Tag Archives: isp

OH NOES!

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Honestly, I don’t know how this happened …

Dear Customer (xxx@tpg.com.au),

Attached is an email that TPG has received complaining about certain conduct.
The IP Address and timestamps provided by the complainant indicate that the
conduct occurred over your TPG Service.

Infringement IP address:       xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
Infringement timestamp (SYD):   2009-11-28 00:50:08

TPG does not condone the use of TPG Services for activities which are
offensive, illegal or infringe on the legal rights of other persons. Such
activities are expressly stated in your agreement with us as being a basis on
which TPG may suspend or terminate the supply of services to you.

It is alleged in the attached complaint that you, or someone authorised by
you, have engaged in such an activity. If you agree that you did engage in the
activity, please cease it immediately. If you do not believe that you have
engaged in the activity complained about or you believe that the activity is
not illegal, offensive or an infringement of another person’s rights, please
contact the complainant in writing as soon as possible and explain your
position to them.

If the complaint is about spam, it may be that your equipment has been
compromised by a hacker. Please obtain an up to date antivirus system and
ensure that your machines are cleaned as a matter of urgency. If you fail to
do so and the spam persists, TPG may take steps to limit the spam by
suspending your service.

If you have any questions about this email or our Terms and Conditions, please
contact Customer Service on 13 14 23 or customer_service@tpg.com.au.

Thank you.

Kind Regards,

Internet Abuse Team
TPG Internet

E-mail: abuse@tpg.com.au
Phone:  13 14 23
Fax:    02 9850 0813

———- Forwarded message ———-
From:
To:
Date:
Subject:

TPG Internet Pty, Ltd.
65 Waterloo Road
North Ryde, NSW  2113  AU

RE:  Unauthorized Distribution of the Copyrighted Television Series Entitled
Navy: NCIS

Dear TPG Abuse Department:

We are writing this letter on behalf of the relevant subsidiaries of CBS Corporation.

We have received information that an individual has utilized the below-referenced IP address at the noted date and time to offer downloads of copyrighted television programs through a “peer-to-peer” service, including such title(s) as:

Navy: NCIS

The distribution of unauthorized copies of copyrighted television programs constitutes copyright infringement under the Copyright Act, Title 17 United States Code Section 106(3).  This conduct may also violate the laws of other countries, international law, and/or treaty obligations.

Since you own this IP address (xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx), we request that you immediately do the following:

1) Remove or disable access to the individual who has engaged in the conduct described above; and

2) Take appropriate action against the account holder under your Abuse Policy/Terms of Service Agreement.

We also would request that you inform the individual who engaged in this conduct that legitimate copies of CBS content are widely available for viewing online, for example on www.cbs.com and many other sites that participate in the CBS Audience Network.

On behalf of CBS, owner of the exclusive rights in the copyrighted material at issue in this notice, we hereby state that we have a good faith belief that use of the material in the manner complained of is not authorized by CBS, its respective agents, or the law.

Also, we hereby state, under penalty of perjury, that the information in this notification is accurate and that we are authorized to act on behalf of the owner of the exclusive rights being infringed as set forth in this notification.

Please direct any end user queries to the following:

CopyrightQs@mediasentry.com

Please include the Case ID 12345, also noted above, in the subject line of all future correspondence regarding this matter.

We appreciate your assistance and thank you for your cooperation in this matter. Your prompt response is requested.

Respectfully,

A Kempe
Enforcement Coordinator
MediaSentry

——————————

INFRINGEMENT DETAIL
——————–

Infringing Work: Navy: NCIS
First Found: 28 Nov 2009 00:50:08 EST (GMT -0500)
Last Found: 28 Nov 2009 00:50:08 EST (GMT -0500)
IP Address: xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
IP Port: 54321
Protocol: BitTorrent
Torrent InfoHash: 390F03C5E7AEF0C48C7D74FEAF9CE2331C1C6A1B
Containing file(s):
NCIS.S07E08.Power.Down.HDTV.XviD-FQM.[VTV].avi.torrent (367,052,052 bytes)

Why do we pay for bytes, not bytes per second?

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What’s the rationale behind a download quota? The price of bits is totally artificial. The ongoing costs are hardware and maintenance, power, infrastructure. None of this is any cheaper or more expensive based on the bits that pass through.

The reason for download quotas is to spread the load. The system couldn’t handle everyone downloading XXX at once, so by giving people YYY per month, you’re encouraging people to self-regulate their usage and spread their bandwidth requirements over a monthly billing cycle.

Why not pay for a set amount of bandwidth? Some people are only going to do light browsing and limited downloading. Give them 5mbps and they could do anything quite comfortably, but you’re at a quarter of the line speed. Give me a plan that offers 5-8mbps during peak time and the full 24mbps during off peak. That’s more than enough for me to play my computer games and check youtube/etc during peak time, and I can download my World of Warcraft patches and other such large, legitimate items of software through bittorrent in the off-peak times when business is offline.

But of course, that would be less money for the ISPs …

Unattended

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As tasks get longer / more complicated, I find myself leaving things unattended a lot. Software installs are a good example of something that are often left alone. In this regard, most installers are decent about getting the meaty info up front, and then just churning away on their own.

One of the things I’ve been after lately, thanks to blowing my download quota last month and being shaped to 64kbps for eight days, is scheduling downloads to run in the 1am-7am “off-peak” time. But this is not an easy thing to do …

Take iTunes. It checks for podcasts, and starts downloading them. But it has no scheduling ability, it just goes for it. You can pause, but then how do you resume? My solution was Quicksilver, and the handy “run at” command. So I queued up all the downloads, quit iTunes and then had Quicksilver re-launch it at 1am and the downloads all kicked off. In Windows, the Task Scheduler will do the same thing for you. I could’ve done something similar by pausing them and having an applescript resume them at 1am, but again it would’ve had to have been started by a third party program. I want scheduling in iTunes, but at least since iTunes doesn’t ask any questions, this is very easy to kick off and leave unattended.

Now take something from Blizzard. They’ve released the teaser cinematic for their latest World of Warcraft expansion, Wrath of the Lich King. I wanted to download the HD trailer, and they offer a customised bittorrent client called the Blizzard Downloader specifically for the purpose. Brilliant. I started it up, selected the save location, then once it had allocated the space and created the partial download, I closed it. Now just because I always like to test these things, I had Quicksilver open the downloader again after a delay, just as I would if I was scheduling it for post-1am. It opens up … and asks for the save location again. Fails the unattended check. What’s worse – when I chose the same location, it didn’t resume, it overwrote.

Sticking with the gaming side of things – the Warhammer Online client also requires authentication before you can patch. Perhaps this is because at the moment it’s a beta, and you need to accept the beta test agreement every time you log in, but it’s still incredibly frustrating, especially since beta games patch frequently, and are often relatively large patches too.

Sure, there are other issues at play here. If Australian ISPs weren’t so damn stingy, we wouldn’t be so focussed on off-peak time. But for now, it’s what we have to work with, so it would be nice if software was obliging!

iTunes + movies + Australian broadband = fail

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Today Apple announced the availability of movies, for purchase and rental, on the iTunes store. As is to be expected, I have a few issues with this.

Like the TV shows, which were announced earlier this year, there’s a significant price disparity between the iTunes prices and dvd prices. Or rather, there isn’t. The purchase prices for movies on the iTunes store are $10 for “catalog”, $17.99 for “recent” and $24.99 for “new” releases. Obviously these are just guidlines, since Star Trek: Generations, which I would definitely consider “catalog” is $12.99. That’s better than all the other Star Trek movies though, which for some reason are “recent”, and thus $17.99. All of the Star Trek movies can be picked up for around $20 each in a shop, on a physical medium, in a plastic box, shipped from a warehouse. If you buy them all at once, they come down to $15 each. Yes, I’m aware that there are costs associated with digital distribution, not least of all the bandwidth required, but these movies should be significantly cheaper than their dvd counterparts. I suspect that a large portion of the blame for this lies with the big bad movie studios, who can’t seem to see beyond their short-sighted quarterly earnings reports, but I wouldn’t put it past Apple to put all the blame on the studios while not being overly aggressive in driving those prices down.

But that’s just the start of the financial pain train …

Take my aforementioned example of Star Trek: Generations. That comes in at 1h 57min 54sec (thanks iTunes). This translates to 1.39GB. That’s really not that bad, given how cheap storage is and such. But comparing that to the download limits on some typical broadband plans in Australia and it doesn’t look so good.

Say you buy or rent one movie per week. I presume that’s not an unreasonable target … You’re looking at close to 6GB per month, just on your iTunes movie habit, let alone the music purchases you’re supposed to be making, or any other internet usage. So let’s check what we have to spend with the ISPs to get that.

First up -this is going to seem comical, but please, bear with me – let’s have a look at Telstra.
$40/month will get you ADSL, hobbled to 1500kbps download speed, and a massive 400MB (not a typo) of downloads per month. Wow.
$70/month will get you the same blistering speed, but a 12GB limit, so we could rent and download two movies per week. Slow down!
Of course you could get that 12GB limit for $10/month less … if you slowed down further to 256kbps download. On the plus side, at that speed, you wouldn’t be able to download more than two movies per week anyway, so your limit would be pretty safe.

So we’ll move to the other “big” player, Optus. Not that great either, with $50/month getting you 2GB or $70/month getting you 15GB. But with Optus you’re on full ADSL2+ speeds (or as close as the disclaimer will allow).

Since doing this for even just the major Australian ISPs will get boring fast, I’m going to skip to the ISP widely regarded as the best in $/GB terms – TPG. Ignoring off-peak limits (since I think the majority of people included in this example won’t, or at least shouldn’t have to, rent a movie at 3am) we need to spend $50/month to cover our target, and we actually get 18GB of peak downloads, which means a ridiculous three movies per week, plus a bonus movie per week in off-peak time if we’re so inclined.

Seriously – is this really how we are Building Australia’s Prosperity with our National Broadband Network? Okay, it’s not likely to happen via iTunes any time soon, but is 3 movie rentals per week really that odd? There’s a big problem with the iTunes store selling and renting movies, but this one isn’t Apple.