Hope they never do it.
 

If they really wanted to slow down piracy online, they could scare ISPs into firewalling everyone. Un-firewalled Internet accounts would come at a higher business level service cost. Only centralized internet servers would work.

That would kill gaming & some forms of online chat (including video conferencing & possibly online phone) services also however.
There are some ISP's (like mine) that are highly reluctant to such pressures & are willing to take such issues to court. Not only ISPs would be willing to take the issue to court as it could affect their revenue or participation level of clients.

Scapegoaters
 

The copyright/piracy trolls will always be there stomping their feet and screaming like little spoilt children not getting their way. They will continually point to scapegoats.

Almost ever since audio recording contraptions existed there has been unofficial copies made. This period of time is probably somewhere near the 100 year mark. Did that ever have a major effect on the music industry's vital income? No

Even the past 50 years there were cassette-tape duplicates made and shared around (be it from vinyl or radio.) Did that ever have a major effect on the music industry's vital income? No

Strangely, over the past 15 years since file-sharing was possible on the internet, the music industry (and others) have been kicking up the hugest fuss ever seen in the world in regards to copyright. They pressure the government (yes with lots of financial donations) who then pressure other governments with trade at risk to change their laws and approach to copyright handling.

As some of us know, the music and video industries were incredibly slow to adapt their business model approach with the changing times. So who is to blame?
Of course scapegoats include p2p file-sharing because it's a good excuse to appease investors. Whereas obviously a clean-out of the management cronies of these industries was/is in need and probably long overdue. (Replacing management with individuals who possess an education might be beneficial. - p)

That very last sentence in very light grey ; can that only be seen by members or is it an edit ; ??

Is that better? :D It's still a light grey but slightly darker.

I always forget about gaming. You have a pretty good point there. I still wonder if that couldn't be worked out so long as the corprate server isn't walled. Would kill games that allow serving from within the game without steam or anything. Seems like those kinda games are for from the mainstream these days.

I've been thinking about this more. If all non-commercial IPs were firewalled, many services like Skype, Game Servers, Messengers, or IRC services hosted on a commercial level service could still remain quite usable with little or no adaptation.

From an anti-p2p point of view, internet connectivity would have to have a large enough price gap between commercial and non-commercial accounts for this to work. Otherwise most people would just cough up a little more money for control over their firewall.

Regardless of pricing difference, it would still be easier for ISPs to recognize those participating in PC to PC communications involved in networks known for piracy. In the past this was not a big deal. But with more court cases against ISPs resulting in client piracy also being the responsibility of the Internet Provider, this will likely become more of an issue to some degree.

Even though it is highly unlikely that non-commercial forced firewalling would become common policy, even with such a state P2P networks could still be maintained with a high rate of success. I don't want to make it seem like a cakewalk, but it would be possible with higher network maintenance. Even if none of the participants had a commercial (non-firewalled) service.

I then thought of another kill switch. Again all commercial services could easily adapt with little effort. But even a network that managed to circumvent forced firewalling would have a very hard time circumventing this in addition to firewalling. Dynamic IPs with an hourly refresh.

Any network surviving this would have to in someway or another rely on a commercial service. Like chatroom or email. But it could still work. The problem then seems to be hinged on how the governments of the world look at encryption in light of recent political controversies. If email was relied on for connectivity (in this imagined world of forced firewalls and dynamic IPs) the data for connectivity would need to be encrypted to remain somewhat reliable. The reason being that email providers (and any commercial service in general) would be held responsible for contributing to P2P networking. The only way to protect services like that would be to prevent them from knowing their service was contributing as much as possible.

With this whole imagined scenario all hinging on encryption this brings us to the possible future legality of encryption. One political position on the plate is that encryption would be legal, so long as the government(s) (including "Law Enforcement") have exclusive access via back doors. With law enforcement having access to the networks connectivity (tunneled over a service like email) all that would need to be established it that the network is used to pirate data. In such a world it might even be enough that the network could be used to do so.

If you have made it this far, please keep in mind that I intend this as a thought experiment.

I guess steganography and facebook accounts could be used, hiding connectivity data behind meme posts.... :)

How do you define "Firewalled"?
Do you mean simply UDP firewalled, or TCP firewalled, or other protocol? Or do you mean blocking via other means?

I suspect UDP or TCP firewalling would be a legal breach of services offered, potentially making an entity at risk of being sued be it the ISP or government being the target of such action.

You also need to consider proxy use and VPN's (although probably not so many people want to invest in VPN use, which costs, but can be very good.)

One that know simply change ISP, I have never switched to cable here in my country because it is in a permanent "firewalled state" (without pubblic IP, if you don't pay an additional fee; it is like a private LAN of cable users when you see it from external internet).
Cable to cable is unfirewalled, cable to normal internet is firewalled; there is also a custom version of eMule for this cable provider.

Both UDP and TCP.

Essentially you have outgoing capacity, with your only incoming connectivity being based on your outgoing requests to an exposed ip/port.

This is pretty much the way browsing works. A host has a port (usually 80 or 443) exposed on their IP. Your browser makes a request to that port via a random outgoing port (regenerated every request). Your data is returned to that port and that port is then closed to incoming traffic (listening).

So to be clear, I am saying that the forced firewall would be rendering non-commercial clients incapable of listening on any port aside from outgoing requests made to exposed hosts. All data retrieved from the internet would have to be requested from an exposed port and returned to the exact port that requested it (after which the requesting port closes).

A VPN would still work fine, so long as it was hosted via a commercial internet service. The only issues being encryption with law enforcement backdoors and the VPN service being held liable for how its service is used.

Again, I'm not say this is going to happen (anytime relatively soon). This is just a thought experiment.

I do believe that one day, in a far away time, it will be this way. But by that time the devices we use won't be capable of running anything but a workstation that only has the internal resources to connect to a network, load data to ram and process graphics. The device would be nothing more than a tool for remote access to a virtual machine that runs on some cloud. Very far away stuff, but make no mistake it will end up there one day. There are companies using this already, like retailers (Wal-mart, Target, etc.).

For now I am just looking at firewalling and dynamic IPs.

I should add that connections can be made between firewalled clients. But it would require the aid of a non-firewalled host service.

This is how services like Skype could still be usable by firewalled users. So long as the Skype service is hosted on non-firewalled host, the service can help negotiate connection between users.

Thanks, I had no idea about this. I am presuming this is not universal with all cable companies. I appear to find a significant number of ultrapeers from countries worldwide that use cable.
I occasionally see ultrapeers with port 80 but this might be for a different reason. An example was one using Cabos but not using cable. I can verify a particular cable using host having used port 80 but they are using an app that can utilize forced ultrapeer mode. I've wondered if this is the case. (I'm against forced ultrapeer mode being available in apps except perhaps for testing. I talked bigjx into removing it from WireShare because it potentially damages the network if the host is firewalled.)

As for VPN, yeah no doubt people should do the research about each specific VPN. As a whole, USA might not be the best place to obtain one but that's purely IMHO from what I've read about each one's protection policies and potential for government or other interference.

I just noticed that I used the term 'cable' and it can also mean other things; I meant fiber-optic.

It wouldn't be so bad to have force ultrapeer, if it was only able to function as a way to initiate a network. Once a network was built up statistics should determine who is an ultrapeer. If the option is selected it should atleast be tested against someones firewall status. If you cannot listen from your external IP, then it should be forced disabled.

I think some apps will note behavior of ultrapeers that cannot preform as expected. Probably because some clients have an outdated idea of what good performance is, and haven't been updated to modern capacities (I haven't looked at enough client code to know).

Completely agree with you. The US is a ugly place right now. But you can see that disease ardently spreading.

It is interesting that they don't firewall cable to cable. Is there a big difference is speed between connection inside and outside the network?

I don't know but I think probably yes.

It isn't a real firewall, it is like a private LAN without the possibility of doing port forwarding or use UPnP.
All your PCs in the LAN see eachother directly, instead PCs over the internet see only the IP of your router and not the IPs of PCs in the LAN.

So all users of this ISP see every other directly, but they aren't seen directly from outside.
As example 100 different people (the number is an example) of this ISP may be seen from internet as having the same IP; if one website ban a single IP it is actually banning a lot of people.

The ISP is Fastweb and the eMule mod is "eMule AdunanzA".

Do they offer a business class account that provides you with an independent static IP and external port access or would you have to go through a different provider?

Does you modem receive an IPV4 or IPV6 address? I assume the external world IP is IPV4?

I don't know, I never tried it directly at my home but I have seen friends with Fastweb.
The IPV4 IPs start with "10."
I don't know about IPV6.

I have major doubts all fibre-optic services around the world would work in that same way.
I am wondering if the Fastweb company is using that custom technique to greatly reduce it's rollout and/or running costs. Such as the licensing costs of ip addresses.
Even the company name FastWeb sounds like a marketing tool to simply offer fast speeds but limited options for a cheap to fair price.

I wonder if the ipv4 address is in fact an ipv6 address but shows up on ipv4 systems as a private networking address.

Do you know if any of them (your friends) use fibre-optic net phones?

Edit: Long reads & cannot be bothered reading it all. Just investigating the ipv4 & ipv6 conversion techniques.

From my understanding, the network does this itself. I don't believe tampering with this is necessarily beneficial for the network IMHO. Low average uptime hosts do not necessarily deserve UP status (particularly but not only if their ip addressing is highly dynamic.)

Possible misconception: Many people seem to think being an ultrapeer means you get better search results. I recall one of the original FrostWire devs & a major LW contributor saying (on this forum) that leafs actually obtain a superior search horizon than UP's. Of course that can potentially be hampered by dud or poorly performing UP's along the way, etc.
In my personal (and recent) testing on this leaf versus ultrapeer topic, I found as a leaf I was getting more search results for the same search terms than when I connected as an ultrapeer. Example: around 120 compared to around or over 200. A notable difference and this test repeated over several sessions.

Sorry this post is actually off-topic from your original thread topic.

:) No problem. It is still good discussion.

I'm glad you looked into the Ipv4/Ipv6 data.

In a world where Ipv6 was used by the majority of providers, I wonder if it would change Fastweb's mind on its service practices. As things sit right now, they could almost come off as trying to help with the addressing problem. Dirty pool :|

My provider (cable not fiber) kinda suck also. While they do give me external world port access, they charge the same for their slowest connection package. I get 10Mbps down/3.5Mbps and pay a little more than what a friend of mine pays for fiber(200 miles away). People only 50 miles away from me get the same connection speed at half the cost.