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Reddit beats film industry again, won't have to reveal pirates' IP addresses

arstechnica.com

91–99 of 99 posts

Re: Reddit beats film industry again, won't have to reveal pirates' IP addresses

#91
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect the conversations went something like this: Film industry lawyer: Tell us everyone who pirated our movies. Frontier lawyer: We've told you everyone we know of. Film industry lawyer: What about those people on reddit bragging about getting away with it? Frontier lawyer: We don't have any way of knowing if those are actual customers, let alone if they're telling the truth. If you have a specific IP you want u…

I'm actually kind of surprised Reddit didn't just cooperate? As a company which frankly has been acting with particular contempt for users of late, how does Reddit profit from fighting this?

Cooperate how?

Do you think they are going to install LLM based surveillance and then hand check the comments in case the LLM is inaccurate?

Re: Reddit beats film industry again, won't have to reveal pirates' IP addresses

#92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah that's why it's good to start a new reddit account every year and delete the old one. As well as VPN, regularly changing mac address on your router etc.

The mac address is layer 2 and no one other than your ISP knows it. Changing it does nothing for your privacy since your ISP knows it anyway.

a lot of cable companies will have you keep ip addresses for a very long time. The only way I've found to get a new one quickly (without taking my cable modem offline for many hours) is to swap the mac of the router in ddwrt (router firmware). That works "nearly instantly" as long as you reset your router and cable modem.

Re: Reddit beats film industry again, won't have to reveal pirates' IP addresses

#93
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be interesting to know if an admission to pirating content on Reddit is actually admissible. I would think it falls under free speech. Eg: someone makes a parody of an old Monty Python song and states, “I’m a pirate and that’s ok.” Should this count in an age where the vast majority of legal notices in this genre are robo-lawyers? Should my internet connection be severed because a guest was bored and posted…

At some point in my life I committed a crime. Here's to hoping that's not enough to have me subpoenaed.

See you in court

Re: Reddit beats film industry again, won't have to reveal pirates' IP addresses

#94

I wonder if they'll still do this once Reddit IPOs

Only if the film industry can figure out how to tank Reddit's stock price when it doesn't. It's a misalignment of incentives. Unless Reddit is exclusively associated with piracy and bad actors, most advertisers will probably ignore the bad press* and keep giving them money. * I'm not even sure it'd be bad press. Internet users aren't overly fond of film companies and we're talking about a meme factory against the peo…

There are so many more disturbing things on Reddit than piracy

If those don’t deter advertisers I can’t imagine piracy would.

Re: Reddit beats film industry again, won't have to reveal pirates' IP addresses

#95

Btw doesn't increasing adoption of CGNAT [1] render useless these types of attempts to identify people based on IP address? A CGNAT IP address identifies multiple households. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrier-grade_NAT

Wouldn't ISPs keep logs of which IP:Port maps to which internal IP:Port at any given time? If not for law enforcement, at least so they can track you better and sell the data.

Wouldn't that just consume absurd amounts of storage? Almost every device in my house constantly does update checks and many other connections, keeping track of every connection sounds extreme

Re: Reddit beats film industry again, won't have to reveal pirates' IP addresses

#96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The mac address is layer 2 and no one other than your ISP knows it. Changing it does nothing for your privacy since your ISP knows it anyway.

a lot of cable companies will have you keep ip addresses for a very long time. The only way I've found to get a new one quickly (without taking my cable modem offline for many hours) is to swap the mac of the router in ddwrt (router firmware). That works "nearly instantly" as long as you reset your router and cable modem.

Fair enough. If I change the mac address of my router the ISP locks me out for a substantial amount of time, deffinately not an option.

Re: Reddit beats film industry again, won't have to reveal pirates' IP addresses

#97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't ISPs keep logs of which IP:Port maps to which internal IP:Port at any given time? If not for law enforcement, at least so they can track you better and sell the data.

Wouldn't that just consume absurd amounts of storage? Almost every device in my house constantly does update checks and many other connections, keeping track of every connection sounds extreme

3 IP/port combos (internal address, NAT gateway, destination) and a timestamp is ~110 bytes. So for, say, 1 million distinct flows started per customer per day, that's 110Mb.

So no, storage sounds relatively reasonable to me so long as the retention period isn't too long.

Re: Reddit beats film industry again, won't have to reveal pirates' IP addresses

#98
This excerpt would be my response to "IP addresses should not be protected by privacy laws because an IP address doesn't identify a person".

> "While the Court is unaware of any cases in the Ninth Circuit in which a court has declined to apply a First Amendment unmasking standard for IP addresses, other courts have recognized that IP addresses are essential to unmasking because an 'IP address cannot be made up in the same way that a poster may provide a false name and address,'" Hixson wrote. "For this reason, the Court finds no reason to believe provision of an IP address is not unmasking subject to First Amendment scrutiny."

Re: Reddit beats film industry again, won't have to reveal pirates' IP addresses

#99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't that just consume absurd amounts of storage? Almost every device in my house constantly does update checks and many other connections, keeping track of every connection sounds extreme

3 IP/port combos (internal address, NAT gateway, destination) and a timestamp is ~110 bytes. So for, say, 1 million distinct flows started per customer per day, that's 110Mb. So no, storage sounds relatively reasonable to me so long as the retention period isn't too long.

Well, they want 7 years of logs. 110 * 365.25 * 7 * users = quite a bit
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