ISP To Voluntarily Disconnect File-Sharers, Offers Free Usenet
Written by enigmax on March 31, 2008Virgin Media in the UK has announced that it is working with the music industry to chase down its file-sharing customers and disconnect them from the internet. At the same time, it will offer an enhanced service which will see its customers get free Usenet binaries access, untraceable by the music industry.
Anyone familiar with Virgin Media’s advertising (previously Telewest/Blueyonder) will recall their TV commercials over the last couple of years which centered round the ability to download greater and greater amounts of media, faster than ever before.
Their ‘Best Things in Life Are Free’ TV campaign, complete with eye-catching computer graphics, with movie and musical themes throughout left the viewer with a clear message: if you want to download music and movies quickly (for free), join us. Now, in 2008, the situation has changed dramatically. Kind of.
According to a report, the ISP has had a change of heart and will be working in collaboration with the British Phonographic Industry (BPI). Starting with a pilot scheme, the BPI will deviate from its stated policy of not going after individual file-sharers by targeting Virgin Media customers on P2P networks and reporting them to the ISP.
Set to go live during the next few months, and at the behest of the UK music industry, Virgin’s scheme will see them send warning letters out to customers flagged as file-sharers by the BPI. Those who do not heed warnings to stop will see Virgin disconnect them from the internet. The scheme will also be available to movie and TV studios who wish to punish Virgin’s customers.
Earlier this year the government said that ISPs should find a way to curb unauthorized downloading. By stepping up with its own plan, Virgin is hoping to side-step government enforced legislation.
A Virgin Media spokesman said: “We have been in discussions with rights holders organizations about how a voluntary scheme could work. We are taking this problem seriously and would favor a sensible voluntary solution.”
So as Virgin Media constantly upgrades its broadband customers to faster and faster connections over the last couple of years (4Mbit connections became 10Mbit, 10Mbit then became 20Mbit, 20Mbit due to become 40mb), it now agrees to punish the very people it targets when offering these super-fast connections.
However, all might not be lost for the file-sharer at Virgin Media, especially those who want to max-out their new bandwidth offering. The ISP will be rolling out a new newsgroup service for its subscribers which should be ready in the next couple of months. Using the Highwinds server banks, the service will offer 7 days retention on the all important binary newsgroups. A Virgin spokesman said: “We’re delighted to be working with Highwinds to build out our newsgroup service. Our expanded access to newsgroups will give our customers a free news feed to newsgroups with exceptional retention, providing one of the best free newsgroup services in the UK.”
Not to mention super high speed access to all the movies, music and software anyone could ever need, with no fear that the BPI, RIAA or IFPI can snoop on the transfers.
The Lord does indeed work in mysterious ways.
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140 Responses
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THIS STORY IS FAKE HERE THE REAL ONE
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/2008/03/30/cnvirgin130.xml
[quote comment="324067"]Kill the royal family they deserve it
UK = U$ colony[/quote]
well thats completely the wrong way arround, go learn some history
and on topic, this could be an interesing story to watch, as virgin essentially have a monopoly over cable in the UK, and if they are sucsessful then it could lead to a rise in the number of BT line type customers, meaning that there would be even more pressure on BT to finally get round to installing fibre to the home. It will also be interesting to see if any kind of privacy laws (data protection act mabye) could interviene in the plan.
the other side of it is that the BPI will loose what respect it had withing sociotey as it had previously said it would turn a blind eye to joe average downloader, and target the people that sell bootlegs instead
THIS STORY IS FAKE HERE THE REAL ONE
THE BIT ABOUT Free Usenet IS A LIE
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/2008/03/30/cnvirgin130.xml
Why do i have to use Virgin Media, this blows balls, looks like im getting disconnected haha
i would never buy my internet service from a company so involved in the record industry like AOL or Virgin. you’re asking for trouble.
well, if one of these VPN tunels is secure and private, £4 isn’t too much to pay a month for piece of mind if you download a lot that you shouldn’t. Still unfair though..
Seems to me its quite good thinking from VM (from their point of view). They can be seen to acting against p2p…while at the same time making sure people can still access music/films etc.; not only that but by caching these files closer to home they cut down on transatlantic traffic.
@Mr Thoughts
@Daydreamer1
@greylion
I agree.
This scheme can be used to discredit the Usenet in a big way. Give it a spin like “child porn and pirates are on the Usenet” and public opinion would certainly agree something must be done about it. As soon as the content MAFIAA is allowed to send cancel messages through the Usenet that can become very ugly. Or they just flood the storage with useless crap and flush the copyrighted material out of existence. Or they might try to close down the alt.binaries tree altogether. Well, not before many file sharers gave up on bittorrent and switched to download.
I bet the MAFIAA has these sorts of strategies laid out and ready to implement in their drawers. That’s one main weakness of corporations, especially big corporations. They have to plan ahead so they can justify large investments. And because they need to earn money to satisfy their shareholders it’s easy to predict the general direction they have to move in.
I believe it’s better not to put too much stress on the Usenet and keep using bittorrent, even thought it’s more risky for the individual. The evolution of a network of peers is much harder to predict and control than the Usenet. I think P2P flexibility is one major advantage over the five-year plans of the corporations. The content MAFIAA has already lost the initiative to P2P networking and we shoud stay ahead.
I just had the greatest idea.. Why don’t the copyright holders go together and offer a Usenet for all of us? We get access to the real stuff asap, we get high speeds, the ISP’s don’t have to chase us around and the copyright holders get money!
Win for everybody!
If you connect to a newsgroup via your home isp connection, it’s easily traced, if your ISP feels like logging it.
There are various methods to “hide” yourself online and what you are doing, but unfortunately, there are no 100% fool proof methods IF your isp is tracking you.
You can’t use their service and expect to be hidden, always hack your friends wifi, ALWAYS!
OMG for bittorrent just install Asureus and turn on the RC4 encryption and run peerguardian 2 and then you wont get caught its as simple as that.
Anyway virgin media are shite because of the traffic shaping. If you want a good isp go with Be there adsl2 connections are 24MB (not available everywhere yet.
^^^^
the only people “protected” on newsgroups would be seeders on torrents, as you aren’t downloading from a person, you are downloading from a server bank your isp is leasing, you can still be tracked for downloading, but no one can really be caught for uploading. The original poster could technically be ‘tracked’ but it’s a grey area, he’s making it available, but not actually providing it to the users, the ISP is doing that :)
Silly limeys
What happened when Tiscali tried the same (shitty) stunt:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/02/15/tiscali_bpi_agreement/
This little venture has “doomed to fail” written all over it. On top of the fact that many subscribers will leave in disgust before it’s even implemented, the BPI is lobbying for a three-strikes system that warns “offenders” via email.
Which, naturally… Will work in practice as nothing more than huge, blaring klaxxons screaming “LEAVE THIS ISP NOW” the instant they arrive in your inbox. Not as a deterrent to stop using P2P.
Also, let’s not forget that the moment somebody recieves a Cease & Desist email for torrenting a perfectly legal file(and mark my words, they will), the whole thing will come tumbling down. Messily.
In a word, Virgin Media is fux0r’d. They’ll learn too late that eagerly riding the British MAFIAA’s dick while tossing their own customers to the wind makes them a shoe-in for the Darwin Awards.
@Mr Thoughts
@Daydreamer1
@greylion
I agree.
This scheme can be used to discredit the Usenet in a big way. Give it a spin like “child porn and pirates are on the Usenet” and public opinion would certainly agree something must be done about it. As soon as the content MAFIAA is allowed to send cancel messages through the Usenet that can become very ugly. Or they just flood the storage with useless crap and flush the copyrighted material out of existence. Or they might try to close down the alt.binaries tree altogether. Well, not before many file sharers gave up on bittorrent and switched to download.
I bet the MAFIAA has these sorts of strategies laid out and ready to implement in their drawers. That’s one main weakness of corporations, especially big corporations. They have to plan ahead so they can justify large investments. And because they need to earn money to satisfy their shareholders it’s easy to predict the general direction they have to move in.
I believe it’s better not to put too much stress on the Usenet and keep
using bittorrent, even thought it’s more risky for the individual. The
evolution of a network of peers is much harder to predict and control than the Usenet. I think the flexibility of a peer network is one major advantage over the five-year plans of the corporations. The content MAFIAA has already lost the initiative to P2P networking and we shoud stay ahead.
[quote comment="324060"]I believe that you’re all forgetting the first rule about usenet…[/quote]
Whats the point about being so secretive? It’s just security through security. Sure, the riaa and mpaa leave usenet alone, but only because few people use it - and if few people are using it, then whats the point?
So look everyone, you oughta know: There is a place called usenet. Its more than just a big fucking discussion forum… people have hacked it to store files on “binary” groups. You can download stuff there at top speed, and you are encouraged to leech, but I should warn you that the selection is not as broad as bittorrent. It’s harder to find rare stuff on usenet. You also need to have good usenet service - most webhosts offer free usenet access, but only retain data posted in the last few days.
Out of interest, how will this work?
Will the BPI have access to Virgin’s logs, or will it work the other way round - the BPI connect to swarms and just whois a lot of IPs, reporting Virgin owned IPs back?
Wish they would voluntarily disconnect Spammers.
Bastards.
It’s “Internet” — not “internet”, you stupid piece of shit.
http://www.anontalk.com/
lmaooooooooo
who cares …
after 10 + years of d/l.. its got boring anyways….. and 20mit, my ass.. its all shared just like bulldog was.. Waste of digging up ur garden to lay a cable.. VM sux, Richard Branson needs to give his public a break not just maddy mccanns parents..!!!!
btw.. APRILS FOOL LMFAO
“arsehole at AnarchyNowQuote AnarchyNow
Kill the royal family they deserve it
UK = U$ colony
@ comment number 22″
if you knew anything, you would know the royal family had their power taken away by the house of commons long before you and your half breed father were even born.
you really want to stop this, then use the law of the land.
its there for you to use as well, its not just for the UK companys to profit from.
OC, you need to understand what your doing, and be able and willing to write and send a registered letter for two…..
can you bring yourself to make even that small effort ?
or are you forever going to type crap about the RF you know nothing about…
send your Data Protection Act Notices to the VM data controller.
your MP and MEP letters about the Phorm deep packet inspection kit,invation of privacy,RIPA,DPA,and even copyright, yes thats right VM are using your clickstream copyright and selling it to Phorm.
Hell , if you have the balls, you could learn how to make a valid court injunction, stopping any and all these actions Virgin media have put in place.
clue, you dont need a lawyer to do it for you, READ UP on it and send the letters.
VM’s etc argument is suspected torrent copyright misuse is wrong, but its OK to use your clickstream copyright so they can profit from it.
(see theregister Phorm stories and cable forum co uk threads)
so read up ,understand what you need to do , and fucking do it halfwit, or just mong out here typeing crap rather than good advice and effecting the outcome.
if your not actively part of the solution,, you are the problem, your sitting there laughing at posts,typeing crap about the RF, and pissing in the wind.
if you have the balls write the letters as others are doing.
make a difference and write that registered post letter, make them work for their money and make it non cost effective for them.
that means get off your fat arse and post your official notices removing their right to process your data as is YOUR RIGHT under the DPA.
but they think your all ASBO hoody infested sheep that cant be arsed right?, and your just going to piss in the wind, and get wrecked because you cant be bovered!
are they right, are you to dumb and aperthetic to really do SOMETHING REAL like write that letter and send it?
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