Avast Ye Bootleggers: Three Strikes and You're Out!
If you're French and fancy yourself a freebooting connoisseur of ill-gotten interactive entertainment, you'd best change your wicked ways, lest you wind up blacklisted from the internet. According to The Times Online, that's exactly what a controversial new law in France will entail when it goes into effect next January. Under the law, anyone who persists in downloading illegal material after being warned would be banned from accessing a broadband connection for up to a year.
Three strikes and you're offline, or you might as well be, since broadband typically refers to anything over 56,000 bits per second, i.e. ISDN 128 Kbps and up. If you've tried browsing the media-swollen web on dial-up lately, you know how pointless it is.
Sound dumb? It is. Dumb because it's a blind alley, an all-encompassing strategy with a carelessly punitive tactic, a "solution" that's like slapping flies with a city-block-sized flyswatter.
Think about all the clueless (or just plain stupid) kids about to get their parents censured from not only internet but television and phone services that also depend on broadband access. Imagine entire families booted for 12 months because a dopey kid downloaded the last three episodes of Lost, maybe even managed to circumvent lockdown parameters using surreptitious tools like keystroke grabbers. When you throttle a connection, you're often punishing a range of users, not just the individual perpetrator. I'm all for lighting a fire and getting parents to take responsibility here, but the sorry truth is that today's millennial generation so dramatically outreaches the last three or four in terms of general tech know-how that it's almost sadistic to expect that parents keep pace.
(What's Bittorrent? What's a tracker? A seed? A swarm? What's a TCP socket? PHE? A symmetrical cipher? An HTTP GET request? An SHA1 hashing algorithm? What are Mininova, Monova, BTJunkie, Torrentz, and isoHunt? Limewire, Azureus, and Transmission? How do Newsgroups work? What's Warez? Zero-day? FTP?)
Where's the government's educational initiative to help parents better understand and monitor their broadband connections? What about ISPs offering easy-to-use web tools that let parents see what's sort of traffic's passing their connection without having to learn how to use specialty tools like packet sniffers? (If you think that's a privacy issue, ISPs already do this anyway.) Who's explaining to wireless users that they (just for starters) ought to change their router's default ESSID, filter IP access by MAC address, and enable security protocols like WPA2 with AES or TKIP (or both) encryption to thwart wardrivers and piggybackers?
What about public wireless locations, say T-Mobile or Boingo hotspots? Free wireless in coffee shops and hotels? I'm composing this on a laptop connected to an open-access wireless access point in a public library. Think about the crazy bureaucracy this sort of blunt blanket legal reaction might create if all those spots suddenly went into lockdown.
I'm sorry, I get that piracy's a huge issue, that it may very well be throttling the PC games industry, and that we need to do something. But I'm not sure it's anywhere near the point that I'd willing to trade privacy for government regulation of private ISP protocols and "solutions" like this one where you're basically carpet-bombing groups to thwart individuals, who'll just cruise down the street and abuse someone else's connection.
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http://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-pledges-isps-to-block-sweden-080622/
Forget about households, TPB wants to take Sweden off the Internet because they want to scan all the traffic going through their "tubes.
wow, heck yea there are a lot of things that are going to go wrong with that issue. take my internet away? i'll find a way. not that i download that kind of stuff....