ISP 'Six Strikes' Plan Delayed

MrSeb sends this excerpt from DailyDot: "Shortly, a new system in the U.S. will allow your ISP to give you gradually sterner warnings and possible punishment if you download copyrighted material. The Copyright Alerts System (CAS) — more commonly known as the 'six strikes' policy, after the number of warnings users receive — is coming. Soon. Any minute now. Really. But it's not here yet, even though several news outlets — including CNN — said the system would go online yesterday, Thursday. Speaking to the Daily Dot, a press contact for the six strikes system says: 'We do not intend to launch until we are confident that the program is consumer friendly. We expect our implementation to begin later this year, with each of the ISPs launching at potentially overlapping but different times.' ... The six strikes system is officially helmed by an industry coalition called the Center for Copyright Information (CCI), which was created by the MPAA and RIAA. It counts the U.S.'s five top ISPs under its umbrella: AT&T, Cablevision, Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and Verizon."

I do not think that word means what you think...

[Taibhsear]

We do not intend to launch until we are confident that the program is consumer friendly.

It is, inherently, not consumer friendly.

Respect for Privacy: The new ISP differentiator

[jcadam]

Oh cool, I was beginning to view internet access as a commodity, with no real difference between ISPs... Now I have something to use as a discriminator when selecting a new provider.

So.... AT&T, Cablevision, Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and Verizon just managed to remove themselves from ever being considered by me again (and no, I don't ever knowingly download copyrighted material without paying for it).

Something tells me the mom&pop ISP down the road doesn't have the time/staff/inclination to bother with this kind of crap.

--
P.S.: Internet business idea #3,633,235: Privacy-focused ISP.

Re:No COX?

[Anonymous Coward]

Cox doesn't fuck around. I have their 50 Mbps package for $100 a month. I don't have cable. I don't get OTA broadcasts, because I've not bought an antenna. I do download about 2 TB of data a month between Netflix, Pandora, and others. I've never had a word said to me about it. They even give me additional bandwidth for the first few megabytes of a transfer when network congestion allows. They call this Superboost, I think. Works well when downloading a bunch of very small files that will be decoded and combined into a bunch of bigger files. They don't seem to care that their are effectively Superboosting the entire multi-gigabyte download.

Re:No COX?

[rickb928]

Cox has had a 3 strikes policy regarding DCMA notices since 2008. Enforcement has been spotty, but they treat it as a TOC violation.

Wanna try it out and see if they still enforce it?

Re:No COX?

[spire3661]

Officially, your account is capped at 300 GB/mo. I have the 25 Mbps Cox package and they 'cap' me at 250 GB, although i make sure i never hit that high. They now show your usage on their website if you care to look. Internet Usage i think its called. Somehow i doubt you are pulling 2 TB/mo without hearing anything from Cox.

Re:And how are these 'warnings' sent?

[Comen]

From this link http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/2011/07/ispplan.pdf

Subsequent alerts may include notifications in the form of pop-ups or redirection
to a special page displaying the alert. Failure to respond to these alerts will lead
to additional steps designed to ensure that the account comes into compliance.
These steps, referred to as “Mitigation Measures,” might include, for example:
temporary reductions of Internet speeds, redirection to a landing page until the
subscriber contacts the ISP to discuss the matter or reviews and responds to some
educational information about copyright, or other measures that the ISP may
deem necessary to help resolve the matter. These steps will only be taken after
multiple alerts and a failure by the subscriber to respond. This system consists of
at least five alerts.

Re:No COX?

[Anonymous Coward]

2 TB a month is pulling nearly 1 MBps (~800 kBps), every second of the month, every month. I don't think even netflix would cause that much. Pandora is probably just noise in that kind of bandwidth measurement. Must hit the torrents really hard

Re:Make up your damn mind!

[Zmobie]

Either you're going to eventually launch it, or not. It will never be 'consumer friendly' since it's a blatantly anti-consumer move intended to whore out to an unrepentantly anti-consumer organization.

Just wait until they've done this to about two dozen decent programmers... they'll invent some new crypto protocol that makes bittorrent look like the redheaded stepchild of piracy... "You can't stop the signal, Mel." -- Mr. Universe

Already been done. It is called BTGuard and you can get it plugged into most torrent trackers for a small monthly fee. Lifehacker ran an article about it not long ago.

http://lifehacker.com/5863380/how-to-completely-anonymize-your-bittorrent-traffic-with-btguard [lifehacker.com]

http://btguard.com/ [btguard.com]

Also, as outlined in the lifehacker article there are other solutions to mask the traffic from an ISP and there is no way in hell they can block some of them because they have much broader uses than just hiding your torrent tracking traffic. VPNs are way too widely used by so many businesses for telecommutes and other such, so it will ALWAYS be an option. And since (at least I think) it would be illegal wiretapping for them to capture your packets and decrypt them, there is not a damn thing they can do about it.