I suspect many people now have heard/read about this. I’m particularly concerned about my privacy now, because I download a lot of torrents, such as I will be downloading oS 11.1A1 later today, and at the moment, I have several other (legal) torrents running.
Will they be able to see that I’m downloading (and so I loose all my privacy (not that there is much on the net)), or not (and so I get falsely accused of pirating)?
I live in the US so I can only speak from my own experience, and can’t speak as a UK resident. But here in the US, I’m pretty sure an ISP can detect torrent traffic, unless you obfuscate it to look like FTP or HTTP traffic. They cannot tell what torrent you are downloading, though. Comcast (an ISP here in the US), however, has been known to go to great lengths to try to slow down torrent traffic, which is what led to people developing ways to obfuscate that traffic. There are programs that make torrent traffic appear to be FTP or HTTP traffic to ISPs, which would have obvious benefits Comcast is being sued right now actually, for web interference. But in the US if you’re downloading an open source torrent, there isn’t much to worry about.
sure sounds like the politics of personal privacy vs a government’s
right [sic] to pry, ugh…errrrr… provide security to citizens (from
terrorist) and protect corporate profits by enforcing copyright laws…
let me say that again: P O L I T I C S
–
DenverD (Linux Counter 282315)
A Texan in Denmark
Packet Prioritising and then Masking could allow your torrents a sneaky exit. Of course, it’s good to have a SuSE torrent seeding away to cover your tracks.
My roommate in college got falsely accused of downloading pirated movies twice. The MPAA or some similar organization, I forget which one, sent two nastygrams to the college saying that his IP address was downloading movies via torrent. However, he was on break between semesters at the time, his computer was off, and he wasn’t even here! And it wasn’t just a delayed notice, either. They mis-identified his IP address somehow, and he had to deal with the grief and embarassment of getting that sorted out with the college. That is why I don’t go to the movies anymore or buy music CDs. I don’t support those thugs.
What personally bothers me is how file sharing is treated in the media, it seldom seems to get mentioned that there are perfectly legal uses for the technology. File-sharing seems to equal illegal downloading in the eyes of the media.
True. Also, it has conditioned most computer-illiterate people to automatically think that all file sharing is illegal. Someone once asked me, “Do you download things?” I could tell that what he meant was “Do you download movies or songs illegally?” But, he had no idea that a lot of downloading is perfectly legit. Heck even to check my email, I have to download packets.
I’m not to sure just how this is going to be policed. Bittorrent/p2p seems to be getting a hammering again - when actually, it’s probably one of the best methods of file distribution we have. Articles discuss traffic shaping, port blocking and other restrictions to curb users bandwidth if they use bittorrent.
Interestingly, the BBC uses p2p in it’s windows based iPlayer, and doesn’t Amazon do something similar. How will this affect them I wonder?
DenverD seemed to hit the nail on the head with P O L I T I C S.
Much of what you hear is lip service and scare tactics. Doubtless there will be some sacrificial lambs brough to the slaughter - to serve as warning examples.
