Single Movie Download Forces Wi-Fi Network Shutdown
A free Wi-Fi service said to be used by hundreds of people has been completely disabled after a complaint was made to the operating ISP by Sony Pictures.
OneCommunity is an award-winning, non-profit organization serving Northern Ohio by connecting public and non-profit institutions to their fiber-optic network, fostering economic development.
One project was completed around five years ago, offering a free and open Wi-Fi network serving the area outside Coshocton’s County Courthouse.
Last week, the network – said to be used by hundreds of people – was completely shut down by the county’s Information Technology Department, after Sony Pictures tracked one user sharing a single movie and issued a complaint.
Aside from use by the public, Coshocton’s Sheriff’s department is said to have used the network to file incident reports, with traders using it to check the validity of customer credit cards.
Of course, the MPAA was quick to offer its usual hard-luck stories for the article in the Coshocton Tribune.
Taking down the entire network over a single infringement is a ridiculous knee-jerk reaction which amounts to collective punishment, but in the face of intimidating threats by a powerful company like Sony, the county obviously felt it was left with little choice.
Let’s hope they don’t ban all cars from the street outside if someone exceeds the speed limit.
Someone needs to contact this county and show them how the piracy or infringement claims are just cash cows for the cartel as shown by our own torrentfreak.com articles.
Something in me wants to connect via a powerful company that offers free Wi-Fi like McDonalds or Starbucks and do this.
Except Maccas and starbucks have advanced filters and firewalls so you CANT do this
murray, actually, you can.
Since when can you torrent at Maccas? They block all ports except for 80 and 443 and do DPI. Well in Australia anyway
many (fairly easy) ways to get around said filters
Name 1?
SSH tunnel. TOR tunnel. There’s 2
Again, they block all ports except 80 and 443, and use DPI to verify that only HTTP is flowing on 80, and only HTTPS (SSL) is flowing on port 443.
This makes tunneling out much more difficult, and makes torrenting slow even if you do manage to get a tunnel up.
e.g. OpenVPN (SSL) client to your home VPN server on port 443 where you have a proxy running. Easy as Pie, there DPI won’t know the diff…done…
[...] Sony Complains and Wifi is Dropped A free Wi-Fi service said to be used by hundreds of people has been completely disabled after a complaint was made to the operating ISP by Sony Pictures. (freakbits . . .) [...]
murray, use Swissvpn.net they offer support for ssl/443. http://www.swissvpn.net/openvpn.html
Starbucks can stuff their filters up their backside as they can’t see the difference between you accessing a SSL protected website, or using a proxy
And no one seems bothered by the Coshocton’s Sheriff’s department sending credit card information (and from reading the linked article, ticketed driver’s personal information) over an open wireless network. Hope the data is at least encrypted since the network isn’t.
Sony was not the one that asked the county to turn off the site, the county’s Internet provider was.
And, Sony contacted the county last week and the wireless connection is now back up.
[...] up. The Coshocton County courthouse based Wi-Fi system is up and running again after it was taken offline due to a single copyright infringement [...]
Far out talk about harsh, that’s pretty bull, typical money cooperation.