Quote:
Originally Posted by Dominic
question:
Remember the days when your ISP can turn off your service if you've downloaded music or a movie without paying for it? And then you have to delete it?
Can they see if you're streaming something you didn't pay for, say a PPV fight or an NFL game?
Asking for a friend.
They can see where you send to / receive data from. If you post here, they can see twoplustwo.com port 80 or 443 for http(s). If you use BitTorrent, they see TCP port 688x. If you use a VPN, the ISP sees that but not what’s behind it. In theory, they can intercept all your traffic but that’s not happening unless you’re affiliated with ISIS or something like that.
The big difference between streaming and torrenting is that the latter means you’re also uploading the content. That’s what triggers those ISP warnings in the US. In other countries, it might get pretty expensive if they catch you torrenting. Couple years ago during our Christmas vacation in Germany, my VPN shut down but didn’t stop the internet connection while I was downloading a US network TV show that wasn’t on German TV yet. Got a nice letter from a law firm that specializes in Internet piracy who charged me almost $1000. Negotiated them down to $300 but still sucked.
With streaming there’s still a disagreement about if caching small parts of the content (basically to buffer it) qualifies as downloading or not. In some countries content providers argue it does and they would like to have the option to go after streamers.
In any case, a VPN is your friend. Not only for stuff that might be questionable but in general to at least somewhat protect your privacy. My birthday is in a couple of weeks and I already have a pretty good understanding what I might get, just based on the adds on my Facebook feed that indicate what my wife is looking at online.