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

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: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: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.