On Tue, 21 Aug 2001, Adam Todd wrote:
> At 22:30 21/08/01 +1000, Danny Yee wrote:
> > > 2. Optus@Home moves to outlaw pirates
> > > Cable & Wireless Optus is planning to abolish pirate activity on its
> > > broadband service, terminating customers caught in the act of downloading
> > > copyright material and unlicensed software.
> >
> >Surely that should be "*illegally* downloading copyright material" and
> >"unlicensed software that it is illegal to copy without a license".
> >While free software is distributed under a license, it doesn't have to
> >*be licensed*, and there's also a fair bit of public domain material
> >with no license at all.
>
> I'm more concerned about how they are going to "determine" if it's pirate
> content?
>
> Are they going to LOOK into everyone's email and data transfers?
I agree -- the idea strikes me as half baked at best. I can't imagine that
it is trivial to be able to monitor large data streams like FTP transfers.
Do you monitor the FTP port? Then I just use a new port number or my own
protocol. I also can not imagine a system that can identify commercial
software reliablty. Do you finger print MS Office, then the baddies just
encrypt it.
I imagine that the procesing requirements to keep up with packets on a
fast netowkr would be pretty impressive as well.
Mikal
--Michael Still (mikal@stillhq.com)
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.1 : Fri Aug 31 2001 - 03:10:04 EST