Safemedia's CEO Tells Congress He Can Stop P2P

palewook writes "Yesterday, Safwat Fahmy appeared in front of the House Science and Technology Committee. During Fahmy's testimony [PDF], he claimed Safemedia's "P2P Disaggregator" technology uses traffic-shaping systems and network-filtering systems that can destroy contaminated P2P networks. And their Clouseau product will make it impossible to send or receive any illegal P2P transmission on any installed network. However, Clouseau allows tunneling and SSH and never opens packets to determine file legality."

Comments

I haven't read TFA

[niceone]

But as the URL is www.zeropaid.com/news/8825/Anti-piracy+company+ testifies+before+Congress+that+it+can+eliminate+P2 P+at+Universities I think the summary might have left out some important information.

Well..

[BlackCobra43]

Lying is. Making misleading statements (like say, "Iraq has WMDs and purchased Yellow Cake uranium to make nuclear weapons!") clealy isn't, as recent real-life examples have proven.

Snark aside, the same situation is happening here. He can destroy some p2p networks, at least temporarily. He's not perjuring himself.

Not intended to curtail intentional piracy

[Chris Daniel]

The title is a little bit misleading; they're not talking about eliminating P2P altogether.

The technology this fellow talks about in his testimony is pretty clearly intended to primarily protect users from doing things like sharing their entire hard drives (he names one example of a woman who shared a directory containing credit card information) and thereby becoming unwitting contributors to copyright infringement and identity theft. He comes right out to say that it doesn't target BitTorrent (even though everybody knows BitTorrent is used primarily for "piracy") at all, nor does it block tunnelling or encrypted traffic.

Anybody who was trying to crack down on piracy in general would make a box that would effectively unplug the internet connection by blocking everything suspicious in the least. This is about curtailing inadvertent contributions to piracy and identity theft, to help better target the willing contributors (as he says, BitTorrent peers require identification and consent before participating in a network).

Programs like Kazaa (I haven't used any of those for a while, so please forgive the lack of examples) often take users through a wizard to find things they want to share on the P2P network, or have a default of sharing all media files found, or worse, sharing the entire hard drive or user directory. Uninitiated users won't realise this, and might just want to download one or two songs -- they end up sharing their music collections with the world.

This is about making it easier for the {RI,MP}AA and their government helpers to target the "problem users," and helping their image by cutting down on litigation against six-year-old kids, stay-at-home moms, and dead people.

Re:Not intended to curtail intentional piracy

[Chris Daniel]

Want it, yes. Will they get it? Read the testimony. He very, very clearly states that this does not stop BitTorrent or traffic that is encrypted, among other false-positive preventing measures. So no, Clouseau is _not_ intended to eliminate P2P altogether. It is rather intended as a means of assistance toward that end, i.e., making litigation more effective and better targeted. Not to mention a nice cash flow for SafeMedia. Of course they have to sell it as being all-encompassing and bulletproof (you quoted from their sales pitch). Any IT person worth his salt, however, knows nothing is such; the fellow who gave the testimony appears to have no such illusions, and was very straightforward.

Link to RFC...

[msauve]

Here's a link to RFC 3514, for those wondering about this.

For a good time, read his testimony

[DarthTeufel]

Seriously... read his freaking testimony... Some highlights from it. Our nation is in trouble. Regarding Clouseau's features o Network Invisibility - Clouseau operates in a stealth mode when performing P2P filtering. This feature allows the appliance to be completely invisible to attacks that may be launched on the device. (uhhhh Sony Rootkit part 2?) How does Clouseau work? I will do my best to explain in layman's terms the following technologies utilized by Clouseau: Adaptive Finger Printing and DNA Markers - SafeMedia's filtering system utilizes proprietary finger printing techniques to identify specific P2P clients/protocols. By using these DNA markers, Clouseau is able to uniquely identify whether a packet is part of a P2P transaction or regular internet traffic. By studying the details in-depth, SafeMedia is able to avoid false-positives. Adaptive Network Patterns - Not all protocols can be easily identified with single packets. As such, Clouseau® is able to monitor packet flows and adapt its filtering based on what it has already seen and now sees. This extensible system utilizes a technique called experience libraries. Experience Libraries - P2P clients and protocols will change every day. The process of adapting to this change and constantly being updated with the latest knowledge of such clients/protocols is the responsibility of the experience library. SafeMedia's network operations trains these libraries with new patterns and DNA markers and push these new libraries to Clouseau" units out in the field. Update - No P2P filtering appliance will function without constant updates. All of the methods described above are constantly evolving and SafeMedia utilizes the Akamai network to push new updates through the internet Using a highly scalable network such as Akamai allows SafeMedia to offload the deployment of updates to a well-established content-distribution network.

Re:er, huh?

[Zakko]

Basically their process is:
All non-bittorrent p2p traffic == illegal, so block it
They claim to stop only illegal bittorrent, without looking at content, so I'm guessing they have a list of known 'legit' BT trackers (bittorrent.com, linux distros, etc.) and whitelist those, everything else is illegal. Their 'no false-positive' claim is easy when you just define everything you block as bad.

It's pretty lame technology, they've been hard-selling my University over the last month or so, primarily contacting me, but also cold-calling administrators and even our lawyers. When the lawyers lead off with jokes about a tech product, especially with all the crap we're dealing with in this area, you know it's a bad product.

Re:Yes, but that's what it's about.

[Iconwolf]

It would be useful if you used a legitimate source to make your point, and not an "obvious parody" http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20070606/105850.s html#comments By the way, the "obvious parody" isn't my claim, it's the claim made by the actual author who wrote that Whitacre skit during his rebuttal in the comments section of the Techdirt story. Of course the fact that I've seen numerous instances of this story being referenced in Slashdot, Digg, Crooks & Liars, and a few other sites as if it were legitimate suggests what is "obvious" to him must not be quite so obvious to most other people.