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Comment by lbotos | Hacker News Reader

Who's responsible when someone torrents copyrighted material through that Internet exchange point?

"NYC Mesh will comply with all federal laws in the countries it operates, however, as policy, no data is collected and therefore no data exists to provide requestors."

This is cute, but if you aren't hunting down people abusing the mesh, the whole connection to the internet will go away for a ToS violation.

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I've worked for an ISP for about six and a half years. In that time, I have received I-don't-know-how-many e-mails about people torrenting and so on. I've had one conversation with a Special Agent from DHS investigating credit card fraud.

Over this same period, I have given out a customer's identifying information zero times (if more than 24 hours have passed, there is a very small chance that I am able to identify the customer). In every instance, it was "sorry, I am not able to identify the customer".

Zero is also the number of times I have heard anything from any of my upstreams regarding any ToS violations or similar.

> if more than 24 hours have passed, there is a very > small chance that I am able to identify the customer

Hmm ??? Could u please explain.

I always assumed that all ISPs will store all DHCP (PPPoE? PPTP? IANANE) allocations by IP & time.

CG-NAT, NAT, etc?

I'm sure that most do. Those records are kept for systems I manage as well, but not for any longer than I need them.

I imagine it's not as bad as running a Tor exit node, which organizations like Noisebridge [1] seem to do without much issue (aside from the occasional visit from the FBI... [2])

1. https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/Noisebridge_Tor

2. https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/Noisebridge_Tor/FBI

What is the agent's thought process on a visit like that? Do they not know what Tor is?

Didn't one of the major ISPs get their ass handed to them in court for trying to say that they were somehow exempt from keeping exactly this sort of information? I mean, you can SAY it, but it would be sort of insane to make a statement like that without a lawyer signing off on it. The law doesn't have a "this is too hard for us" or "we didn't build our network for this" exemption, does it?

The user, just some one user torrenting material using Comcast doesn't endanger Comcast themselves.

That's just not how IXes and peering agreements work.

The beauty of it is as it becomes popular people will start torrenting WITHIN the mesh network.

Brings back memories of using DC++ hubs on the university network

I imagine tor exit points have the exact same issues?

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