RIP Filesharing
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| tracyanne Feb 02, 2012 5:32 PM EDT |
We knew each other for such a short time, but you were murdered by assasins who my never face trial. You were so sweet and now you are gone. |
| Khamul Feb 02, 2012 5:57 PM EDT |
This certainly puts any filesharing site like Megaupload, RapidShare, Uploaded.to, Filesonic, etc. in danger, but it still doesn't really address torrents. Centralization is always more vulnerable than decentralization due to the single-point-of-failure phenomenon; all the govt has to do is shut down one site and tons of users are thwarted in whatever sharing they were doing. Of course, this is only if that site is within the jurisdiction of the govt (it doesn't work if the servers are in Russia or Vanuatu). But torrenting is very different, because it's peer-to-peer, so you have to go after every individual file-sharer separately, which is orders of magnitude more work. You can go after the torrent-sharing websites (like Pirate Bay), but that's hard too, because they're usually in other jurisdictions, and plus, it's easier to host such a site in someplace far-away like Russia, as bandwidth isn't so important for a torrent site as it is a file-sharing site: each torrent is only 10-20kB, instead of tens or hundreds of megabytes. The HTML code viewed by each visitor probably consumers far more bandwidth than the actual torrents downloaded. |
| tracyanne Feb 02, 2012 6:13 PM EDT |
I New Zealand, right now, Torent sharing is illegal. If people are flagged as torrent downloading more than 3 times they receive a warning from their ISP. If they ignore the warning they lose their internet connection. Yes that's right the NZ government has made the ISP thier internet police. The ISPs are responsible, and if they don't comply they lose thier license to act as an ISP. This is what the RIAA and the MPAA want and get through secret IP agreements such as ACTA. |
| BernardSwiss Feb 02, 2012 8:48 PM EDT |
So if I were in New Zealand, I'd be in big trouble right now, just for torrenting Debian, Mint, and Slackware? |
| tracyanne Feb 02, 2012 10:07 PM EDT |
Chances are, Bernard, although as I'm not there, I don't know the details. It could be that they install monitoring software on Windows and Mac, or they might be looking for signatures of file sharing software commonly associated with "piracy", or ports commonly used. It could be that if you use SSL, or even port 80, that they can't know. |
| Khamul Feb 02, 2012 10:14 PM EDT |
That's pretty messed-up. Torrents are easily the best way to get Linux distros; why download 4.4GB from some overtaxed server instead of just getting it from peers? As for for software, ports, etc., the software for torrent downloading is the same no matter what you use it for: Azureus, Ktorrent, and several other popular clients (I recommend Ktorrent myself, it's really one of the better-done KDE apps from what I've seen, unlike the mess they've made of Kontact/Kmail, though that seems to be resolving). But for ports, AFAIK you can switch to different ports I believe, but I don't think you can use SSL or anything like that, as that's not part of the protocol. Switching to different ports than the standard ones might throw them off, unless they're doing deep-packet inspection which would probably show the traffic to be BT. At this rate, within 20 years I expect Russia will be the freest industrialized country in the world. Except maybe for Switzerland, but they're probably going to be really picky about who they let in (it's not like they have tons of space to accommodate millions of new immigrants, with a total national population about as big as the metro area I'm living in). |
| mbaehrlxer Feb 02, 2012 10:43 PM EDT |
tracyanne: according to this article: http://www.nbr.co.nz/article/isp-says-new-copyright-law-effe...
Quoting:The Act states that an IPAP, or ISP, is required to send infringement notices from rights owners to identified account holders and is not required to monitor user activity, according to Telecom, TelstraClear and Orcon.the linked article: http://www.nbr.co.nz/article/telcos-ready-three-strikes-law-... also says: Quoting:Under the Act, IPAPs, usually Internet Service Providers (ISPs), are required to match an identified IP address to an account holder if a copyright owner sends the ISP a notice alleging infringement.it's bad enough but that looks like as the ISPs are not going to act by themselves. otherwise they'd probably just block torrent connections. so using torrent for free software is still safe. greetings, eMBee. |
| tracyanne Feb 02, 2012 11:09 PM EDT |
Thanks eMBee. I'll let my son know. He's under the impression that it's more draconian. Whereas it's probably about the same as Australia. |
| JaseP Feb 03, 2012 10:11 AM EDT |
How does a system like that stand up against VPNs??? What's to prevent someone from "down under" from setting up a VPN to an offshore site, and torrenting from there??? |
| Khamul Feb 03, 2012 1:13 PM EDT |
@JaseP: Other than the volume of traffic looking like a torrent rather than anything else, I don't see how. And the volume can be shaped by setting your upload rate limit low, so it looks like you're just downloading something big. |
| tracyanne Feb 03, 2012 5:51 PM EDT |
I don't think it's actually a problem, not the problem he thought it was, anyway. From what eMBee posted it's similar to Austalia. |
| JaseP Feb 03, 2012 5:54 PM EDT |
Personally, I think ANY censorship or restrictions are a problem. |
| tracyanne Feb 03, 2012 6:17 PM EDT |
I agree JasP, but it's not the problem it seemed, and in practice it's not really a problem at all. |
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