a, Is it legal? And b, how do I do it?

[ged]

But as yet not reported, you can use proxy servers if you want although I don't bother.

Proxy servers won't help. The ISP can see all your traffic because your gateway to the Internet is a machine that they operate -- or at least that their supplier operates. I think I feel an idea coming on... no, scratch that, it's bad.

I thought it was 1024 Mb in a TB?

TiB. The official SI multipliers are 10, 100, 1,000 etc. but geeks started to use 1024, 1048576, 1073741824 and instead of 'k' 'M' and 'G' they use 'ki', 'Mi', 'Gi' etc.
I never did really work how how you're supposed to pronounce them though, the 'i' doesn't roll off the tongue so easily at the 'o'.

I get 1.80 IIRC on my NTFS 2Tb drives after format or thereabouts.

There will always be some overhead but ten percent (200GBytes) sounds a bit steep! Just checked on the wife's 1T Movie drive and the overhead is about 1.6%. The filesystem is ext3.

 

[Nagual]

It's only in recent years, from around 2000, that hardware manufacturers like HDD makers started to use SI, previously it was as most people take the MB's or GB's to mean. Other folks have followed suite, like ISP's. Oddly your OS will probably still display KB's as 1024 Bytes, etc. RAM manufacturers also still use 1024.

As far as I know 1024 Bytes, is pronounced Kibibyte, so you get Mibibytes and Gibibytes too..

I don't care what they are all called, I wish that everyone would use the same system and make sure it's transparent.

 

[nunzionuk]

I used to work in PC World (please dont hate me I was only young then) and people always whined about the size of hard drives, but as it says on most retail boxes, 2TB is 2,000,000,000,000 Bytes and not 2,199,023,255,040 Bytes.

Also there is the over head of the FAT table, which isnt the same as the FAT file system. Then each file system has its own overhead, as stated above, about 1.6% for ext3 and is about the same for NTFS.


But all that is off topic.

If you want to rip a dvd to your hard drive/media player, then that is not illegal, afaik. If you then share that it becomes illegal (the sharing of copyright). Using bittorrent is not illegal, as long as what you download is public domain.

And, as I work for an ISP, I can confirm, we can see your traffic, BUT unless we are watching in real time we are unable to store everything you do, as it would over flow our logging servers, some ISP, mainly in the USA, monitor traffic for set protocals, like bittorrent or other peer 2 peer applications, but this is not common in the UK YET!

Another thing to remember when ripping DVDs is that you have to break the reigon code, i would suggest using DVD Decryptor for this, and saving the vob files to your harddrive, then using something like handbreak or dvd catalyst to convert into a watchable format, like h264 or xvid/divx.

 

[Melonfish]

Ged, i honestly wouldn't worry about it m8, detectable by the ISP yes, actually looked at by the isp.... well thats an entirely other planet m8.
do you know how many logs an isp can generate in a day?
having worked for a few i can honestly tell you that the amount of data collected can be staggering. its not always stored either at least until the govt pass the digital economy bill in which case ISP's will have to go out and buy stupidly huge database servers to store this rubbish. and believe me it is all rubbish.
ISP's DO NOT CARE what you download as long as you don't drag their name through the mud they are the gateway to the net, not the net police.

the only things i'd be worried about downloading would be music files and the latest of the latest films. oh and computer games from some of the smaller companies (larger ones just accept that its going to happen tbh)
as long as your not silly with it you're simply one other user in a sea of users, don't take the mick and you'll be fine.

the prob with music and games is that they are monitored but not by the isp, more by the companies themselves through torrents. they then put a legal request into the isp to get your details, believe it or not alot of isp's fight this.
pete

 

[Trunks]

As I understand it - from a reliable source! If you own a Cd, you are not breaking any copyright law by converting it to different format ie mp3. As long as it is for your personal use - not for profit or distribution.
I assume it will be the same principle with your dvd's, of asked you might need photographic evidence to prove ownership of the titles, next to your passport for instance go for it.

 

[ged]

my honest advice would be don't bother ripping the dvd's and having to play with shrinking them.
hit the torrents engines and download em instead. its just as illegal ...

and very easily detectable by your ISP.

Ged, i honestly wouldn't worry about it m8, detectable by the ISP yes, actually looked at by the isp.... well thats an entirely other planet m8.
do you know how many logs an isp can generate in a day? having worked for a few i can honestly tell you that the amount of data collected can be staggering. ...

Just to set the record straight, I'm not worrying about illegal downloads on my own account, because I don't do it. I'm just trying to give people information so they can make their own informed decisions. Many people have gone to prison because they did not understand how electronic information is handled. Granted most of them have been paedophiles, fraudsters or drug dealers but a computer system is a computer system. Electronic information can be very hard to erase. It's best to think of it as indestructible.

Yes, I do know how much log data an ISP can generate, because one of my businesses is a (very small) ISP. It does not require a vast amount of storage to log when an IP address was allocated to an account number. About Sixteen bytes per IP lease, and not usually much more than one lease per day, so for a big ISP that's at most a few gigabytes per year for their entire customer base. My laptop can store that much information without even noticing. All you need then is for some file sharing company to get raided because it's been hosting kiddie porn -- even if it didn't know -- and you might find yourself getting out of bed at three in the morning wondering what you're going to tell the neighbours, and if they'll believe you.

There is undoubtedly information out there which can be used in ways nobody has thought of yet. It's, er, a bit like forensic science. People are being convicted this year of crimes committed twenty years ago because new techniques have been developed. In the case of IT, instead of pushing back the frontiers of science it's probably it's just a matter of thinking of new ways to use information that's already lying around and in many cases freely available. Actually a fellow did that a couple of years ago, and fairly soon after that he bought himself a new Ferrari. I think it was a Ferrari. Something very expensive anyway, paid for by thousands of people he'd bullied because of information that had been supplied to him, quite legally, by their ISPs. Unfortunately then he was a bit careless and let loose some information onto the Internet that he shouldn't have. It all came back to bite him and he wound up bankrupt.

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/368653/acs-law-file-sharing-case-settled-confidentially

But most of the people he bullied out of five hundred quid each won't be getting their money back. Had he not been so careless he'd probably still be driving his Ferrari, and quite likely advising government on intellectual property and the Internet.

Incidentally the last time I looked, at least one ISP was actively inspecting its traffic and taking action on its findings. BT was throttling BitTorrent traffic something shocking at evenings and weekends. The point being that if the OP wants to use the file sharing sites, then he should know that at least one ISP is, if not watching, probably logging.

 

[Squidders]

Spot on, two great programmes. If your watching on a laptop use a programme you can use Handbrake, a free programme as well which will shrink your film down to a single .AVI file of only 500-600Mb. These files are fine on a computer but no good on your 50" flat screen.

DVD shrink lets you rip your DVD in standard format or an .ISO file and with (free) Virtualclonedrive you can 'mount' the image and play it. If I were you I'd download the programmes and have a play with them, they all have tutorials / forums online to help you.

http://www.dvdshrink.org/

http://www.dvddecrypter.org.uk/

http://handbrake.fr/downloads.php (works with linux too Ged)

http://www.slysoft.com/en/virtual-clonedrive.html

All these work with Windows 7 64 bit editions.

Another vote for Handbrake here... I use it to get .mkv files to my ipad after ripping my original discs with an application called MakeMKV. All freeware.

 

[horsevad]

Proxy servers won't help. The ISP can see all your traffic because your gateway to the Internet is a machine that they operate -- or at least that their supplier operates. I think I feel an idea coming on... no, scratch that, it's bad.
.

It would be possible to use a strong encryption between the two nodes, negating the possibility of the ISP knowing other than some kind of communication is ongoing. If redundant proxies in multiple jurisdictions (countries) is used, actual tracking can be extremely difficult if not outright impossible - depending on resources.

//Kim Horsevad