Mike LaVigne, IT director, said the number of people who access the Internet using the connection varies widely, from perhaps a dozen people a day to 100 during busy times such as First Fridays and the Coshocton Canal Festival.
It's used by Coshocton County Sheriff's deputies who can park in the 300 block and complete a traffic or incident report without leaving their vehicle. Out-of-town business people can park and use their laptops to make connections.During festival times, vendors find it a convenience to check the status of credit cards being used to make purchases, LaVigne said.
Because it's a single address used by many people, it's difficult to tell who made the illegal download, although the county plans to investigate the matter.
Illegal movie download forces shutdown of free Wi-Fi [Coschton Tribune via BoingBoing] (Photo: ashestoages)
]]>Sadly the $20 the MPAA might have lost here could cost the tax payers and citizens of that town millions.
]]>@nerdtalker: Maybe because any security professional will laugh the moment you say "completely secure". There's good security, but total security is a myth. Even AES has some surprising attacks against it.
]]>@thisistobehelpful: soooo... you want libraries to have filters for pornographic images and videos? I'm really interested in your deep understanding of image recognition technologies.
]]>It's obviously a touchier subject when it comes to government censorship.
]]>Because politicians and law-makers let them. :-(
]]>Jesus, haven't these people seen the anti-piracy ads before movies? Stealing a movie is the same thing as raping your mother! If we keep stealing from Hollywood, how will they come out with Austin Powers 4?
/vomited in my mouth a little
//perfectly fine with stealing from Hollywood if they keep putting out crap like this: [www.urinalgum.com]
Oh the machinations of these corporations is frightening!
]]>Neuter the RIAA and MPAA please? Those two rabid dogs are a menace to society.
]]>@GitEmSteveDave_HurtHisKnee: we went in to watch a different movie, and all of a sudden, the love guru shows up. we told the theater people, they stopped it, only to bring it back up again.
luckily they finally figured it out and moved us to another theater to watch our movie (luckily, from the beginning).
]]>@Nick1693:
Yes, but a decent level of encryption means that the person decrypting the information needs either
a) Warehouses on top of warehouses filled with the most powerful systems available and several years
or
b) An entire lifetime in which to crack the decryption key
or
c) Incredibly, astronomically good luck.
Distributed computing projects have shown that *good* encryption is nearly impossible to crack in the amount of time necessary to make use of the encrypted information.
]]>Still cost them a pretty penny to litigate, but yes, I don't know of any taken sucessfully to verdict.
]]>It also shouldn't refer to a single wireless router at a courthouse as "municipal wifi"
]]>It's hashed on the server side.
]]>Someone pirated a DVD. Solution: shutdown the entire network
A Few Equally Ridiculous Parallels:
Someone keyed a car. Solution: destroy all cars
Someone lied. Solution: eliminate all forms of communication.
Someone shoplifted. Solution: eliminate consumerism
A kitten peed on your bed. Solution: KILL ALL KITTENS!
@haoshufu: Yes. Where have you been?
]]>@bohemian:
No, they most certainly can not, and did not in this case--the municipality decided to shut it down on the basis of the notice they received--the MPAA has no judicial powers.
Oh but the gun manufacturers *have* been sued many timesfor others using their products to commit crimes. Not saying I agree with the theory of liability, but the lawsuits are quite real.
]]>Y hallo thar safe harbor provisions to the DMCA....
]]>@digisplicer: I remember seeing him in Inglorious Basterds and doing a double take. It kind of took me out of the movie, because then I expected him to be playing a Mike Myers-ish character, like Dr. Evil or Fat Bastard. He was just a British general, no laughs. No volcano lair.
]]>Ever heard of VPN? Anyone? We're what, 18 comments in and nobody even brought up that using any service over a VPN makes the untrusted public wifi link completely secure.
No doubt in my mind that's what the cops and vendors are using, otherwise they're plain stupid.
]]>ISP's have a Safe Harbor and can't be sued for copyright infringement by a customer (well like anything you can be sued for whatever but it doesn't mean you will lose). They can be sued to release the name of the person that transferred copywritten files but they can't be sued for someone using their network to do so. ISP's are not the intended guardians of the web even though some think they are...
The issue here is that the city may technically be an ISP but they are a pseudo-private entity providing connectivity to others. Like the article said, there is only one IP for the city so it looks like the city is acting like Pirate Bay.
Anyway, as far as I'm concerned MPAA and RIAA can go eat a big steaming pile of excrement with a nice chianti! (well maybe a nice Thunderbird instead)
]]>"There's the bastard! So you though you could get away with downloading 'Howard the Duck', did ja? You are going to jail for a long time!"
]]>WAIT... they should sue the company that made the movie for making an inviting temptation. after all, if one has a pool and a neighbor comes and drowns in it that person can be sued for having an attractive nuisance
]]>The police have regularly involved investigators from the MPAA and RIAA into cases where they were the alleged victims. In SWeden, the lead Police investigator for the pirate bay trial went to work for WArner bros for 6 months, in the middle of investigating the pirate bay case (warner was one of the accusers)
In the UK this past week, the high court ruled that despite a criminal prosecution being dropped on an alleged copyright case, the police can keep siezed equipment because the one of the British Lobby Groups (FACT, I believe) is debating a private prosecution.
Again, in the UK, a police raid was made on a mans house for running a torrent site (oink) they eve n 'happened' to ahve a BBC camera crew with them. The BPI (UK's RIAA) had told the police that they were selling pre-release music, and earning thousands in membership fees (both false). 2 years later, the guy's still on bail, awaiting trial, for 'conspiracy to defraud the music industry'
I wish I were joking. I should also mention that in the UK, music sales are UP 50% over 10 years ago.
]]>Ok, the ISP is actively doing nothing. It is actively allowing ALL content. It has no way to tell what content is being transfered without wiretapping it (and yes, I know about the loophole that email, while being stored, is then tehcnically not intercepted in trasit and so isn't a wiretap, and the other loophole that was the FISA amendment act last year). Also there's another problem, bittorrent, the most popular P2Pmethod, is non sequential, and doesn't contain filenames in the data transfer. You can't tell, looking at the data packets, what it contains or refers to. So the ISP has no way to tell if the content is a movie, or a linux ISO.
Thirdly, even if it was a movie, they have no way to tell if it's an infringemnt or not. I actually have limited distribution and performance rights for 3 seasons of a Comedy Central show (which ran for 5) plus one of the pilots for it. If they block my transfer, when they're wrong, they violate their common carrier status. Comcast was dragged into hearings about this very issue 2 years ago, when their sandvine equipment dropped bittorrent and other similar network traffic.
In fact, There's a trial just wrapping up in Australia right now, because AFACT, and the ISP iinet. Torrentfreak has great coverage of it.
In short, it's actually not the job of the ISP to prevent it (and can be a felony to do so), and copyright infringement is a civilly actionable situation, not criminal. The MPAA actually prefers civil suits to criminal, because their cases wouldn't stand up in criminal trials (higher burdon of proof, you can't just outspend the defense team) the claims made by the MPAA don't ever add up (a record summer at the box office this year, you don't say!)
Oh, and the system the city is looking to buy, doesn't work. If you want proof, just ask Edwyn Collins.
]]>(Hashing is a form of 1-way encryption)
]]>My home town on the Consumerist! Coshocton is a very small town with only two places with public access to the internet - the library and a coffee shop. I know this from checking around because my mom does not have an internet connection. The local hotel has internet access for guests, but they don't allow dogs. Anyone in town could get to the free Wi-Fi hotspot after a five minute drive (or less). Also hard to find a place to send a fax there. And until I switched to Verizon, no reliable cell service (Cingular, AT&T, Sprint). But I still love going home to visit.
]]>Infringement notices are fairly common, but a first offense rarely leads to any actual legal action. Some ISPs won't even turn over your info without a court order (thank you Verizon), which means you're off the hook unless you're a serial violator and the MPAA really wants to get you. This town made a rational decision to shut down their access before it got to that stage.
]]>As opposed to the fact that since the MPAA would never be able to show who used an open network and would therefore never be able to get any legal action going against anyone ever in a million years.
Has anyone tried to shut the MPAA down yet. They must be guilty of some RICO law or something.
]]>I digress, this sounds like a corporation actually taking responsibility for the action of a member rather than saying, hey it is not the cities fault. However, that said, it is a sad commentary that one individuals actions could be responsible and why is MPPA (Motion Picture Association of America) going after one individual for a singular act in this instance?
BOOoo for tyranny of the minority!
]]>Depending on the means of transmission, it could be intercepted in between those points, too.
But intercepting data doesn't mean you can do anything with it.
]]>@xtc46 - thinksmarter on twitter: That is completely wrong. To even begin to get access to a wired line, you will have to go through walls, pavement, piping, etc. Also, wired connections can and are encrypted. Which only gets harder if that line happens to be fiber optic and you are in view of security cameras and other people.
Wifi on the other hand just requires you to get within range of it, and you can easily fit in with an entire crowd with no knowing. And WEPs are a joke; a WEP can be cracked within an hour, ten minutes even, with enough traffic on the line with programs that anyone could learn to use and require no knowledge of how networks or encrption work. Not to mention there was a paper recently published about reseachers craking a WPA in under a minute.
]]>full disclosure: worked for an ISP for several years.
]]>So this basically sets a legal precedent (if the shutdown was the result of legal action and not voluntary) for private companies to shut down public utilities because they believe the utilities are being used to harm their profits.
I supposed next McDonalds will ban gas stoves because they violate their intellectual property with home-made value meals.
]]>*(I say supposed because without a judgment or conviction, there's no proof that the MPAA's allegations are true.)
]]>Credit cards (and related technology), on the other hand, have so many inherent security flaws that IMHO one more way to exploit them doesn't really matter.
]]>the mpaa can kiss the hariest whitest par of my @$$. hope they have painful deaths/homocides.
]]>@thisistobehelpful: See, the library is a government entity. And the funny thing about the government is that it has a pretty hefty set of TOS. It's called the Constitution. So yeah, I'm pretty sure that's covered under free speech.
]]>It's a questionable area and I don't think I've ever read anything about any actual court cases...
]]>Also I hope your friend gets a good punch in now and then and calls the cops.
]]>the mpaa can kiss the hariest, whitest part of my @$$
i hope they have very pain full deaths/homicides.
However, if Coshocton is so cash strapped that they can't figure out how to prevent this on their public WiFi or at least set up a terms of use page before allowing people on, they SHOULD disconnect it b/c they're in way over their heads.
]]>Private industry now has judicial power over government?
]]>I actually just registered an account because of this post. Consumerist, I've been reading for a while now, and I'm pretty disappointed in this one. Please don't jump into panic parties like this; I count on you guys as a generally level and reliable source of info. Thanks for at least not using Cory Doctorow's references to the Geneva convention - sometimes I am embarrassed to be on the same side of the issue as he is.
]]>Think the headline is a bit misleading. It should have read "town over-reacts to MPAA notice and shuts down free wireless".
Coshocton needs a to grow a pair...
]]>ouch dammit i just used the road analogy at that local news site. EFB!@delphi_ote:
]]>Fear of big-money liability makes this stuff happen all the time. Also possible is that people in charge of wireless decisions get convinced by cash in the dead of night that this is an excellent reason to shut thiungs down. Coincidentally next month or next week there will be an announcement that it would be more cost effective for the city to hire this kind of work out to a company that does wireless. This is usually accompanied by a no-bid dead-of-night decision on which company it should be.
Maybe I'm just being a little cynical...
]]>Also, I use Gmail with SSL always on, but yes. =)
]]>@Nick1693: Because the MPAA has very deep pockets that contain lots of politicians with grabby hands.
]]>I do see how this could be convenient though, but why does the MPAA have this much control over what can happen to a network?
]]>