Reactions to story from Deeplinks | Electronic Frontier Foundation

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  MPAA doing well, still complaining about piracy

  http://feelingelephants.wordpress.com/2008/04/15/mpaa-doing-...
  26 days ago in FeelingElephants’s Weblog · Authority: 16

  You know those threats from the FBI you watch every time you watch a movie (and which can’t be skipped)? The ones that completely ignore fair use–by definition an “unauthorized use of copyrighted material”. Well, in addition to those the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) is constantly complaining about piracy to everyone from Congress to Comcast (see below). Here’s their front page today: I like Lucky and Flo, the anti-piracy dogs. With the exception of two ratings topics, everything on the front page is about piracy. From the way they’re carrying on, you would think that they are loosing money by the aircraft-carrier load. Not so. This year they posted record earnings (again): The domestic box office continued to grow in 2007, reaching $9.63 billion after a 5.4% gain. Domestic theater admissions held steady at 1.4 billion tickets in 2007. In 2007, the average price of a movie ticket in the U.S. rose to $6.88, a 5% increase over 2006 So, not so much with the poverty and woe. And if you click on the link entitled “MPAA’s Dan Glickman Comments on Comcast and BitTorrent Agreement on Network Management” (which I wish I had not clicked on since it was a sneak-attack-pdf-download) you will find that they are doing something with Comcast and BitTorrent to combat piracy. For non-total tech-policy wonks, this oblique press release refers to the packet-forging which the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s been tracking since September. Basically Comcast decided it could pick and choose which applications, protocols and forms of encryption it would transfer–without telling its customers. They have since backed off–which makes the MPAA’s continued pride over their “agreement” sound just as out of date as their business model. All in all, let’s hope for collective licensing and pay for those weekly NetFlix. Inspirational Quote: “A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze new problems, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.” – Robert A. Heinlein
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  I’m not really Dutch

  http://www.wooliet.com/2008/04/03/im-not-really-dutch/
  38 days ago in woolie t. · No authority yet

  A few factors converged and I made what it a pretty rare decision to try out a paid online service, Torrent Freedom. It’s really a great idea for a business (I wonder if it’s working out for them money-wise). The short form summary is that they create a sort of “ISP within an ISP”. The purpose of which is two-fold: 1. all of your traffic is encrypted 2. all of your traffic appears to originate from, and end at, their servers. The first impetus towards wanting something like this was the news late last year that Comcast (my ISP) was screwing with their customer’s traffic. Comcast is forging TCP RST packets which cause connections to drop (a technique also used by Internet censorship systems in China). These packets cause software at both ends to believe, mistakenly, that the software on the other side doesn’t want to continue communicating. I knew this to be true because while running my Bittorrent client (Azureus), I noticed that once I was seeding, I had practically zero upstream traffic. In other words, my share ratio was close to nil. I, of course, figured I had messed something up, though for the life of me couldn’t figure out what. Not to mention it worked fine when used with another ISP. Comcast recently announced they would, by the end of the year, end that practice. But as this EFF article points out, ISPs will probably continue to fuddle with your traffic in some form without your knowledge. So, unless Comcast decides to start throttling all encrypted traffic (i.e. Canadian ISP Rogers), Torrent Freedom is a nice fix. Another contributing factor is my plain curiosity to see something like this work. I’ve recently tried (though not a complete success yet) to create a VPN for my dad to use to connect to his office network while working remotely. The open source method for accomplishing this is OpenVPN, which is the code on which Torrent Freedom is built. Torrent Freedom works by connecting you to their virtual network and assigning to your machine one of their IP addresses. Once connected, all traffic first travels to their servers, and is then forwarded along to its ultimate destination. The response routes back to their servers and is then forwarded back to you. It’s a definite excessive amount of hopping packets around, but it works. To confirm this, I visited What Is My IP Address and saw a map pinpointing my location in……Holland. I followed the Visual Traceroute link and saw the traffic start at the site’s California server and end in lovely Bennekom, Netherlands. The same page, from a different computer in the network, mapped me correctly to my hometown. Niffty. The final piece in my decision to sign-up with Torrent Freedom was so that I could download TV shows without too much worry. I was reading through the comments at this Lifehacker entry, and noticed plenty of people reporting some form of “gotcha” when downloading HBO, NBC etc. shows. I had figured (naively) that because I never downloaded movies or music, I was pretty far removed from the “cease & desist” movement. The TV in our house has rabbit ears, and that’s it. But my wife and I love picking TV shows, downloading entire seasons, and making our way through them, one episode at a time (usually during that all-too-brief window of time between both kids in bed asleep and us not yet setting the alarm clock). One last thing I wanted to show is the EULA you have to agree to when installing the Torrent Freedom client. 1. Some of the code in this client is opensource, and some of it has been custom-written. Please don’t steal the custom bits - we worked hard to build good code to extend the core OpenVPN technology. If you want to use it, contact us and we’ll license it to you. Just don’t steal it. 2. We can’t promise you that this little application will solve world hunger, untangle string theory, or teach humans to live together in peace. Instead, this client application is provided to you “as is” - just like a used car, only without the used part, and without the car. 3. If the application suddenly becomes possessed by a demon and does horrific things to your computer, please don’t sue us as it’s not our fault. We’ve tested it and we’re pretty sure there’s no demon-friendly backdoors, but we can’t pay you if it goes haywire, sorry. May you walk the path in peace and find true wisdom along the way.
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  News

  http://runt-amuck.vox.com/library/post/news-198.html
  41 days ago in Runt-Amuck · Authority: 1

  Unlocking Stonehenge's secrets Excavation starts at Stonehenge Group Urges Iran to Release Gay Prisoners Less Cookson, more Ali: Tyneside town finds hidden Muslim history Software for Keeping ISPs Honest Science tackles female sexual dysfunction No sex, thank you ... we're Japanese Philanthropists ensure gay community's future Scientists probe meditation secrets Movie Review: Sukiyaki Western Django (2007 Japan) Interview: Anti-Flag Comcast Reduces Discrimination, Plans To End It Altogether Rooks team up to solve problems Homicides in San Francisco 2007/2008 The new nuclear risk Global disarmament must start at the top - with the US and Russia. But first we need to update the non-proliferation treaty
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  Comcast Reduces Discrimination, Plans To End It Altogether

  http://www.PrivacyDigest.com/2008/03/29/comcast+reduces+disc...
  43 days ago in Privacy Digest | News that can impact your privacy. · Authority: 141

  Comcast Reduces Discrimination, Plans To End It Altogether - Via EFF: Deep Links: Last month, shortly before the FCC held its first hearing in an investigation of Comcast's interference with BitTorrent and other P2P protocols, we noticed that Comcast was no longer injecting forged TCP RST packets in the simple tests we had been running on its cable network. Those tests had been showing interference through January 2008. Some sources with access to larger datasets informed us that the cable ISP was nonetheless still using RST packets against some BitTorrent sessions, just not the simple uses of BT and Gnutella that we had been testing. The status quo: Comcast is still interfering with P2P, but they are being more subtle about it. read more »
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  Software for Keeping ISPs Honest | Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)

  http://www.PrivacyDigest.com/2008/03/29/software+keeping+isp...
  43 days ago in Privacy Digest | News that can impact your privacy. · Authority: 141

  Software for Keeping ISPs Honest - Via Electronic Frontier Foundation - Deeplinks Blog » March, 2008: Yesterday's announcement of a détente between Comcast and BitTorrent was great news. Unfortunately, the general problem of ISPs doing strange things to Internet traffic without telling their customers is likely to continue in the future. EFF and many other organizations are working on software to test ISPs for unusual (mis)behavior. In this detailed post, we have a round-up of the tools that are out there right now, and others that are in development... The Backstory When you sign up for an Internet connection, you expect it to actually be an Internet connection. You expect that you can run whatever applications and protocols you choose over the link, or indeed that you can write your own software and run that. There is a disturbing trend, however, of ISPs stepping in to meddle with your communications, deciding that some applications and protocols are more suitable than others. Or deciding that they can inject advertisements into your queries for domain names, or your browser's exchanges with web sites. Or deciding that encrypted traffic should be throttled across the board. read more »

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