Comment by q3k | Hacker News Reader

Comment by q3k | Hacker News Reader

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German ISPs don't do that ('sniff all transport' and automatically sue? for copyright infringement). ISPs have no business in doing this (Why would they? DPI infrastructure is expensive, so it setting up some magical automation to detect torrents, check against some database, etc. Plus, pre-preemptively suing someone will likely cause them to not be a repeat customer.).

Traffic inspection by ISPs (let alone sharing of collected data with third-party entities) in the EU is required to have a legal/technical basis and/or user consent, depending on what is being done and for what purpose [1]. Even attempts at blanket (meta)data retention for law enforcement agencies have pretty much been ruled illegal in the EU [2] and Germany [3].

What probably happened is your friends were torrenting, and some entity acting on behalf of copyright holders got their IP from public trackers/DHT. Then they came knocking to the ISP with a cour order, asking for information about the person behind that IP address, and the ISP gave them that [4]. Finally, the entity sent a C&D to your friends.

[1] - See the EU DPS' opinion on how the existing EU legal framework affets ISPs' data inspection abilities: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELE...

[2] - See Directive 2006/24/EC, tl;dr https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_retention#European_Union

[3] - htps://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/DE/Sachgebiete/Telekommunikation/Unternehmen_Institutionen/Anbieterpflichten/OeffentlicheSicherheit/Umsetzung110TKG/VDS_113aTKG/VDS.html

[4] - https://blog.raychenon.com/file-sharing-violations-in-german...

Sorry for making error in terminology yes it is some Lawyer agency or what not, but result is the same. If someone can sniff your transport regardless who it is end result is the same, you do not have privacy and idea that you can copy something for your own or your family use is just plain wrong.

I mean you can, we can do "anything" but there are repercussions for each action.

There is no need for any sniffing for the above scenario to happen.

It’s literally just using the P2P nature of bittorrent to get peers’ IP addresses (you can do that too! Just start any torrent and look at the peers tab in your client), then using the legal tools to request data about a person breaking the law using such and such IP address.

That is true but unless static address why would anyone give you exact geo location of the IP address?!

If you extend this to everything you can have massive surveillance without cookies, MAC address of device, IP address for each package and you know who is accessing what kind of content on internet. So, why wait whenever someone reads article about class 1 drug just brake his door and arrest him, isn't it ?! I mean fork privacy, democracy, and judicial process, just lets immediately arrest everyone :/

Anyway, in German scenario how can you certify that someone was not hijacking your router?

(As per friends case, they had friend who was sleeping over and connected to their Wifi ...)

You can get the exact geo location of an IP address in the US or almost any other country too. Don't even need a court order, just pay for an expensive GeoIP Database, which will work 99.9% of the time to get someone's postal address by zooming in on Google Maps.

The sniffing relies on people trading files using p2p connections (and exposing their IPs) and lawyers getting the user of the IP at that time from internet providers, either via court order or some other back channel. There is no deep packet inspection.

Some lawyers are even using sites similar to https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com/

It probably costs less to pay the amount than fighting it in court. I think it's capped at 450 Euro or something? But I know some people who got scot free by merely having a lawyer send a response.

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