When Newspeak Attacks
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University Bans BitTorrent to Stop Flood of Infringement Notices * TorrentFreak
A university in Canada has taken sweeping action in an effort to stem the tide of piracy notices. The University of Calgary says that after banning BitTorrent usage on several networks, infringement notices immediately dropped by 90%. People wanting access to the protocol will now need to apply for...
FTFA:
With opportunities for generating revenue piling up, the volume of notices has continued to increase, causing headaches for users and ISPs alike. The phenomenon has also been felt at the University of Calgary, which acts as a service provider to thousands of students.
Inevitably, some of those students have been using their connections to obtain music and movies for free, which has led to the university receiving large numbers of notices.
Yes, downloading content without paying for it is totally "obtaining music and movies for free" and not theft. And going after people who are stealing from you is "[an opportunity] for generating revenue"
TorrentFreak -
finitions for the active downloaderthief.
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Why so much downvote on the OP?
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@pydsigner Seems to be en vogue lately.
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Just use a VPN. In fact, anyone on a college network should use one.
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@izzion said in When Newspeak Attacks:
TorrentFreak -
finitions for the active downloader thief.TF is pro-torrent. In other news, Fox news doesn't seem to like that Obama fellow very much. :/
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@izzion I actually don't think that such activity is illegal in Canada. Soooooo, they are just fishing by sending the notices to Canada.
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@Polygeekery said in When Newspeak Attacks:
@izzion I actually don't think that such activity is illegal in Canada. Soooooo, they are just fishing by sending the notices to Canada.
Correct.
In fact, we pay a tax to
compensate the artists for lost revenueline the pockets of the media conglomerates who have never once passed a single cent to the artists to date on blank media, hard drives and mp3 players specifically for this.The
shit sucking assholesmusic conglomerates in recent time bought and paid for a law letting them send John Doe C&D to ISPs, universities and other large networks, and those must be passed on to the account holder.Now, if I were a university, and the shit-sucking assholes (whoops, forgot the polite del/ins on that one) were harassing my IT department and blatantly abusing a law-- well, I just might be tempted to tell the shit-sucking assholes to fuck right the fuck off.
And if they threaten a prolonged, expensive legal action, I'll remind them that I'm in charge of a university-- with a law school-- with dozens/hundreds of lawyers and lawyers to-be-- who all, being students-- have a very keen hankering for some Social Justice. And who would love some in-court time on their resume.
Throw as many highly-paid lawyers as you want my way. I've got tenfold pro-bono students waiting to take you on. And they're paying ME.
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@Lorne-Kates said in When Newspeak Attacks:
Throw as many highly-paid lawyers as you want my way. I've got tenfold pro-bono students waiting to take you on. And they're paying ME.
Do I need to tell a software developer quantity ≠quality?
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@PleegWat True, but you really just need to scare them into thinking that it won't be worth it.
The justice system works a lot like nuclear deterrence.
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@anonymous234 Or, indeed, that you can outspend them. A lot of
shakedowncease and desist letters involve implied threats of lawyer-induced bankruptcy along the lines ofLook at our expensive layers. We might not have a case, but we have a lot of money and can afford to keep paying them until way beyond the point that you have spent all your money on legal representation. And then we'll carry on until you give in and pay us. Really, it's going to be much cheaper for you to pay up now. We won't tell anyone you did it.
If the counter argument is
So what? My law students are free, and have effectively infinite time to devote to this. It will cost me nothing to fight you in court until your vampires have sucked the husk of your corpse dry. Not only that, but I will publicise everything. Remember what Groklaw did to SCO? Do you really want to be on the receiving end of that?
the bluff is called, in a "fist to the face" manner.
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@tufty said in When Newspeak Attacks:
@anonymous234 Or, indeed, that you can outspend them. A lot of
shakedowncease and desist letters involve implied threats of layer-induced bankruptcy along the lines ofLook at our expensive layers.
Are they threatening the University with prostitutes?
Filed Under: Or maybe they're threatening to install Xinu on their servers (wow, that joke was obscure even for me)
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Chickens, innit.
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@Polygeekery said in When Newspeak Attacks:
@izzion I actually don't think that such activity is illegal in Canada. Soooooo, they are just fishing by sending the notices to Canada.
Funnily enough, torrenting is illegal in Poland (for copyrighted content - before some
tries to convince me they're totally only using it to pull Linux ISOs. Yeah, dude, and I watched Debbie Does Dallas for the plot).However, just downloading copyrighted content isn't - if you can get a hold of a filesharing site which has the movie or CD you want, you're totally in the clear. It's just sharing that's verboten - and since with torrent you need to seed while you download, well.
Oh, except for software, which you're not allowed to even download, for some certainly very complicated legal reasons.
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@PleegWat said in When Newspeak Attacks:
@Lorne-Kates said in When Newspeak Attacks:
Throw as many highly-paid lawyers as you want my way. I've got tenfold pro-bono students waiting to take you on. And they're paying ME.
Do I need to tell a software developer quantity ≠quality?
Do I need to tell a software developer that highly-paid ≠quality?
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@Maciejasjmj said in When Newspeak Attacks:
with torrent you need to seed while you download, well.
Well, that one at least is easy:
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@Gurth doesn't the protocol kill your download speed when you do this? I can't find the specifics, though.
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@Gurth said in When Newspeak Attacks:
Well, that one at least is easy:
Does that include the discovery traffic too? That's what makes torrenting such an awful thing technically.
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@Lorne-Kates said in When Newspeak Attacks:
...The
shit sucking assholesmusic conglomerates in recent time bought and paid for a law letting them send John Doe C&D to ISPs, universities and other large networks, and those must be passed on to the account holder.Now, if I were a university, and the shit-sucking assholes (whoops, forgot the polite del/ins on that one) were harassing my IT department and blatantly abusing a law-- well, I just might be tempted to tell the shit-sucking assholes to fuck right the fuck off.
...Based on what grounds? As you said, the current law requires that ISPs (which presumably the university is acting as in this case) pass on the notices to their users. Either they pass on the notices or they are liable, not as a civil matter that they can try to weasel out of, but as a criminal matter.
This is the BS that the past government brought to us, bought and paid for by the corporations, as you say.
The other problem is that the university has to keep logs of who used which IPs and when. They do require students to log into wifi, but keeping those logs around for thousands of devices moving around campus every day is not trivial.
I don't agree with how the current copyright law works in Canada, or with a university censoring internet access, but this is the path that makes the best use of their limited resources.
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@quijibo said in When Newspeak Attacks:
They do require students to log into wifi, but keeping those logs around for thousands of devices moving around campus every day is not trivial.
Here's a nickel; get yourself a
better computerbigger disk.
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@PleegWat said in When Newspeak Attacks:
@Lorne-Kates said in When Newspeak Attacks:
Throw as many highly-paid lawyers as you want my way. I've got tenfold pro-bono students waiting to take you on. And they're paying ME.
Do I need to tell a software developer quantity ≠quality?
I don't care about quality. The goal of a lawsuit isn't to win the case. It's to bankrupt the other side with lawyer fees.
The strategy doesn't work when one side has free lawyers.
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@dkf Spoken like a true armchair "computer guy" from his parents' basement. Disk space is the easy part. Building a system that logs all of the data accurately (such as devices moving between APs) and being able to query it based on thousands of notices efficiently is not trivial. Most devices are behind a NAT so the logging may need to be down to the public IP/port as well as the NAT table entries at that point in time.
I've heard that several Canadian ISPs employ multiple staff members whose sole job it is to read these notices and forward them on to the right customer. It's not like the law requires notices to come in some convenient data format that can be parsed automatically...
I don't want my public universities to employ people whose sole job it is to appease the media corporations. That is a waste of public money.
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@quijibo given the stuff dkf usually works on, this would be pretty trivial by comparison...
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@quijibo said in When Newspeak Attacks:
Building a system that logs all of the data accurately (such as devices moving between APs) and being able to query it based on thousands of notices efficiently is not trivial.
It depends on how the network is set up. Our wireless doesn't let anyone use resources without them logging in, either to the shitty captive portal or by VPN (there's several of these configured in various ways, including some that let devices log back in automatically making them really convenient). At that point, we've got a confirmed record binding IP and user and we don't have to guess.
Nobody will be torrenting over the network when they've logged in via the captive portal. That's firewalled and bandwith-limited so hard it can hardly do HTTP and HTTPS…
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@Maciejasjmj said in When Newspeak Attacks:
@Gurth doesn't the protocol kill your download speed when you do this? I can't find the specifics, though.
Not that I’ve noticed. I’m on a 50 Mbps line (in theory) and regularly get download speeds of 2.5 megabytes or more per second with this setting.
However, there have been some things that simply refuse to download, or sometimes don’t download a single bit for hours, despite there being hundreds or thousands of seeders, and then suddenly do at full speed. It could be that it’s related to this — but I haven’t checked yet.
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@Gurth said in When Newspeak Attacks:
@Maciejasjmj said in When Newspeak Attacks:
with torrent you need to seed while you download, well.
Well, that one at least is easy:
you know...... usually an upload/download limit of
0meansunlimitedjust saying.
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@accalia said in When Newspeak Attacks:
you know...... usually an upload/download limit of 0 means unlimited
No love for
-1? :(
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@accalia said in When Newspeak Attacks:
you know...... usually an upload/download limit of
0meansunlimitedjust saying.
I was waiting for that one :) Here’s a test run with upload speed at 0 KB/s:
and here the same file with the upload speed checkbox unchecked:
But you’re right in that the torrent client I used before this one did consider 0 to be “unlimited,” so chances are others do too.
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@Gurth okay so your client is a leech friendly client.
fucking leechs.
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@accalia said in When Newspeak Attacks:
@Gurth okay so your client is a leech friendly client.
fucking leechs.
Just trying not to break a law that might actually see me get in trouble (even if the chance is rather remote).
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@Gurth said in When Newspeak Attacks:
@accalia said in When Newspeak Attacks:
@Gurth okay so your client is a leech friendly client.
fucking leechs.
Just trying not to break a law that might actually see me get in trouble (even if the chance is rather remote).
what law says downloading is legal but sharing is illegal.
that's not how copyright works.
i should know.
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@accalia Dutch copyright law used to be interpreted that way, because according to that, you can make copies of material for study without breaking the law. For years, downloading of copyrighted materials (other than computer programs, which is explicitly forbidden by the law) was taken to fall under that clause, until fucking Stichting BREIN won a lawsuit over it a few years ago.
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@quijibo said in When Newspeak Attacks:
@dkf Spoken like a true armchair "computer guy" from his parents' basement. Disk space is the easy part. Building a system that logs all of the data accurately (such as devices moving between APs) and being able to query it based on thousands of notices efficiently is not trivial. Most devices are behind a NAT so the logging may need to be down to the public IP/port as well as the NAT table entries at that point in time.
I've heard that several Canadian ISPs employ multiple staff members whose sole job it is to read these notices and forward them on to the right customer. It's not like the law requires notices to come in some convenient data format that can be parsed automatically...
I don't want my public universities to employ people whose sole job it is to appease the media corporations. That is a waste of public money.
That's why we setup snort with a rule to only capture the kind of traffic which usually resulted in those nasty letters.
We didn't really have much choice about it because it was that or losing our connection completely after the 3rd complaint by someone to the university (which was our "ISP").
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@accalia said in When Newspeak Attacks:
@Gurth said in When Newspeak Attacks:
@accalia said in When Newspeak Attacks:
@Gurth okay so your client is a leech friendly client.
fucking leechs.
Just trying not to break a law that might actually see me get in trouble (even if the chance is rather remote).
what law says downloading is legal but sharing is illegal.
that's not how copyright works.
i should know.
To my understanding, in the U.S., distribution is what gets defendants slammed because the MPAA/RIAA, etc. can seek damages for every copy of the work you distributed, regardless of whether it was in part or in whole and regardless of the fact that on a BitTorrent network that could be thousands of people. So that's what runs damages into the millions based on an estimation of the work's retail value * everyone who was leeching that torrent at the time.
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@quijibo said in When Newspeak Attacks:
Spoken like a true armchair "computer guy" from his parents' basement.
Lol.
You know that he's literally a network guy for a university, right?
If anyone knows about this stuff in the "real world", it's probably him......
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@sloosecannon said in When Newspeak Attacks:
@quijibo said in When Newspeak Attacks:
Spoken like a true armchair "computer guy" from his parents' basement.
Lol.
You know that he's literally a network guy for a university, right?
If anyone knows about this stuff in the "real world", it's probably him......His parents run a university?
Is he related to @ben_lubar ?
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@accalia said in When Newspeak Attacks:
what law says downloading is legal but sharing is illegal.
that's not how copyright works.
i should know.Switzerland's does, too: getting a copy is legal, only giving out / distributing a copy is illegal. It is, IMHO, absolutely the way copyright should work, and a law which forbids downloading is severely abusive.
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@sloosecannon said in When Newspeak Attacks:
You know that he's literally a network guy for a university, right?
No, I'm more competent than them. Or at least I'm more competent than the ones we've got left; we fucked ourselves over by getting rid of the people who really knew what they were doing on that front. :( (The removal of our head of IT who did this made the Register, much his disgust and almost everyone else's intense amusement. :))
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@ixvedeusi said in When Newspeak Attacks:
a law which forbids downloading is severely abusive.
See: DMCA
