I'm more concerned with what the triggers will be. Are they actually tracking the content of URL's (only)? Are they looking for any traffic on the same port as BitTorrent? Are they simply looking for a significant amount of traffic outbound from your home connection??? (good-bye, working from home???)
For a $35 dollar appeal fee, it might indeed be time to look at other providers if this happened very often.
Actually, I also would like to know how you could accomplish this. Assuming "this" is "use your connection in a P2P network to make a peer report that it is connected to A.B.C.D, when in fact you are at W.X.Y.X"
This is easily done with a man in the middle attack. You can change your src ip headers and then listen for the response when it gets sent to the spoofed ip.
The $64,000 question: how many private trackers have been infiltrated by these watchers? I turned off the cable 2+ yrs ago and have been torrenting tv shows since then (no movies or music). When I get my first notice, I'll be getting a seed box ($15/mo for a decent one).
EDIT: I would happily stop torrenting and pay $20-30 for the few shows I watch. If, say, all of them were on a Hulu-like service, I'd definitely go that route.
There are certain services that accomplish what you want at a much much better quality level, cost $10-12 per month and offer full SSL connections, but I'm not allowed to tell you about them.
Neither is a "seed box" or private trackers, or anything else that the parent post mentioned. No one in this thread is talking about legal alternatives, because they don't exist. The illegal alternatives are a an insanely better experience, and people are paying for them to boot.
There is a huge opportunity for someone to come in and create the Spotify of video, but it probably won't happen soon because it will be near impossible to work with content providers to create it. Plus there's not a huge incentive, since even Spotify is being sucked dry with licensing fees.
Let's face it: the current state of the industry is not capable of providing a high quality user experience to the consumer (I'm almost 100% convinced). They're all about forcing the consumer to use whatever creates the most money, and if you amass enough power, sure, you can do that. Effectively, they are exercising their legal rights to hold back the quality of the end-user experience. Is it right? It is a moral grey area. They have the right to protect their content and the creators of that content, to ensure they are compensated fairly. But at the same time, it is holding back progress.
In short: if you want the best personal digital entertainment experience, a legal alternative at any cost is not available. There are simply too many providers and too many limitations and services. Furthermore, the quality of illegal methods (which will not be named; the secret ones are indeed the best) are extremely high as to be almost the best possible outcome.
It is a very complicated situation. "Legal alternative" is synonymous with "worse" right now, but I do hope that improves.
Some will. But that's advanced enough that most people just won't bother.
Most people pirate stuff because it's easy. If it's not easy, they'll just shift to paying for things.
Me, I would just have made purchasing of content much easier, but I suppose if you're in Hollywood it somehow seems sensible to just make everything in the world harder instead.
You rent a server in another country (such as Netherlands) that does the torrenting for you. You then SFTP to your seedbox and download your torrent files from there. All your ISP can see is that you are downloading a lot of bytes, not what the bytes actually are since it is over SFTP.
I like how they immediately assume that since everyone infringes copyright, everyone needs to be re-educated. Such an easy solution! It also tells us a lot about the people behind this whole thing.
How many ISPs can (or would) post a news item on their home page re: EFF...
“Sonic.net privacy policies recognized by the EFF
The Electronic Frontier Foundation assessed the policies of 18 leading Internet companies, and Sonic.net has come out with top marks. The EFF wrote in their report that...”
Not your fault, of course, but it kills me that consumers in most areas in the US let the ISP market die. The monopoly players gave great intro prices and they all jumped ship.
For years, I've paid Speakeasy and Sonic more than I could have paid to a phone or cable incumbent. And I've been happy to do it, because when something goes wrong I get to talk to actual smart people who want to fix things.
I'm also sad that our competition regulators allowed this to happen. A pseudo-choice between two basically equivalent options isn't enough for the magic of the free market to work.
> Not your fault, of course, but it kills me that consumers in most areas in the US let the ISP market die. The monopoly players gave great intro prices and they all jumped ship.
It's not just that - we subsidized the construction of the Internet channels with our tax dollars, and then the government essentially handed over the control of those to the private companies, who now claim that they can charge whatever they want for access to "their" lines.
Consumers may have played a role, but at the end of the day, it's the government (the constituents)[1] who have sanctioned the existing monopolies.
> I'm also sad that our competition regulators allowed this to happen. A pseudo-choice between two basically equivalent options isn't enough for the magic of the free market to work.
Choice? 80% of consumers have zero choice in their ISP. For me, the only alternative is 'no Internet'.
[1] Obviously consumers == constituents for the most part, but I make the distinction to draw attention to the fact that they would need to act in their role as voters/citizens, not as consumers, if they want to change anything.
Did you miss the whole Comcast lawsuit/controversy?
Throttling access to your competitors (Netflix) artificially to make your own product seem more attractive by comparison - does that qualify as 'bundling'?
"Hoewing said his company's customers will experience this as a pop-up window."
Presumably by injecting Javascript into customer web traffic? I don't torrent copyrighted material, but I was hoping we were done with ISPs screwing with HTTP after the ad replacement scandals of a few years ago.
Ok, I actually like that a lot more. I could see it being characterized as a "pop-up" by less technical speakers.
If an ISP is going to communicate with me outside the usual channels, I'd much rather they do it at a DNS level, where it's obvious something's happening, than at an HTTP level where there's a much greater temptation for mischief.
Plus you can just ignore their DNS server, and use 8.8.8.8/8.8.4.4 (google's) or OpenDNS instead. (though that may not work if they cut off your connection until you acknowledge)
> Plus you can just ignore their DNS server, and use 8.8.8.8/8.8.4.4 (google's) or OpenDNS instead.
Or just hardcode the values into /etc/hosts.
> though that may not work if they cut off your connection until you acknowledge
Oh, so they can threaten to renege on their end of the contract (the service I have already paid for) unless I admit to their accusations of potentially incriminating activity? That's just ridiculous[1].
Love the term 'casual pirates'. I very much doubt that once anybody has gotten used to being able to download whatever they want that they are going to do it only once in a blue moon.
In reality there may not be enough time for the ISPs to respond to each act of piracy before a new one is commited.
And in the end, all they will do is force the pirates down into the darker corners of the internet. A good thing for freenet (better that people trade the latest Game Of Thrones episode than the latest 40 year old rapes children and films it for your enjoyment), but a bad thing for the internet, and society at large.
I am a casual pirate. The last time I pirated stuff was torrenting some HBO shows, which promptly got me an email from my ISP.
At that point I could have done one of two things
1) Start spending $10 a month or so on an SSL Usenet provider, a VPN, or any of the other various tools that would allow me to keep pirating without getting caught
2) Start spending $10 a month or so on HBO, and watch it from the comfort of my couch on my flat screen without messing around with any of that stuff.
There are always going to be ways around whatever system they put in place, but the more obstacles they put in the way the more people will decide its no longer worth the effort.
That's why I'm a casual pirate. I'm not arguing that it works for everyone, I'm saying that they do exist.
I have cable because I watch a lot of sports, as soon ESPN lets me pay for streaming without a cable subscription I will drop it, but unfortunately live sports is the one thing than can not be pirated easily, consistently, and in high quality.
This is correct. HBO doesn't cost $10, it costs more like $80. Sure, you get a lot more than HBO for the $80 but there is no way to get HBO alone unbundled.
You can't spend that $10 marginal price for HBO without spending a bunch more money on stuff you will never watch. For example, even if you never watch sports you're pretty much forced to get a cable package with ESPN included, which is a sizable chunk of your subscription cost.
I'd like to see cable companies offer ala carte channel choices, or even better, offer usage-based billing like they do for their data packages. Until that day, many people are going to take the free option instead.
> There are always going to be ways around whatever system they put in place, but the more obstacles they put in the way the more people will decide its no longer worth the effort.
The problem is that there are more obstacles in the way of legal consumption.
You can fix that by putting up artificial obstacles to illegal consumption, or by simply removing the obstacles to the legal consumption which most "pirates" would prefer to use.
>I very much doubt that once anybody has gotten used to being able to download whatever they want that they are going to do it only once in a blue moon.
I have to think hard to recall the last time I pirated anything, three or four years at least and it was probably eight-plus years ago that I did it with any regularity.
Netflix, Steam, Amazon, O'Reilly Safari and a world of excellent OSS provide me with more fairly priced / free content, education and tools than I have time.
For a $35 dollar appeal fee, it might indeed be time to look at other providers if this happened very often.