I'm on VPN now, so take THAT, misguided ISP! And NSA too!
I've been excessively perturbed about NSA's shenanigans lately. Now, on a separate but related note, today my internet service was rudely and abruptly cut off.
Reason? Someone from this IP address downloaded several files from a torrent with "Girls" in the title, and the ISP service suspected child porn. (Obviously the traffic stream + title keyword triggered some boneheaded alert in their system.) So, with no hesitation, no inquiry, and certainly no informing the end user, they simply pulled the plug on us, until, 4 hrs later, we made a phone call to inquire WTF.
I know who dl'd the "suspicious" files. It was ME. Something totally innocent and having nothing whatsoever to do wtih porn. While I am steaming about this in another room, the account owner is getting lectured and being told she will have to go down to their office to sign a statement asserting this household has not been downloading child pornography. Other technotrivia about router access, but that's irrelevant.
The point here is the monitoring of traffic, the arbitrary service interruption, the "you must grovel to get service back" etc ad nauseum.
!!!!!!!
Straw. Final. Camel's back beyond repair.
I'm on a VPN service now that is based in the fucking SEYCHELLES, that records no logs and is happily unresponsive to any information requests except those coming from a local court. to which they still can't provide info, since they record nothing. (As an added bonus, it assigns me an IP in a foreign country of my choice. I've chosen my favorite foreign country, which incidentally allows me to watch streaming media from there which is viewable only by people with an in-country IP. Huzzah.) If squeezed by US authorities in US territories, my VPN company also happily shuts down their services, thumbs their nose at Big Brother, and relocates elsewhere to open new nodes again.
A bit much, you say? I don't think so. I have every right to privacy in my internet trollings, and that's all there is to it, and now I've taken steps to ensure that that is so. Because you know what? I've had it. I've had it with our govt spying on us, and had it with our local fucking ISPs taking it upon themselves to monitor our media consumption habits and intervene not with a dialog about a perceived problem, but with complete denial of service. Fuck 'em all. I'm so going off the (traceable) grid. So if you all start seeing my email route through hushmail or similar encryption services soon, this is why. I can't do this piecemeal. It's all or nothing. This must become my new habit of interaction with the Net. I used to lament the loss of anon.penet.fi (the original Finnish anonymizer service, from the early '90s), but now I guess I'll just pay for my own modern equivalent. Today I just finally got a snoot full, so now it's going to be all for me and nothing for Big Brother. For $5/month, it's more than worth it.
And as soon as my middle finger gets unstuck from the f-you position, I'll resume writing and communicating, only now from somewhere (apparently) in Europe. Which is just as well. I feel another novel coming on.
HA.
Reason? Someone from this IP address downloaded several files from a torrent with "Girls" in the title, and the ISP service suspected child porn. (Obviously the traffic stream + title keyword triggered some boneheaded alert in their system.) So, with no hesitation, no inquiry, and certainly no informing the end user, they simply pulled the plug on us, until, 4 hrs later, we made a phone call to inquire WTF.
I know who dl'd the "suspicious" files. It was ME. Something totally innocent and having nothing whatsoever to do wtih porn. While I am steaming about this in another room, the account owner is getting lectured and being told she will have to go down to their office to sign a statement asserting this household has not been downloading child pornography. Other technotrivia about router access, but that's irrelevant.
The point here is the monitoring of traffic, the arbitrary service interruption, the "you must grovel to get service back" etc ad nauseum.
!!!!!!!
Straw. Final. Camel's back beyond repair.
I'm on a VPN service now that is based in the fucking SEYCHELLES, that records no logs and is happily unresponsive to any information requests except those coming from a local court. to which they still can't provide info, since they record nothing. (As an added bonus, it assigns me an IP in a foreign country of my choice. I've chosen my favorite foreign country, which incidentally allows me to watch streaming media from there which is viewable only by people with an in-country IP. Huzzah.) If squeezed by US authorities in US territories, my VPN company also happily shuts down their services, thumbs their nose at Big Brother, and relocates elsewhere to open new nodes again.
A bit much, you say? I don't think so. I have every right to privacy in my internet trollings, and that's all there is to it, and now I've taken steps to ensure that that is so. Because you know what? I've had it. I've had it with our govt spying on us, and had it with our local fucking ISPs taking it upon themselves to monitor our media consumption habits and intervene not with a dialog about a perceived problem, but with complete denial of service. Fuck 'em all. I'm so going off the (traceable) grid. So if you all start seeing my email route through hushmail or similar encryption services soon, this is why. I can't do this piecemeal. It's all or nothing. This must become my new habit of interaction with the Net. I used to lament the loss of anon.penet.fi (the original Finnish anonymizer service, from the early '90s), but now I guess I'll just pay for my own modern equivalent. Today I just finally got a snoot full, so now it's going to be all for me and nothing for Big Brother. For $5/month, it's more than worth it.
And as soon as my middle finger gets unstuck from the f-you position, I'll resume writing and communicating, only now from somewhere (apparently) in Europe. Which is just as well. I feel another novel coming on.
HA.