Uk Bitorrenting

[Miknal]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8381097.stm

"ACS: Law recently obtained two High Court orders that require ISPs to hand over the names and addresses of the account holders for 30,000 IP addresses, a number which can identify a computer on the internet. It is currently preparing three more."

A lot of bittorrent stuff has been in the news recently, which is starting to get a bit worrying. So what can people do to protect themselves?

I know nothing about this sort of stuff.

 

[blueshift]

So what can people do to protect themselves?

Assuming that someone was using bit torrent to circumvent copyright law, the best thing they could do is setup their BT client to tunnel all of their bandwidth through the Tor onion router, which is a very strong proxy service. But I wouldn't recommend downloading any large files (through BT or otherwise) through Tor because it's an abuse of the service. It's already slow enough as it is for people who are using it for it's intended purpose (anonymous web browsing) without people hogging all the bandwidth for frivolous things like downloading music.

 

[craigix]

You could probably just pay to subscribe to a proxy server which keeps no records.

 

[atomicthumbs]

You could probably just pay to subscribe to a proxy server which keeps no records.

But then you'd have a record of payment somewhere. I wonder if there's a way to use Bittorrent through Tor?

 

[Orkie]

So what can people do to protect themselves?

Pay for stuff like you are meant to?

 

[blueshift]

I wonder if there's a way to use Bittorrent through Tor?

Yes, but it's an abuse of the service. Just like when someone leaves an entire bowl of candy out on Halloween and one person dumps the entire thing in their bag and walks off.

That being said, if someone were using BT to circumvent copyright law they could do several things to lessen their chances of getting caught. Such as throttling back downloading speeds during peak hours. Only downloading late at night or early in the morning when there are less people on the network would give their ISP less reason to be looking into why they're using so much bandwidth and therefore less reason to send them a letter asking them to cut back on the downloading. Also, since newer media is more profitable than older media, copyright protection agencies are probably more likely to go after someone for downloading say Spiderman 3, which came out two years ago than they are to go after someone who's downloading Easy Rider, which was came out forty years ago.

Of course, if your that paranoid the best way to not get caught downloading pirated material would be to not download pirated material at all. For example, you can legally download the Last Man on Earth with Vincent Price because it's in the public domain. Pretty good movie actually.

 

[Esn]

You guys in the UK now have a shady unelected official with the power of creating and enforcing new punitive measures with no parliamentary oversight. I just hope it's not contagious.

So what can people do to protect themselves?

Pay for stuff like you are meant to?

And if you use it to get material that cannot be obtained legally in your region, tough luck. Spend days finding an obscure store in another language that will ship to your country, use Google Translate to navigate the credit card payment system, and pay the $40 shipping charges like you're meant to. Or wait 5-10 years until some company does a localization and buy it then.

Anyway, I don't feel too sad for some of the rightsholders. They get profits of €112,500 from getting 150,000 legitimate customers to buy one of their songs - or from sending just 5000 letters to alleged pirates (source).

 

[fischju2000]

You could do a tunnel, there are VPN services like The Pirate Bay's Relakks. But if you are going to pay, €15 a month for unlimited newsgroups access is the safest way. Don't listen to anybody who says PeerGuardian is good protection.

 

[OrR]

You could probably just pay to subscribe to a proxy server which keeps no records.

But then you'd have a record of payment somewhere. I wonder if there's a way to use Bittorrent through Tor?

I don't know any country where paying for usage of a proxy server would be illegal. They won't know what you use it for, and there are legal uses, so what can the state do? Search your home preemtively because they suspect you are a terrorist? Unlikely, but perhaps now becoming possible in some places, so it might be a good idea to encrypt your stuff if you are living in a less free country like the UK or Germany. I've been thinking about getting an Ipredator account because I want to keep using the internet. IMO, we should all switch over to Freenet for filesharing but it seems to be hard to convince people. :-/

 

[blueshift]

You could probably just pay to subscribe to a proxy server which keeps no records.

But then you'd have a record of payment somewhere. I wonder if there's a way to use Bittorrent through Tor?

I don't know any country where paying for usage of a proxy server would be illegal. They won't know what you use it for, and there are legal uses, so what can the state do? Search your home preemtively because they suspect you are a terrorist? Unlikely, but perhaps now becoming possible in some places, so it might be a good idea to encrypt your stuff if you are living in a less free country like the UK or Germany. I've been thinking about getting an Ipredator account because I want to keep using the internet. IMO, we should all switch over to Freenet for filesharing but it seems to be hard to convince people. :-/

I think what Atomicthumb was saying was: if some copyright enforcement agency spotted an IP address illegally downloading a movie all the government would have to do is track the IP address to the proxy service the person was using, than subpoena that proxy company to give out the name of the person on their network who was downloading that movie. Of course, this is assuming that the proxy company kept records of what all their customers were doing. Which any good proxy service would not do. But I don't know what the laws are about such things. Maybe in some countries (or even in the US? I don't know) proxy services have to keep records of what their customers are doing.

 

[jlepley]

How about cyber-cafes or other publicly accessible hotspots? I'm pretty sure a lot of them don't keep track of who uses them.

 

[blueshift]

How about cyber-cafes or other publicly accessible hotspots? I'm pretty sure a lot of them don't keep track of who uses them.

If you were uber paranoid you could install an app to spoof your MAC address to make it harder yet for them to track you. I remember reading on a forum about how some guy got free Internet access at a hotspot that cut off service unless you paid for some sort of time card after 20 minutes. But he got past it by setting up a script to create a new MAC address every 19 minutes so the server would think that it was a new laptop connecting and thus continually give him 20 extra minutes of web access.

 

[second exodous]

How about cyber-cafes or other publicly accessible hotspots? I'm pretty sure a lot of them don't keep track of who uses them.

If you were uber paranoid you could install an app to spoof your MAC address to make it harder yet for them to track you. I remember reading on a forum about how some guy got free Internet access at a hotspot that cut off service unless you paid for some sort of time card after 20 minutes. But he got past it by setting up a script to create a new MAC address every 19 minutes so the server would think that it was a new laptop connecting and thus continually give him 20 extra minutes of web access.

Ha, that's funny, we have hotspots like that in the US, I can't believe I have never thought of doing that. I've changed a MAC address before but I never thought of making a script to do it automatically.

 

[WizardStan]

And if you use it to get material that cannot be obtained legally in your region, tough luck.

You could accept the fact that you can't have everything, move on, and find something else that you can actually purchase. There's no real shortage of movies, music, or software anywhere in the modern world.
"But I want to play XYZ!" you might whine. You, sir, are a corporate whore, succumbing to the hype of marketing. Shrug off that mantel! Join the revolution! Internet radio and open source software for all! FOR FREE!
and so on and so forth.

 

[Fishbong]

Nevermind, i confused somthing.

 

[craigix]

With my shitty 1.5mb connection is is faster to just buy obscure dvds on ebay.

Seriously you can get almost any film for like £1. It's not worth downloading anymore.

Plus more and more is available on youtube and iplayer now. Or just search around for websites which link to streamed films. Loads of ways to avoid torrents.

 

[Esn]

"But I want to play XYZ!" you might whine. You, sir, are a corporate whore, succumbing to the hype of marketing.

Those who search out little-known material that cannot be bought in stores are corporate whores who succumb to the hype of marketing. Gotcha.

Anyway, the specific example that I was talking about earlier was, believe it or not, when I tried to legally buy a DVD (from Canada) that was only sold in the Czech Republic. I thought that the European Union meant the lowering of trade barriers, but you wouldn't know it from how hard it was to find any Czech store that would ship internationally (actually true of many former Eastern Bloc countries...).

 

[WizardStan]

Those who search out little-known material that cannot be bought in stores are corporate whores who succumb to the hype of marketing. Gotcha.

If you want to put it that way, I suppose. Doesn't quite convey the full effect, and is a little vague.
I was thinking more along the lines of "those who go to great lengths and costs to obtain something on the simple basis that they want it, and then complain and/or acquire it through questionably legal means instead of accepting the fact that not everyone can have everything they want" but didn't feel it was necessary to say all that until you intentionally missed the point.

 

[gibberish]

there is no point trying to stay safe. if they want to find you, they will.
the more ridiculous measures you take to try and remain anonymous, the more suspicious you look when they eventually "find" you.

just do what you want, safe in the knowledge that the chances of actually being caught are probably about as good as the chances of winning the lottery.

 

[Esn]

Those who search out little-known material that cannot be bought in stores are corporate whores who succumb to the hype of marketing. Gotcha.

If you want to put it that way, I suppose. Doesn't quite convey the full effect, and is a little vague.
I was thinking more along the lines of "those who go to great lengths and costs to obtain something on the simple basis that they want it, and then complain and/or acquire it through questionably legal means instead of accepting the fact that not everyone can have everything they want" but didn't feel it was necessary to say all that until you intentionally missed the point.

Well, that's the point, really. What would have been the cause of "great lengths and costs" previously, these new file-sharing technologies can make pretty simple to obtain. They open up new markets for certain products that didn't exist before. It's moving so quickly that the rights-holders often are very late in realizing it and providing legal alternatives, and some of them vehemently fight this thing. But I think that eventually, they'll find a way to make obscene profits from it, just like they found a way with radio and TV (which were also largely non-commercial & vehemently opposed by established industries for the first part of their existence).

Anyway, I think critiquing someone for cultural tourism is a little odd. Whatever floats your boat, though. I trust that your cultural tastes are entirely mainstream, of course.