPs are
supplying them the pieces. In order to solve this, you would need to add an
additional layer to the protocol, where a user downloads and uploads files not
related to the ones they want for themselves, so knowing the IP that is
uploading the file to you does not help you find someone who is actually
responsible. At this point, you are probably better off running existing
clients through a TOR proxy.

~~~
nwh
Please don't torrent through the onion router.

~~~
bionsuba
Could you elaborate?

~~~
harshreality
The default number of tor hops in a tor circuit is 3. What would be 2GB (1GB +
1GB) of potentially metered/limited bandwidth for the sender(s) and receiver
combined in a point to point connection, becomes 8GB of potentially
metered/limited network utilization: 1GB for the downloader, 1GB for the
uploader, and 1+1GB (down+up) each for the tor nodes in the circuit.

Given that tor node bandwidth is a precious commodity, it shouldn't be
difficult to see how downloading large files through tor is a problem.

It's not just tor; downloading large files by any means through tor hurts the
tor network. Tor happens to be by far the most popular means of redistribution
of large files for which people would like to gain anonymity.

------
a1a
This is really bad. I don't care for piracy, but I'm really worried. This is a
prediction of the internet.. year 2020:

TOR, freenet or some new network is in size like p2p was 2013. It has got a
lot of attention from ordinary people and developers and it's actually pretty
fast now days. Pretty much everyone runs a relay, it's basically like it was
running uTorrent back in 2005 - not a big deal. While everything is free,
which is quite nice for the pirate, it's also hell. Since everyone is
basically untraceable, even Megan, the twelve year old who wants the new
Disney movie. It's now totally impossible to trace down the terrorist, online
drug-dealers, etc. The cyber-police is drowning in false positives, this
because Megan and her classmates are using the same crypto-network.

Is this what we want? I think we should tackle the piracy problem from another
angle. Let's start more services like spotify and hulu. Make it not worth it
to pirate stuff because there is a awesome legal alternative.

~~~
Karunamon
>Is this what we want?

Short answer: Yes - but not for the reason you stated. The "cyber police" have
been getting far too powerful and chummy with ISPs as of late. Any measures an
average person can reasonably take to make surveillance hard if not impossible
to conduct should be happening.

Police can rely on old fashioned police work. They do not need DPI gear in
every datacenter to trace down kiddie pornographers, "terrorists" and online
drug dealers (which is a section of law enforcement which needs to shrivel and
die anyways).

------
chucknibbleston
If they know what you pirated, why don't the content providers just get your
ISP to shut off your internet until you watch enough ads to make up for the
cost (they could do a little rev-share to incentivize comcast). Piracy will
exist as long as content providers insist on selling something that can no
longer be sold.

------
D9u
Does anyone remember the NASA imagery from Mars which was taken down by
YouTube due to alleged "Copyright Infringement?"

<http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/08/07/nasa_dmca_takedown/>

Who's to say there won't be more of the same with this system?

------
pbhjpbhj
> " _it will issue escalating punishments to suspected pirates, severely
> reducing their connection speeds after five or six offenses_ " //

How would you punish person A but not punish person B who uses the same
connection. How can you establish person A is guilty rather than person B in
order to decide that A should be punished.

Why is copyright infringement now suddenly no longer to be decided by a proper
legal process instead being decided by the plaintiff?

How will the legal system protect against the innocent being punished and
ensure that due punishment for false claims made by plaintiffs is forthcoming.

Without a proper process to punish false (or evidentially unsupported) claims
this surely breaches basic legal rights.

When companies share libellous legal claims about a person without evidence
surely the USA legal system would punish those companies?!?

------
yaddayadda
Big brother is simply helping oldthinkers crimestop[1].

[1] <http://www.newspeakdictionary.com/ns-dict.html>

------
bigphishy
Here is a thorough guide for covering your ass and using darknets
[https://pay.reddit.com/r/evolutionReddit/comments/193m6k/six...](https://pay.reddit.com/r/evolutionReddit/comments/193m6k/six_strikes_goes_live_on_monday_how_to_beat_the/)

------
sokrates
This is the perfect example of a result that arises when people disconnected
from the internet think "OK, what can we do against piracy? Wait, piracy is a
crime, and the best thing we can do to reduce crime is education. So why not
educate users?" Why ISPs are complying with this bullshit is beyond me.

The video perfectly demonstrates the sheer ridiculousness of this system. It
reminded me of the Portal 2 trailers:
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qcED35LL8I>

~~~
dangrossman
Two reasons:

1) The top ISPs and the top media companies are one and the same. They're all
cable providers and some of them are subsidiaries of entertainment
conglomerates. It's their own content and their own cable TV revenue piracy
threatens.

2) They're getting paid. Instead of handling infringement notices being a cost
center, it can be an additional revenue stream for them, in exchange for a
little throttling of the customers costing them the most in paperwork.

------
dzamie
If I understand this correctly, someone who claims copyright on a software can
sign up for an alerts system on a P2P, at which point any infringement of
copyright is automatically forwarded to the ISP. The ISP then reprimands the
alleged pirate via email/alert, and if the consumer continues to receive
warnings, they will have to play a video on their computer and/or receive
restricted internet access.

The "you must watch a video" thing doesn't seem too bad, considering that
it'll probably be possible to just run it in its own tab and ignore it, and
speed restrictions are already being put in place by some ISPs.

------
mgkimsal
Would be sort of decent of them to actually, perhaps, reach out to their
customers to let us know this is coming. Not had anything in my bill for the
past several months that this new system was coming down the pike.

------
javajosh
Is there some reason why there isn't an inexpensive Chinese-made device that
people could buy that creates totally decentralized urban and suburban mesh
networks over public spectrum?

~~~
wmf
Mesh networking is very hard and there's no business model to pay for the very
hard R&D since it's fundamentally about not paying.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Doesn't the OLPC have ad-hoc mesh networking built in?

~~~
wmf
AFAIK it never worked well and was dropped from later releases.

------
edouard1234567
Seems like a few ISPs are creating their own SOPA like system very similar to
the HADOPY system put in place in France.

------
sexyalterego
This was originally a Daily Dot story. Mashable just syndicated it.
[http://www.dailydot.com/news/copyright-alerts-system-
launch-...](http://www.dailydot.com/news/copyright-alerts-system-launch-six-
strikes/)

------
smsm42
OK, so I guess we have a market for ISPs that don't do that. I wonder if
there's any site that lists such ISPs at least in major cities?

------
drivebyacct2
And everyone's favorite VPN is...?

~~~
kintamanimatt
Private Internet Access[1] has been serving me well for a long time and
they've got endpoints all over the place, from _Oh Canada_ to the Netherlands.
Things are consistently fast and reliable, their customer service is
responsive, and you can log in from multiple devices at a time which is great.
They're cheap too.

[1] <http://www.privateinternetaccess.com>

~~~
GhotiFish
I like most of their policies, but they really need to be explicit about their
usage limits.

    
    
      "You can only use a reasonable amount from our service. 
       How much is reasonable? You'll find out when you hit 
       it and we decide to drop the hammer, take your money, 
       and never speak to you again."

~~~
kintamanimatt
Where are you quoting that from? I can't find anything in the ToS about that
and one of the features they list is "Unmetered VPN Transfer".

~~~
GhotiFish
Really? Cause I found this:

    
    
      "Additionally, we may impose usage limits to our services,
       suspend or block services, or cancel any and all services
       at our sole discretion at any time. Finally, we do not
       guarantee the accuracy and timeliness of any data received."
    

You can see that little gem here:

[https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/pages/terms-of-
service...](https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/pages/terms-of-service/)

under _Service Level Agreement_

    
    
      "Subscriber understands that Privateinternetaccess.com
       also reserves the right to scale back or throttle
       bandwidth originating from subscriber accounts that may
       breach the present Agreement or in the event of
       excessive usage on the Privateinternetaccess.com network."
    

Same page, under _Our Rights_

Which is REALLY ODD that they would have those terms, because on their contact
page:

 _"Are there any limitations on usage or bandwidth?"_

    
    
      "We do not impose any restrictions or limitations on usage
       and/or bandwidth consumption. Please feel free to engage in
       any legal activity. "
    

Huh. Wonder which one I should believe?

~~~
kintamanimatt
That's very different to what you originally quoted! Having said that, yes,
there is a discrepancy there, although I've got a feeling it's a CYA provision
in case someone with Google Fiber decides to download all of YouTube.

~~~
GhotiFish
>That's very different to what you originally quoted!

I will admit to some paraphrasing. :)

------
drivebyacct2
I have to say after using other ISPs, I'm quite happy with Cox Communications
in the Midwest. It wasn't always great, but the reliability of service is much
better than the others I've had the displeasure of using. It's a bit pricey,
but they have a monopoly here so it could be worse. Other than frying my modem
once (it was documented and others had the exact same problems on the same
date), it's been good. With other ISPs I've had to lease their hardware that
inevitability has fundamentally-broken Wifi functionality.

And, more relevantly, they've stood up for consumers in these cases and their
name is notably absent from the list of participants.

------
rorrr
1) Install HTTPS Everywhere extension for your browser

2) Use VPN if you can

3) Use TOR browser if you can

Let's overwhelm the internet with encrypted traffic. Nobody will have enough
resources to decrypt or MITM all that traffic.

~~~
zanny
It isn't about encryption, since if a content provider can get a hand on a
torrent file or a tracker + magnet, they can get all the IPs of everyone in
the swarm. The only way to avoid that is having your traffic routed through
someone else so you can't be directly visible, which is expensive in the broad
sense.

------
sabat
I guess it's a lot easier to try things like this than to update your business
model. That might require thinking and work.

------
martinced
So technically the bandwith-limitation can be triggered for any user from
these ISPs right?

So we _may_ after all see some heavy bandwith-throttling for users whose
machines have been infested and are part of botnets.

That would be lovely.

