Belgian court rules that ISPs must block file-sharing

Sun Jul 8 17:29:44 UTC 2007

     I get a warm, fuzzy feeling every time this sort of stuff comes up
because I go back and read about the time @Home came within inches of
receiving the Usenet Death Penalty.

http://news.com.com/2100-1033-235788.html

    Gotta love the implied righteous outrage in this article - " The
self-appointed administrators of Usenet ..."  - the nerve of it, those
people who own and operate systems, deciding what is and isn't an
acceptable use thereof.

   I sometimes wish for an IPv4 death penalty - organizations making
nonsense pronouncements like this would benefit from a little quiet time
to contemplate the nature of their foolishness. Oh, that would impinge
on national sovereignty and then we'd see a concerted effort on the part
of these increasingly irrelevant nation states, so we'll let the
distributed, disinterested nature of IPv4 space blunt and exhaust folly,
but its nice to dream ...

Sean Donelan wrote:
>
> On Fri, 6 Jul 2007, Chris L. Morrow wrote:
>>> I wonder if they did a proof of concept at all, or if they just read
>>> the glossies..
>>
>> Surely you jest? they, of course, did a full scale mock up on their E1
>> connected lab in belgium. Perish the thought that they may have
>> attempted
>> anything less. Best of all, this 'test' was probably conducted by a
>> paid-for consultant to the belgian gov't, probably at the equivalent
>> 4-500
>> USD/hr :(
>>
>> The State-of-PA folks 'back-when' did their proof-of-concept testing
>> in a
>> lab connected via T1... their legislation was equally as clue- :(
>
> It shouldn't be a surprise, since most of it is marketing fluff.  Same
> as the Antivirus vendors, Intrusion Detection vendors, Spam blocking
> vendors, etc.  They all seem to have the same problems when trying
> working in public ISP networks. And all have done the dog and pony
> show trying to
> get politicians to force ISPs to buy their products, whether or not
> the products are actually effective or safe.
>
> An university using these systems said "works great, we receive less
> complaints from the RIAA, but sometimes we interrupt student's other
> network traffic such as VOIP calls."
>
> For example is it Safe:
>   Will it block traffic to emergency services, e.g. 9-1-1 or 1-1-2 if the
> caller has a radio playing copyrighted music in the background?  I'm
> sorry your call can not be completed to 9-1-1 until you turn off your
> radio even
> if you are being murdered in your home.
>
> or is it Effective:
>    Will it block copyrighted music transmissions mixed with other
> things such as a voice call with a radio playing in the background. 
> If you leave
> other communication channels operating, people will find a way to use
> them.  Good for venture capilists funding these companies, because you
> have to constantly pay for new and improved.
>
>