Today I Learnt...

Labcoatguy said:
I had to look up Jubilee clip to find out that it's what we know of here as a hose clamp. I find it interesting that (as seen on TV) British English uses a lot more (or at least different types of) genericized trademark than American English, with biro, hoover, probably a few others I can't think of right now, and now Jubilee clip.
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Another TIL. I thought he meant a video clip of the Queen's Jubilee!
 
Dr_Grip said:
And by "supplying" you mean having techs on loan in Auschwitz to maintain the Hollerith machines and the CEO meeting Hitler.
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Good thing you use Apple, they were founded after the war :D
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Now there is a reason to tell people not to use "PCs"
 
Today I learnt that downloading a movie in Canada is quite illegal. In fact, in terms of downloading copyrighted material here, the only thing that's legal is downloading music onto a medium which is covered by the private copying levy that the country imposes on some blank media, such as onto a CD. But even then, downloading music to an hdd ... illegal.

I also learned that Voltage Pictures is the first to go after downloaders after the new C-11 bill to the Copyright Act was passed in federal parliament. They're the studio that made "The Hurt Locker" and they're attacking a small ISP in court to provide user information for some IP addresses collected during a torrent head hunt.

So I guess that's how the witch hunt starts ... so much for downloading whatever you want being legal in Canada.
What can I say, nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition. Luckily, never downloaded that stupid movie, despite being with the ISP in question. VPN, here I come! But download speeds are going to suck from here on out, because of no incoming connections. :(
 
Jon said:
They were? :blink:

Well that's not weird at all. Glad I stopped using the aftershave because the last thing i'd want is to smell like Hitler... That's how it starts.
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Just imagine the ad campaign. "Smell like Hitler, be like Hitler", "What country did you invade today?", or "Blitzkrieg, the new fragrance by Hugo Boss."
 
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I had a conversation about facial hair with a colleague yesterday. She said that since Hitler nobody had ever had the same kind of moustache so I had to show her a picture of Ron Mael from Sparks.

ron-mael-sparks-moustache.jpg


"You here to invade? Gas some Jews?"

"No, just play keyboards."

"Oh, OK then, come in. "
 
toma_alimosh said:
Today I learnt that downloading a movie in Canada is quite illegal. In fact, in terms of downloading copyrighted material here, the only thing that's legal is downloading music onto a medium which is covered by the private copying levy that the country imposes on some blank media, such as onto a CD. But even then, downloading music to an hdd ... illegal.

I also learned that Voltage Pictures is the first to go after downloaders after the new C-11 bill to the Copyright Act was passed in federal parliament. They're the studio that made "The Hurt Locker" and they're attacking a small ISP in court to provide user information for some IP addresses collected during a torrent head hunt.

So I guess that's how the witch hunt starts ... so much for downloading whatever you want being legal in Canada.
What can I say, nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition. Luckily, never downloaded that stupid movie, despite being with the ISP in question. VPN, here I come! But download speeds are going to suck from here on out, because of no incoming connections. :(
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VPN is not useful as it doesn't conceal origin very well just encrypts the traffic (you can download from encrypted only peers just the same). What you would want is to use TOR and private trackers with DHT turned off in the client.

Or you can just use NZBs, not sure about Canadia but stateside they can only get you if you share w/e you are downloading (since torrents not only download but also upload the file to other peers this is how they track it) as there is no proof that you download something unless you download from them and that wouldn't really be illegal since it's a copyright holder providing the copyrighted material.
 
As someone who's used TOR in the past, I have to let you know that downloading a movie over it would be only slightly faster than writing, casting, shooting and editing it from scratch yourself. :p
 
prizrak said:
VPN is not useful as it doesn't conceal origin very well just encrypts the traffic (you can download from encrypted only peers just the same). What you would want is to use TOR and private trackers with DHT turned off in the client.

Or you can just use NZBs, not sure about Canadia but stateside they can only get you if you share w/e you are downloading (since torrents not only download but also upload the file to other peers this is how they track it) as there is no proof that you download something unless you download from them and that wouldn't really be illegal since it's a copyright holder providing the copyrighted material.
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Actually, what the studio did was contract a digital forensics company to collect IP addresses of anyone sharing their work on torrents. So the forensics company turned off uploading and joined the torrent. They had permission to acquire by any means, but not to distribute. The forensics company slowed down their downloads to a crawl, so the movie downloaded over the course of several days. From there, they collected IP addresses from anybody that shared the torrents online, or anyone that attempted to connect to them to get the works. Then the studio went to the ISP, gave them the list, cited copyright law, according to which they needed to notify their subscribers to get legal counsel. After this procedure, the ISP is required by law to give the subscriber information based on the IPs and time stamps. And the judge upheld the decision to share the information on the first run, and the ISP is appealing it. Thus, apparently you can be sued for uploading/downloading through an unauthorized channel, as long as it's a forensics company spying on you on behalf of a copyright holder.

So it's not the ISPs that you have to hide your stuff from. In fact, this ISP is fighting as hard as it can to not have to give up the information of its subscribers. All you need to do with regards to them is encode your connection, so they don't throttle it. They throttle or slow down anything P2P.

But encoding your connection will not hide your IP address from anybody you download from. They'll know that you're the one downloading/sharing it. The only way to hide your IP address is through a VPN or Proxy service that hides your IP address and doesn't log activity and time stamps. It's the only way they can't come after you. If they go to the VPN/proxy provider whose IP address they got from the forensics, the only thing they can say is that they don't have logs, so they can't link any subscriber with any activity, per se.

In order to get a court order to reveal the people behind an IP, they'd have to prove that the people at the IP address obtained were the ones doing the infringement themselves. In the case of a proxy-type service, it's obvious that they weren't the ones doing it. As far as I know, the industry as a whole can't sue all the customers of the proxy company, because not all may have committed copyright infringement. Thus, only studios can sue independently, or as a group, and then they need to link copyright infringement of their works, not just in general, in order for the evidence to stand.

The court order to reveal identities behind IPs on the net can only be obtained with enough evidence to link that specific IP to the act committed. Thus, if they catch your personal IP, they caught you. As far as the court's concerned, the studio has a case against you and can sue, and the ISP may have no choice but to share subscriber information, according to current law.

Sure, there's trivial defenses that you may get away with, such as having an open WiFi, which neighbors may have been using to commit the act. It's a poor defense, but might get you by. Either way, you have to hire a lawyer, and pay legal fees to defend yourself, which will be very expensive, so you'd try to settle it out of court. They'd ask you for just-slightly less than minimal legal fees or else they sue, so what do you do? You have no choice but to pay them to go away. If you go to court, you lose more money. And no, in Canada you can't counter-sue for legal fees for being needlessly dragged in court, which is bullshit. So if your IP is on the list, you're losing money anyway, even if you're innocent. So even people who are not doing copyright infringement should get behind an IP mask if doing BitTorrent stuff. Judges are never smart enough to understand technological terms, and if the word "Peer2Peer" is used, they're sure to convict like a bunch of morons, because of the bad hype the term gets in legal circles around here.

So encrypting won't help. And as far as I've heard, it was proven quite a few times that TOR has vulnerabilities, so forensics companies can still get your original IP from those things. But from paid VPN and Proxy companies, they can't. They can hack the company's systems to get it in real time, which would be illegal, and any evidence gathered from that would be inadmissible in court.

And private trackers offer some protection, but not enough. Forensics companies can infiltrate private trackers. If cops can infiltrate release groups and take them down, forensics companies can infiltrate private trackers.

But the problem with the VPNs and Proxies remains: You can't have incoming connections, only outgoing, so that slows down most torrents, almost to a crawl.
 
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TIL that if you live with a 110lb German Shepherd dog, who is hyperstimulated by the smell of barbecue ribs you have cooking in the oven, be very careful when your arm is near her face.
 
TIL I'm passing on the regular butt massage my bernese mountain dog gets (she has stiff joints) to my little pit bull mutt. His face when I started doing it was priceless. dearsweetjesus.jpg.
 
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toma_alimosh said:
Actually, what the studio did was contract a digital forensics company to collect IP addresses of anyone sharing their work on torrents. So the forensics company turned off uploading and joined the torrent. They had permission to acquire by any means, but not to distribute. The forensics company slowed down their downloads to a crawl, so the movie downloaded over the course of several days. From there, they collected IP addresses from anybody that shared the torrents online, or anyone that attempted to connect to them to get the works. Then the studio went to the ISP, gave them the list, cited copyright law, according to which they needed to notify their subscribers to get legal counsel. After this procedure, the ISP is required by law to give the subscriber information based on the IPs and time stamps. And the judge upheld the decision to share the information on the first run, and the ISP is appealing it. Thus, apparently you can be sued for uploading/downloading through an unauthorized channel, as long as it's a forensics company spying on you on behalf of a copyright holder.
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You are actually saying the same thing I said, but in a ton more detail you don't get nicked for downloading only uploading. So if you go NZB route (which is download only) they can't really prove copyright infringement unless they are the ones that provided the material to you in the first place.
And private trackers offer some protection, but not enough. Forensics companies can infiltrate private trackers. If cops can infiltrate release groups and take them down, forensics companies can infiltrate private trackers.
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Yep private trackers are far from bulletproof, the only thing about encrypting traffic is that others can't snoop what is actually being sent. This actually works on NZBs as well the connection is encrypted so anyone snooping on the traffic from servers has no idea what is actually being sent through. So unless the forensics company sets up their own newsgroup/server where they share the stuff they can't do much.

As far as hiding from ISPs it actually is necessary stateside as there are these new agreements by ISP to first nag you into stopping then start throttling your bandwidth if you are infringing, if traffic is encrypted they don't know what's going through (well they *know* but not in legal terms) so they don't do it.
 
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prizrak said:
You are actually saying the same thing I said, but in a ton more detail you don't get nicked for downloading only uploading. So if you go NZB route (which is download only) they can't really prove copyright infringement unless they are the ones that provided the material to you in the first place.

Yep private trackers are far from bulletproof, the only thing about encrypting traffic is that others can't snoop what is actually being sent. This actually works on NZBs as well the connection is encrypted so anyone snooping on the traffic from servers has no idea what is actually being sent through. So unless the forensics company sets up their own newsgroup/server where they share the stuff they can't do much.

As far as hiding from ISPs it actually is necessary stateside as there are these new agreements by ISP to first nag you into stopping then start throttling your bandwidth if you are infringing, if traffic is encrypted they don't know what's going through (well they *know* but not in legal terms) so they don't do it.
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But that usenet stuff sounds so complicated. What's the learning curve on it look like?

I might have to learn how to use that, I guess. Well, apart from that, there's IRC, but that's pretty much as open as torrents, and no encryption either. IRC and FXP boards are only safe as long as they're obscure, not that I'd have access to that, since they try to keep it private. Are newsgroups more open to public?
 
toma_alimosh said:
But that usenet stuff sounds so complicated. What's the learning curve on it look like?

I might have to learn how to use that, I guess. Well, apart from that, there's IRC, but that's pretty much as open as torrents, and no encryption either. IRC and FXP boards are only safe as long as they're obscure, not that I'd have access to that, since they try to keep it private. Are newsgroups more open to public?
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Newsgroup stuff has no more of a learning curve than torrents, you'd need to get a newsnet account (like Thundernews) and get some indexing sites (kind of like trackers) some are paid some are free and also grab sabnzbd+ which is the software for downloading. There is also stuff like couchpotato, headphones and sickbeard for automatically downloading things you want.
 
A word of warning: when it comes to Usenet you want a paid indexing site, even the better free ones leave a bit to be desired
 
TIL one of the best phrases to wake a man up is, "I think your car got towed."
 
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