Posts by Matthew Poole
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good to see why you're so anti this too, cos it means extra work for you personally :) not that you're bias or anything
Doesn't mean any extra work for me. I'm well out of the ISP sphere, and I don't work in central IT services for the university so I wouldn't be implementing anything there, either. I'm just against attempts to prop up a dying business model through statutory extortion, and against one group demanding that another group do things that benefit the first group and have no benefit for the second group, but expect that the second group should pay all the associated costs. That pretty much sums up everything that has been enacted in legislation thus far, and also sums up this suggested wholesale filtering. It's bullshit. In the real world, if someone does something that costs them and benefits you, you pay for it.
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So what you're saying is that you don't use a PC, you tap on a wire like MacGyver did!
Taught him everything he knows :P
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That said I'm a firm believer that downloading has hurt the recording industry (although nowhere near the levels the IFPI would have you believe), but I'm also a subscriber to the idea that it's not an altogether bad thing.
I would hope that most copyright-reform advocates, as well as those who just think that the music industry is full of itself, will concede that downloading hasn't been a zero-harm situation. That said, the industry's shills have done their cause no assistance by pulling numbers out of their collective posterior to "prove" that "downloading is destroying the industry," to justify ever-more-draconian statutory enforcement of their business model.
A few years ago, a document that probably wasn't meant to be seen by the public ended up on the RIAA website very briefly. Long enough to be downloaded by an analyst, who examined the numbers. It contained a breakdown of costs of RIAA members, and showed that the industry lost more to "shrinkage" and "breakage" than was considered to be a fair assessment of the actual losses due to downloading. Unfortunately I cannot remember anything more than this, and my Google foo isn't serving me well this evening, so I can't post a link to the commentary. Needless to say it made RIAA look really bad, because it showed just how wasteful their supply chain is, and suggested that maybe the internet model, with its zero-breakage/zero-shrinkage distribution is actually a much, much better system.
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any expansion on what you did at isp's matthew. as in describe the sort of things you were involved in.
I did network engineer-y things. Router configuration and management. Switch configuration and management. Connectivity management. Capacity planning and management. Traffic analysis. Also management of things like email, web and DNS servers. Things at layers one-through-four of the TCP/IP network model. Stuff that's directly relevant to this discussion, and for most people would qualify me as competent to pass comment. If that's not good enough for you, well, tough. This is as much of a justification for my belief that I know what I'm talking about as you're going to get.
As for my definition of "working in IT", ISP helldesk, ISP NE/SA, support engineer for a major IT consultancy, SA for one of the largest web-hosting companies in the country, and now my present job as an SA-cum-NE for a university. That constitutes "working in IT" by most definitions with which I am familiar.
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I didn't pick it up from your brief history but was there any experience in there of working at isp level?
You read and read and read and don't actually see a thing, it appears.
If you think you're raising my blood pressure, sorry to disappoint. I just get emphatic when responding to trolls. And like it or not, you do meet the definition of troll.
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Knowing what you say you know about the way things work in little black boxes tell us how you can see modern technology being used efficiently to grab pirated material and how you might do it to avoid grabbing legitimate users.
Mark and I have both already answered that question. It's not possible. Whether or not you want to hear it, that's what we're telling you. The technology exists, yes, but not in the form required. The costs to make it deployable in such a fashion are astronomical. If "the media industry" wants it to happen, they can pay for it.
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I first wrote a computer program in the 70's at school, bought my first comp in '85, have been working in the industry since '89, and specifically in the internet industry since '96. I've been a councillor of the Internet Society, I've run the Government Information Managers Forum, I've been the IT manager for a Government Ministry and I've worked in the area of e-government since 2000. I know how this stuff works and, to be candid, your posts show that you don't.
Come now, Mark, how does that possibly qualify you? I mean, really. Be reasonable. You're not an end-user with gut instincts, so you obviously don't have the foggiest bloody idea what you're on about.
</sarcasm type="heavy">So you're just going to have to accept that your idea is not feasible, technically or economically.
Actually it is technically possible, for values of possible that equal "costs greater than the GNP of a medium-sized, non-bankrupt African nation". If the entire global music industry were to throw their combined net profits for the last financial year at the problem, it'd be resolved in a matter of months. All of the parts are out there right now, it's the cobbling them together that'll cost obscene sums of money, mostly the coding to track, store and hash all the multi-part streams. Dealing with the encryption that's just starting be deployed could be a problem, though.
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what's you're experience in isp level data analysis again, or in the use of bit torrent or anything that allows you to say something with such authority?
Ohhh, let's see. Coming up on 10 years working in IT, eight of them in network engineering roles or related, including at major ISPs. Currently I work for a large university as a system administrator/network engineer, and have just completed an information systems degree with a network and security focus.
Unlike you, my history is quite readily established through Google. This is my real name. I'm known within the NZ network operators' community. There are plenty of posts archived on NZNOG that demonstrate that I am at least passingly familiar with the topics under discussion. Hell, ask Russell. We've been crossing paths online for over a decade.
a programmer who could write a program to analyze anything the wanted to, even if it required them to download the odd gig or 5000.
The arrogance of that statement is breathtaking. "I don't care how hard it is, I know that it's possible so it must be done!" You're right that it's possible, but you also don't give a flying fuck about the complexities or costs. Costs that would not be borne by your industry, as they never are. They're always dumped on the ISPs, who pass the costs on to their customers, with any notional benefit accruing to neither them or their customers. Fuck that! If you want this shit done, you can damn well pay for it.
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If I can harvest ip addresses of people sharing copyright material its not going to be too hard for anyone else to is it.
But without downloading the file, you can't be certain that it's actually infringing. A name proves nothing. I could record some traffic noise and call it "Chasing Cars", and share it, and that'd be legal. I could even make it the same length as the song of the same name by Snow Patrol. Totally legit, but without downloading it you don't know what it is. So you're back to where you started, which is that you don't know, and don't want to know, what the limitations of wholesale traffic filtering actually are. And I'm not going to bother wasting the electrons trying to explain to someone who actively ignores what they're being told.
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I think the point is more that any ideology is wonderful in its pristine state. It's when you roll it around in the dirt of messy, irrational, bewilderingly perverse human reality that the cracks start to show.
Exactly. As I say frequently, communism is a wonderful system. Until you involve people. The thing about capitalism is it doesn't pretend that people don't have differing motivations and "hot buttons". If you're a money-hungry sociopath, capitalism doesn't try and make you act like you're disinterested in personal wealth and only in it for the collective good. Collectivist-based societies require at least some subjugation of personal motivations, and pretend that nobody has those motivations in the first place. All pigs are equal, etc.
Capitalism certainly has its problems, and it highlights human selfishness pretty successfully. But those problems can mostly be managed, if people don't pretend that capitalism is perfect and should be left alone. People like Rodney, for example. The market will not correct itself without intervention, because almost no markets exist that actually qualify as "perfect".
And while we've got Rodney et al actively involved in governing the country we shouldn't hold our breaths on rigid enforcement of licensing rules, because Rodney has exhibited a total lack of desire to bring in the responsibilities side of the profit equation. Profit uber alles, and that's all that matters. Not that Labour were much better, but they didn't have an "unfettered free market" ideologue like Rodders cluttering up their side of the House.