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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."
Awesome! When he's finished with that, he can stop the AIDS epidemic in Africa, and stabilize Iraq. Then maybe next summer he can finally get that space elevator built using all the energy from the fusion power plant his company has just finished perfecting.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
Isn't lying to Congress illegal?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
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.
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.
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
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
I heard that during his testimony Fahmy's left eye kept blinking uncontrollably and that at one point, while raving about Clouseau, he absentmindedly amputated his pinky while toying with his Leatherman.
No kidding. I also find the irony of naming a tool for stopping copyright infringement after a fictional character from a movie/cartoon series which I'm surprised isn't trademarked in some way somewhat delicious.
I guess it's a better name than Dreyfus though?
Typo in parent:
Isn't lying to Congress illegal?
It's a French word, easy to misspell. The correct spelling is, "de rigueur."
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
The title is a little bit misleading; they're not talking about eliminating P2P altogether.
The technology this fellow talks about in his testimony is pretty clearly intended to primarily protect users from doing things like sharing their entire hard drives (he names one example of a woman who shared a directory containing credit card information) and thereby becoming unwitting contributors to copyright infringement and identity theft. He comes right out to say that it doesn't target BitTorrent (even though everybody knows BitTorrent is used primarily for "piracy") at all, nor does it block tunnelling or encrypted traffic.
Anybody who was trying to crack down on piracy in general would make a box that would effectively unplug the internet connection by blocking everything suspicious in the least. This is about curtailing inadvertent contributions to piracy and identity theft, to help better target the willing contributors (as he says, BitTorrent peers require identification and consent before participating in a network).
Programs like Kazaa (I haven't used any of those for a while, so please forgive the lack of examples) often take users through a wizard to find things they want to share on the P2P network, or have a default of sharing all media files found, or worse, sharing the entire hard drive or user directory. Uninitiated users won't realise this, and might just want to download one or two songs -- they end up sharing their music collections with the world.
This is about making it easier for the {RI,MP}AA and their government helpers to target the "problem users," and helping their image by cutting down on litigation against six-year-old kids, stay-at-home moms, and dead people.
Don't blame me -- I voted for Roslin.
Ed Felten wondered the same: see is Safemedia a parody?
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.