Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 15th Mar 2012 22:06 UTC
"If you download potentially copyrighted software, videos or music, your Internet service provider has been watching, and they're coming for you. Specifically, they're coming for you on Thursday, July 12. That's the date when the nation's largest ISPs will all voluntarily implement a new anti-piracy plan that will engage network operators in the largest digital spying scheme in history, and see some users' bandwidth completely cut off until they sign an agreement saying they will not download copyrighted materials." One day, years from now, historians are going to debate whether this was the point of no return.
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Member since:2011-01-28
I'm not sure what level of invasiveness they'll be allowed to use. It may be "only" monitoring traffic passively. (I say "only" here with great hesitation, can't believe we're living through an age when corporate spying on private communications is legal and acceptable). If it is passive, then encryption will be 100% safe against it.
On the other hand, if they're going to add participating nodes and tamper with packets to perform man in the middle attacks, then unauthenticated P2P encryption is useless since a client cannot know whether it's communicating to a real peer or the ISP's spy proxy. To resolve this, peers would need to authenticate using out of band (non-p2p) mechanisms. Conceivably centralized services could provide that authentication, but then there'd be little stopping the spies themselves from being authenticated.
On the other hand, tor proxies and the like do provide plausible deniability. I do wonder if tor users will have their internet service shut down on account of third party activities? If so, people using tor for perfectly legal private communications might be effectively prohibited keeping their traffic private in the future.
Member since:2005-08-18
if they're going to add participating nodes and tamper with packets to perform man in the middle attacks
Hmm...you are right. I thought the torrent p2p encryption was better than it apparently is. It's just a fancy way to obfuscate the traffic.
On the other hand, tor proxies and the like do provide plausible deniability.
I'm just waiting for the MPAA/RIAA mafia to lobby for making encryption illegal. Well, illegal for private citizens, that is.
Member since:2006-06-09
* They'll have to capture enough packets to find out exactly what it is.
Indeed, it can be pretty tricky to operate on individual packets. But every torrent and individual files in it have a hash advertised together by client, which is guaranteed to be rather unique. And probably, together with a couple of chunks of copyrighted data downloaded from users computer, can be enough to prove something beyond reasonable doubt or at least grant a search warrant, for example.
* They'll have to find out what license this material is under.
They probably will focus on top torrents and newly released material.
* They'll have to find out if you're allowed to download this or not. For example, maybe you purchased a legal copy that is distributed via BitTorrent.
Not, if it is a CAM or TS downloaded well before actual release to the public.
Features
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OSNews is a sponsor of this year's O'Reilly OSCON in Portland, Oregon, USA. A lucky OSNews reader will win a free three-day pass, including two tutorials days. To win the pass, post a comment on this story saying something about Open Source Software or OSCON. We'll pick a winner at random next week. If you don't have an OSNews account, you may email us your entry. Part of the conference is the 9th annual Open Source Awards, and today the 16th is the deadline for nominations. If you'd like to nominate an outstanding open source contributor, do it here. Read on for more information about OSCON. Update: The 20% discount code for OSNews readers is "OSN."
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Linked by Thom Holwerda on 04/24/13 22:24 UTC
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Linked by Thom Holwerda on 04/18/13 11:21 UTC
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Member since:
2005-08-18
It's not illegal to download copyrighted material, it all depends on the license of that material.
The logistics for figuring out if what you're downloading is illegal and violating someone's copyright is rather involving, at the ISP level.
* They'll have to capture enough packets to find out exactly what it is.
* They'll have to find out what license this material is under.
* They'll have to find out if you're allowed to download this or not. For example, maybe you purchased a legal copy that is distributed via BitTorrent.
Of course, they'll probably just wing it and do something like considering all torrent downloads illegal.