MI5 comes out against cutting off Internet pirates | Hacker News Reader

MI5 comes out against cutting off Internet pirates

timesonline.co.uk

15 pointsbaxter7 comments

This just shows how out of touch the UK govt is. I wonder which Labour sponser lobbied for this. The government assume this is a hardcore minority. I'm not an illegal filesharer, but I sure know a lot people that do. I don't think it's a small minority. Questions...

- How do you define 'illegal fileshare'? Based on the network used? The content of the file?

- How would this be implemented? Would the ISP do the blocking?

- What's to stop the 'criminal' from using a wifi connection elsewhere?

- What effect does this have on the neutrality of the net in the UK?

(Sorry, posted this comment on another thread before seeing this)

Also:

- Does the whole household get cut off when one member illegally fileshares?

"Does the whole household get cut off when one member illegally fileshares?"

I would imagine the entire connection gets cut-off, because it would be very difficult to allow the household to keep the connection and prevent one person from going online.

What if they move house? what if its a big house? or several flats? an internet cafe? a business? a university?

I can see three plausible options:

  i) The government throws its hands in the air and gives up.
  ii) The government cuts off the entire building/complex.
  iii) The government cuts off people entirely at random.

Knowing the way most governments tend to work, my money is on number 3, with number 2 coming in a distant second.

Encryption will make this moot very soon. In fact routine encryption will confound many attempts to post-fit content control into the existing internet. For instance, deep-sniffing routers that prefer ATT traffic over Vonage, or prefer one ISP's subscribers' traffic over another because of the rate they pay.

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