torrentfreak.com — Virgin Media, plagued by a recent flurry of bad publicity thanks to its policy of working with the music industry to warn file-sharers, has announced today that there is “absolutely no possibility” that it will disconnect its users from the Internet or hand over their details to the music industry.
Jul 3, 2008 View in Crawl 4
sint4xJul 3, 2008
Boo hoo. In Canada we pay ?24 a month for 10 and actually get 6 - 8!
durzagottJul 3, 2008
I love my Be Broadband! Fast, reliable and great for torrents.
grimfandangoJul 3, 2008
can you inject data into an SSL connection? hmm, wouldn't that cause some of security error?
Closed AccountJul 3, 2008
If they did that (screw with VPN traffic), they would get a lot of complaints from people using VPN's for work. I suppose they could throttle specific sites, but I doubt that.I've not actually used one of the non-stupid-country-VPNs (like vpntunnel, relakks, secureIX etc) other than the free trial periods, so I could be wrong, but the obvious problems are:- Speed and latency: all your packets going though another country is always going to be slower than directly to the server (not for throttled bittorrent connections obviously, but for day-to-day browsing, or gaming for example)- Paranoia: you are sending all your network traffic out via some random third-party. When SecureIX was on Digg, about half the comments seemed to be paranoia regarding SecureIX giving information on torrents downloaded to the RIAA/MPAA etc.. Really I doubt this is an issue (as getting seeds/peers from torrent trackers is trivial, and far less effort/bandwidth than running a tunnel that will get a few peoples activity, as opposed to thousands..)The latency could be solved by setting up the VPN running your torrent client on a dedicated machine (or also functioning as a file-server and such), or a virtual machine. The speed is mostly an issue with the provider who has enough bandwidth (The free SecureIX service are incredibly slow, for example, a paid server will probably be quicker). The paranoia is really an unsolvable problem, I suppose finding one who's user-agreement specifies that they log no data whatsoever (Relakks for example - <a class="user" href="https://www.relakks.com/faq/legal/">https://www.relakks.com/faq/legal/</a> ), and running the VPN only on a dedicated torrent-machine could help too, so you're not sending anything but torrent transfers (not your email logins and such)Another possible problem with the VPN is that it bypasses your routers NAT (which stops inbound connections from the internet), so you have to setup a software firewall on your local machine (unless the service offers firewalling of it's own, but this normally means you can't open ports for your torrent client..). Once again, running it in a "disposable" virtual machine, or an OS that isn't Windows would help with this (OS X/most-Linux-distros almost all ship with no listening sockets, so have almost no issues with worm-viruses - No DCOM, NETBIOS and such!)You can share data with other uses of the VPN like a LAN, as that's precisely what it functions like.. You just have to connect to the other uses VPN IP address (not the IP assigned to them by their ISP)
thatsnotpuddingJul 3, 2008
There is "absolutely no possibility" they are telling the truth. Oligarcic pricks.
nootsJul 4, 2008
wow thanks for that informative post dude.
dullnationJul 4, 2008
That's an impressive speed for 1999! We didn't even get broadband in our town until 2001, it was at 512Kb for a year even then :P
kevynJul 4, 2008
Be tell me that I should hopefully get 8mb... which simply isn't good enough compared to the 20mb I get from Virgin (and I actually do get 20mb...every now and again it drops to 18mb...but I can deal with that)Be broadband means I have to subscribe to a f**king BT phone line which I don't want either.Don't get me wrong, I'd like to go to Be there... but paying extra and getting involved with BT is no fun game
seaiciubberJul 4, 2008
Well I'm lucky since I get 19MB down and 1.2MB up.The problem with Virgin is that you only get 20MB so long as you stay within their caps and also don't use bittorrent (be it legit or not)I agree having to have a BT line is a pain if you don't need it.