Posts by Cameron Junge
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any expansion on what you did at isp's matthew. as in describe the sort of things you were involved in.
Well, I know Matthew, and I know his experience. I know of the work he's done for 2 major NZ ISPs and his networking prowess.
He knows what he's talking about. He dreams about networks and protocols.
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I regularly hit my 10GB a month download allocation and I don't download any copyrighted material, except under fair use when I'm doing research and I certainly don't republish that stuff. I pull down a lot of free software, Linux distributions, web tools, all manner of stuff. I also watch a fair bit of YouTube, courtesy of the links provided on this site and others. How is tagging me as a large scale downloader going to solve copyright infringement.
Ah yes, YouTube... the bane of many ISPs :P
YouTube has taken off... so has Flickr, and even social network sites like Facebook & MySpace embed videos. You can watch old episodes of Shortland Street online now - TVNZ & TV3 both provide that.
Soon you'll be able to stream movies to your home (in the next 10 years... maybe!). Video is the big bandwidth user, and there is a lot out there that's perfectly legal. Add in streaming internet radio stations (legal) and you're looking at a lot of data being used for every-day, legal activities. Xtra knows very well how much YT is hurting it - it relied on "mum & dad" internet users paying $20-30/m for a few emails. Now it's "mum & dad" being sent videos and pictures of the grandkids via flickr and YT.
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@robbery: Part of the problem with the current situation is that it's all based on lies, lies & statistics.
The movie industry had one of it's best years ever, and it's been the start of a recession. 2006 I think it was was one of their worst in recent years. They blamed piracy, yet there's been no major changes in movie piracy rate since then. Maybe it had something to do with crap movies...
The RIAA always pulls out numbers about piracy, and how it's killing the industry. Anyone with 1/2 a brain can see that suing your customers is not a long-term solution. Seems the RIAA is waking up to that fact, as the US law system is starting to swing against them. I think they're about to suffer a whole lot of hurt.
The numbers the RIAA pull out always go on about how big the problem is, but don't tend to actually BACK them up. Various studies have been done into the numbers and most call the RIAA out on them, and some have even pointed out that quite a lot of people go & buy a CD or two after listening to a couple of tracks they download. iTunes Store is the biggest musci store on the planet - and they've just announced multi-tier pricing and no DRM. Taken a while, but seems they're finally realising this Internet thing can actually make them money.
To give you an idea of how the media industry likes to manipulate numbers:
A couple of years ago, the movie Sione's Wedding was copied from a pre-release cut. It got thrown around locally a little bit, but didn't have a huge impact on the local p2p sites.In one report on the court case they claimed to have lost $150k in sales from movies & DVDs. By the end of the court case that number had increased to over $500k I believe. Ticket sales alone was estimated to have lost $300k - that's probably about 20,000 bums on seats. How many people do you know who saw it at the movies? I don't think I know anyone, and I also don't know anyone who got a copy before it was released.
Oh, and poor little Sione's Wedding broke the local box office records when it was released.
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data usage.
yes there are exceptions to this, programmers and media industry regularly legitimately send high volumes through and shutting them down is bollocks but the latest word was warnings and asking for explanations.Ah, due process bedamned, eh? Guilty until proven innocent...
& I argued your bittorrent comment above.
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identifying those files which would be 90% of movie piracy would be a relatively small part of the work. getting the other 10% would be massive. applying it to music, even worse.
Ok, so someone's sharing a movie. You know what the name of it is cause when you search you see the name. You download the torrent and can see the peers.
So now you have a name & a bunch of IPs. But you have no idea what the torrent content is. So you have to download it. Which is relatively easy.
Easy if you're a client... ie. the RIAA using MediaSentry, etc. (Who, btw, they just fired...).
But as an ISP all you're seeing a bunch of bits over a certain protocol. You have no idea what it is until you put it all together. You might be able to get the name, and you'll know the 2 ends (well, the external IP...). If you're lucky to be able to get all the bits and put them together, then you might find that the song Chasing Cars is actually the sound of the cars going past Matthew's room.
Now, add in encryption. Many of the bittorrent clients now support encryption. Many other P2P programs do as well.
So either the ISP has to break the encryption, or it has to do man-in-the-middle... which is detectable. Realistically it's infeasible to break the encryption on every connection. One torrent could have 10 connections open... the resources would far outweigh the benefits, and there's no guarantee that it is what the name says.
Oh... and I won't even mention the (official) poisoning that goes on on some torrent sites & P2P programs.
Your 90% just became a lot hard to verify...