US ISPs, Big Content Reaching Antipiracy Agreement 342
Chaonici writes "The word from CNet is that an antipiracy agreement between a number of ISPs (including Verizon, AT&T, and Comcast) and the RIAA & MPAA is nearing completion. Under the agreement, ISPs will step up their responses to copyright infringement complaints against subscribers. If a subscriber accumulates enough complaints, the ISP can throttle their bandwidth, limit their Web access to only the top 200 websites, and/or require participation in a 'copyright awareness' program that explains the rights of content creators. ISPs and rights holders will share the costs of the system. Ars Technica confirms the story with notes from an industry source, who mentions that the Obama administration is 'generally supportive' of the agreement."
What is this? (Score:5, Insightful)
What is this, fascism week?
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I smell a lawsuit.
Great for businesses not in the top 200!
Re:What is this? (Score:5, Insightful)
Isn't Pirate Bay in the top 200 sites?
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Car Analogy...
Isn't it like the oil companies blacklisting you in all but a list of auto dealerships they feel is the most popular based on the fact that you own a car that doesn't burn enough gas?
Re:What is this? (Score:4, Informative)
good luck finding one!
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Lucky you for living in an area where that's possible. In huge areas of the USA, there is literally only one option for high-speed non-satellite internet. In most other areas, there are only two or three choices... the two or three choices that are now in agreement to do something anti-customer. If they weren't a colluding oligopoly, that wouldn't be possible.
Re:What is this? (Score:5, Insightful)
That would be great if there was actual market competition in the broadband arena. It's pretty simply a monopoly, and if you factor in the government sanction that provides the monopoly... then yes... it is fascism.
This is vastly more sinister than the government adopting this stance officially.. because we can vote the bastards out who passed it. With the current state of broadband in the US, the only voting out we can do is canceling service in protest, something I suspect the Great Unwashed is unwilling to do.
This has nothing to do with actual infringement. All you need is to piss off the right people and zing! you're throttled and limited. There is no due process. If you get "enough complaints"... your ISP is going to screw you over withholding service that YOU paid for. How equitable is that? How is that not illegal? The EFF needs to sue.
Without competition, we are, to put it bluntly... fucked. And this sort of nonsense has made it more and more clear that the *AA's don't want my money. That's fine. I'll keep it. If only 20% of the people in the US did that, we'd be able to force change. As it stands now, about all we can do is shake our fists and shout insults as the *AA's burn down the orphanage and assrape the kids escaping the fire.
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Screw that. Let's just use the technology that exists today, and start building out our own networks. Tired of paying high prices for substandard service.
THIS is the answer. We MUST begin building a community mesh-networked internet (the intermesh? nah, dumb name. Internet3?) This is absolutely the only thing that can possibly allow us to move into the future with anything like freedom of speech.
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I'm sure there's plenty of "hackable" wireless routers laying around to do it, but there needs to be a place to point people to. Set up the SSID as a web address, web page provides ROMs and details on the whole thing.
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And, when they tell the government what laws they need passed to be sure the deck is stacked in their favor.
America is so beholden to the content makers it's not funny ... and they've more or less started to make the rest of the world beholden to them with ACTA.
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Consumers have no power when there is exactly one ISP in the area.
consumer is powerless (Score:5, Insightful)
When all of the business are in collusion, the consumer has no power.
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Actually, it isn't fascism when two private businesses agree to do something incredibly unfriendly to the consumer.
But when all the business in a given market do the same, it is collusion and restraint of trade. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competition_law#United_States_antitrust [wikipedia.org] Now if we can get the government to take our side...
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I'm just saying things have really been picking up speed over the last week. Just last week, Australians and Americans could access any website without government/corporate permission.
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Yeah - though at least in Australia there is (in most areas) a pretty wide choice of ISPs (and only two ISPs are doing this retarded voluntary filtering thing). But you'd be kinda screwed if you lived in an area (in whatever country) where you didn't have any other realistic choice of ISP ('desperate' options like relying solely on 3G and satellite notwithstanding)
The wording scares me (Score:4, Insightful)
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The wording is very scary, it certainly seems to imply that the powers that be only have to accuse you of piracy, with little or no means of proof and no appeal process.
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The so called "due process" wasnt laid out for a case where basically millions and millions of people, i.e. the majority of a country's population, are guilty and have to be prosecuted by comparably a tiny number of prosecutors. Usually, something that the majority of people doesnt consider wrong and does on a daily basis isnt even illegal. But in the case of enforcing copyright, you basically have a small, very small minority trying to force the majority into not doing something very basic like information
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"There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power government has is the power to crack down on criminals. When there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws."
-- Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
As much as I find undiluted Objectivism distasteful, it's hard to argue with what I see... If you can only control through intimidation, and your charter is to intimidate the "bad guy", you have to make everyone th
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Her 'innocent men' were industrialists and I'd say right now that they are the ones who are giving freedom a bad name, freely colluding against individual liberty and privacy.
Rand is still as distasteful as she ever was.
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Top 200 web sites? (Score:5, Funny)
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What's the reasoning behind only allowing the top 200 web sites anyway?
Why are websites with less traffic bad?
This is wrong on so many levels.
Re:Top 200 web sites? (Score:4, Informative)
What's the reasoning behind only allowing the top 200 web sites anyway?
Why are websites with less traffic bad?
This is wrong on so many levels.
Simple. The **AA want you kicked off the Internet, but your ISP still wants to collect their full monthly rate from you. So this way everybody is happy except you and you don't have a vote.
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Freedom.
Good... (Score:2)
[/sarcasm]
oh, the irony (Score:2)
lawsuit (Score:2)
For unfair disconnection in 3... 2... 1...
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And yet not, as the terms of service will be revised and you will agree to them in order to have internet service at all.
subject (Score:4, Insightful)
"ISPs and rights holders will share the costs of the system."
Ha ha! But seriously, customers will share the costs with other customers. RIAA might jack up member fees, but they were probably going to do that anyway.
CONSUMERS will burden the costs of the system (Score:5, Informative)
ISPs and rights holders will share the costs of the system
Naturally, the ISP will pass on the costs to the consumer, and the rights holders will find a way to pad the product price with their piece of the cost, but we all knew that.
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Bullshit. (Score:5, Interesting)
If anything, this is going to push me into "pirating" more. Limit my freedom just because some asshole corporate fuck thinks it's "fair"? Fuck these mother fuckers. I'll advise EVERYONE I know to NEVER do business with Comcast, AT&T, or Verizon from here on out.
Just because of this, I refuse to buy a movie or song ever again. 100% piracy from now on.
It's seriously time for a pro-freedom ISP that encrypts everything, logs nothing, and is crazy fast. Anybody have access to some VC capital to make this happen?
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Why not power it with cold fusion while you're at it?
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Your freedom to have an entitlement complex is being infringed? My God, call the waaaaaaambulance immediately! This is truly an emergency of epic proportions. What will you do if you can't gorge yourself on pop culture? That truly must be a life not worth living.
Re:Bullshit. (Score:4, Insightful)
One more has finally seen the light.
I don't consider myself pro-piracy. I believe that receiving the benefit from something without the owner's permission is unethical (even if the owner still gets to benefit from it). I am an artist myself, and thus have a vested interest in copyright law. I believe that a reasonable copyright system is worthwhile, and those who try to avoid recompensing artists and authors under such a system should be punished.
We do not have such a system. We have a system where a person can be punished on the mere accusation of wrongdoing (DMCA takedown notice); where the online equivalent of jaywalking is punishable by fines in the hundreds of thousands of dollars (Jammie Thomas); where so-called "limited-time" copyright keeps getting extended so that nothing will ever go public domain again; where companies can lock up their works so that even when they do go public domain they still can't be accessed (DRM); where the force of law backs this up so you're not allowed to bypass such locks even for legitimate use (DMCA); where copyright infringement is equated to terrorism by assigning it to the organization created specifically to go after terrorists (DHS); where anti-piracy international agreements are made in secret and all we get is a name that equates piracy with one of the most severe crimes of a civilized society (Anti-COUNTERFEITING Trade Agreement); where companies can get away with spamming letters threatening lawsuits without even a hint of accuracy checking so that even people who don't have a computer get threatened without any legal recourse; where giant companies can convince the government to do practically anything just by complaining about how much they're being harmed by piracy even when they're making record-breaking profits; where the whole idea of copyright, which was originally meant "to promote the progress of science and useful arts" now keeps every possible idea locked up so tightly that the law hinders the progress of science and the useful arts, all so that a handful of executives of big companies can each buy a third yacht.
I'm not pro-piracy. I'm anti-broken-copyright-system. It's gotten to the point where I consider it more unethical to give money to those who support such a system than to copy or share something that does not belong to me.
Don't blame me. I'm just a product of the system. The system has declared war on me, as it has on everyone who has ever read a book, watched a movie, or listened to a song and wanted a copy of it for ourselves, but not at the price nor in the format that is on the market. And when you declare war on that many people, don't be surprised if some of them fight back.
contracts? (Score:3)
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I don't recall the fine print of my TOS, but I would really wonder whether or not the contracts signed allowed for this bullshit, and whether or not such things would hold up in court.
You'll probably find a "we can alter the terms if we notify you" clause in the fine print. You're option would be to cancel the contract rather than accept the change.As a side note, that can be a way to get out of a contract with a termination fee without paying the fee.
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I think a better attack against this is any non top-200 site to sue the ever loving hell out of them. It'd be easiest for small local ISPs since it's blatantly anti-competitive practice to block traffic to your competition. Other companies would have to show damages of being bloc
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Internet Access Is a Basic Human Right (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, who am I kidding. They probably won't have anything to say about it at all.
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If they did, they may soon find themselves without internet access....
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The UN recently declared internet access to be a basic human right.
Who is "The UN"? The only nations you need to give a shit about are on the UNSC. Do you think China believes in basic human rights at all? Do you think that the USA believes internet access is a human right? The UN just announced that it's wrong to discriminate against people on the basis of their sexual orientation, and the delegate from the USA called it a historic event, but you must remember that sexual orientation is NOT protected in the USA, except by some states (like California.) Until every nation
Anybody surprised? (Score:3)
What does it take to become an ISP? (Score:2)
So someone will just rent a big pipe from a company that's not signed up to this, split it and sell it on (full encrypted) to downline customers. Sounds like a business model to me...
Another thought - do corporations realise that their 'net feeds will be deep packet sniffed to look for copyright infringing material? I wonder how much they will like the ISPs no longer being just a bunch of tubes...
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Re:What does it take to become an ISP? (Score:4, Insightful)
You are entirely right, except:
You see the problem isn't fascism, its corporatism.
That's what 'fascism' is, dude. The corporations and the government, working together. The corporations do what the 'government isn't allow to' (Like find people guilty of crimes without due process), and the government makes sure the corporations stay well feed, and invulnerable to any sort of lawsuits or prosecutions.
Don't go around inventing another word. It already exists, it's 'fascism'.
I pointed this out back when the government asserted the right to immunize the telecoms for the telecoms' illegal spying at the government's request. In short, the government hired corporations to commit felonies, and then forgave those felonies, and classified their end of it so they couldn't be prosecuted either.
We're not in some hypothetical hysteria people making up stuff...we're in actual, literal, dictionary-definition fascism. Sadly, people seem to think fascism requires concentration camps or something....it doesn't, ask the Italians.
We are also, I feel I should point out, in a dictionary-definition police state. Because of Gitmo. The executive claiming the power to imprison and hold people without charging them with crimes is the definition of a police state.
Sounds fair enough... (Score:2)
I'll drop my subscription again (Score:2)
In fact, they'll probably have notices or even loc
Piracy not cool anymore... (Score:3)
Personally, I think we're on the downward side of piracy anyway. Of course the President would be on-board with this because the frivolous complaints against 10k people at a time are a misuse of the courts and a waste of time.
I think piracy is on the way out anyway. Things like iTunes, Netflix,& Hulu make it really easy to get almost anything legally. I don't think regular folk will like getting the first warning letter one bit... Having a warning system in place will get people warned their actions have consequences sooner... Just knowing somebody takes notice is enough to get many people to stop. I think most people have "grown up" and are sick of all the spyware, viruses, and hacks from torrent sites anyway.
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What are you talking about?
How exactly are videos and music going to carry spyware or viruses? Or "hacks" for that matter - are there a lot of people who have been hacked by, what, I guess tracker operators?
The most you'll see on BT are those ridiculously lame "go to www.lulz.sk/~kodeks to download the proper codec for this movie" videos (where I assume you're invited to download 'rapem
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I think most people have "grown up" and are sick of all the spyware, viruses, and hacks from torrent sites anyway.
As opposed to the spyware, viruses, and hacks from Sony, Microsoft, and many hardware vendors? (note that Sony has hacks and spyware, Micorsoft has spyware like WGA, and many companies have released viruses in the driver disks)
Fighting back? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Isn't using a proxy and encryption one answer? (Score:2)
Is there anyone who thinks these ISP warnings can't be kept from triggering by judicious proxy use and encrypted traffic? Or is deep-packed inspection good enough to identify P2P traffic? Even if it could, it surely couldn't determine the copyright status of the stream.
I was going to remark that we would surely see services like Tor and FreeNet grow exponentially in response, but what's wrong with a good old simple non-US proxy service plus traffic encryption? At least when we're talking about cyber-lock
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In other words your ISP has simply decided to take the stance of harming their own legitimate customers while not doing anything truly effective to the hardcore infringers. Somebody who really wants to share copyrighted material will simply rent a seedbox in a country like China or India, use that for all their torrents, then copy the completed torrents to their home machine. And they simply won't care if it takes a full day or so to download an entire DVD over an encrypted connection.
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The next step is to block encrypted data, unless the server is on an approved white list (banks, big e-mail providers, etc)
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one more nail in their coffin (Score:2)
Private Sector / Non-legal Solution (Score:2)
Is it possible that the private sector has realized it needs to stop leaning on the judicial branch of the government as a crutch? This proposal at least seems better than their response to extort settlements from people in courts, so that's a step in the right direction.
The "copyright awareness" program seems like a worthy response. If they assume that their customers are innocent when they decide to take action, a course about securing your wireless connection and teaching their kids about not downloa
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Both ISPs and big content are still relying on the government, and the settlement letter thing seems to be dying out due to judges with a sense of due process. Suing individuals wasn't going to be a profit stream or a deterrent.
Cats out of the bag (Score:5, Interesting)
Really, it is out. Look, it is there, sitting on the windowsill licking its... well, that is just rude... but it is out of the bag in any case. No you can't put it back in the back. Or the case.
Whenever now some new story breaks about the latest means of illegal filesharing and the industry moving against it, I am near instantly asked by non-techies how to do it themselves.
Educate them? What, that artists like Britney Spear would starve to death without your hard earned money? Yeah, I am sure most of the people I know, some of who have trouble making end meet month to month give a shit.
Content production has always relied on the artificial limitation of availability (we only print X amount) to keep the price up. With digital reproduction, this limit has gone. Worse, the cost of distribution is approaching trivial. I can share a movie for a couple of cents. How in the world are you going to persuade me to pay MORE for a SINGLE movie then I pay for my internet connection that can give me hundreds of them?
And yet, movie ticket sales are on the increase. Gaga earns millions. Clearly all this piracy isn't actually affecting anyone. Where are the starving artists, where are the movies that should have been made that are not made (no, the ones that should not have been made but were made do NOT count instead).
It reminds me of the anti-piracy messages in shows like Futurama. Yeah, you sold me, I felt very bad for downloading the entire series... oh wait, I didn't. The cost of purchasing series is just to high, i am not going to pay that much for a piece of plastic. As for watching it on TV, the commercials are just to long, not just the ones that make money, WHY one EARTH do TV stations struggling to keep viewers watching commercial breaks ADD to the length of the breaks by advertising their own station I am WATCHING?
Talk about oversell.
The content industry either re-invents itself or has to just accept the year after year profit increases they been suffering at the hands of pirates (oh, you thought they were making a loss? Nope, in fact investing in music back catalogs is now considered a risk free investment for pension funds).
Educating me? I am educated thank you very much, I know the costs of printing a plastic disc and the cost me of funding the superstar lifestyle of an artist versus the cost of me not funding it.
No more music? I could care less. If all the artists of the world want things to change, let them strike. Every single one of them against me not paying for their work. STRIKE. See if anyone gives a shit. Do you?
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Not so bad. (Score:2)
How will this impact hardcore infringers? (Score:5, Insightful)
Answer: It won't.
Most people who are hardcore infringers are already using things like seedboxes for uploading & downloading torrents. How do these idiot lawyers expect these agreements to impact VPS's hosted in countries like India? Rent 100gig of disk space & bandwidth from another country for $20/month or so, run all your torrents there, then use rsync via ssh, scp, etc. to do an encrypted transfer to/from your home. Even with deep packet inspection the ISP couldn't possibly know that you're copying copyrighted material to/from your seedbox.
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If you can't download them to home, what good are they?
Wow, you really aren't all that bright, are you?
Your ISP starts throttling bittorrent on you and doing deep packet inspection of those torrents to see what you're sharing. So you rent a seedbox at a different ISP and do all your bittorrent transfers there where your local ISP has no control. Once you've received the entire torrent at the seedbox then you simply download it to home over an encrypted connection. As I said in my original post you just use scp/ssh or something similar that's SSL encrypted (p
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I think if they disallowed any encryption other than SSL, most people wouldn't complain because they'd still be able to access their website and email.
Wrong. Every corporation in the country that relies on VPN's for their employees would complain, as would every corporation in the country who has sysadmins who work remotely using tools like SSH to log into hosts. As would every single person/corporation who uses encryption like GPG to encrypt sensitive e-mails and other data.
And on top of that you could never trust on-line banking or anything else ever again. There are tools out there to help identify SSL man-in-the-middle attacks that more and more ba
The future is here! (Score:4, Insightful)
Silencing Dissidents (Score:2)
Have an opposing view? Let us dig through our proxy logs to see if you've downloaded any MP3s from Rapidshare or the like.
What, no due process? No rebuttal? (Score:3)
I should have been a lawyer. They have so much power. Apparently they can just write letters to companies to do their bidding regardless of anyone else's rights.
So, now we have a situation where, if there are enough copyright complaints, let alone valid ones, the ISPs must comply. No due process at all---it's all about the all-powerful squeaky hinge.
Trooper: This usage is covered under fair use.
Ben: The copyrights are for sale if you want them
Trooper: Let me see your writ.
Luke fumbles around looking for a signed writ.
Ben (in a controlled voice): There is no fair use
Trooper: There is no fair use
Ben: These aren't the rights you are looking for
Trooper: These aren't the rights you are looking for
Ben: We can stop his business
Trooper You can stop his business
Ben (to Luke): Move along.
Trooper: Move along. Move along.
-----
Welcome to the USA. Former jurisdiction of the US Constitution.
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Cool goatse link bro
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Goatse.
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ya got me
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Well thanks for the useful info, but what if something like this [slashdot.org] happens to me?
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Also, charge something like $0.30/GB overage - people wouldn't mind that
Are you serious? At that price you won't get any customers at all unless you are the only choice. No one in the US is going to pay those prices unless they live in the middle of nowhere and have no choice. In which case, congrats because they are only going to use a few GB per month and you will get all of $1.00 from them.
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Peer Block is neigh pointless. All it does it prevent communication with an IP based off a list. This fails in 2 distinct ways. A. You have to have a trustworthy list that assumes they don't rotate their IP addresses and isn't poisoned by those same companies. B. The Trackers have a full list of IP addresses that are part of the swarm and also maintain statistics on upload/downloads. Preventing communication isnt the same as being hidden, dont trust peer block to do much for you.
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Peer Block was never a foolproof measure. It blocks the bogon ranges, which is the most important part, but basically any company using a non-static address (like a home connection) to monitor swarms will have no problem doing so.
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My God. That's the biggest entitlement complex I've ever seen in my life. I'd nominate you for some kind of award, if it existed.
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I enjoyed your comment, but why on earth did you link to an embedded youtube video on metacafe?
Here's the actual link [youtube.com]:
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First, you're talking about obsessive hoarders here. These are the kinds of people who download dozens of music tracks every day, with no intention of ever listening to them... just because they can. It's there, so they pirate it. If it weren't there, they probably wouldn't ever miss it.
Second, it's the principle of the matter. To them, paying for som
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Fourth, it seems to be some kind of bizarre psychological trait that you'll commonly find in people. For example, an overclocking enthusiast will spend an extra $50 on CPU cooling, so they can overclock their CPU by 100 MHz, instead of just buying a CPU that's 100 MHz faster, for $25. People like feeling that they got something extra, for free, even if the reality of the situation is that they only cost themselves more money. Some people are more ideological than pragmatic.
You do realize this is 2011, right? What you are describing is Pentium overclocking. As in Pentium 1. Ah yes. I remember my Pentium 166. I spent so much effort trying to get to 200 Mhz. Also some people would prefer to use proper cooling even if they were not overclocking. It makes even more sense now that clock speeds are no longer increasing. So it makes sense to keep your CPU for many years. Also, even then it cost more than $25 to buy that extra speed. Probably $300 would be more like it. And nowadays y
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if you are spending an extra $20 a month just to let you secretly pirate stuff so that your ISP can't detect you, why not just buy the stuff legitimately?
Let me answer your question with a question. Why pay more than $20 a month for internet service if all you use it for is browsing/email/facebook? I remember paying $10 a month for reliable, always connected, dialup service and it worked okay for browsing. It just wasn't fast enough to download content. Face it. Piracy is what drove the internet to broadband speeds.
Besides, I think you are missing the point. This is about freedom. If someone puts shackles on your legs, you would be willing to either pay some
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$20/month for 10 years = $2,400
5,000 DVDs @ ~$15/each = $75,000
doesn't take a genius to see which is cheaper.
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There's a difference between using the internet for just browsing web sites and actually downloading content. The only point of having "broadband" speeds at all is for the content. If the ISPs find a way to cut that off I won't be paying $100 a month anymore just to browse websites. Maybe I'll pay $20 a month for slow DSL or even $10 - $15 a month for dialup.
It will also become quite tempting for many techies to steal internet service from unprotected or WEP wireless routers. My friend has already been doin
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