The ISPs are a natural monopoly, or oligopoly at least, because it's expensive to lay cable for each home. Their business is quite profitable even when they don't get to control their customers traffic.
How is the anti-P2P enforcement these days? I think there are companies gathering bittorrent swarm data and selling it to lawyers interested in this sort of bullying. In Finland at least you can expect a mail from one of them if your IP address turns up in this data. However I think it is mostly focused on video and music piracy.
I'm in Italy. Most people I know have been pirating movies, series and games [1] for 20+ years, via torrents and eMule (yes, eMule is still big in Italy), and nobody ever received any letters.
But there's a big exception: as soon as you start pirating soccer, they're going to come after you.
[1] I've personally stopped pirating games a long time ago, because it's just easier and safer to buy them on Steam or GOG. Gaben was 100% right when he said "Piracy is almost always a service problem".
Yup, Gaben was 100% right. I haven't pirated a game or music album in ages. Having games that just work is great. An update came out? It's auto-installed. Don't have to wait for the cracker group to put out a new patched executable. For music, Spotify means I don't need to curate a collection and buy individual songs. Yes, I acknowledge that it means I don't own any of it, but that's fine. I'm still coming out ahead compared to paying for $1 for every individual song.
But movies and TV shows? All the studios fucked it up by all wanting a piece of the pie. It became a horribly fragmented market. I'd need, what, 8+ subscriptions to have access to it all? Netflix, Hulu, HBO, Disney+, Peacock, Paramount+, AppleTV, Amazon Prime Video... Other than sports-centric streaming that I don't care about, what am I missing?
It's utterly ridiculous. My pirating plummeted when Netflix streaming became a thing. It returned when studios revoked the licenses so they could put it on their own platform.
In Germany you can expect to get a letter from some law firm, confirmed by some judge that orders you to pay 100s or 1000s of euros if you don't use a vpn
They will attempt to download DMCA files from you as often as possible and then calculate the amount of times times price of the product to come up with a fictional damages amount
US colocated seedbox with ~10k film and tv torrents seeding at any given time, the last letter I got was ~2014 IIRC, before that it was several a year. I never responded to any of them.
I don't think I'm especially good at covering my tracks, so either they've abandoned individual enforcement in favor of going after distributors or they no longer bother with non-residential IPs.
edit: curious, how were these notices served to you when you were receiving them? Were they sent to the colo who forwarded them to you?
Anecdotally it seems the only enforcement in the US these days is via ISPs who have made some agreement to "self-enforce" against their residential customers, sending emails threatening to cancel service after three strikes. They seem to only monitor for select "blockbuster" level movies. A friend got one of these as recently as two years ago from CenturyLink iirc. Meanwhile I lived in an apartment building that had a shared (commercial) connection for all the tenants and eventually stopped using a VPN at all, never heard anything.
> curious, how were these notices served to you when you were receiving them? Were they sent to the colo who forwarded them to you?
Yup, they would send their spam to `abuse@provider.tld` regarding an IP address, my provider would look up the IP address and forward it to me.
Presumably if they ever cared to escalate they could file a lawsuit and subpoena the provider for my identity, but they never did. They're looking for easy settlements and that would cost time and money.
Well, they did sue Cox Communications for a billion dollars because they weren't self-policing. ISPs can lose their safe harbor status and effectively become accomplices in all the piracy of their customers.
Happens every day in the US. Mostly video and music (MPA/RIAA). There's also been some effort put into extorting ISPs for the activities of their customers, but the effectiveness of that is still being determined as cases work their way through the court system. We should have a better idea this summer after the supreme court decides on the $1 billion in damages one ISP was ordered to pay to a bunch of RIAA labels.
It will be a lot more profitable to sue ISPs than it is to try to sue poor parents and grandparents for what children do online.
I've heard Finland sends out letters, same with Japan. Are there actual consequences, or can they just be ignored?
Norway I haven't heard of anyone getting anything in the past decade. The ISPs supposedly get letters from lawyers but just toss them, since the intersection of the burden of proof and our privacy laws make it such that nothing can really be done.
I think there was some ISP that gave out names and IP addresses to one of the firms years ago, but nothing happened and the police said "we have better things to do".
AFAIK you can completely ignore the letters, because taking you to court would be very costly and might not end well for them. However, they keep doing it because some people get scared and pay up right away.
Yes, I think it's the same in here, you have been able to ignore the letters without any consequence. Also from what I hear, the letters have been very inaccurate. I doubt the IP based proof would hold in the court of law.
Since the Tapani storm of 2011 there's been a massive undergrounding of the power grid, so much of the rural areas are now also quite safe from outages. But there are still a lot of the old type of grid left and the economics for undergrounding those are increasingly unfavorable. Perhaps grid connected batteries next to the transformers might soon be more economical for many of these areas. They could serve other functions beside backup power, after all.
Yeah. That's partly why it feels so foreign to me that these blackouts would still affect tens of thousands of homes.
The Tapani storm was such a divisive experience. In the city the only effect of the storm I remember was that the windows were ringing quite a bit that night. Otherwise nothing out of the ordinary.
Modern air-to-air heatpumps heat at over 100% efficiency even at those temperatures, they are very widely deplyoed in the Nordics for heating. And even where it is sometimes that cold, most of the year it is warmer than that. Still yes, you should have another source of heat just in case.
This is largely a misconception that's caused by the fact that EV fires are hard to extinguish with normal water sprays. That is because the bettery packs are designed to be water proof, so it is hard to get the fire patrol's water in. If you can immerse the pack in water, the fire is extinguished without much trouble. That's unlike petroleum fires, where the fuel is lighter than water and liquid, so water spray will boil and spread the fire instead of extinguishing it.
You can also recharge your geothermal well or ground heat collection field by heating the outgoing thermal collection liquid with either cheap electricity (rooftop solar?) or direct solar heat collection. I think this will be a growing thing as the earliest mainstream ground source heat wells start to be a few decades old. Many of them are sized so that they don't fully recover during the summer, so the heat output slowly drops.
Z2 means you'll have two parity disks, like in RAID-6. That should be okay. The trouble with RAID-5 are the rebuild times that rise to multiple days with modern disk sizes. The duration of time you run effectively without redundancy grows uncomfortably large. Especially if you don't have a hot or even cold spare around.
Only if you need high availability, which is probably not the case for home use.
If one of your drives fails under RAID5, before you even order a new disk, you should do an incremental backup, so that your backup is up to date. Then it doesn't really matter that the rebuild times take long. And if you have more data coming in, just do more incremental backups during the rebuild time.
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