New UK Anti-Piracy Measures

[El Unicornio, mang]

Shows like Game of Thrones are very heavily monitored. Since they're a paid subscription service, they have a big issue with anyone getting the stuff for free (you can't even pay to legally download their shows).

Another point though: It takes them about three hours on average to get an IP address. If you have a fast internet, just download it then instantly stop seeding. This kind of defeats the point of torrenting but is a safe bet.

[Zetetic]

Another point though: It takes them about three hours on average to get an IP address.

Where's that claim from?

I think it might be a gross misrepresentation of a claim staked out in this paper that suggests that of the 40% of the 'direct' monitors[nb]Which are those that actually connect to other peers rather than just requesting the peer list from trackers (etc.?)[/nb] they observed connecting to peers on Top 100 torrents on ThePirateBay, appeared within 3 hours (and that this was far shorter for sufficiently popular torrents).

[El Unicornio, mang]

I think I must have misunderstood the terminology. Regardless, the people I know who have been issued warning letters didn't stop their downloads after they had finished. The longer you seed, the greater your chance of being caught.

[Zetetic]

I certainly think your last sentence is true - particularly if you're talking about reasonably popular novel torrents.

Edit:

Proportion of peers accepting incoming connections. The results of our 2009 study revealed that outgoing connections could only be made to 16% of peers. This fell to 7% in 2011. Since monitors currently engage in active direct monitoring only, peers may still be able to participate in a swarm undetected by enforcement agencies, who rely solely on a peer's ability to accept incoming connections in order to communicate with them.

Does this mean that very few peers in a swarm are seeding?

[MojoJojo]

From what I understand from the article - in the UK the voluntary agreement is probably pointless, since it is just letters. The fear is that it's completely toothless because the content holders decided they couldn't get what they wanted as things stood so they've agreed to a completely pointless agreement so they can push for some real teeth when it fails to stop anyone downloading.

The alternative is that content holders have basically given up on stopping downloading at the consumer level and are throwing less money/energy at it, and have decided that blocking torrent sites, new business models and just living with it will do.

[Viero_Berlotti]

Yes, if this isn't really going to achieve anything for them, what is the point of the BPI/MPA bothering to waste time and resources monitoring trackers and paying 75% of the cost of running the scheme.

[George Oscar Bluth II]

Sorry, I missed the exact wording originally.

Thee was no "boast" I simply said that the festival was vastly superior when it was open to all-comers, and you didn't need £500 for a weekend. it was more spontaneous, there was a greater variety of people there and it was more alternative. people have gathered on Midsummers for thousands of years, Glastonbury - after the police put a stop to Stonehenge - was the  greatest remaining example of this. To have turned a broad church, open to all, with many still choosing to pay - it used to sell out anyway hence my earlier response - open ended alternative event into yet another middle class jolly is an absolute tragedy.

As a man once said 'This land is made for you and me'...and what was that he said about a fence?

Jesus fucking Christ, how many times did this have to be explained to you? If they hadn't put the fence up, they wouldn't have been allowed to hold the festival. It'd have been over, finished.

Presumably that would have been a tragedy too?

[VegaLA]

I've got several friends in the US who have received warning letters from ISPs, mostly for downloading HBO/Showtime stuff. The ISPs themselves don't care, but they're legally obliged to send letters if they're instructed by studios to do so.

I know someone* who got their NET frozen by Time Warner for Downloading Sony and HBO content. The Wife could not navigate the NET due to some page by the ISP stating not to download material etc...etc...and to acknowledge she read the blurb. He told her to ignore it but she went mental. One reboot of the router and all seems quiet since then but someone has been very paranoid since then.

*

Spoiler alert

I repeat, Someone

[close]

[Big Jack McBastard]

Edit:Does this mean that very few peers in a swarm are seeding?

Usually the case from what I've seen, yer big recent torrents will have loads of people setting them off and forgetting about it for a bit while they do other shit, so they end up seeders for a little while and add to the seemingly high count but most will drop out either when they realise it's done, or the second it finishes if they're eager/paranoid.

The last 6 eps of GoT torrents with the most peers for examples:

Peers     Seeders
80,749  6,122
38,125  1,406
23,533  756
18,507  555
15,273  538
12,789  440

So for every seeder there are something between 13.4 and 33.3 people on the cadge with 19.1 being the mean.

[Too Many Cochranes]

On a slight tangent, I'm on 30mb Virgin and regularly receive offers in the post for them to upgrade me to 60mb at a cost. It seems hypocritical for them to be offering speed doubling and sending out anti piracy warnings.

Why would I need 60mb when I can torrent a well compressed HD film in roughly 10 minutes? It's an upgrade aimed at pirates or a minority of heavy business users.

[Famous Mortimer]

I have to assume the ISPs are hoping that all their heavy users just figure out a way round the piracy warnings.

Or that there's going to be some vertical integration soon, get ready for Universal buying BT.

[El Unicornio, mang]

On a slight tangent, I'm on 30mb Virgin and regularly receive offers in the post for them to upgrade me to 60mb at a cost. It seems hypocritical for them to be offering speed doubling and sending out anti piracy warnings.

The ISPs don't care what you're downloading, they send letters because they're legally obliged to. Regardless, people can use very high bandwidth from downloading legally, streaming netflix, online gaming etc.

Fiber optic speeds (about 20 times faster than the internet service I have):

[MojoJojo]

Edit:Does this mean that very few peers in a swarm are seeding?

I think from the words used they're not talking about seeding but the business of allowing an incoming connection to your client. I can't remember the details of bittorrent but I think you can't upload much if you don't. The uploading is the illegal bit (and I think it's probably a lot harder to track if you haven't opened up your ports).

Mr. Bastard's report ties in with than that - to seed you'd have to open ports, but you can open your ports without seeding.

(I'm still surprised by the actual ratios though - when bittorrent was becoming popular over stuff like eMule there was some hype about how it applied game theory to encourage people to share. eMule had a reciprocal policy but it was a trust system where the clients reported how much they uploaded, so a trivial alteration to a clients code would give you an advantage. Even when you cheated with a hacked client bittorrent still outpaced it by a factor of about 10. I now realise it was probably about the decentralised search thing making it easy to soak up all the download bandwidth.

TL;DR - P2P don't feel guilty about not seeding. Only a very small number of people in the community need to share for it to work)

[VegaLA]

New tactics....

http://www.engadget.com/2014/09/01/uk-police-domain-registrars-piracy/

[Uncle TechTip]

New tactics....

http://www.engadget.com/2014/09/01/uk-police-domain-registrars-piracy/

Could distinctive IP addresses become a valuable commodity in the future? Or else the first thing you do when you join a site is to stick so-and-so into your hosts file.

[Big Jack McBastard]

I realise this is old but...

Why do people want stuff they don't believe is worth paying for?

<Prostitute based joke at your expense>

Because people like free things. Because spending all their spare scrip on some copies of a poxy film or bit of music every week isn't necessarily as orgasmic an experience for others as it is for you maybe?

How about addiction? I don't believe it's worth paying for cigs but goddamn if I don't crave me some nicotine.

How about a kidnapped kid with an insane ransom that would bankrupt a small nation?

It's because want outweighs money, there's always more want than there is cash and opportunities to facilitate it.

[Rev]

And also because that's not what internet piracy is about for most people.  There will be people who just pinch everything, but the majority spend as much as they ever did on films, music, and such - they just experience more and make more informed purchases after seeing what they like.  The informed purchase part is the thing that shits up studios and labels - they lose blind purchases for shoddy products.

This has been the case since the nineties.  This remains the case.

[Puce Moment]

A quick question COMPLETELY unrelated to illegal downloading.

Do people use IP masking software and do you use software so that you can see stuff in other countries, like Comedy Channel shows in the USA?

[Jamie Oliver is fat]

Why do people want stuff they don't believe is worth paying for?

Personally, I think prices are too high, and official delivery mechanisms aren't a patch on Bittorrent'ing say, a 50gb Bluray movie that I get to keep as a single file DRM free on my hard drive.

The movie and less so these days music industries are too busy fighting us, rather than trying to monetise us and accept where we are in terms of delivery technologies. They're stuck in the past and unable and unwilling to accept how people want to obtain their material.

Anyway, TORRENTSHACK IS BACK

[El Unicornio, mang]

A quick question COMPLETELY unrelated to illegal downloading.

Do people use IP masking software and do you use software so that you can see stuff in other countries, like Comedy Channel shows in the USA?

I use Cyberghost, so I can watch iPlayer when I'm in the US.

[olliebean]

Ad-Free Time for multiregion Netflix. (Also works with a bunch of other sites, including iPlayer for non-UK folks.)

[Dusty Gozongas]

Do people use IP masking software and do you use software so that you can see stuff in other countries, like Comedy Channel shows in the USA?

Further to El Unicornio, mang's post, I would assume that many members of this forum would answer yes on both counts. I'll add the Modify Headers and Proximate browser addons to the tool-list since we're chatting about it.

[VegaLA]

Anyone here using TOR related tactics?

http://www.engadget.com/2014/11/07/operation-onymous-tor-pierced/

After receiving emails from my ISP* I was considering using some sort of ISP cloak but not sure how if it'll be any use now?

Cunts really want me to acknowledge I received their email. Yeah? Get to fuck!

[El Unicornio, mang]

I don't use TOR, too slow and also using it to download is frowned upon in the TOR community. VPNs are really the best option. Only about a fiver a month, although I'm skint so I use other safe options like Soulseek or twoddl for stuff that's likely to be monitored on torrent.

I've curbed my downloading a bit though. There's more stuff available for free out there than any human could possibly get through in a lifetime anyway, so I get a lot of that. Also, blu-rays are really cheap now so I don't mind actually buying them.

[VegaLA]

Looks like the 'music industry' have locked a target.

http://www.engadget.com/2014/11/30/music-labels-sue-cox-over-piracy-notices/