Secret Internet Copyright treaty leaks. Its bad.

[pamela]

Guess it's time to start saving my favorite articles, recipes and doomer info to disk.  Within a few years there may be no good reason to have internet access.  Well that's 60 bucks a month I could spend elsewhere.

no kidding!
I'll have to get about twelve triple trillions blank disks!!!
LOL

[jock]

The books thing is at capacity, I have an attic full plus piles spilling off the end of bookcases which get sorted and moved to said attic at regular intervals. As long as there is some gas available to run the gennys (yes I have 2) I reckon I could have a nice little data centre going. (enough computer parts to keep half dozen machines running indefinitely and networked to said terabytes of knowledge).

If you got gas you can research.  Bit of a pipe dream I know but at least I tried to preserve something.

[jtollison78]

Guess it's time to start saving my favorite articles, recipes and doomer info to disk.  Within a few years there may be no good reason to have internet access.  Well that's 60 bucks a month I could spend elsewhere.

no kidding!
I'll have to get about twelve triple trillions blank disks!!!
LOL

Disks, can you actually buy those anymore? Just get s few USB drives or an extra external hard drive. Also, get to know some real geeks, so you can be up on whatever encryption/decentralization tech comes into play if this happens. I doubt the authorities will even care, as long as they get a say in what 90% of people people are doing, they'll probably leave the others alone. Either that, it'll go back to the Mitnick days when everyone is terrified of geeks and you spend years in prison without trial.

[dermot]

No worries. We'll all surf the Jocknet. 

My room-mate dug up an old laptop from her basement, given to her years ago by a Microsoft
bigwig. Toshiba 4900CT, from 1995.
http://www.toshiba-europe.com/computers/products/notebooks/t4900ct/index.shtm
Intel Pentium 75 MHz, 8 MB RAM that's expandable up to 40 MB. 770 MB

And it only cost $7500! Beautiful monitor, btw - really bright and sharp. Probably where a good
chunk of the cost went. Only 14 years later, you can buy a machine that outstrips that by order
of magnitude. Always amazing.

I remember hearing that when Spielberg began his Shoah project in the mid to late 90s, he
had a terabyte of storage built to hold the interviews. It cost a couple of million dollars. Today,
you can buy a 1TB drive for $80.

Having moved around so much, I've developed an appreciation for travelling light. You could lug a
book collection and assorted CDs, OR just rip them onto a HD, where they weigh nothing.
CON: HDs can fail (so lots of backups, which still weigh less than carrying the stuff); also, you need
electricity - which is an argument for laptops. At least you can get a few hours of battery life, and
recharge them with intermittent power supplies.

I've still got a few books ('where there is no doctor', for example), but the rest the collection
is in ones and zeros.

But yes - definitely start using your time wisely to get anything you want to have now, before any
shenanigans of the sort mentioned here.

[shaleoh2]

i hope i never ever have to burn my 'hard' copies 

[ArmaGoof]

Hmmm...follow the money here folks. IF a law were passed limiting the internet to only commercial and government information, at a time when a lot of people may be consider dumping their access in favor of necessities anyway, then providers like Comcast and hundreds of others would see devastating reductions in revenues, resulting in massive layoffs from not only their own people, but from all providers and manufacturers of anything related to keeping 300 million Americans online and engaged in buying their products and services.

This would face a HUGE wall of resistance, including from the children of those who wish to make it so.  Every cell phone being manufactured these days is banking on internet access - with emphasis on services that are a breeding ground for copyright infringement.  I think that providing any information should carry the same risk as any other activity.  If you make it available, someone or many will rip it off.  If you don't want it ripped off - don't make it available.  If you don't want people to make derisive comments about what you do, don't do it.  It's a big, bad world out there - no place for sissies and whiners.  If you're going to play, expect to get your ass kicked, your identity stolen, your work plaguerized, your patent hi-jacked and your darkest secrets revealed or just plain made up.  Get over it, or get out.

[Smoke~n~Mirrors]

Or an alternative will grow up in parallel with the internet, maybe a cell-like structure of open nodes and a protocol that figures least node routing.

 

If you are really concerned Google UUCP or start a local dial in BBS.

You could even bridge wireless routers to provide access in dense population areas or long haul it if it's a clear line of sight.

I don't envision this treaty as having much impact on the internet though.
The level of encryption that is freely available to the average user there can be no practical method of enforcement.

[JurisDoctorOfDoom]

My guess is whatever is passed will have next to no effect on sites like LATOC as the news page is almost entirely just headlines - which most of the MSM except the AP want  - and the discussions here are people's original content. So there is next to no copyright infringement going on. But the p2p networks, the music downloading, etc, that's what they really want to go after as there is so much money in it.

[shaleoh2]

MetallicA yeah 

[haniel]

Guess it's time to start saving my favorite articles, recipes and doomer info to disk.  Within a few years there may be no good reason to have internet access.  Well that's 60 bucks a month I could spend elsewhere.

Or an alternative will grow up in parallel with the internet, maybe a cell-like structure of open nodes and a protocol that figures least node routing.

You're not finished with it yet? 

I'm in the process of setting up a home network and web server. If someone else in the next town did the same, we could run cable and our networks could talk to each other and to hell with the internet. It would be a constant process keeping such a thing running, but it's very doable.

Maybe I should pick up a couple of cheap routers.

Why run cable?  Wireless connectivity.  Open source protocols.  Old machines, or better still, old laptops, running charging on solar during the day, which keep the indexing and routing tables alive. 

[Mezzanine]

VPN clouds anyone?

When you consider that most internet users mainly consume media / information from huge websites, one might be forgiven for forgetting what the internet actually is. It's not TV, it's not Radio, it's a peer-to-peer network - it's a level playing field. That's the point.

Peer-to-peer networks are extremely difficult, if not impossible to police by their very nature - no one's in charge.

All that we're seeing right now is the major ISPs getting it in the neck because, for the vast majority of users, they're the gatekeepers to the peer-to-peer network. They're the weak spot. But all is not lost.

What can you do when your ISP is forced to police or restrict your activity? Well, for a start, you get off their DNS servers and use something like OpenDNS. Secondly, you subscribe to a tunneling service (or set up your own), which, when implemented correctly, will hide your IP from the net and your traffic from your ISP. Voila.

Prediction:

As the public internet becomes increasingly monitored and restricted due to legal obligations forced onto the ISPs, we'll see the rise of the darknets. They'll become increasingly commonplace, and unless the anti-piracy interest groups actually manage to have encryption outlawed (not feasible, too many essential / legal uses), there'll be little that they can do about it.

I can imagine a climate in the not too distant future where using the internet without a secure tunnel will be akin to using it without a firewall. That's the way it's going to have to be if this kind of persecution persists.

Look at what's happened in Sweden. It's estimated that half a million internet users now tunnel their traffic. That's half a million connections that the ISPs can no longer monitor, half a million users that are safe from the threatening anti-piracy cease and desist letters and so on.

The only real threat to this scenario is traffic throttling / strangling, net neutrality erosion is scaring the crap out of people at the minute, though I can see both sides of the debate on that issue.

There's no denying that filesharing uses a huge amount of traffic compared to normal web-browsing. "Boo hoo, if they can't cope with the traffic, they should upgrade their infrastruture", we hear people cry. It's not that simple. The global carriers have serious hardware and links to run to keep the game going, and price of their bandwidth reflects that. It's hellish expensive. The ISPs have simply mastered the art of buying it in bulk and carefully sharing it out to make access affordable to home users.

Joe Bloggs takes out a 20 megabit "unlimited" connection and rightly expects to be able to max it out all day long. He gets pissed off when his 8GB 1080p movie download is throttled. "I'm paying 20 bucks a month for this crap!". Perhaps if he investigated the costs involved in renting a truly unlimited 20 megabit leased line he'd realise that comparitively speaking, his connection is so cheap it's almost free.

The ISPs want to be able to control how much bandwidth their users are chomping through and I can totally see where they're coming from. It's not simply the cut-and-dry case that they're eroding net neutrality for commercial gain.

That said, there'll always be a market for protocol-neutral internet connections. I guess we'll see a bigger split between the ISPs geared towards entertainment (affordable, throttled, ad-supported, empahsis on commercial streaming content) and the ISPs geared towards serious internet usage (expensive, fixed bandwidth, unthrottled, tunnel-friendly).

Put simply, the walls do seem to be closing in slightly, but I don't think there's a need for high-doom alarm on this stuff. It's not the threat to net access but the threat to freedom of speech that we need to keep an eye on.

[Tinfoilhatmann]

While we're building utopia, ISP's should be responsible for making sure no one on the internet is mean or tells a lie.

Or cheats while gaming

[TheDignityofStruggle]

While we're building utopia, ISP's should be responsible for making sure no one on the internet is mean or tells a lie.

Or cheats while gaming

Put it on the list!

[Alameo]

Squizzle

What do you make of the speed/price issue.  Is it not true that we pay a lot more vs. other countries yet have slower speeds? It's my rough understanding that our "Business" speeds are the basic service levels elsewhere.  Just wondering...

[Uniquack]

Look, we're going to need a redundancy, a fallback position anyway.  As energy costs rise, the giant server systems that form the internet backbone are going to become expensive to maintain.  While that might be balanced out by more telecommuting, assuming the economy doesn't completely erode, there needs to be another alternative internet.  Just like many of us support expanding small farms, I'd recommend we look into expanding new alternative BBS systems.  Using 56k modems and perhaps adapting modern P2P network technology, it may be slow but it may allow us to maintain a digital repository of information and communication for a long time after totalitarian control of the Internet comes about.  Just start looking into this as a backup, a part of preparation...