‘guilty until proven innocent’
on 06/27/2012 at 06:12 AM
This is the same kind of crap the RIAA has been pulling since the days of acetate records and reel-to-reel tape recorders. Same complaint, different medium.
I read the article and all the comments, and not one person twigged to the hidden reality: in order to spot the “illegal activity” the ISPs will have to be analyzing your data stream. Which means Big Brother IS Watching. Reading all your emails, looking at all their attachments. Keeping track of every picture, program, and document you download. And keeping a list of all the places you visit.
A huge number of “sub rosa” sites have shut down or gone under in the past year. File Sonic, etc.
I doubt this bill will pass as is. And I predict a rise in privacy enhancing applications that will let you surf anonymously, email encryption, etc. I also foresee hack attacks on ISPs targeted to wipe out their server caches and user history files. Not Denial of Service acts, just Denial of History.
Most compression utilities (ZIP, RAR) already allow large files to be broken into many smaller pieces. They also allow encryption. Rename MovieFile1.rar as MyPictures.bob, MovieFile2.rar as Accounting_data.bak, etc, and put each one out on separate website somewhere. Collecting and renaming and decrypting them then becomes a bit of an Easter Egg hunt, but when you get them all you run the utility, and a whole movie pops out the other end directly onto your Blu-Ray DVD burner. No data stored on your PC for more time than it takes to burn the disc and check that it works properly.
See, I’m not a hacker or a movie downloader, but even I can immediately find a way to beat this nonsense. The ISPs would wind up spending every last clock cycle they have trying to analyze every chunk of data that came through. That would kill them dead.
a rise in privacy enhancing applications that will let you surf anonymously,
There’s something called TOR which I have not looked into but read about in a computer magazine.
To me, the biggest issue with these claims in the lack of progress towards a true streaming of what you want. We are still forced to get 200 channels in order to see the one we really want.
Companies like Netflix and Hulu are on the right track - let users pay for what they want. And big media is fighting them every step of the way.
If the RIAA and MPAA have their way, you will be forced to watch 15 trailers before your movie and never be able to skip or fast forward. In between each chorus of a song will be a jingle for some new useless product that doesn’t do what it claims to and will break the first time you use it.
And let’s not forget paying twice the original cost to upgrade from last years media to this years. New VHS movie $15.00, new DVD movie $30.00, new Blu-Ray $60.00. I can’t wait to see what new and improved crap will cost me $120 to upgrade.
I don’t pirate, I don’t go to movies, and except for Clockwork Angels - I don’t buy new CDs. Mainly because it’s all crap.
06/27/2012 at 08:26 AM
