| Data retention: how much do you care about your privacy? | Posted by IH on Jul. 4
In today's news,
Youtube was ordered to give user histories and IP's to Viacom
for evidentiary collection (aka. discovery in legal terms). I've went through this same process with
our lawsuit
brought by the MPAA
so I thought I'll share some of my thoughts on the issue.
As unreasonable as I think these lawsuits by Viacom/MPAA may be, in order for the legal process to work, plaintiffs are entitled to evidence in order to prove their case. However, user privacy should be a large concern in disclosing of data (logs) as evidence, and in neither Youtube's or our case, there's no reason for turning over data that would expose your personal identify (such as your IP address). From glancing
the order against Youtube,
the reason they were ordered to turn over user histories is to prove user infringements, and inclusion of IP's in such logs is to uniquely identify users who may have signed up multiple usernames/accounts. I call bullshit on that. If someone uses multiple usernames, he can as easily login with multiple IP addresses, disclosing IP's would not help the plaintiffs in proving copyright infringements. I expect Google/Youtube to appeal the order (at least I sure hope so).
As for us, we successfully argued in our MPAA case that we don't need to turn over your IP addresses as it is a violation of user privacy with no evidentiary value, and only turned over .torrent access logs in anonymized form. You may not like to hear that .torrent logs are being turned over, but the truth is we were ordered to do so and that the MPAA does need anonymous logs to prove their frivolous lawsuit.
The bottom line is, what really matters to you is your privacy and I can assure you that
our rather simplistic privacy policy
is true and correct: we will not disclose your personal identity to any third party, without your consent. For other website admins, as Brian Aker of MySQL
has suggested,
for sake of privacy of your users and your own sanity, only keep server logs in anonymized or aggregate form. I see no usefulness to keep full logs long term. As to ISP or other man in the middle snooping of your activities on isoHunt, we now have
SSL encryption
option to protect your visit to isoHunt.com from prying eyes.
Note that the same privacy policy applies to our other websites, TorrentBox.com and Podtropolis.com.
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| SSL now available for citizens of Dubai (and others)! | Posted by SecretSquirrel on Jun. 25
YOU CAN NOW SEARCH SECURELY WITH ISOHUNT.COM
Worried about having your traffic sniffed? Concerned about privacy? We've got your solution. A connection via ssl allows you to communicate with us privately, bypassing caching servers and deep packet inspection hardware.
Thanks in no small part to the work of Spike, we are proud to offer SSL on 2 of our sites. https://isohunt.com https://torrentbox.com and https://forums.torrentbox.com are all now valid urls for reaching us. This should mean that folks in
Dubai, who have recently had to start using an alternate domain
of ours, should now be able to visit us directly. If you have issues with transparent proxies or mean people snooping on your connection, this should come as fantastic news for you. We'll be evaluating how much extra load this places on our servers over the next few weeks, and if there's a large outpouring of people preferring to browse isoHunt or TorrentBox securely, we'll be investing in some dedicated hardware to handle the SSL connections. (
Soekris vpn1401
's have hifn chips with some very nice linux kernel drivers for crypto offloading, so they'd make our SSL stuff faster, and be completely transparent  )
Just a heads up: we did in fact buy certificates, but loading some pages may cause warnings due to ads and digg not being on SSL secured connections, so please don't complain if you see these warnings. Your communication to isohunt.com and torrentbox.com are fully secure when browsing under https://.
Also, there's a poll attached to this announcement, PLEASE give us your feedback regarding whether you'll be using SSL or not.
Reference:
Stress testing experiment with redirecting all traffic to SSL
(our servers handled it fine and SS did some optimizations to handle extreme load better)
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| Firefox 3 released! | Posted by SecretSquirrel on Jun. 17
Mozilla would prefer going through their (seriously hammered) servers so that they can update their counters and go for the record. If you'd like to see the current counter: http://downloadcounter.sj.mozilla.com/
Update (IH): To grab your copy of Firefox 3 and add to their counter for setting record for most downloads in a day, go to
Spreadfirefox.com.
Update ( 06/18 ): It seems the final download count in last 24h is around 8 million. Congrats Mozilla on setting a new record!
The IE team would be proud.
You may have noticed if you searched for Firefox torrents here, we have also
seeded torrents of the major Firefox 3 installers
on major platforms and languages. They are seeded on isoHunt servers for fast downloads. If you still haven't grabbed your FF3 copy yet, what are you waiting for? Disclaimer (IH): I use Safari, Opera and Firefox interchangeably, Firefox for its myriad extensions and it's great seeing real competition in both performance and UI from the browsers.
Reference: Initial
mirroring announcement
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| Canadian DMCA and the ACTA | Posted by IH on Jun. 12
Without going into all the painful details here, refer to
Geist's initial thoughts on it
and all the side links in his posts. To all Canadians consumers, there's much to dislike about this bill, so
answer to Geist's call and write to your government.
If there's a time to get political, the time is now when the new bill is being introduced. I'll write more on this as I read more on it. In the mean time, some simple things you can do if you use Facebook: join the
Fair Copyright for Canada group,
as well as our own
isoHunt group
on Facebook. There may come a time when will perhaps organize rallies of some sort, so lets stay in touch.
Another big one to watch referenced in Geist's post is the
ACTA,
a sneaky trade agreement to turn border patrols into copyright enforcers. Imagine P2P software/downloads banned (authorized distribution or not), and your laptop confiscated because it carries contraband digital bits. All very draconian, and fortunately with the Internet and Wikileaks,
no secret is safe.
UPDATE:
From the Canadian Music Creators Coalition (
CMCC
):
Copyright Reform Bill Doesn’t Help Canadian Artists,
and David Fewer Of CIPPIC
On Canadian DMCA Introduction
(video)
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