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Reddit beats film industry again, won't have to reveal pirates' IP addresses
- pleasantpeasant 3y agoI wonder if they'll still do this once Reddit IPOs
- sircastor 3y agoOnly 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 people who said "You wouldn't download a car."
- Sunspark 3y agoOnce they're public, everything is going to change. At that point it becomes "building value for the shareholder" and "minimizing risk for the shareholder". Except in this case, users are the product, and if you ruin the experience for the user then you've ruined your own product, thus defeating the shareholder. The only thing Reddit offers is a user community on a mega-forum.
- declaredapple 3y ago> At that point it becomes "building value for the shareholder" and "minimizing risk for the shareholder". Generally people refer to this as Enshittification > if you ruin the experience for the user then you've ruined your own product, thus defeating the shareholder. Enshittification is literally the opposite of this.
- hightrix 3y ago> At that point it becomes "building value for the shareholder" and "minimizing risk for the shareholder". Reddit has been on this path for years. Almost every recent change, when viewed through this lens, makes much more sense.
- TheCaptain4815 3y agoIs this the first major public forum to go public?
- duskwuff 3y agoMaybe if you define "forum" in a way which excludes social media sites like Facebook, but that feels like an artificial distinction.
- EasyMark 3y agoIt really does, there are facebook groups that have 80% of the functionality of reddit on specific topics, much like reddit, with discussions like reddit, and sharing media, just like reddit.
- rychco 3y agoI'm firmly of the belief that all users should wipe their post/comment history & delete their accounts before this happens. User-content is what provides reddit their value, but once they go public it's (almost) guaranteed to become steadily worse & less useful as shareholders squeeze the life out of it.
- 1970-01-01 3y agoOnce again, IP addr is not a person. If you want to reveal who's who, you need to have a search warrant.
- imoverclocked 3y agoThis isn’t about identifying a particular user, it’s about showing that Frontier does nothing to quell piracy by its users and thus provides an incentive to pirates to use their network.
- BriggyDwiggs42 3y agoWow i didnt realize frontier is so based
- favourable 3y ago> IP addr is not a person And most IPV4 addresses are vague and only give a coarse location of where you are, and they're typically shared among many others so an IP is not a guaranteed signal that it was 'you' who pirated stuff.
- declaredapple 3y ago> And most IPV4 addresses are vague and only give a coarse location of where you are That's not true, you can request/compel Frontier to tell you what specific customer that IP was assigned to at a given time. > and they're typically shared among many others so an IP is not a guaranteed signal that it was 'you' who pirated stuff. Most residential ISPs in the states have 1 ipv4 (and possibly ipv6) assigned per customer and don't CGNAT, from my brief research Frontier doesn't seem to use CGNAT at least for residential internet.
- rpmisms 3y agoThe FBI contacted me over a shitpost on Reddit using this exact process. Hilarious, but also very concerning.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago> Voltage Holdings and Screen Media Ventures cited Reddit posts in which users say that Frontier didn't terminate their Internet service despite sending many copyright infringement notices about torrent downloads. One of the users wrote, "I got a total of 44 emails from frontier about downloading torrents and that it could terminate service. They haven't yet. And I kinda feel like if they didn't do it after 44 emails. That they won't… ." Don't they just want to file a lawsuit against Frontier? What is Reddit's involvement other than their website being used for this communication?
- VoidWhisperer 3y agoMy understanding is that the users in question were talking about piracy or committing piracy on reddit and the movie companies want to get the IPs of those users from reddit in order to prove that Frontier isnt terminating people committing piracy. Alternatively, depending on how large the list of users they requested IPs for from reddit is, it could be a fishing expedition to see if any of them happen to belong to frontier
- imoverclocked 3y agoIt 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 to Reddit while at my house?
- bawolff 3y ago> Firms wanted seven years' worth of IP address logs on users who discussed piracy. Does that mean reddit stores ip addresses for 7 years? That seems excessive.
- forgotmypw17 3y agoI think it's basically for the entire account history. You can verify this using the data request feature.
- Arrath 3y agoWhat the lawyers wanted may be very different from what reddit actually keeps.
- vdfs 3y agoRight,I bet reddit hold data for more than 7 years
- mysteria 3y agoI suppose it's possible the poster's IP is stored in the post metadata itself, along with the date, username, and so forth. Don't know if that's how Reddit works but in that case it'll be retained forever. As for the reason for 7 years worth of data, I think that's because the firm wants to go back and search for infringing acitivity on all those IP addresses due to dynamic IP updates and so forth. If the user is still active on Reddit the more recent IP addresses probably are enough to identify him if a warrant is served to the ISP. The ISPs I know only retain a link from a dynamic IP to a subscriber for one to two years max.
- ipaddr 3y agoThis lawsuit is a big ad for Frontier. I'm going to see what services they offer.
- sam0x17 3y agoIt makes me miss the pre-acquisition-by-akamai days at Linode, particularly in the 2010s it was quite easy to simply respond with "thanks for letting me know, the user in question has been banned" and go right back to torrenting
- PrimeMcFly 3y agolol, that's the kind of behavior that does deserve legal consequences IMO, and I'm very pro piracy.
- pyaamb 3y agousername checks ou-oops. sorry, forgot this isn't reddit xD
- hypeatei 3y agoGood. Piracy is the result of poor delivery or poor pricing models. It's very aggravating when lawyers are just thrown at a problem because corporations are too lazy to do the work.
- myself248 3y ago*alleged pirates right?
- pharmakom 3y agoI assume the pirates are using Tor or a proxy anyway though?
- zahma 3y agoIt doesn’t seem like the pirates who were described in the article were behind any kind of proxy, which is why the ISP Frontier repeatedly wrote them to desist. They were pirating on the clearnet without any obfuscation. Pretty dumb and easily the lowest hanging fruit for copyright enforcement. Using Tor for streaming or large downloads probably won’t result in great quality or quick speeds. Using Tor for browsing and seeding on private torrent trackers is also typically banned for security reasons.
- pharmakom 3y agoWell they don’t need Reddit to see who is seeding. But posting to Reddit can easily be done through Tor or proxies.
- mondrian 3y agoBtw 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrier-grade_NAT
- hamandcheese 3y agoWouldn'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.
- mondrian 3y agoYeah that's true. You need the data from both the ISP and reddit, and correlate using timestamps from both sides. That's true of VPNs, too. If multiple people with the same external IP were browsing reddit around the same time, the argument in court would likely become about the accuracy of timestamps.
- yonatan8070 3y agoWouldn'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
- hamandcheese 3y ago3 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.
- itsTyrion 3y agoWell, they want 7 years of logs. 110 * 365.25 * 7 * users = quite a bit
- cactusplant7374 3y agoThis past week I've gotten two people banned from reddit (full site ban). I was curious if it was possible so I picked some comments that I didn't think deserved a ban. The comments were more jokes than anything. Nothing serious. Maybe Frontier should hire me.
- 15457345234 3y ago> The comments were more jokes than anything. Nothing serious. Yeah if you're not spreading doom, gloom and negativity reddit doesn't want you, they have a tone and they're policing it. Really is the most negative and grim place on the entire internet.
- neilv 3y agoA recurring revenue opportunity for Reddit would be to forget about the old defender of online freedom image, and sell data. :) "How much is it worth to your case, to know who the commenters on this thread are?" "What would you pay to filter hiring candidates for ideology, troublemaker tendencies, or bedroom kinks that bother your conservative Chairman?" "Your own actuaries can tell you how much money this individual vice data will save your insurance company, so let's split it." "Making your astroturfing more effective, and getting full credit in your org for shifting perceptions, would be easier if you could crunch individual voting behavior." "There's only so much censoring that bribed mods can do on the sub that keeps dumping on your brand. Seems like the private messages of your most influential critics would be useful to you. Oh, ha, I just pulled up the alts for one of them on my screen, and looks like they're secretly also an OnlyFans model." "Would your government or department like to subscribe to the Access Plan or the Fusion Plan?" Obvious idea: https://thenextweb.com/news/reddit-knows-your-dark-secrets https://thenextweb.com/news/reddit-knows-your-dark-secrets
- TeMPOraL 3y agoI'd love to see them try this, and then to watch the international backlash, not to mention holy GDPR fire raining down on their heads.
- neilv 3y agoI'd love to see other companies crushed for behavior like the above hypotheticals. To push the public and lawmakers to finally decide that corporate surveillance is evil. (Reddit still has positive karma balance, especially from earlier days, IMHO. There are many, many companies much more deserving of being made an example of.)
- wkat4242 3y agoGDPR doesn't apply if they're really frontier customers. As they're not in the EU.
- jowea 3y agoOh yes one my favourite ~~TED~~ Onion talk business case studies: "The Power Of Selling Out: Your Customers As Political Capital - Onion Talks - Ep. 9" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8c_m6U1f9o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8c_m6U1f9o
- hsbauauvhabzb 3y agoReddit thread I’m guessing this is in reference to https://www.reddit.com/r/Piracy/comments/14soiil/44_dmca_complaints_from_frontier_fios/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Piracy/comments/14soiil/44_dmca_com...
- wanderingmind 3y agoAs an aside can your ISP track torrents if you still use DNS over https or VPN services? How does the tracking work and how can you mask better?
- hn_acker 3y agoThis 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."