So my ISP cut me off today . . .

bigj3347

Senior member
Sep 19, 2004
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So I've been using Kazaa for like five years, and it has really gone south for the past couple of years, people kept leeching and not sharing so all the new files are never circulated. I've heard of bittorrent but it seemed too complicated to make the switch worthwhile so I just gradually stopped any p2p file sharing. I just got a new 120 gig hd and figured I'd see if i can fill it up. With kazaa going nowhere, I downloaded bittornado and was and running. It's like getting in to a 911 turbo after driving your grandmother's oldsmobile for your whole life, the download speeds were consistently over 100 kb/s. After they were done downloading, I thought I'd return the favor and seed the files so others can enjoy as well.

I woke up this morning and my internet was down, I thought that was weird cuz I rarely get service outtages around here. I called Cox high speed internet to see what's going on and they tell me to call this 1800 number. I call and they tell me I was cut off for sharing copyrighted material. Now I've uploaded from kazaa for the past four years and nothing's ever happened, I seed a file on bittorrent for 1 day and I get shut off. It's a three strike policy so I still have two strikes but is bittorrent really that exposed? I know what I did was illegal but if the ISPs and the movie companies were cracking down to my level (I uploaded maybe 1 gigabytes worth of files), They'd have to bust just about every college student there is in this country! Am I like the only bittorrent user who's stupid enough to walk around with my ass (IP) exposed??
 

mundane

Diamond Member
Jun 7, 2002
5,603
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I've heard talk of a program that shields your ISP to some degree, Peer Guardian. I don't have much experience with BitTorrent though ... maybe someone on the board can shed some light on the issue.

What's this three strikes policy? And how are you online now?
 

bigj3347

Senior member
Sep 19, 2004
458
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0
I had to call this 1800 number from ISP, they gave me the lecture of how they're cracking down on file sharing and that this was my first strike. It's like a broken record, they're cracking down, they're cracking down, well this is the first time i've had proof that they're cracking down. I feel like i'm the last kid who stuck his hand in to the cookie jar and got busted for it.
 

naddicott

Senior member
Jul 3, 2002
793
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76
Bittorrent is totally exposed from what I understand. For example, on the World of Warcraft downloader (which is a mutated version of BT) you can see every IP that you're connecting to up and down as well as the port on their system you're connecting to. As a copyright holder, tyring to enforce your rights on BT is as easy as using any client that shows connection IP's, hunt for torrents of your own stuff, and send cease and desists to ISPs for every single IP you see with a single byte uploaded of torrents of your materials.

No comment on the propriety of your past activities...
 

dev1ance

Junior Member
Nov 13, 2004
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I've never been a big fan of bit torrents. I always go with using IRC to download archived programs, music, movies, whatever. Must've downloaded about 50 Gigs worth or so in the past year.
 

drag

Elite Member
Jul 4, 2002
8,708
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Bittorrent rocks. And don't forget that it was originally intended for perfectly legitiment transactions. (sharing Linux install ISO images I believe).

I've delt with Cox Cable before, being a customer. What they said about cutting down on file trading is a lie. Pure and simple. Hell, if it wasn't for file trading the cable internet companies wouldn't be as nearly as popular as they are.

What the truth is is that it's WAY TO EXPENSIVE to let people file trade using bittorrent. Did you know that a FULL 35% of all internet traffic is JUST BITTORRENT?? That stuff is nuts. It's completely true, it completely dwarfs a Http, and even E-mail traffic hands down. They don't come close to using as much as bittorrent alone. It also completely dwarfs other p2p file trading networks (usenet, edonkey, kaaza, you name it)

How the cable company works is that since the majority of the time the majority of the people aren't using the internet to transfer stuff. Hell, even when your surfing the internet with firefox and have 20 pages open your only going to be downloading maybe 5% of the time. So they heavily oversell their bandwidth to customers in order to make up for the cost.

how the hell do you think that they can sell you a 3Mb/s download speeds with "unlimited" bandwidth for 50 bucks a month were it costs a business a thousand dollars a month for a dedicated T1 that is 1/3 as fast?

But I know for a fact that Cox uses excuses like this to save bandwidth. They do with blocking port 80, they blame it on a obscure worm from years ago, but it's realy because they don't want you to run web servers. If you buy the business package then they'll unblock it.

Bittorrent is even worse. When doing a lot of that stuff your dominating the line and since your sharing it with the other customers it's realy hurting them....

I noticed that since Cox upped the speed of the network from 1Mb/s downloads to 3Mb/s downloads the quality of the line declined somewhat.

But cox is silly, the 1-800 number is a waste of money... Most intellegent ISPs would restrict your bandwidth and set it up so that you share it with other file traders and let the non-file traders have clean unrestricted bandwidth. But maybe the trouble is that EVERYBODY is using bittorrent.

Oh well. They won't be to weird about it. Remember they give you 3 chances, it's just that your using to much bandwidth, if they stopped all file trading they'd loose all their business. If you get a 2nd call then stop it.

If I had a chance I'd go with DSL. With DSL your not sharing the bandwidth like you are with Cable. They still oversell the bandwidth and that, but what you get is yours usually. It depends on the company.

You get what you pay for.

Personally If I could I'd drop cable in a second and go with a company like Speak easy. They have very liberal rules on usage, you can even share your connections with your neighbors and they don't care. They say your bandwidth is your bandwidth and it's yours to use. People even setup wireless access points for passerbys.

they have gaming server packages, and even have local rpm search mirrors for Linux users. They are more expensive, but I think its perfectly worth it for me to pay for a company that has a nice attitude.

But alas. DSL isn't offered in my area. (well SDSL is, but ASDL isn't.)
 

mundane

Diamond Member
Jun 7, 2002
5,603
8
81
Useful info, drag. You're turning out to be a bubbling fountain of wisdom =). I had no idea of those percentages. Like I said, I've only used BT a little bit (Time Warner Cable here) for TV episodes (and I've heard they've started cracking down on those, as well.). At first I thought the MPAA/RIAA had pounced on the OPs ISP; now it looks like just a pro-active measure by their service provider. I didn't think those big corporations gave warning shots =)
 

drag

Elite Member
Jul 4, 2002
8,708
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Now keep in mind that I can definately be wrong.

But cox is in it for the $$$$. They would only care if MPAA had a definate legal power over them to make them responsible for their customer's copyright violations.
I don't think (or at least hope) that it never gets to that point. Suing Cox Cable for bittorrent abuses is akin to suing Hertz because they found a dead hooker in the truck of a rental car after somebody returned it.


(also keep in mind that their is NO such thing as anonymous on the internet. Your ISP can know everything about your surfing downloading habits, they keep logs of network usage and can even read the websites as you download them. All this is very easy with a packet sniffer (like ethereal) and logging facilities built into most modern networking equipment. While they may not (or may) be held responsible for your computer usage they can be compelled to turn over information on you or a group of people's activities if they are compelled to thru a legal order.

Every once in a while I would snoop (for a joke, mind you.) in on my roomate's web surfing and read the webpages as they downloaded them. Then a couple hours later I would ask them why they were visiting so and so website and freak them out with my computer godliness. :p Of course now they think I can log into their computer and download files when the computer is turned off, so I probably went a bit overboard.)
 

bigj3347

Senior member
Sep 19, 2004
458
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0
Yea, I was thinking about switching since cox is really expensive. 50$ a month. I gotta admit its pretty fast, except when I am downloading files. . then it turns in to 56k speeds. I think the only other high speed internet options are verizon dsl for 30$ and SBC yahoo . .don't really care for the extra yahoo or msn premium though . .any thoughts?
 

drag

Elite Member
Jul 4, 2002
8,708
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Look for a local ISP maybe. With DSL you pay for the line seperate from the ISP, were with cable you pay for both at the same time.

Yahoo and MSN offer packages with various ISPs. For instance I Qwest in my area and they offer a bundled value service pack with MSN highspeed that is nearly as cheap as AOL dial-up. It's not nearly as fast as cable though.

For speed to dollar cable is very hard to beat. I pay 50 bucks in my area for a 3mb/s download 512mb/s upload and that is freaking fast. (cox just upped it's basic service plan from 1mb/s to 3mb/s due to increased compitition).

It realy realy depends on your area and what options you have aviable. Some areas of the country you can get like 6 Mb/s downloads thru DSL for dirt cheap if your lucky.

The basic idea with DSL now is that with HDTV being standardized you will be able to transmit TV shows and such thru your copper wire. Of course this requires massive amounts of bandwidth, but that's what fiber optics is all about. The phone companies are getting fiber everywere and it'll allow short hops with dsl lines that will allow 10-20Mb/s downloads and even faster. Evetually you'll just get fiber right into your house.

The idea is that the DSL companies are going to break the cable mini-monopolies over the counties and allow a second way of getting massive amounts of TV programming thru your phone lines/fiber.

So in the next few years there are going to be some realy neat things going on if you happen to live in the right places of the country. They want everything on your DSL or Cable: Phone lines (Voip), HDTV, internet, video convercing etc etc etc.

Also there is possibly significant cost savings associated with DSL....

Cable is now pretty expensive if you take full cost objectively.
you have internet + cable TV + your landline phone bills. Then most people have cell phones on top of that. So some people's monthly bills for entertainment and connectivity runs past 200 dollars a month, depending on location.

What they are starting to do now is offer "naked" dsl, were you don't pay for phone access anymore, just the DSL line + ISP costs.

So if you get rid of cable, get rid of your land line, get rid of cable internet you can reduce the cost drasticly by just going with DSL internet + cell phone.

Hell, with the internet and such I get all my news and such off of the radio and internet. My entertainment is taken care off with video games and such, and I've probably only watched maybe 5-6 hours of telivision for the entire last month. That's 10 bucks a hour to watch mostly commercials and morons.

And guess what. It sucked. 180 channels of crap. 9 times out of 10 the most interesting thing on is watching home owners work on interior decorating. And even thats 20 minutes of commercials with 10 minutes of programming. All those commercials give me a headache and I almost can't stand to watch TV anymore. And me and my roomates spend well over a hundred dollars on the whole digital cable/phone/internet thru Cox. And i don't even have a cell phone.. all this cable BS is slowly turning into a

Depending on what you want, your location, and what services you expect DSL is a bad idea or a good idea.
 

CTho9305

Elite Member
Jul 26, 2000
9,214
1
81
azureus with safepeer.
Given how the BitTorrent protocol works, I don't understand how it's possible to make yourself safer. It won't connect to known-**AA IPs? That seems like a pretty weak defence. All they need to do is pay off one college student to borrow his net connection and then what? You're going to start blocking whole universities? If they get a cox cable account are you going to block everyone on cox? Eventually there won't be anyone "safe" to connect to, and they'll have won.
 

rh71

No Lifer
Aug 28, 2001
52,844
1,049
126
how would having peerguardian or safepeer help ? I looked up peerguardian and it blocks "rogue connections". Bittorrent requires connections for sharing - what exactly would blocking "rogue connections" do ?

If the MPAA or RIAA wants to collect IPs, they just sign on as another peer and whoever they see sharing, "gets caught" by IP.

The only way around this that I could see is have a spoofed IP address, but then would BT work with a fake IP ?
 

eddie

Senior member
Jan 1, 2000
490
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I've been on sbc dsl for a few years now and have never had any problems with them telling me about my download/upload habits. I've uploaded and downloaded gigs worth of data, really just depends how anal your isp is willing to be.
 

bamacre

Lifer
Jul 1, 2004
21,029
2
61
This is why I have always stuck with the Hotline Client/Server. It's old, not as many people use it, but my ISP can't see sh$t. It's completely private, you can run it over different ports, you can delete guest logins, etc. It's a file-sharing, IM'ing, news-posting, all-in-one app. And no spyware, etc.
 

effee

Golden Member
Sep 4, 2004
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This is why I love not being in the US sometimes. Some countries don't care.
 

bigj3347

Senior member
Sep 19, 2004
458
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Originally posted by: drag
Now keep in mind that I can definately be wrong.

But cox is in it for the $$$$. They would only care if MPAA had a definate legal power over them to make them responsible for their customer's copyright violations.
I don't think (or at least hope) that it never gets to that point. Suing Cox Cable for bittorrent abuses is akin to suing Hertz because they found a dead hooker in the truck of a rental car after somebody returned it.


(also keep in mind that their is NO such thing as anonymous on the internet. Your ISP can know everything about your surfing downloading habits, they keep logs of network usage and can even read the websites as you download them. All this is very easy with a packet sniffer (like ethereal) and logging facilities built into most modern networking equipment. While they may not (or may) be held responsible for your computer usage they can be compelled to turn over information on you or a group of people's activities if they are compelled to thru a legal order.

Every once in a while I would snoop (for a joke, mind you.) in on my roomate's web surfing and read the webpages as they downloaded them. Then a couple hours later I would ask them why they were visiting so and so website and freak them out with my computer godliness. :p Of course now they think I can log into their computer and download files when the computer is turned off, so I probably went a bit overboard.)


I think I'm gonna cut back on my filesharing, but use peerguardian when I do so. I'm interested in seeing how effective peerguadian is from screening out cox. If I get busted again, I'm just gonna drop cox and look more deeply in to verizon or sbc yahoo dsl. cox has got a damn monopoly in my area. Other than satelite there is not other cable service. My monthly digital cable, high speed internet costs me 100$. Their so called basic cable package is only the network and local channels. You have to include the "expanded service package" just to get ESPN, TNT, MTV etc. IMO, that's a crock of sh!t. If you don't buy the expanded package for an extra 25$ a month, your paying 30$ a month for channels you can get with an antenna. Anyways, I'm just ranting on Cox and their ridiculous prices and services.
 

CTho9305

Elite Member
Jul 26, 2000
9,214
1
81
Peerguardian can't protect you from your ISP - they can just look at the packets going to/from your computer to determine that you're using bittorrent and what you're uploading/downloading.
 

bamacre

Lifer
Jul 1, 2004
21,029
2
61
Originally posted by: CTho9305
Peerguardian can't protect you from your ISP - they can just look at the packets going to/from your computer to determine that you're using bittorrent and what you're uploading/downloading.

Isn't that illegal for them to do. Sounds like illegal search to me. They might as well read his e-mail.
 

Nothinman

Elite Member
Sep 14, 2001
30,672
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Isn't that illegal for them to do. Sounds like illegal search to me. They might as well read his e-mail.

I doubt there's been sufficient precedent in the US to say either way, atleast with regards to random protocols. But you can't really bitch about your ISP reading your email IMO, you're the one sending the data in plain text across a public medium and I believe the US government can already place an email sniffer on an ISP's network without a warrant.
 

drag

Elite Member
Jul 4, 2002
8,708
0
0
People reading your e-mail/logging IP addesses/tracking protocols is the same moral equivilance as shouting a conversation across a crowded restaurant and people evesdropping. It doesn't have anything to do with you living inside the US or outside the US, or legallities. Nothing realy enters into it.

It's the same as if your dealing drugs out of your car in the parking lot or picking up hookers from a Cab. It's like growing pot out of your backyard. Anybody can walk by a view it, I can do it. Nothinman can do it, so then the MPAA can do it and so can the FBI/KGB/European Union thought police... It doesn't matter.

It's all public knowledge.

There just isn't any privacy on the internet. There is no anonymous anything. Using stuff like proxies or anonymizers or whatnot set up screens and boundries, but they aren't something that can't be worked around or overcome with some extra effort.

Does a cop need a warrent to look in your front window and see you snorting cocaine? Of course not.

You can hide what your doing with encrypted tunnels and such, but they still can tell exactly were it's comming from and were it's going. It's just something that is fundamental to how the internet works and networking in general. They HAVE to know, or it doesn't work.

The only thing that keeps you safe is that NOBODY CARES what you do. :)