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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."
"Kato! Ze network is rrrrringing!" *thwack*
Clouseau was a terrible detective: any success he had was purely by chance. I can't help but wonder if this is a joke, just based on the name.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
How long after they conquer the internet with their traffic shaping devices until the company starts ransoming P2P media companies? What do you think will happen once they 'shape' a WoW patch and the entire world goes into catalytic convulsions pre-disposing a worldwide geek uprising?
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?
Aren't civil courts the ones set up to deal with things like this?
Peer to peer traffic isn't illegal, is it? File sharing isn't either.
File sharing of copyrighted works is. But how does he know which P2P traffic to stop without examining the content? What stops us from just encrypting everything anyway? Or it's just going to stop all P2P traffic without caring about its legality? Wouldn't that actually be illegal?
If he explores all forms and substances Straight homeward to their symbol-essences; He shall not die.
If you go to the website of the people making the claim they can erase internet piracy you'll notice a few fun things.
y -Little-Secret.asp
:=)
http://www.safemediacorp.com/Internet-Piracy/Dirt
Basically it seems they are mostly targeting the mostly obsolete networks like Kaazaa, iMesh, Limewire and eMule. The fact that internet piracy has since moved on to the mostly legal bittorrent network seems to be lost on them.
They also spout strange things like that the 2 billion songs sold on iTunes are being traded over P2P. I thought the point of iTunes was that it was heavily DRM'd?
Read and enjoy
technology which is designed to destroy contaminated P2P networks by draining the illegal content of those networks
How is it going to detect 'contamination' by copyright material? AFAIK there's no watermarking yet. Maybe something like a signature database (ala anti-malware scanners?). Yup, I'd love to see the footprint of that little file.....
Users simply plug it in the subnet as a bridge and it goes to work without altering their network topology."
Without changing the logical topology perhaps. The physical topology is altered by introducing a whopping great single-point-of-failure and potential bottleneck.
will detect and prohibit illegal P2P traffic while allowing the passage of legal P2P such as BitTorrent.
...
"That is why our P2PD implemented in Clouseau never opens any transmission packets. Rather, we monitor the ever-changing and adapting myriad of illegal P2P protocols/networks and continually update our systems to block only these illegal transmissions."
So... BitTorrent P2P good, other P2P bad?
It must be using the Evil bit (http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3514)
Maybe this is why this snake oil salesman was talking to people who make laws (Congress) instead of vict^H^H^H^H customers (Universities). It's not Congress' job to help universities with their network congestion, but maybe someone thinks it's their job to add exemptions to what disqualifies one as a common carrier.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Ed Felten wondered the same: see is Safemedia a parody?
Not in any particular order, lots of blah cut out:
Virtually everyone who uses file sharing programs appear to use them exclusively to download infringing files.
The only solution to making this free, copyrighted material unavailable to these masses is to eliminate peer-to-peer file sharing programs altogether.
There is not and will almost never be a legitimate business or governmental justification for use of file sharing programs.
Mission Statement
SafeMedia's Coalition Against Internet Piracy (CAIP) is committed to increasing the understanding of the negative impact of Internet Piracy and advocating for the successful implementation of "Clouseau(TM)" by working with Congress and the administration; Departments of Justice, Commerce, and Education; and Copyright Holders and their Associations, Unions, and Organizations to drive greater government-wide efforts to address the serious issue of Internet piracy and the violation of the copyright laws and to recognize that there is now a solution (Clouseau(TM)) to the serious unresolved issue of Internet Piracy.
Mmm... RIAA shill? Just block everything that it can't recognize? Basically a way to push their personal firewall application to have it installed by law? They can't sell enough of their product by themselves?
Coalition Goals
As Congress and copyright holders are in a stand-still watching the erosion of copyright laws, SafeMedia product solutions must emerge as the technological solutions to a political, legal, and social problem created by technology advancement.
Somehow, those persons sound a lot like Hitler. The erosion of copyright law is not in the consumers advantage. With the current status of DRM, DMCA etc, the spirit of the copyright law does indeed get eroded and congress doesn't do anything about it. We as customers are duped by stupid businesses that don't want to change the way they work.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
"Clouseau was a terrible detective"
I thought the same thing. It's like using the Rocky theme "Gonna Fly Now" during a sporting event. Rocky lost that one, folks. Playing that song in support of your team is the musical equivalent of loser talk.
I was under the impression that people who testify in front of Congress are authorities in their field.
...
So one may think that this Safwat Fahmy is an authority in the field.
Absolutely not. This person has not published a single document in any single respectable publication venue (including academic ones).
A simple google search reveals that he has not been involved in any important project and his only previous experience in Information Technology was founding an utterly failed company called WiZnet. That company produced nothing but a site which is nothing more than an electric-electronics product.
Hey Congress, what about inviting people like V. Cerf, D. Clark, and tens of others successful academics and businessmen to clarify to you how the Internet and its tubes works? Even Bram Cohen would be a much more appropriate person for the task.
And we expect this bunch of amateur, gullible, uninformed, corrupted bunch of representatives to solve the much more complicated Middle Eastern problems? sigh
Good thing, the US was not governed by such an incompetent bunch in the second half of the 20th century, or we would all be dead or forced to be Nazis of Stalinist Communists by now.