Slashdot Mirror
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."
Looks like a good way to squeeze some decent money out of DHS.
I'd ask him if he can filter out TOR.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
I think the likely hood of this is about the same as the spam companies shutting down spam for good, or the virus companies ending viruses, or doctors ending illness.
Basically, no chance in hell. The ingenuity of one little company pitted against every single person who wants them to fail? Look at AACS? Weren't they going to end movie piracy? How's that workin' for them?
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
articulo dice: "..(it) will detect and prohibit illegal P2P traffic while allowing the passage of legal P2P such as BitTorrent."
So wait, it blocks P2P sharing, but not BitTorrent, or it only allows legal torrents? If I'm reading this correctly, it assumes all bitTorrent is legal, so therefore allows it to pass. Isn't BitTorrent that majority of file-sharing anymore? I can't see this tool being extremely useful.
What a crock. Even my mother knows that things can be distributed at different bitrates, different encoding and different formats. This has about as much of a chance of "solving" the vastly overstated p2p problem as I do of winning the lottery.
And how pray tell do you suppose fileplanet will handle the onslaught of millions of simultaneous ravenous geek downloads? It will be like the slashdot effect amplified 10 fold.
Getting caught lying to congress is illegal.
I don;'t even download TV shows (timeshifting, a legal use, albeit an untested/alternative form of timeshifting). I definitely don't download any music whatsoever - Instead of try-before-I-buy, i simply do not tempt myself any more, so I don't download music, I avoid listening to top-40 stations, and I don't and won't buy new music, aside from a select few acts I go out of my way to follow.
However, I use P2P networks for downloading things such as Linux distributions, particularly opensuse and kubuntu. If P2P networks are broken up like this, they are interrupting totally legal activities and any ISP which engages in such traffic shaping should immediately lose their privileges/protections they enjoy as common carriers. By discriminating traffic they are no longer merely carriers deserving of protection against liability (for activities such as carrying terrorist communications, kiddie porn, and other illegal communications) because they are going out of their way to stop some illegal activities by blocking traffic, so they should immediately become responsible for blocking ALL illegal traffic. When a terrorist or pedophile or ebophile successfully sends illegal communications, the ISP should be held at the same level of responsibility as the purpetrators themselves.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
Why? It'll be more fun to laugh at him when everyone sees him for the fool and moron he is, instead of just the /.ers doing it.
No, do not shoot him, he deserves no such mercy, he deserves to live in the torment of his own making.
Peer to peer is not illegal, but i doubt that will sway such an idea. I mean, be honest most of peer to peer stuff is illegal, or at least shady (pornography etc). I'm sure just stopping all P2P is not beyond these sorts of people. The point about encryption is valid - theres not much he can do about that though. I guess thats what all teh l33t h4x0rs will turn to.
with the help of the United States CONGRESS.
Yours sincerely,
W.
Worrying about wars, Katrina or public infrastructure doesn't do nearly as much for the campaign war chest as worrying about business profits. I've said it once and I'll say it again (and again, and again...): if you want to know why things are the way they are in this country, follow the money.
Except that businesses don't like the civil courts. Civil courts cost them money. They are merely necessary evils. Criminal courts, OTOH, from the corporate perspective, are free. So why make laws like the DMCA, which, among other things, criminalizes some forms of copyright violation, within limits? Yup. Follow the money.
My blog
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.
The true innovation here is clear. Their product has the psychic ability to determine what is legal and illegal without actually inspecting the traffic. With a little tweaking of this psychic software they can finally create computers that do what we mean and not what we say.
Actually lying is making a purposefully misleading statement, saying something that is incorrect without knowledge is just being wrong. Hypocrisy is, on the other hand, using Iraq's nuclear program as justification for a major bombing in 1998 and the balking when someone else does is several years later.
Catching the consumers is easier. Catching a producer takes a lot more effort because you're usually dealing with people that are adept at avoiding being caught. However, you can catch a few consumers, splash it on the front page, and people think you're actually solving the problem. See also: drugs, child pornography.
Peer to peer traffic isn't illegal, is it? File sharing isn't either. File sharing of copyrighted works is.
Pedantic correction: File sharing of copyrighted works without permission is illegal. The emphasis is important because pretty much everything is copyrighted but in many cases the public has permission to share (e.g. linux distros, game demos, CC licensed materials etc).
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
Oh, so Clinton destroyed what little infastructure was left in Iraq did he?
Bush just didn't throw a little bit of ordinance around. He dismantled the country. He destroyed the Army. He wiped out what little water and power services were left. He left the borders ungaurded. He gutted law enforcement.
There is CONSIDERABLE moral difference there.
Nevermind actual body counts.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I Can Stop Democracy
If you can't have democracy without a free press, the above is correct. Destroying the internet won't stop "piracy", kiddie porn, or any of the other horsemen of the infopocolypse, it will only protect the corrupt from the truth. "traffic-shaping systems and network-filtering systems that can destroy contaminated P2P networks" are all the rage in China, and they could care less about music and movie sales. The free flow of information on the internet is starting to take it's toll on government and corporate propaganda. That free flow is the target of this and other attacks on the internet, because it makes corruption harder.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I hate Clinton and I think those bombings were wrong. Yet you are incorrect that he did it for a few points in the polls, he did it to satisfy the Republican Congress, who had long accused him of being soft and demanded that he take action against Iraq. It was playing politics in order to get enough political capital to be able to accomplish things like the balanced budget. I just want to make it clear that while Clinton is responsible for those bombings, the hawks in government pushing him to do it were the Republicans in Congress.
Of course the later cruise missle attack against "al Qaeda training camps" in Iraq and "chemical weapons factories" in Sudan were done solely to get Republican pressure off of him in the early stages of the Lewinsky scandal. So yeah, no love for fuckface Clinton.
But you are still completely wrong that the invasion of Iraq is anything but a vastly worse sin than what Clinton did. You keep saying "try and make things better". Here's a hint: If you are going to try to make things better, then you need to have a plan to make things better. They had no plan, in fact they deliberately avoided making a plan and told anyone who suggested that they would need a plan to shut up. Ergo they were not trying to make things better. At best, they were wishing that things would magically become better.
The level of destruction that Bush has caused in Iraq needs a whole fucking lot more than wishful thinking before it becomes anything other than what it is: The destruction of a country.
The enemies of Democracy are
There's nothing "morally superior" about trying to change things within a nation that isn't yours. If you don't like the actions of that nation's government, bombing the nation is one allowable reaction. Changing the government is the job of the people of that nation. If they're not willing to change their government, then it's only their own fault if they get bombed.
Hmmm... It seems to me that Al-Quaeda make about that same argument as a justification for 9/11...
problem is he's totally full of fucking crap.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Iraq has been a mess for a long time, probably since its formation just after WWI. As much as I dislike Bush, I can't blame the whole situation on him. When you look at war among other options, there were no good options.
1) Are sanctions against things that are necessary for water treatment but could possibly be used for chemical weapons better than war? Even when they kill thousands of kids a year and provide no end in sight?
2) Was there any way to responsibly end the sanctions?
I also think that there is a very good chance that Iraq as a cohesive state would not be likely to survive Saddam, so there was a very good chance we would end up there anyway. This is simply due to the fact that the very forces that are tearing Iraq apart from the inside today were there under Saddam (but he was fairly adept at directing their energy elsewhere).
This being said, even if one concludes that war was necessary morally or otherwise, it has been executed so badly that it is hard to imagine a worse outcome. Even today, Bush does not seem willing to really tackle the hard realities of Iraq-- that it is a civil war between those backed by Iran and shielded by the US on one side and those backed by private individuals in Saudi Arabia and Jordan on the other.
I have ideas for what we need to do about Iraq but I also have next to no faith in politicians from either party to do the right thing. However, here they are:
1) We need to state clearly that we are not willing to be pulled into taking sides in a conflict between paramilitary groups. We need to essentially threaten to leave Iraq unless the Iraqi government establishes clear rules prohibiting sectarian militias from taking part in any sort of government activity. If that becomes necessary, we need to loudly state *why* we are leaving (i.e. unwilling to let the Shiite militias shield themselves behind our troops while committing attrocities).
2) We need to state clearly that we are guests of the current Iraqi government and will depart upon their request.
3) We need to start working with the Arab League and EU to bring in Arab League and EU (not NATO) troops in as peacekeepers under a joint EU/AL command. Such peacekeepers would also have to work closely with our forces and those of the current government.
There are also other things that need to be done but this would be a good start.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP