Downloading in the UK

[Gavriel Black]

For those of you in the UK, this is something that the government are thinking of implementing.

You've been downloading! haha you don't have internetz anymoar! (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7240234.stm)

I really can't see how they'll police it.

And remember, downloading is bad and not endorsed by the GRN! mkay? cheers kids =p

[Reaper]

For those of you in the UK, this is something that the government are thinking of implementing.

You've been downloading! haha you don't have internetz anymoar! (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7240234.stm)

I really can't see how they'll police it.

And remember, downloading is bad and not endorsed by the GRN! mkay? cheers kids =p

No ISP can activaly view what your downloading, as that would be in breach of their own confidentiality agreements to their customers, but that doesn't stop them accounting for how much bandwidth is used in sending and receiving data packets, over a period of a week or month, some ISP like virgin have put Target caps on most of its services in make it fair on other customers, so for isntance My ISP provides me with a 4Mbit connection, but have put a 800Mbyte target, so if i hit that during the hours of 4pm-9pm(peak usage hours), i will automatically have my connection speed dropped to 1Mbit for the duration of 5 hours.

but who's to say what i am downloading, if i was to connect and listen to EVE-RADIO for the whole day i would probably reach a good 3-400 Mbyte total download. but if ISP's can't activly see what is come down your line, how can they police it at all, otherwise alot of people are going to be banned without good reason to be. just for having a high bandwidth usage. Will that mean all Internat Radio stations will be banned? even the legel ones!

[Rob]

Well, it's easy to monitor file-sharing streams, really - bittorrents have a rather specific port range, as far as I know. So it'd be perfectly feasible to see that someone is using a torrent program, but not what they're downloading. That's where things get a bit trickier. Of course, you can always encrypt your files - and if people started doing that, the question would be whether or not the ISPs (given that they'd be the police) could demand of users to decrypt their files.

There is also, obviously, the problem with free music vs pirated music. Several artists give their music away for free - but it'd be up to the ISPs to check whether or not it was a legal or illegal MP3 that was downloaded.

Oh, and I guess privacy concerns are an issue as well.

Much easier for the regular user to pay for their stuff... probably cheaper in the long run. Besides, we should be seeing some pretty interesting sites later this year. I'll say no more, but for music lovers, it'll be heaven. (Legal heaven, even)

[DJ_Wiggles]

Herd this on the news on the way to work this morning, now the way that i can see they impliment this is that they have a list of the IP'S that are bad and naughty "Torrent tracker sites" etc and if you connect to those ips well then your are at risk


on a side note anyone on virgin media who is on the "large" 4meg package should head to http://www.virginmedia.com/customers/even-faster.php and http://allyours.virginmedia.com/html/existingcustomers/faster/schedule.html as they are upgrading the 4meg service to 10meg over the coming months much the same as they did the 10 to 20 meg

[Rob]

The problem is that even by having a blacklist, they risk putting the banstick on someone that wasn't doing anything illegal; there are several legal torrents even on the "naughty" IPs.

Personally I don't think this idea will lead anywhere. But I guess anything can happen.

[MrBlades]

ISP's would be hard pressed to monitor individual connections in order to police what their users are accessing. However, certain media organisations can easily trace a users IP to a media source (shared via a torrent or on a fixed ftp location) and determine if it's a copyright infringment or not. Once they have verified the content is copyrighted, they are then in a position to get in touch with the infringing IP's service provider and make the ISP's aware of the illegal activity.

Now, government legislation may force ISP's to issue warnings and force disconnections on those that break the law in this way, but it won't happen any time soon since they will have to establish an official regulatory body (this wont fall under Ofcom's domain as they would be inadequate to manage it) and then force a change in the law to make it able to penalise ISP's for allowing it to go on.

So, not doable short term. However, in 2-3 years if it gains momentum, it will probably go into effect.

Downside of this for ISP's is that they will have harshly treat their customer base in future as well as impliment new technologies to be able to automatically issue warnings for infringement by their users - an additional expense they will have to pass onto their userbase.

End result, one of two things will happen. ISP's will be forced to compete even harder with eachother (having to raise prices to ballance the new legislation) or begin talks with digital download merchants in order to help their user base legally access this material, for a reasonable price.

Further in the future, this will eventually break down the barriers between traditional media merchandising and do away with the US vs Rest Of The World with material release to the public.

Potentially, this sort of thing, if it becomes common world wide will enable a much wider broadening of products and services becoming available to the consumer at a much quicker rate than currently. Think about it, getting new film and TV releases days or weeks after a US release rather than months or in some cases, years.

It's both a good and bad thing, but definately the first step to globalising entertainment.

[Whitey]

I watch BBC iPlayer a hell of a lot, as I can watch it when I want and not tied down to a fixed time with the TV.
Point being, this must chew up a huge amount of download. Then theres the 128kbps on the audio streams (when listening to radio)
How are people suppose to use these new legal services, if when push comes to shove, these new services may use as much bandwidth as downloading a few albums or a film a day.... also, do these services work when a connection has been capped? I've heard reports that they dont, spec if your on the crappy packages.......
..... and if you have your internet cut off altogether, then nowt will work anyway.

just think...... No Internet... :eek:

Cant see it myself

[Reaper]

just think...... No Internet... :eek:

Cant see it myself

Yeah the government and military create the internet, they simply are regaining control over its populous, can you imagine a world where the internet was never invented, we'd still be clawing at the next Microsoft and Apple OS's to be released and buying top shelf Porn. :D

[DJ_BEO]

I watch BBC iPlayer a hell of a lot, as I can watch it when I want and not tied down to a fixed time with the TV.
Point being, this must chew up a huge amount of download. Then theres the 128kbps on the audio streams (when listening to radio)
How are people suppose to use these new legal services, if when push comes to shove, these new services may use as much bandwidth as downloading a few albums or a film a day.... also, do these services work when a connection has been capped? I've heard reports that they dont, spec if your on the crappy packages.......
..... and if you have your internet cut off altogether, then nowt will work anyway.

just think...... No Internet... :eek:

Cant see it myself

Its not so much bandwidth as it is Ports and packet construction that can give away what your doing. I do network monitoring and deal with this all the time. Of course I'm just looking at customer networks for malicious and unauthorized activity (So don't look at porn at work). If your interested in what happens check out www.Snort.org. Now on an ISP level it would be a nightmare to physicaly monitor and would be reduced to redflag and blacklist scenarios. It would be crude and the risk of false positives would be high. So it becomes academic of how much both the ISPs and customers would deal with before they had enough.

[BlackLight]

If this kind of thing comes into effect in the UK, then people will simply find a way around it. We ban Myspace and Facebook at work, people start looking for proxies - there's no difference here.

Someone will come up with a clever way to proxy the trackers and/or spoof torrent data... hell, my copy of utorrent has the option to encrypt data being sent back and forth between itself and other utorrent instances on the net to avoid packet sniffing...

As someone has already said above - how is an ISP gonna determine copyright-v-freely available data? There's so many grey areas in this too - like tv shows : copyright material in the show, but sent out to anyone with a receiver. It's the same as waaaay back when, when everyone taped programs off the telly onto their VCR.

Yep, am rambling, but it's mainly at the fact that governments jump on the bandwagon waving the 'anti-piracy' flag, and yet have NO idea what the hell they are talking about.

[caff]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7246403.stm

it hasnt even been finalised and were kicking up a fuss... REVOLUTION!!!

[Whitey]

Bob Hoskins - Circa 1996: "It's good to talk"

[Rob]

Let's hide all our porn films in jpegs again!

[KMonarQ7]

Comcast is getting reamed here in the US about their throttling practices. It appears that the US House of Reps. has introduced a bill which will require ISP to explicitly NOT cap the downloads of paying customers.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23147101/

[Gavriel Black]

Comcast is getting reamed here in the US about their throttling practices. It appears that the US House of Reps. has introduced a bill which will require ISP to explicitly NOT cap the downloads of paying customers.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23147101/

good, not trying to sound funny, but my fellow sky (my isp) customers can go to hell lol.

When I pay for my internets, I expect my internets, lots of internets and I want my internets NAO!

ty

[DJ_Satal]

Rob mentioned somthing interesting coming.

I too have heard rumours of something very very interesting coming soon!

Im sure you all know what im talking about, if not try to catch me in IRC :)

[Shnooter]

Comcast is getting reamed here in the US about their throttling practices. It appears that the US House of Reps. has introduced a bill which will require ISP to explicitly NOT cap the downloads of paying customers.


Another thing that relates to MonarQ's post and other ISPs is this, some more good news :D

http://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-devs-introduce-comcast-busting-encryption-080215/

[Ion]

if your caught downloading illegal files i think the internet being revoked is the least of your problems

that said if they are just going on the basis on throttling/banning people that just download shedloads then thats just wrong