Posted on 09/04/2012 12:36:01 PM PDT by Nachum
Anyone using file-sharing service BitTorrent to download the latest film or music release is likely to be monitored, UK-based researchers suggest.
A Birmingham University study indicates that an illegal file-sharer downloading popular content would be logged by a monitoring firm within three hours.
The team said it was "surprised" by the scale of the monitoring.
Copyright holders could use the data to crack down on illegal downloads.
The three-year research was carried out by a team of computer scientists who developed software that acted like a BitTorrent file-sharing client and logged all the connections made to it.
BitTorrent is a method of obtaining files by downloading from many users at the same time.
The logs revealed that monitoring did not distinguish between hardcore illegal downloaders and those new to it.
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.co.uk ...
Bastards!
I can see it now in the not-too-distant future. Some candidate for office is going to be struck down because somebody will discover they illegally downloaded music or movies.
Is NetFlix really so expensive that people screw around downloading Harry Potter or whatever, and risk losing their ISP service?
agreed.. monitor them and arrest them.
Most of the downloaded files are FAR from Harry Potter.
They are The Dark Knight Rises and The Avengers. Things that are still in theaters.
Good luck finding harry potter or any other decent movie on netflix streaming
Good luck finding harry potter or any other decent movie on netflix streaming
And of course spreading this around couldn’t possibly be intended to simply scare ppl away, right?
I’d love to have the ability to LEGALLY stream movies that are newly released so as long as the price is decent.
As well as a whole lot of Porn
(I've heard tell)
Fixed it...
That too, somebody is going to pay big money to get that information, you can bet.
I can see it now in the not-too-distant future. Some candidate for office is going to be struck down because somebody will discover they illegally downloaded music or movies.
Great point!
I recently got a nastygram from my ISP about someone downloading an HBO movie from my IP address. I knew it wasn’t me, because I already owned a purchased copy of the movie in question. I tracked the problem down to someone piggybacking onto the wireless signal from my ISP provided router. My only actual wireless device is an HP printer. The ISP’s WiFi used only WEP security; easily crackable, I now find out, with any of several free downloadable WEP-cracker programs in 3 minutes or less. I wound up disabling the router’s wireless feature and purchased a much more secure wireless access point that uses WPA2 encryption so that I could still use the printer.
All this will do is shift the bandwidth thief to one of the other wifi networks in ny neighborhood.
Now, if there were only some way of tracking down the piggybacker.
I read one idea that would essentially make everyone on the system into a pirate, sort of.
The idea takes the concept of distributed computing further, by using the most available asset of most users, some of their empty hard disk space, say 1GB per user.
Before they start swapping files, they download most of a GB of *pieces* of file content, with massive redundancy of pieces by users. A user might have the equivalent of pieces of a thousand different movies on his system, without a single whole movie. If he gets more than a certain number of pieces from the same movie, his system discards some of them.
But a user would have no idea what was in his 1GB.
To get an entire movie, a lot of time would be spent looking for related hash strings. Otherwise, it would be a constant transition of file pieces flowing hither and yon, and hard to tell who was collecting a particular file from the flow.
>>I’d love to have the ability to LEGALLY stream movies that are newly released so as long as the price is decent.<<
That’s not going to happen any time soon.
Studios have stock in theaters. If we all could sit in the privacy of our homes and watch 1st run films, who would go to a theater?
“”If the content was in the top 100 it was monitored within hours,” he said. “Someone will notice and it will be recorded.”
Less popular content was also monitored although less frequently, the study indicated.”
Thanks for the tip!
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