New Anti-Piracy System to Hit U.S. Internet Users on Monday

http://www.dailydot.com/news/copyright-alerts-system-launch-six-strikes/

by uptown • 13 years ago

147 195 13 years ago

sabat• 13 years ago

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

tbeseda• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/11/us-copyright-surveilla...

voyou• 13 years ago

I don't think this new system is any more automated, is it? The change is that the ISPs have agreed on various ways to penalize users who are accused of copyright infringement.

carbocation• 13 years ago

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.

mtgx• 13 years ago

Sonic.net does that. I don't think it's available in too many areas, though.

wmf6• 13 years ago

Try business class service.

Ao7bei3s• 13 years ago

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

richardwhiuk• 13 years ago

The entire telecoms industry is digging everything it can into absolutely not being that. It's entirely not a market they want to be any, as it's a commodity service and therefore yields poor profit.

rayiner2• 13 years ago

Start your own ISP and make it a dumb pipe.

drivebyacct22• 13 years ago

And everyone's favorite VPN is...?

dmschulman• 13 years ago

Was doing some reading up on this last night!

Torrentfreak had a handy article: http://torrentfreak.com/which-vpn-providers-really-take-anon...

rishimoko• 13 years ago

PIA for me. They take Bitcoin and XRP.

https://www.privateinternetaccess.com

drakeandrews• 13 years ago

XRP?

kintamanimatt3• 13 years ago

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

GhotiFish3• 13 years ago

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."

w1ntermute2• 13 years ago

I just use a seedbox. Check out Feral Hosting[0], they're great.

0: http://www.feralhosting.com/

autarch2• 13 years ago

The http://torguard.net/ SOCKS proxy service works quite well if all you care is bittorrent. They also offer a VPN product. They don't keep logs, which is something to look for in any decent VPN or SOCKS proxy.

shitlord• 13 years ago

If all you care about is bittorrent, why not just use private trackers for whatever you need?

hafifuyku• 13 years ago

https://put.io

mindcruzer• 13 years ago

https://airvpn.org/

mehrzad• 13 years ago

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.

tomp2• 13 years ago

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

gizmo686• 13 years ago

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.

nwh2• 13 years ago

Please don't torrent through the onion router.

oakwhiz• 13 years ago

Or, you could trade pieces only with trustworthy clients, based on a chain of trust.

tomp2• 13 years ago

Yes, but it's possible to have a network of peers that exchange data (almost) anonymously - TOR is a great example, but it is not scaleable - more users using it means it gets slower, not faster. AFAIK, there are protocols that have scalability built-in, like I2P and another bittorrent like protocol whose name I forgot; political measures such as this will increase their development and adoption and therefore make them useful and practical.

james4k2• 13 years ago

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

windexh8er• 13 years ago

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...

dangrossman4• 13 years ago

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.

UnoriginalGuy• 13 years ago

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...

reustle• 13 years ago

I feel the problem is they'd like to but their contracts with the cable companies prevent them from doing so.

joonix• 13 years ago

And the cable contracts provide basically guaranteed revenue as opposed to the risk of trying out online publishing. Execs want to cover their asses, not risk them. The potential payoff of going fully online is probably not high enough to justify risking their entire revenue base.

HBO is just a publisher, their expertise is sifting through and finding great creative talent to produce great shows. There's not a big difference between cable TV and internet, they share the same last mile, even. It just takes a long time for incumbents to adapt to change.

api2• 13 years ago

The game is protecting cable TV from total disruption by the Internet. Cable is the big cash cow. That's also why there's such a powerful, almost jihad-like effort to keep sports off the net. A lot of sports fans have cable to watch the game.

NoPiece• 13 years ago

Right, and it is not just the cable companies that are fighting the disruption. Television networks are now getting a major chunk of their income from cable companies by increasing the carry and retransmission fees. This revenue source has become much more important as ad revenue has declined. So a healthy cable company business is in their interest of the big media companies as well.

http://www.fiercecable.com/story/news-corp-reports-100-incre...

digitalengineer3• 13 years ago

Sports is the only thing right now that does not fear piracy. After all, there isn't much value in a day-old game. It needs to be a live broadcast. Torrents, newsgroups are always "yesterday news" to real sports fans.

dangrossman4• 13 years ago

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.

twmb• 13 years ago

I'm wondering if partnering with Netflix and taking the potential flak from TV would be worth it. I don't see the reason for HBO to have HBO Go other than the tie in with TV companies.

Would it be more profitable to pair up with Netflix or to sell their shows drm free easily online? I know I'd pay for that service in a heartbeat, and I wonder how many people who own cable (I don't) would switch to paying for the few channels they actually want. However, I don't want to buy cable for one or two channels / shows, so they lose out from all money I'd willingly give them. I don't want them to cancel an amazing show because of the perceived lack of profit (Spartacus) if they could in fact double their profit from people who would buy their shows directly.

darklajid2• 13 years ago

  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.

yuhong• 13 years ago

I wonder when exactly this will happen.

jburnat• 13 years ago

This seems like wishful thinking, though: most of the attempts of media companies to take on "disruptive" technologies end up looking fairly ridiculous.

waterlesscloud3• 13 years ago

Funny, I've been able to purchase and stream seasons 1 and 2 via Amazon. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00BHASVQC

Looks like HBO was able to take my money just fine.

GuiA• 13 years ago

OP is talking about season 3, how it'll inevitably get pirated, and how there's no alternative.

erichocean• 13 years ago

Still not for sale at any price

It's at Costco for $33.

CamperBob22• 13 years ago

Sigh. Yes, I can buy last season's shows at Costco. So?

biot3• 13 years ago

How is HBO "trying to legal threat everyone into submission"?

I've purchased seasons 1 and 2 of Game of Thrones on Bluray. I don't have cable yet HBO managed to take my money just fine. I bet those seasons are still heavily pirated despite being available for purchase, just as people pirate movies, TV shows, and music that has been available for legal purchase for years or decades. People just want to get shit without paying for it.

james4k2• 13 years ago

Well, you'll have to watch the next season 9 months or so after everyone else does.

zacharycohn2• 13 years ago

It's more complicated than sticking to outdated business practices. It's a classic innovator's dilemma.

People pay to subscribe to HBO (tv). If people could get a lot of that content by subscribing online, for cheaper, then lots of people will switch over. Which means HBO disrupts it's own cashcow moneymaker with something that makes less money.

AnthonyMouse2• 13 years ago

So who says it has to be "cheaper"? Charge the same amount for the streaming service as they get from the cable companies.

The problem is not HBO, the problem is Comcast. If HBO offered all their premium content a la carte over the internet for competitive prices, HBO would be fine. They would make even more money than they do now -- except that the cable companies would collectively go berserk and retaliate, the fear of which is what stops them.

If the DoJ had any interest in not looking like a collection of apathetic former RIAA lawyers there would be an antitrust probe into this sort of thing by now.

chimi• 13 years ago

This is a tired argument born out of ignorance. You have no provided no evidence that the pirates would pay for it if they could, nor have you provided any evidence that HBO would make more money selling Game of Thrones to individuals than selling their network to the cable companies as an exclusive option for consuming their content.

rohern6• 13 years ago

I am going to assume that you are an older person who has no real experience with "piracy" because the tone of your comment suggests a misconception about how it works. "Pirates" absolutely will pay. They pay to get the content as soon as it comes out and in high-definition.

There are large and influential companies that have come to recognize the piracy is the result of failures of distribution, not pricing. The prime example would be Valve, which since it made Steam its primary distribution channel, had paid very little attention to piracy (compare to EA). The CEO, Gabe Newell, has discussed this publicly, and you can find him discussing it on YouTube.

His example, which is particular to the gaming industry, but applies also to feature films, is that it is not reasonable to think that individuals who can afford $40/month internet connections and $2000 gaming rigs are pirating games because of money. They pirate games because they cannot get them legally conveniently and readily. This is particularly true in countries where English is not spoken. It takes months for a game to be released in Russia in Russian after the game is released in the United States. If a gamer can get a version in Russian faster via piracy, he's going to do it. The same rule holds for feature films, where again, release dates are not universal.

As to your second point, if you cannot see the common sense in the idea that the millions of American and foreign young people who do subscribe to cable or to HBO but who enjoy Game of Thrones want to be able to watch it online in high def the same way that they watch every other show, I think you're just trying to argue for the sake of it. Even if only 10% of these people paid to watch it on HBO/iTunes/Amazon, that is money that HBO is not getting now. Being able to pay a few bucks to watch the episode the same night that it is released in high-definition is well worth it. To take just one demographic, college students living in dorms do not have cable subscriptions. They all watch the show by streaming from sites that violate copyright or via file-sharing.

Perhaps you do not know this, but it is trivial to watch shows online. You can stream video from dozens of sites, with more of these appearing every month. These sites upload new episodes with hours of their original airing. That being said, Netflix has millions of subscribers, including very many young people who know how to watch shows like this. Young people also spend lots of money renting movies and television shows on iTunes that they could find for free online with a little effort. People pay for a high quality stream without the annoyance of pop-up ads and banners, and they like fast downloads and ease of use.

Here's Gabe talking about piracy, so don't take my word for it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLC_zZ5fqFk

CamperBob22• 13 years ago

What in the world makes you think I wouldn't rather give money to HBO and Showtime instead of hidemyass.com?

smsm422• 13 years ago

I'm not sure about HBO making more money one way or another, but there's ample evidence at least some people would pay for movies they are now downloading if they could download them in the same convenient manner with good quality and reasonable timeframe and price. I, personally, would gladly ditch my TV subscription and pay the same - or even slightly more - say, $50/month to an internet solution that would deliver me the same dozen or so of shows I am watching in a convenient manner. I'm not using 99% of the channels I'm paying for anyway. In fact, I am regularly checking current offers from various places - Hulu, Amazon, etc. - but none can offer enough coverage and convenience for me to go with them. And if my brain-dead DVR (my punishment for being cheap and getting into Dish contract I can't wait to end) misses an episode or they decide to run a baseball game over the time and the brain-dead DVR doesn't know how to adjust, I'm pretty much out of options when online solutions won't feature it for a year or so and I can't continue watching the series since whole story arc will be messed up. That unless I do the obvious thing and just download it - because unlike what Dish or Amazon could offer, somehow those pirate guys actually can deliver convenient, easy to use and reliable way to get the content to me, and I could watch it anywhere any way I like. I'd pay money for something like that if somebody would bother to do it for me for money.

shmerl• 13 years ago

When they'll start selling their videos without any DRM and in timely manner (and not months after the release) - then you can say they are actually competing with pirates. Until then - they aren't even trying to compete.

beedogs11• 13 years ago

HBO programs are one of the main things I pirate. Their distribution channels are the modern equivalent of the horse-and-buggy.

I'm not about to wait a year to watch shows here in Australia that aired ages ago in the US. Get with the fucking times, HBO.

agotterer• 13 years ago

It actually just came on DVD a few days ago (Feb 19th). http://www.amazon.com/Game-Thrones-Complete-Blu-ray-Digital/...

guelo• 13 years ago

Or HBO could follow the business model it thinks it's most profitable. You're not entitled to watch Game of Thrones.

api2• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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).

sokrates• 13 years ago

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

dangrossman4• 13 years ago

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.

Beltiras• 13 years ago

Because ISPs are the same corporations as the content owners.

yaddayadda• 13 years ago

Big brother is simply helping oldthinkers crimestop[1].

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

mgkimsal• 13 years ago

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.

EGreg• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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.

pbhjpbhj4• 13 years ago

>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.

ams6110• 13 years ago

Almost all residential ISPs operate under government-granted monopolies, though. If this were not the case it's a lot less likely that "Hollywood" could get thousands of smaller competing ISPs on board.

adventured2• 13 years ago

No government?

The telcos are government controlled, sponsored, and protected corporations. The entire industry is practically one giant government sponsored monopoly system.

We live in an era in which the US Government has the power to directly control every single aspect of the economy. Either directly or indirectly via threats. There are laws on the books to dictate everything and anything, using one agency or another.

This is nothing but government in action. Classic state sponsored corporatism, aka fascism lite.

We have a Hollywood sponsored President for crying out loud. They own him, every bit as much as people liked to claim big oil owned George W. And we have a VP that likes to break international law to fulfill Hollywood's demanding lobbyists.

aba_sababa• 13 years ago

> We have a Hollywood sponsored President

wat

zanny2• 13 years ago

One of the primary reasons this can even happen is because all the internet infrastructure in the US is already government granted monopoly on the local level. It isn't free market at all, which is why ISP's can collude like this and get away with it. Nobody has an option.

Though I am usually libertarian, I don't know a good way to see the mass deployment of essential 21st technologies like fiber / high speed rail / automated transport without the traditional forced violence method employed by government. You won't get those gifted through inheritance and chance with obscene wealth offering to build the next generation of infrastructure.

digitalengineer3• 13 years ago

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/

wmf6• 13 years ago

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

digitalengineer3• 13 years ago

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?

kostya-kow• 13 years ago

How does this compare with Tor network?

thefreeman3• 13 years ago

the real answer is seedboxes and VPN's, which are readily available for reasonable prices

javajosh2• 13 years ago

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?

kaybe2• 13 years ago

Hm, the Chinese government doesn't endorse that kind of technology?

javajosh2• 13 years ago

The Chinese make 'em, they don't use 'em. You know, like iPads.

wmf6• 13 years ago

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.

pbhjpbhj4• 13 years ago

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

cjh_3• 13 years ago

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/

kaybe2• 13 years ago

Crunchyroll does however only give access to some shows depending on your region. Makes it mostly unusable for me, sadly.

cjh_3• 13 years ago

I'm sorry to hear that, I made the jump from 'it works in New Zealand' to 'it works everywhere'.

creamyhorror• 13 years ago

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_3• 13 years ago

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.

rorrr• 13 years ago

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.

zanny2• 13 years ago

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.

martinced• 13 years ago

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.

bigphishy• 13 years ago

Here is a thorough guide for covering your ass and using darknets https://pay.reddit.com/r/evolutionReddit/comments/193m6k/six...

edouard1234567• 13 years ago

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

goostavos• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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

chucknibbleston• 13 years ago

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.

adventured2• 13 years ago

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).

D9u2• 13 years ago

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...

beedogs11• 13 years ago

Sometimes I get the feeling that the second half of my life is going to be a lot shittier than the first.

a1a• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

>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).

D9u2• 13 years ago

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?

acabal2• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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.

acabal2• 13 years ago

That's part of the problem, but the other part is that regular people just don't care. I don't think they will care until it's too late, and even when it's too late they might not care to realize it. (I.e. in the future where the internet only works for Comcast-approved sites, and folks are happy with it because at least they can pay Comcast $80/month to watch Game of Thrones in their browser.)

Technology has to step in and make anonymity and encryption basic on some fundamental browser, os, or protocol level, so that the average user doesn't even need to actively search out anonymity solutions.

I don't know what the answer is. I suppose if it were that easy, we would have figured it out by now.

Edit: VPNs are still not a perfect solution, because your activity on them could be logged. (The TOS says they don't keep logs? Then you're just trusting the company to do what they say in their TOS, because when the government comes knocking it'll go right out the window.)

ericabiz• 13 years ago

Plenty of these exist on the marketplace. Personally, I use HideMyAss (http://hidemyass.com/vpn/) (no affiliation other than a happy customer.) I use it for privacy reasons, although I'm sure there are plenty of folks who also use it for downloading. It's an OpenVPN client with its own configured servers and a friendly, easy-to-use GUI for Windows and Mac. It is so fast that sometimes I forget I have it on when I'm doing normal web surfing.

It's also come in handy for me with troubleshooting. For instance, once I was able to track down an issue with Cloudflare's CDN where customers in certain parts of the world could not access a website, by using it to appear as though I was coming from that area of the world. Cloudflare support confirmed the issue and fixed it once I was able to screencap with my home connection vs. my HideMyAss proxy IP in a different "location."

rdl• 13 years ago

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)

thefreeman3• 13 years ago

A seedbox is really the way to go. There are definitely a few additional steps you will need to get used to between you and your content, but its definitely worth it for peace of mind. There are also some nice benefits like being able to stream most media on demand rather then waiting for it to download.

A couple keys: 1) Get an extension for your browser that will automatically submit .torrent files to your seedbox. 2) Get a good multi threaded download manager for transferring from your seedbox to your pc. Regular browser downloads will not max our your connection. One linux I use aria2c (command line) and for windows, "free download manager" cannot be beaten.

w1ntermute2• 13 years ago

You don't need a browser extension if you use the Deluge thin client, and it's a lot more functional.

oijaf8882• 13 years ago

Why will regular browser downloads not max out your connection? I've downloaded stuff via browser downloads at > 100Mbps without trouble.

SkyMarshal• 13 years ago

There's a really thorough post about CAS, and available countermeasures, at reddit:

http://www.reddit.com/r/evolutionReddit/comments/193m6k/six_...

TLDR: VPN's, I2P, VPS's, Usenet, Retroshare, Alternative ISPs, and spreading awareness of CAS and its countermeasures via active grassroots outreach and communication.

drivebyacct22• 13 years ago

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.

smsm422• 13 years ago

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?

dzamie• 13 years ago

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.

pbhjpbhj4• 13 years ago

> "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?!?

sexyalterego• 13 years ago

This was originally a Daily Dot story. Mashable just syndicated it. http://www.dailydot.com/news/copyright-alerts-system-launch-...

New Anti-Piracy System to Hit U.S. Internet Users on Monday

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