How To Persuade Parents/neighbours To Fileshare strive for the acceptance of filesharing

[ruben1405241511 0]

How To persuade your parents/neighbours or anyone who has control over your internet access, that filesharing is good

 

everyone who is currently engaged in an internet dependancy probably knows this: the internet account-owner whoever that might be, fears that he might be menaced by your file sharing (illegal.. uh) and your traffic use.

Shouldn't be taken to seriously

 

There are some rules that should be sorted out first:

±• The more, the owner (whoever this might be and in whatever way your are dependant, I'll use this term from now on) knows, the harder it will be to persuade him just by sweet-talking. You have to come up with stuff he/she doesn't know.

Also people get more paranoid, the more they know how extensive the internet's depths are. There are some people, especially the youngers who just don't care, but some are obsessed with security. It's hard to get throught to those.

π• Depending on what you want (use all bandwith, expose the computer. btw. never use these terms), it will be harder. Say it niiiice. And not all at once.

ƥ Some of you fools out there, have something called scrupel ;-) No, of course, you probably want to stick to the truth. Well, you ought to learn that there are always many truths :-P some truths are good for you, some aren't.

µ• You must have a good relation at the moment. It's a fixed requirement. You can't persuade people that won't listen to you.

 

Ok, but now that you know the rules of the game... let me show you the tricks.

 

Let's start with your mantra (you should use this in all its variations as often as possible):

You will not even notice!

Say this loud, say it proud. People are afraid of changes, so tell them it will stay the way it used to be.

 

Depending on what you want, you also need different arguments.

I'm sure, that the Pros round here can add some more later.

 

Let's start with the pros and cons of Filesharing. Well it may sound a little one-sided :-P but don't forget we're trying to persuade and we are not doing a moral debate.

 

ƒ1. You can test a lot of expensive things without paying for it. If you really like them and the producers need support, you will buy it, but you're a pupil/student/unemployed/drug addict/mentally disabled/whatever so it's only fair that you have access to these media for free. You wouldn't buy it anyway, because you do not have the money, so they don't lose a customer.

∂2. You don't use these software for professional purposes anyway, you don't make profit, so they won't make profit either.

∫3. You will download a lot of stuff which is for free, but it is faster this way.

∑4. Pornography is a taboo for you.

 

Ok, so far so good. If you are gifted with a quick tongue you can get anyone to give in. If you have crossed the moral border, the security will appears.

 

“But they could see my family photos!”

or hack my computer or steal my bank account data or blahblahblah.

 

First of all: It's a hell lot of effort to hack a computer. It is already vulnerable, but you (promise to) make it safer while you're using the filesharing software.

Secondly: You're probably not prime targets for cracking. If you are not really rich or have secret information, why should they make this effort. Oh, you are really rich? Then BUY the software, man. I'm writing this for the man from the street here :-P

The Filesharingsoftware you are going to use, is a safe one, it is not that polluted as KazAa (want to use KazAa? Why in hell should you?) and you know what you are doing (make sure that this is true).

Now the point has come, to overwhelm them: Discover things about their internet connection, that they don't know (like that your router is hidden from the internet or that you have this speed or or or... go ahead tell them stuff about ports). Managed to overwhelm them? Good!

Tell them, that you are going to be extremely careful, that you read a lot about it, tell them exactly WHAT you will do to protect their computers. Use technical terms, but explain some of them.

 

This has always worked for me, but it should be clear, that it is easier if you know more than the owner, because the act of overwhelming is easier then.

 

Let's get to the next point. We can contribute more facts and phrases later on.

 

Many of you might not know what I am talking about, but in some countries there are no real flat rates. In Germany and Belgium you always have a bandwidth limit.

To me it happened sometimes that I exceeded the bandwidth, which resulted in 64kbps speed (bad) and everyone noticed.

Afterwards they were mad at me because I was the source of it. The persuasion is difficult in this case because you don't build on peaceful territory. Be careful!

 

Tell them, that it won't happen again, you didn't know about it, but usually if you cared more, they wouldn't even notice.

A normal website is about 3 KB big, all the traffic they are using is only a tenth of what they could use. You will be really careful with your downloading from now on. Bombard them with filesizes (Film: 700 MB, DVD: 4GB, Song:3 MB, Website: 1-100KB, Picture: 1KB-2MB, Email-attachments: 10 MB)

You will be sooo careful, they won't notice, keep going, keep going.

 

Finally, some golden (purple) rules, that you should keep to during these conversations.

Commandment 1: Be nice!

Commandment 2: Don't make them feel that you're superior to them (probably ain't true anyway :-P). It just happens that you are quite informed about filesharing.

Commandment 3: Make promises: I will download for you too, I'll explain this and this feature on your computer to you, You won't even notice, I won't do illegal stuff.

Commandment 4: Stay calm. Some people are immune to facts. Be even nicer!

Commandment 5: Say thank you afterwards. That's just good manners ^^

[jipman 0]

Euhm... rubenEven if you download yourself, you shouldn't try to get someone else to do criminal activities (which, I'm honest at because it is illegal). Some people just want to have a clean conscience (did i spell that right?), which you just have to respect.If someone askes you how to fileshare/p2p/whatever, then I, and i think everyone can explain/help without any hesitation, since you are NOT the one who started it.There's no need to convince anyone that filesharing is good, this is indeed a moral issue and everyone has their own thoughts about it. Also, why would you persuade anyone to start filesharing? You don't gain anything by it so unless the person asks you themselves it would be silly to walk up to a person and say: "filesharing is good, you should do it too"...ps. Can't say I'm innocent though, got 2 harddrives of 160, and managed to fill m up in 2 months..... Ahh well... nevermind

[ruben1405241511 0]

Hello,I'm very well aware of the fact that this is a moral issue, but you obviously did not even read the thread completely. Maybe you did that because you didn't want to get your mind polluted, but what I wrote and repeated: This is a moral issue with more than one side, but in cases where you want to persuade someone to allow you to (parents, neighbours) it is useful to have some arguments. This was not supposed to be taken completely seriously, but as you might notice now: There ARE situations where you need to convince someone. Might not have occured to you yet, but has to me and I also saw a thread here on Xisto concerning this, where they were considering methods to use internet without parents knowing, which I do not think of as morally more correct.It should also be said that FileSharing is not necessarily illegal in a lot of European countries (I don't know how it is in the Netherlands though, I have friends there who download, but could be illegal). The law in Germany says, that it is illegal to download stuff that you are not owning. I can legibly download CDs I own or movies I got on DVD. And also GNU-licensed files. In Sweden it is the same. The law-prosecution is just different. So I am NOT promoting criminal activities here, never said so, never will do so. YOU however just inspired others, by the way you described the speed that one can download illegal stuff with.I hereby make clear: I do not support downloading copyrighted material, if you don't intend to buy it, it harms the artists.I think it should be allowed to write a slightly humourous argument-list for practical purposes, but I'm willing to take on a moral debate.In any way the second part would not be concerned by your concerns.best regards,Ruben

[abhiram 0]

"filesharing is good, you should do it too"...

Hey ... I use that line all the time . I've convinced a thousand people (read two-ten) already.

File sharing isn't much of an issue here in India ... atleast not as far as I can see. But it's mostly used by the youth (like myself ) ... college, school kids and the lot. I don't even try to explain about file sharing to the other age groups. They are not interested ... just happy playing their solitaire .

[jipman 0]

I understand your reasons for the topic, and it's quite funny in it's own way. I don't really feel something for a moral debate since this has been discussed over and over again on almost every other forum I was on and at school.I wasn't pointing out that downloading is illegal though, although it probably sounded like it. Of course filesharing could be used for legitimate purposes, but be honest, usually it isn't.I suppose I was a little inconsistent here, since I did my amount of posts in that topic about secret bittorrent usage you talked about . No excuses can be made, although I read the 'Shouldn't be taken to seriously' part, I still took it a bit too seriously.ps. Hm.... BitComet seems to have crossed the 100GB "Total Downloaded" value today.

[ruben1405241511 0]

Thanks, hope that means that you will move it back to HowTo-Misc. because a topic with "HowTo" in the title is misplaced in computer talk.And I want to defend filesharing: I have and will again use it for legal purposes. For example: New CDs with Copy Protection, that I can't import myself. Downloading them is legal (in Germany and many other countries). Or CDs that got too scratched too play (because they are da*n low quality).I know that this is a often discussed thing (even though on a coder-homepage you probably won't find that many voices against it, because, well we're mostly young and rather poor, but as I said, I was not starting a debate, but writing a HOW-TO. I rather hoped that you might contribute arguments to fill up a discussion. Gotta go, write later!