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

Hmmm.

[SatanicPuppy]

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?

er, huh?

[Hettch]

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.

Re:er, huh?

[TheThiefMaster]

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.

Selling Congress snakeoil

[grapeape]

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.

Re:Huh

[Anonymous Coward]

Getting caught lying to congress is illegal.

P2P is not inherently illegal

[kimvette]

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.

Re:Congress?

[morgan_greywolf]

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.

Re:Sued merely for downloading?

[eln]

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.

Re:But it's not illegal per se...

[radish]

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).

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

[twitter]

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.