see here http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8481790.stm & here Been sent a threatening letter from ACS:Law - Virgin Media Broadband - Digital Spy Forums & here http://www.acs-law.org.uk/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=51&Itemid=60

I thought the most interesting comment on this was Williams last week saying how the future of music lay with pester power from kids and Brand image/advertising.

No matter of court cases and technology will surpress those who don't want to pay. digital distribution allows more money to go to the artist and less to the producer/label/manufactorer
etc

but with on-line libraries in their millions, more my space acts than free people to watch them and a sea of charts/top 10s,best ofs. the whole thing is more watered down than ever

Advertisers are the only ones who cut through the noise with a consitent repeated message that sticks. its all about being associated with a brand if you want to make big pop bucks.

I got sent a few letters from this lot. Told them to fuck off until they show me some real evidence, haven't heard owt for a few months.

They do have right to query the ISPs. who can report on the bandwidth used on a given protocol (p2p)
means fuck all as they can't prove what files you have? you could be sharing free music with friends..

They do have right to query the ISPs. who can report on the bandwidth used on a given protocol (p2p)
means fuck all as they can't prove what files you have? you could be sharing free music with friends..

That's not how they do it.

The owner of the copyrighted work employs a company that monitors specific torrents.

They grab the IP addresses and make a court order to the relevant ISP to find out who had that IP address at that time/date.

Technology is not proven though, and still untested. There can be lots of fake IPs on a torrent, and IPs can be obfuscated.

You can use something like Peer Guardian to block known monitoring IPs.

Proving what you are downloading and where the files are should be crutial, and that the network wasn't hacked for example. I guess that is why they are doing stuff like this... http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8480699.stm if this goes ahead i will be terminating my virgin contract in just the same way i avoided BT because of the Phorm trials.

i think its definitely time to start encrypting everything that gets sent especially over B/T. Unfortunately my technical know how doesn't allow for darknet. I can barely get foxyproxy to work.

You can use something like Peer Guardian to bloke known monitoring IPs.

"to bloke"? Is this an Oz term or did you just mean "to block"?

I've sacked off BT long time ago anyway, Usenet is where its at.

Also, with BT it seems they are targeting seeders and not leechers.

That's not how they do it.

The owner of the copyrighted work employs a company that monitors specific torrents.

They grab the IP addresses and make a court order to the relevant ISP to find out who had that IP address at that time/date.

Technology is not proven though, and still untested. There can be lots of fake IPs on a torrent, and IPs can be obfuscated.

so a man on bitorent searches for content and sees how much that user has? god thats simple

I know ISPs monitor protocols to analyse traffic flows etc. so its info easy to get.
Its all a deterent, it will stop a lot of people putting their libraries up, that happends there is less available.

"to bloke"? Is this an Oz term or did you just mean "to block"?

I've sacked off BT long time ago anyway, Usenet is where its at.

Also, with BT it seems they are targeting seeders and not leechers.

i thought it was "Cloke"

Ha my Ex used to work for them and she told me they were closing in on file sharers. they represent a lot of musicians

Ha my Ex used to work for them and she told me they were closing in on file sharers. they represent a lot of musicians

They wouldn't have the rights then.

Musicians don't generally own the copyrights, they sold or licensed the rights either to record labels (recording rights) or publishing companies (playback, cover versions, performance rights).

Musicians don't generally have the ability to exert control over their rights once they are signed, the labels or publishers need to do it.

It's also risky as hell. No musician really wants to be aligned with suing their fans (except Metallica), best let the labels take care of it as it's their responsibility (they own the rights) and it won't tarnish the name of the artist when it goes to court.

Looks shady though... it's a bit of a protection racket. Give us £500 and we won't take you to court. I think most who believe it to be legit would pay up because £500 is so low a figure that it's similar to just seeking legal advice on it.

ah i should have clarified. the musicians who are smart enough to have production arms i.e Pharrell

It's nothing more than a massive deterrent. There is no way they can enforce this properly so it will be a token gesture to make a point and highlight the low hanging fruit for new paper stories. Fear is an effective weapon

I am surprised they don't attack the ISPs, but then i guess you open up a huge can of worms when the law men decide to restrict what services the ISPs can allow through..

I have heard that peer guardian is not so reliable as it is easy for the companies who monitor torrents to set up with new IP addresses.

Similarly, as I understand it, encrypting will hide your traffic from the ISP (except Virgin who now deep packet inspect), it will not stop your IP address from appearing in the swarm - which is how the record companies find you anyway.

The reason they go after seeders is that it is distribution of copyrighted material which is the offence. I think the downloading bit is not straightforwardly illegal.

A proxy would be the way forward as this would hide your IP from the swarm, but is reportedly slow. And I am not actually sure how you would set it up.

I have heard that peer guardian is not so reliable as it is easy for the companies who monitor torrents to set up with new IP addresses.

Similarly, as I understand it, encrypting will hide your traffic from the ISP (except Virgin who now deep packet inspect), it will not stop your IP address from appearing in the swarm - which is how the record companies find you anyway.

The reason they go after seeders is that it is distribution of copyrighted material which is the offence. I think the downloading bit is not straightforwardly illegal.

A proxy would be the way forward as this would hide your IP from the swarm, but is reportedly slow. And I am not actually sure how you would set it up.

You mean this right ?
http://www.detica.com/index.php?option=com_articlemanager&Itemid=266&task=display&artid=317&year=2010

Apparently its just to see the levels of illicit downloading, but what's the bet they'll be using the data for other things too.

Time to research options me things.

Does anyone here with a mac have much success using tor with transmission?

oh... gash.

One told Which?: "My 78 year-old father yesterday received a letter from ACS Law demanding £500 for a porn file he is alleged to have downloaded.

"He doesn't even know what file-sharing or BitTorrent is...."

Yeah yeah......that old chestnut

Here's GW's wall of PG2 text for archival and linkage purposes.

Quote from: GreatWizard on August 30, 2008, 12:46:30 PM

PG2 is a placebo. Of course, you see some addresses blocked. The fucking thing blocks ONE-THIRD of the Internet address space, by its own claim.

What you do NOT know is whether the addresses this piece of shit blocked were, in fact, the very peers who had the pieces you were downloading.

By inducing and then reinforcing paranoia, PG2 does more harm to torrenting than the RIAA, the MPAA and the FBI combined. I've said it before - if PG2 didn't exist, the MPAA would have invented it. :)

Here's just a small selection of the problems with this overhyped garbage:

http://www.slyck.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=38295

The Media Defender internal email leak offered plenty of information for the taking. MediaDefender-Defenders said that they hoped that the email leak will prove to be a viable tool to protect against anti-P2P efforts. This is something BlueTack has been trying to do. After the email leak, a text file that compiles the complete IP (Internet Protocol) list Media Defender used while dropping fake files onto various P2P sites and networks was posted. While judging the effectiveness of these lists had proven to be an impossible task before the major leak, the effectiveness can now be tested.

Slyck began the investigation when BlueTack's 'Paranoid' IP filter blocked one of TVUnderground's new eDonkey2000 servers. A request for comment or information on the matter to BlueTack's team went unanswered. To this day, why BlueTack has blocked only one of TVUnderground's servers is unknown. In the meantime, Slyck is currently in the possession of a copy of BlueTack's IP filter lists, and further investigation into related matters appeared warranted.

According to the BlueTack website, "B.I.S.S. is a site dedicated to improving the safety and awareness of all our members and guests, providing News, Security articles, Software Reviews, Technical Support, Guides, IP Research and Free Software needed to help us keep our connections to the net and each other safe, secure, and free from unwelcome intruders."

Among the things offered are the blocklists, which have been met with either acceptance by the file-sharing community or complete rejection. Some say that the blocklists allow users to simply block any anti-filesharing company and allow users to connect with non-industry IPs. Others say that there is no way to get the right IPs before the IPs are changed to different addresses, thereby rendering the filters ineffective. It's been the subject of debate for quite some time amongst many experts with no real way to test the lists, at least until the Media Defender email leak.

The 'Paranoid' eMule IP filter was retrieved on September 27, 2007. The Level1 IP blacklist, which is supposed to block all known anti-p2p IPs, was retrieved on September 30, 2007. The idea behind getting these lists now is to offer ample time for Media Defender's now public IPs to be added to the lists for a much more effective blocklist for PeerGuardian users.

Slyck then obtained a copy of the publicly available 14.3MB compressed text file which lists all of the Media Defender's IP addresses. At this point, it became obvious that testing such a large volume of IPs would prove to be an overly time-consuming challenge, at least by hand. In order to alleviate this problem, it was best to test one particular IP range. Conveniently enough, the first range started with 116. Slyck then decided to test all of the IPs that started with the number 116.

The total number of IPs used by Media Defender starting with 116 was 1,474. Obviously, BlueTack did block all IPs that started with 116, but how many Media Defender IPs were successfully blocked? When Slyck investigated, there was a common theme that blocklists seemingly jumped over several ranges used by Media Defender. After some extensive study using the Level1 list for anti-p2p companies and the 'Paranoid' list, BlueTack would have successfully blocked 16 IPs. Thus, this sample test offered 1.09% protection against Media Defender in that range.

The IPs that were successfully blocked were: 116.255.1.109, 116.255.1.154, 116.255.1.244, 116.255.1.27, 116.255.1.52, 116.255.1.85, 116.215.157.243, 116.212.14.223, 116.199.202.170, 116.199.202.240, 116.199.207.83, 116.199.207.84, 116.199.226.78 , 116.199.227.11, 116.199.227.27, 116.199.227.67. The remaining 1,458 IPs would still be allowed through even with these two filters being used today.

While BlueTack may still perpetuate the idea that their filters are 99% effective, these latest findings will only fuel criticisms towards BlueTack's actual effectiveness. A complete test might not be possible short of creating a simple program to test every single number or spending weeks hand-testing every single Media Defender IP address. In the mean ime, it seems very apparent that BlueTack's filters have a few holes.

And that was tested against known and published addresses!! In order to catch those 16 addresses (probably by dumb luck and the law of large numbers), BlueTack also blocked more than 4 million INNOCENT addresses in the same range.

==============================================================
A SECOND TEST:

I am convinced that it is not authentic. I did a reverse lookup on 500 or so somewhat randomly picked addresses from the 5.3 million addresses in that list. Look at the results -- it's pretty clear that the vast majority of the items in the list are residential dynamic IP addresses from all over the world.

===============================================================

http://www.physorg.com/news110035755.html

Not Much Anonymity for Unprotected File-Sharers: Researchers Examine P2P Networks
The same technology that allows easy sharing of music, movies and other content across a network also allows government and media companies easy access to who is illegally downloading that content.

"Note that it is not our intention here to examine how accurate and comprehensive these lists are, though this would be interesting and challenging future work."

=============

"after a quick look through the document, found elsewhere (PDF) (thanks again guys), all their stats are based on a couple of assumptions: that the blocklist contains no false positives, and more importantly, that it fails to contain no address that should be included. i will leave it to others to comment on the likelyhood of these assumptions being correct."

FROM PG;s ow website:

Well, it is accurate in the sense that it blocks everything on your blocklist.
It is impossible to know all the addresses to block

PeerGuardian is known to be incompatible with McAfee and BlackICE firewalls. Outpost is also known to cause a problem if you shut down PG2 while it is running. There is currently no way around this, so we recommend you try switching to another firewall

PeerGuardian blocked someone, should I be worried?
Well, it was blocked, so why would you worry?

PeerGuardian is slowing down my connection!
This occurs because of the way PeerGuardian blocks packets, not connections.

PeerGuardian is blocking an IP like crazy, should I worry?
PeerGuardian will constantly block IPs. Many times you will see IPs get blocked three or more times before giving up - this is due to the way most computers handle reliable connecting. After a period of time, people may retry to see if you are responding yet. This does not mean people are spying on you.

A block list is a list of bad IP ranges that are know to spy on people’s computers.

This software is provided 'as-is', without any express or implied warranty. In no event will the authors be held liable for any damages arising from the use of this software.

Total of IP's being blocked right now:

* 2,377,645,666 

first things first, if the government was and/or are spying on you right now, it will be on a IP range that is not on our blocklists and is a secret range of IPs, second thing is, if the government was and/or are spying on you right now, they would be doing it on a whole diffrent level.

I have more. Lots more. :)

Just felt that this will make explanations a bit easier. :)

In summary:
Peerguardian does not work at all and actually damages bittorrent by blocking millions of good peers. I mean they blocked their own update servers...come on.... ::)

-edits-
Changed the title to be more descriptive...added summary for the lazy/bad readers...

And yeah torrenting through Tor is really selfishly cuntish

You can use something like Peer Guardian to block known monitoring IPs.

doesn't work in vista x64 or win7 x64 :(

Got e-mail today from pbay about Ipredator https://www.ipredator.se/
Will this work or something like deep scanning will ruin all effort to stay ammoniums on torrents?

And yeah torrenting through Tor is really selfishly cuntish

Sounds great! What's Tor? :)

Basically a proxy, running through peoples donated computer/servers. Best proxy program around, and you can configure it for program you want.

The general idea behind tor is that people is restrictive regimes can use it to gain anonymous and unrestricted access to the internet.

Which is why some folks think it is a bit off to use it to download heroes.

Like a VPN but with an internet rather than intranet connection?