Therefore, our advice is for you to buy an up-to-date cable descrambler from your cable TV company….

Rhett

Banning torrents because they _can_ be used for illicit content is just silly.

By your logic, we should also ban the ftp protocol as well, since it is also widely used for illicit content.

In fact, peer-to-peer transfers with instant messengers and DCC’s with IRC can also be used for illicit content, so lets ban all of those to.

Guess what! There’s a lot of illicit content using the http protocol as well! So lets ban that too.

You can find illicit content on the newsgroups, so lets ban the nntp protocol.

You can even get illicit content through mail-reply servers like in the 80’s. We’ll have to ban pop3/smtp/imap4 too..

In fact, any protocol you can use to transfer a file, can be used to get illicit content, so we’ll have to ban _ALL_ file transferring protocols, so that just leaves us telnet.

Hmm, no wait. We used to use Z-modem and uucico with telnet connections, so we can transfer files with telnet too, so we’ll have to ban that.

Bottom line, is the tcp/ip system itself, is designed for transferring data. Only way to be sure would be to ban the whole internet itself…

Your position is stupid. The torrent protocol is on par with the ftp protocol and other protocols.

I suppose if someone gets shot and killed, you think it is the gun’s fault too?

Get real, and take your head out of your ass…

– Smoovious

And anyway soon the internet will be so standard and unoposed the big companies wont have any choice their connections will soon be given away for free.
some are already doing so. so what do they care.

I worked at a college property not long back as a maintenance tech.And out of my apartment there i built custom computers for clients of mine.

The property had a 1 GIG download limit there.When i hit that limit for the first time the server shut my internet off.

When i asked why my net was shut off i was told by my manager that this had been done to stop p2p and bittorrent programs due to virus’s getting into thier system.

My opinion “no matter how this is viewed
it is another right being taken away from us”

Doesn’t quite work like that.

Bandwidth shaping technologies look into the packet header and determines the protocol from that – so regardless of what port you use, P2P traffic gets blocked.

This is why header encryption of the bittorrent protocol is causing such media attention – because their expensive new software to shape your bandwidth is not going to work.

As an example, Rogers has software they created that is *supposed* to recognize what the traffic is and deny passage to what they decide shouldn’t go through. It’s impossible to make a computer think critically, they just do what they’re told by a programmer and the user.