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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."

16 of 288 comments (clear)

  1. Can he thwart terrorists too? by rrohbeck · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Looks like a good way to squeeze some decent money out of DHS.

    I'd ask him if he can filter out TOR.

  2. Hmmm. by SatanicPuppy · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
  3. er, huh? by Hettch · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:er, huh? by TheThiefMaster · · Score: 4, Insightful

      What you have to remember is that even though bittorrent may be the most common peer-to-peer system, it's difficult to target because it IS being used for legal stuff (at least 0.5% of the time!).

      On the other hand (nearly?) every other p2p system is completely illegal, often sharing anything you happen to have on your pc, in some cases including stuff you don't want to share, and as most of them are stupid enough to use unencrypted packets and the same port every time, they are stupidly trivial to block.

      Add a little marketing spin (99% of illegal p2p = 99% of illegal p2p networks instead of 99% illegal p2p traffic for example), and a cool name and you have something you can sell to the government.

    2. Re:er, huh? by BuhDuh · · Score: 3, Insightful
      Extracted from the link [pdf]

      Accuracy: Clouseau is fully effective at forensically discriminating between legal and illegal P2P traffic with no false positives (i.e., identifying another protocol as the targeted protocol) whether encrypted or not. It prohibits sending and receiving all illegal P2P files, and prevents the flow of copyrighted digital files from legal Internet services, DVDs and CDs to P2P networks where they are totally accessible to millions of users to pirate.
      Is it just me, or is this meaningless drivel, designed to impress?

      --
      Enlightenment? It's just a flush in the pan.
  4. Selling Congress snakeoil by grapeape · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  5. Re:Huh by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Getting caught lying to congress is illegal.

  6. P2P is not inherently illegal by kimvette · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
  7. Re:But it's not illegal per se... by haleq · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  8. Re:Congress? by morgan_greywolf · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Doesn't Congress have other things they should be worrying about like the wars they allowed, Katrina,and the public infrastructure instead of worrying about business profits?


    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.

    Aren't civil courts the ones set up to deal with things like this?

    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.

  9. Re:Sued merely for downloading? by eln · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  10. Re:But it's not illegal per se... by radish · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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"

  11. Yes, but that's what it's about. by twitter · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  12. Re:Well.. by Chris+Burke · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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
  13. Re:Well.. by Kazoo+the+Clown · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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...

  14. Re:Joke? by timmarhy · · Score: 3, Insightful
    tell people what they want to hear and you'll have no problem getting them to listen. congress wants this whole copyright infringment/p2p thing to go away. they don't understand and don't want to, and this guy is telling them what they want to hear.

    problem is he's totally full of fucking crap.

    --
    If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....