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.

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.