The Internet Is Under Great Danger Today (In America)

mammajamma said:

Oh no! I might be punished for stealing things!

But seriously, it only affects torrents, and the fact they only reference the RIAA/MPAA as partners in the plan suggests that they're only going after movie/music torrents, so as long as you don't plan to download "Jack and Jill", you should be fine. At any rate, there are other methods of piracy (cyberlockers, Usenet) that aren't affected by this plan, and the plan's been known long enough that those that go out of their way to pirate have had time to adapt. I don't torrent much, but I likely wouldn't be affected by the stuff I do torrent.

Blocks movie torrents? Well, I guess it's time I actually learn how to rip off the DVD, or record it with some recording program, as I've only torrented movies actually in order to secure clips form them, and in many cases I already own the movie (Granted, a have wily VHS collection... Does that still count as a film collection? Surely I'm not the only one who still buys them... am I?)

BloodyAcid said:

I'm not the biggest tech guy out there, but would changing the extension of an audio file from .mp3 to .png do anything? And also would adding, let's say, an extra minute of silence at the end of a song help?

Back when I had a YouTube account I discovered that by using a special tool to increase the pitch of an mp3's audiotrack and by applying the "fade in" and "fade out" features I could successfully dodge the annoying filters of the WMG group...
These tactics managed to preserve around three-quarters of my videos from being slammed down.
But yet they still managed to fish out just a few. Grrr.
Anyways, I'm on Dailymotion now, and this kind of stuff is much easier to bypass the filters there.

Clonehunter said:

Blocks movie torrents? Well, I guess it's time I actually learn how to rip off the DVD, or record it with some recording program, as I've only torrented movies actually in order to secure clips form them, and in many cases I already own the movie (Granted, a have wily VHS collection... Does that still count as a film collection? Surely I'm not the only one who still buys them... am I?)

It doesn't block movie torrents, you just might get a notice from your ISP as one of the strikes if you download one, and that's only if you seed along with it. Gawker has a decent writeup on the whole shebang. Everything I've read about it so far says it's just an attempt to scare Grandma away from downloading Big Bang Theory.

Well fuck. This thing actually got passed? These greedy assholes really need to be put in their place. And does anything (such as Steam games as some pointed out)that uses large bandwith trip this up?

Am I fucked or what? There's a lot more I need to be told. So I could actually get in trouble from a false positive? If so, assholes will be ripped.

EDIT: Wait, the five major service providers? Thank fucking god Wow! isn't on here. But still, a bit more clarification on these bastards' plans would be appreciated. (thanks mammajamma)

For those that didn't read mammajamma's link, basically CAS isn't that big of a deal:

*Only P2P networks are being monitored. This means sites like Mega, Mediafire, etc. are not affected.

*Only people SEEDING illegally uploaded content on P2P are being targetted by CAS. So you can still pretty safely download the stuff (but I'd still suggest TOR or something anyway)

*Only people who are perpetually seeding will probably even be seen by the CAS people monitoring the P2P networks. If you're seeding something for a very short time you probably won't even be seen.

*Only the ISPs are being notified to give out warnings (which most of these ISPs have already had such warning services for years now), the ISPs are not giving out your personal information to ANYONE (without a court order).

*After 6 warnings, that's it. Like literally, that's it. They won't send any more warnings and save for the ISP choosing to slow your connection to a crawl, they aren't really doing anything else. Chances of being arrested and charged with something are pretty slim even with CAS in place.

Lobbying groups, just bring up the big guns and be done with it!

I do hope that the Internet as we know it dies, I dislike being at the mercy of ISPs, too bad it's physically impossible to be otherwise under this system.

Dr. Durr said:

I upload backed-up CDs to my Google Drive. I am kinda scared to do it with Fallout 2 and Windows 95.

What the hell are you worried about?

- Isn't personal cloud storage password-encrypted?
- You're probably not using it to share with others, are you...
- Windows 95 is so old, Microsoft may not care unless it's something massively shared, which very likely is not.