Today i received a letter from my ISP...

Correct.

You could possibly devote a single machine to downloading, run it from a live CD and save everything to an external USB drive. The machine would not require a hard drive at all.

Then when you shut the machine down, your activities would be wiped from memory (for all practical purposes) and the drive could be concealed or moved to a remote location.

Ubuntu would work, and Firefox as well as Azureus/Vuze comes with it on the install CD.

Ubuntu Linux runs on older hardware, that $20 Pentium II 266mhz with 256 megs of RAM would be more than sufficient. ALl the machine needs is USB ports and the ability to boot from CDROM.

Edited to add that Ubuntu Linux comes out-of-the-box with a good graphical interface and runs very well on older hardware. There is an "Add/Remove" option at the bottom of the start menu that makes installing software a breeze.
[edit on 9-6-2009 by Symbiote]

[edit on 9-6-2009 by Symbiote]

reply to post by ratcals

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I couldn't agree with you more. It is stealing. I have been in the music and entertainment business for decades. About five years ago I was engineering a CD, it was a very low scale operation and before we even got it packaged there were already pirated copies of some of our tracks I heard one on the local radio no less. I could have tried to find out what happened...I could have raised hell at the radio station but it had to have started as an "inside job" from there...we might as well have given up and did eventually due to other contract disputes.

Private torrents doesn't make it secure, the RIAA and MPAA can still get at you no matter how private the torrent site is. Unless you can get on a really private torrent site by invite and someone can vouch for you, private sites aren't secure.

I am a member of various private sites for they have quality torrents. Beyond that, it is all about ratio. You cannot go on a private torrent site and leech without giving back ratio wise or else you will be booted out. Any Sony exec can register to a private torrent site and see who is uploading and downloading their material.

Yes


Change ISP in a heartbeat and never look back. Every horror story i have read about companies such as sony going after ISP or in worst cases, an individual, they do so if it is a small ISP or weak individual such as an elderly or teens/kids downloading mp3's and movies, individual who are clueless on how to defend themselves in front of giants.

As for law enforcement seizing someone's computer, it is mostly unheard of. Granted that if you are in college and you are using their bandwidth to share copyrighted material, they will bear the wrath of the "giants", just googled the stuff and several students had their computer seized by campus officials.

Unless you are running a torrent site with servers to facilitate people to share copyrighted material, such as out of the theater movies, then you become a number 1 priority and have a big bull eyes painted all over you.

In your case, your ISP just got scared and played the A-hole game on you. To add insult to injury, they made you sign a letter so they can wipe their hands clean of you. Also, I would ask that ISP of yours if they run on the "Neighborhood IP" meaning that it is not unheard of that people living in the same localized areas are sharing a same subnet IP address. I have seen cases in the gaming community about how some people got banned from gaming servers for they have been accused of creating 2 or more accounts that are running on the same IP when it is not the case and those people are living some 100 meters from each others.

In any case, it sucks for you that this happened and do yourself a favor by giving them the finger of honor and take your business elsewhere where you will not be given any grievance. They deserve that much and you deserve better.

reply to post by miss_silver

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Thanks for your comment, unfortunately i still have one more month with them since i did pay in advance, and guess what, the contract specifies that if i cancel before a year of service has gone, i still have to pay whatever days/weeks/months are left before a year of service great! so anyway, i will still move to another isp, the thing is, there are only two on this town , i am traveling through Mexico right now, so i guess is time to move on, i wanted to leave to my next stop anyway so i will probably just spend another 15 days here and move on. i guess i will have to cancel the contract and pay for a service i will never receive, instead of leaving the service running as i had planned, because my brother stays here and he wanted it for his kids, but with this kind of things, i don't think so..

Way to go crappy business who steal from their clients and have no remorse about it


[edit on 9-6-2009 by Kaifan]

This reminds me of a situation that recently happened to me. I was fixing a friends laptop and I had it at my house a couple days. The second day I receive an email from Comcast that my email (port 25) is being turned off because of "suspicious activity" on that port. So now I am stuck using web mail.

The laptop did have a large number of infections which I am sure was the problem, but to shut off the port? The laptop was talking on the network, maybe, 2 hours tops just to download spyware removal software from my server. I wish I still had the email to show you but I forgot I had the web mail setup to delete the trash bin after 1 day.

Now I am just waiting for them to turn off port 80 for "suspicious activity"



JT

[edit on 9-6-2009 by Greenblaz]

SO you move a lot around as you stated in your posts. Next ISP you subscribe to, make sure they have a 3G network

reply to post by Greenblaz

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It looks like the lesson to be lernt from this thread is when you are looking to fix a friends computer keep it isolated from your network untill you are happy to connect it.

Decide what apps you require and use a known machine to download them - use a flash drive or a disk maybe to transfer the apps... Or teach your friends good back up procedure and just go for full recoveries.

reply to post by Now_Then

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Yea tell me about it. The funny thing is I told them what happened and they refuse to turn on port 25. The activity is obviously off my line. Looks like I am going to FiOS.

JT

reply to post by watchZEITGEISTnow

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Peer guardian makes you think you are safe,your really not when it comes to this type of thing.They intentionally lure people in to a certain torrent file and take note of the IP's.Peer guardian does not protect against that.

Oh do I yearn for the good ol' days when an ISP wouldnt give up customer information to Law Enforcement, much less the entertainment industry.
You know what changed all that? Effin online predators changed it.
I fully support tracking these types of people, as long as thats as far as it went.
Anytime you open the door, just a little, for law enforcement, they will kick it wide open.
They use things like that as an excuse, knowing that nobody in their right mind would oppose tracking sexual predators but its just an excuse.
This type of scenario is played out in many other ways and its eroding our privacy rights bit by bit.

I shed about as many tears for the entertainment industry as I do Bill Gates.

reply to post by ratcals

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Not Quite Right. Music Performers and Literary authors may indeed receive an up front fee for their work. However, there is an established formula that governs the amount of royalties that these people receive based on the actual sales figures. In the case of relatively unknown artists, these royalties may be much more than any up front fee. For instance, an unknown musician may get a $10,000 fee for an album, and if that album is only mildly successful - say 20,000 sales - that may be it. On the other hand if it takes off - a million sales - the vast majority of the money would come from the royalties. Obviously the next time the musician makes an album he/she will be able to demand a higher up front fee, and the royalties estras may kick in at a higher sales figure. It works the same way with authors.

See this Wikipedia article for a more complete description of royalties than most of us would ever care to know Royalties Explained

Most likely Sony runs it's own torrent server and collects the IP and MAC #s of the people that get it's part of the download. They only know the destination IP# and Machine MAC#. If you have a dedicated IP it's easy to find you. If it's dynamic and shared it's harder but isolatable. They may have gone to your computer but that is a gamble on their part. They probably just know you via the IP# and related that to the ISP.

This whole thing has been going on for quite some time.In the uk it used to be davenport lyons who have since handed it to another lawyer firm.They asked users to pay a 500 pound fine for anything from music,games or porn.I actually got a porn copyright one through but i ignored it because i dont download porn.Thats not me lying either lol an 85 year old woman who can hardly use a computer nevermind torrent got the same one as did alot of other people.Not the same mind you really.But they are really starting to crackdown on illegal torrent use.Around 25,000 letters in the uk were sent out in december last year alone from davenport lyons.They finally handed it to another firm because of their scare tactics and the fact they falsely accused alot of people(they were on watchdog here in the uk).I dont know about other countries laws but you are correct *downloading* isn't illegal but uploading it is,so that is what they have to prove....tricky.



[edit on 10-6-2009 by Solomons]

Torrent downloading isn't illegal.
They wouldn't win a lawsuit against you.
Just don't worry about it.

I got a similar message from ISP regarding a download that was of copyrighted content. Encrypting your bittorrent traffic doesn't get round the monitoring tools.
I was told that a 3rd party monitoring company had notified them. The way to get round this is to install Peerguardian which is free opensource utility that blocks traffic from known ip addresses linked to government, entertainment etc..
I would highly recommend it.

phoenixlabs.org...

To the poster above me...

Torrent Legality



aaaaaaaaaand

here

MPAA Piracy Laws

illegal...point blank and period

-Kyo

There are a lot of casual and unrepentant thieves and their supporters here at ATS, it seems. I wonder if there are other people who have worked in show business besides me who are bothered by any of this? This kind of stealing hurts the artists involved not just the CEOs and large entertainment entities...but I guess many of you think if "everyone does it", it's OK.

I do sympathizes with those of you who have worked on someone else's computers and gotten in trouble because of their illegal activities. Lots of artist give their work away for free. Go to Jamendo if you want free music. As far as free video there is a ton of free content out there for you as well.

I don't sympathize with thieves. I've been punished plenty for purchasing all my MP3's legally but I think the recording industry is wising up on that with less DRM protections that go way over the top given how often people are constantly buying new computers and other media ware so the situation is getting better for the law abiding.

I warned everyone about this type of stuff from/by the record companies. Check out my thread about it here: Tarrant Lawsuit Bad? Think again.....

While stealing is not right what the record companies are doing is not right either. Please check out my thread!

it is illegal? yes

but you wont be able to stop it .... even if you make some kind of application to detect and ban ... there will be always somebody to make a better way to avoid it ...

if the final user cannot get access into it ... they will start to sell illegal stuff just like it is made right now, but we all would buy the illegal for less instead of buying the original stuff

why? nobody is full of money ...

why I would PAY to have an internet fast if I cant download something? I already pay a lot in the internet, I wont be able to pay fo everything .. that is just a sick thing

Well, so, what they could do?

In the movies business, they could provide free download of the movies, but they could insert some kind of ad into it ... it is a cheaper way to spread ...

Tvshows they are doing it ...

For music, it is a little harder, they would have to think ... The bands could provide it for free online ... Why I have to pay for a music and then pay for a performance ... I think the mp3 would be a way to sell to the public that they deserve to be seen... and that is already happenning, nobody is buying cds ... at least I dont know anyone ...