Hacker News Reader

Comment by digitalengineer | Hacker News Reader

That is indeed that way they use to talk. Not anymore: http://dottech.org/28447/isps-in-the-usa-to-start-monitoring... or http://hearusnow.org/posts/180-is_your_isp_tracking_your_web... or http://www.digitaltrends.com/web/major-isps-turn-into-copyri...

Jut saying: If torrents are your thing, you might want to invest in some VPN... http://torrentfreak.com/torrentprivacy-fast-and-anonymous-bi... (Now would MPAA executives link to that?)

View on HN

But why would one trust a VPN more than an ISP? The article says "while making sure that nobody can see what you’re downloading," but that's clearly not true: they can.

I think they'll go after the low-hanging fruit. Going after a person that's using a VPN (with no logs) is a lot harder.

How long until the FBI and CIA start working with VPN providers and trying to get warrantless VPN taps legalized? How many VPN providers today are NSA honeypots?

When these conversations come up, you can assume the above comments are talking about VPN providers outside the US that specifically do not cooperate, particularly in Sweden and Canada. Honeypotting these would be pretty tough and, if proven, the information gleaned from them would be largely off limits to most courts.

That assumes that they do not co-operate. Perhaps they are not required to co-operate by law. However, let's assume that you are running a VPN hosting service out of Russia or wherever that is not doing so well financially.

Now you get a nice offer from some men in fancy suits who represent some company that has some link to the MPAA/RIAA/whoever. They offer to help subsidise your server costs and in return they get access to your log files. Now maybe this country does not have such privacy laws as other places, so you aren't compelled to tell your customers about this change.

The new subsidies however do allow you to lower your prices to a level where you start getting a huge chunk of the business.

BTW, those articles are mostly wrong. In the US six strikes system the monitoring is done by DtecNet, not ISPs. This matters because ISPs see all your traffic while third parties can see much less about what you're doing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com