Thinking about getting a Usenet account, questions on security.

Hey I am thinking about getting an account with Astraweb and I have a question regarding security. I have just got one of those mean little letters from my ISP regarding an item from a public torrent (yes, I know, dumb) But I was wandering if there was a way that Usenet can be tracked by RIAA, MPAA, and the like. And has anyone ever gotten reported to their ISP for only downloading through SSL? I do not plan on uploading anything at all, not even posts, I just want to read stuff and use binaries.
I have done some reading and I have seen the answer is no to both of these, but the posts/articles are dated a couple years ago or so and I was wandering if anything new has come about.
Let me know.
Thanks

I've never heard of anything... If you were to use SSL and say port 443 the traffic would look like normal https traffic to your ISP. They can't see what it is no more than they can see what your online banking is.

im using usenetvault and they got a ssl server it works perfect at a nice price 2:fst:

You don't even need encryption unless your ISP is doing traffic shaping, it's illegal and considered wire-tapping, for them to try and actually see what you are downloading. It's just meant to disguise the type of traffic. Plus it's not their job to actively try and enforce the copyrights of others.

Although,
In my case I have found out that it really pisses my ISP off when I download half a TB or so a month. They shut off my connection and told me I had a virus... lmao.

There is no way the MPAA/RIAA can track your traffic. There is no point of interception, like with p2p where they can pose as a normal user and monitor traffic. You are on a direct connection to a server farm.

No one has ever been sued for downloading from Usenet.

Sounds good so far.
Broken, what is there to say to an ISP when they ask you what you are using so much bandwidth for or whatever?
Thanks for the responses so far.

Lots of linux isos? Or MYOB open my pipe or give me my money back.

Well say you can pull down at 1000KiB/s (slow i know) ... There are 1440 minutes in a day or 86,400 seconds. Or 2.59 million seconds in a month. That should mean you are paying for the chance to download 2,592,000,000KiB per month. That's about..... 309GB And 1000KiB/s is pretty slow for usenet. Torrent guys probably touch a fraction of that.. I would guess it's possible to pull down close to 1-1.5 TB a month on a halfway descent connection..

I could see why they might not like it.. I would guess that if you did pull down 1+TB a month, you would have downloaded more than 95% of your neighbors in a 5 year time period and that must stick out like a soar thumb..

Someone check my math...

Quote:

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Originally Posted by mkil5

Hey I am thinking about getting an account with Astraweb and I have a question regarding security. I have just got one of those mean little letters from my ISP regarding an item from a public torrent (yes, I know, dumb) But I was wandering if there was a way that Usenet can be tracked by RIAA, MPAA, and the like. And has anyone ever gotten reported to their ISP for only downloading through SSL?

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A couple of major items are missing from your original posting.

A. Your country/state/city location.

B. Your ISP

Most if not all of the problems going on these days (in fact, since the beginning of days) are the transmission schemes which utilize 'party lines' for data. Like the cablecos, wireless, satellite, etc. The DEDICATED circuits, like DSL and T-lines, have NEVER had any of these problems. Simply because they arn't 'party lines', where your data is intermixed with all your neighbors, right at the point it leaves your machine.

It's those 'carriers' (the cablecos) that have the huge need to 'keep the lines clear', simply so they can oversell what is a limited resource to yet more 'customers'.

With DEDICATED circuits, where that line is yours and yours only from your home to the central office (where it hooks to multi-gigabit internet streams), there's simply no need.

Until fairly recently, the 'cablecos' have been able to say they are 'faster' (but they never mention their 'network shaping' they do!), but DSL (and real fiber, not the 'fiber in your neighborhood' the cablecos are 'pushing' in their adverts) is catching up by leaps and bounds. Of course, your situation may differ, depending on your location.

But the basics, as listed by '222MHz' are true. I'm on a fairly slow DSL line, but run almost 24/7 (get a good UPS for that machine!), and I easily exceed 2Gbytes a month. If I pushed it (some months I do), I can easily exceed several times that.

I happen to know my DSLAM (DSL Access Multiplexor, the machine my DSL line is connected to at the telco central office) has multiple 10Gb/s internet feeds connected to it. My little part of that stream is.... simply drowned in the flood.

But I know for a fact that if I was on Cable-Modem service, I'd be the recipient os several cease and desist letters, and have my 'service' cut off.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by mkil5

Sounds good so far.
Broken, what is there to say to an ISP when they ask you what you are using so much bandwidth for or whatever?
Thanks for the responses so far.

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I told them I was downloading HD porn from the bangbros site (seriously, lol).
They told me that's probably where I picked up a virus at and advised against downloading from there again - they then turned my connection again before I got off the phone with them.

Since then I haven't heard from them again.

lol, that is a pretty good excuse about the porn.
but I am on a cable line, could they give a cease and desist letter if they do not know what is being downloaded? I could be downloading some legitimate hd porn!

I'm on a cable line too, 20mbps from Insight Cable.
They will have no idea what you are downloading, there will be no cease and desist letters. That would be impossible, the copyright holders CANNOT connect to you. Usenet really isn't p2p, you connect to no one. The usenet providers don't even monitor what you download, only if you choose to upload something - they have to cover their asses.

Like I said above,
your ISP doesn't give a shit what you download. They only care about the amount of what your downloading. And if they view that has excessive they may throttle you, or like they did in my case, cut off your service.

On the throttling... I'm pretty sure they've throttled us down a lot.. Anyone gone about getting it removed?

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Originally Posted by 222MHz

On the throttling... I'm pretty sure they've throttled us down a lot.. Anyone gone about getting it removed?

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Because it's your ISP there isn't much you can do about it.
The only thing you can try is getting an Usenet provider that offers more connections. It might be that they are throttling the speed of a single connection from your line, while they aren't throttling the overall connection speed of your line.

If it's an overall throttle they may release it if you download less over a period of time. None the less, I would call them and bitch. They'll probably swear up and down that they aren't doing it, but at least you'll feel better.

Be sure that it isn't your Usenet provider.
I've had problems with Usenet providers before like Usenethosting and PowerUsentServer not being able to provide me the service I was paying for (overselling their lines).

http://img245.imageshack.us/img245/4...itorlp1.th.png

Look at the graph... from 1.3 down to 200.. Who do you thinks to blame?

http://filesharingtalk.com/vb3/%5BIM....png%5B/IMG%5D

I don't know what program that is....
Even if I did, it's hard to say. It's easy to try a new Usenet provider thou. Just sign up for a free trial at Giganews (the best) and see if your speeds increase. If they do, it was your Usenet provider.

BTW
who are you using right now?

Sipping off the roommates easynews via NNTP. The window I posted was my system monitor.. (Like a task manager I think the others call it)

I'm going to be grabbing a giganews account within a couple of weeks..

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Broken

I'm on a cable line too, 20mbps from Insight Cable.
They will have no idea what you are downloading, there will be no cease and desist letters. That would be impossible, the copyright holders CANNOT connect to you. Usenet really isn't p2p, you connect to no one. The usenet providers don't even monitor what you download, only if you choose to upload something - they have to cover their asses.

Like I said above,
your ISP doesn't give a shit what you download. They only care about the amount of what your downloading. And if they view that has excessive they may throttle you, or like they did in my case, cut off your service.

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But did they really cover their ass? Notice that many stuffs are still available on their server.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Broken

You don't even need encryption unless your ISP is doing traffic shaping, it's illegal and considered wire-tapping, for them to try and actually see what you are downloading. It's just meant to disguise the type of traffic. Plus it's not their job to actively try and enforce the copyrights of others.

Although,
In my case I have found out that it really pisses my ISP off when I download half a TB or so a month. They shut off my connection and told me I had a virus... lmao.

There is no way the MPAA/RIAA can track your traffic. There is no point of interception, like with p2p where they can pose as a normal user and monitor traffic. You are on a direct connection to a server farm.

No one has ever been sued for downloading from Usenet.

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Half a TB??? :w00t: where the hell do you store it man? Storage farms?

And I do believe Usenet.com was sued by RIAA :)