Slashdot Mirror
AT&T Announces Plans to Filter Copyright Content
An anonymous reader writes "The LA Times reports that AT&T has announced plans to work with the Hollywood movie studios and major recording labels to implement new content filtering systems on their network. The plans raise many troubling legal issues including privacy concerns, false positive filtering, and liability for failure to filter."
I was wondering when they were going to give up their common carrier status. Now they can all go to jail for monopoly!
Yeah, I don't get that either. They can have the absolute best filtering software in the world, and it will all go tits up the moment the client encrypts his communications. The users will continue to swap pirated material, and AT&T will find itself on the legal hook for it.
I mean, how stupid can you get?
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Just put everything in a passworded protected archive. Hell, I bet you could even skip the password protected part, since opening every archive that comes across the wire would be prohibitively slow.
We need to wait for all those dinosaur top managers to retire.
Practically every business I know is managed by someone who started managing before the personal computer revolution. It surprises me, but in more than a decade they don't seem to have learned anything. They hit blindly without understanding what they are doing, or even caring what they are doing.
We are seeing in our culture HUGE disrespect for technically knowledgeable people. The wild imaginings of someone who knows nothing are considered better than the counsel of those who have learned how things work.
No, you'd need to be somewhat cryptographically secure. If you just pay lip-service to the concept, you'll trip off a digital arms war between file sharing and AT&T's filter upgrades. It's better to be secure up front so that AT&T gets the idea that there's no way of enforcing these filters.
It's not that difficult to exchange symmetrical keys using an asymmetrical encryption method. Once those keys are exchanged, you can communicate freely without AT&T being able to eavesdrop. When they finally finish cracking your packets a year or two later, they'll find themselves in big trouble for having lost their common carrier status.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
It won't work. If they block P2P, people will use a different port. If they search traffic for P2P, people will use encryption. If they look at traffic analysis, people will figure out how to disguise traffic patterns. And so on.
And by people, I mean that a few clever hackers will implement it and everyone will just use it (kind of like bittorrent).
Of course, they could start by blocking youtube... that'll make them really popular.
Well, the figure for losses about bootlegs I can kind of believe. After all you have to pay cash for a bootleg, and that is real money which isn't going to the copyright holder. The figure for online piracy seems like one of those bogus ones. It is only a loss if the person would otherwise have paid. I doubt that they have a good way of measuring that.
And finally, can we PLEASE get some accuracy in the titles. Everything (bar public domain) is under copyright. If they filtered out copyright content, there would be nothing left for the customers. How would they even find the public domain content without any search engine's copyrighted front (and filtered) page?
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Exactly. By the time AT&T gets anywhere with filtering, BitTorrent clients will come with encryption enabled by default and will all select a random set of ports.
Is AT&T suggesting they can somehow go up against an encrypted, data-heavy connection using random ports? Or even well-known ports like 443? You can't very well just block long transfers, either. If you do that, P2P clients will be programmed to cycle connections, only transmitting one MB or such per connection before resetting.
Best to build for the capacity you sell to your users. If you can't handle what you sold, downgrade their plans, raise prices, or install new lines.
I'm not for piracy at all, but the ISPs should stay out of criminal and civil matters altogether until they have a public order from a judge instructing them otherwise.
This will render ecommerce impossible, and I'm sure that if they go to that extent, they'll block VPN and ssh, which will make a home internet connection useful only for instant messaging, viewing porn, and arguing endlessly on slashdot. ;)
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
If AT&T is going to start watching every single thing its users does and the users have no recourse whatsoever, I say it is time to end the monopoly that cable and wired ISPs and phone companies have in most areas and let competition reign. If I had the choice between a company that is going to spy on me and give anything they think is suspicious to the RIAA/MPAA or paying a few extra bucks to a company that will truly honor my privacy, the choice would be extremely easy.
Instead, I'm stuck with one cable company and one DSL company servicing my area. Thanks, local government.
But HTTP underneath SSL/TLS which happens to be tunneled inside of plain HTTP (or any other "legitmate" protocol) would still not be blocked. No matter what, to have perfect (or, I would say, even adequate) filtering, they would have to be omniscient regarding the intention behind the contents of all packets. Or just unplug everything.
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
Well, given block/chunk size in bittorrent clients, they should recover from any sporadic disconnects after 1-2 blocks are transferred, will have an increased overhead in terms of new connections, but should still work... I also have to agree that AT&T should stay out of content blocking... I know that if I hosted britney_spears.mp3, which turned out to be a commentary file, and it was blocked, I might have something to sue about... AT&T is opening a can of worms on the legitimate side alone.. I know for a fact I wouldn't use AT&T for services before, let alone now.
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
I still think one of the most brilliant developments in practical cryptography was SSH. The idea of simply caching the public key on the first connection and checking to see if it has changed on later connections is vulnerable to a man-in-the-middle attack on that very first connection, but it still solves 99% of the problem with 1% of the effort. That's the proper model for any new effort to routinely encrypt everything, all the time, to make the haystacks as big as we can.
Try to speak my native language (Icelandic) before you come with that comment. Then we can speak on even terms.
Also, Republicans in the U.S are mostly nothing but a group of losers with a thing for 1699 and a lot of money. They don't care if they destroy the planet in the progress and censor everyone how disagree with them. Just as the make one more buck on it and in between.
It's an entirely different story when you have two resourceful parties who want to communicate and will deploy all sorts of resourceful defenses and countermeasures -- starting with end-to-end encryption -- to ensure that they can continue to communicate. Stopping spam is absolutely trivial by comparison.
DMCA applies to copyright violations, not outright illegal material. (Hence the 'C' part of the acronym.) You don't send a DMCA takedown to a child pornographer or someone passing around leaked state secrets or whatever else; you send in the FBI right then.
Yeah? And what would people switch to? Dialup?
For example, where I live the only broadband I can get is Comcast. If they fucked over the customers like AT&T I'd have no other choice.
"The Federal Reserve is a fraudulent system."--Lew Rockwell
End The FED. -
This almost sounds like a setup ' see, we tried, but you cant do it on the network side we need legistlative help'. Then congress mandates an 'approved/trusted' OS+connection software+local monitoring software to get online. ( and of course new hardware to go with it so you cant disable anything 'bad' while offline either )
If you try to conect with anything other then the above either it doesnt work, or you get reported for an 'attempted circumvention'.
Scary times ahead.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Bingo. That's the whole idea. This internet thing has been nothing but a headache to those in power anyway. You get foul-mouthed hippie bloggers who say bad things about our sainted politicians, you have web sites that actually help people find the lowest prices on products, and there are even ways for people on the internet to send messages that are hard to eavesdrop. We can't have that, now, can we?
The ideal internet for the people who run things would be a place where people shop, watch movies and TV (but only what they pay for) and buy songs from iTunes and msTunes and sonyTunes and warnerTunes. It's OK for folks to talk to one another, as long as they do it over a clear channel (say!) and they can post pictures of their dogs and babies but not police beating protesters or (God forbid!) that troublemaker Michael Moore.
Once this mess of an internet gets straightened out, people will have all the freedom they could want, as long as it's within these reasonable parameters.
Oh, I forgot: THE CHILDREN! THE CHILDREN!
You are welcome on my lawn.
Every post on Slashdot is copyrighted -- it's a creative form of expression in a fixed medium (namely bits on a disk somewhere). Yet here they are... How can that be? It's because the posters are granting a public license to view their work, implicitly by placing it in a public forum.
The fact of the matter is that the vast majority of the content flowing through AT&T's networks are copyrighted. It's not sufficient that a work is copyrighted, but rather that the exchange itself is a violation of copyright. But how can the computer know? If you have a license to the work through some asset purchase, it's not infringing; if you have a license agreement that grants certain rights to obtain/distribute copies, it's not infringement; if you are using the content for academic research, the purpose of criticism, or in parody, it's not infringing. So, how is their computer system to know, a priori, of the legal arrangements, or your intent to use a work? What if you live in a jurisdiction that doesn't recognize the copyright (e.g., it may be public domain because the copyright expired in your jurisdiction).
The point is that it's technically not feasible to police copyrights. AT&T may be inerefering with network traffic on behalf of a third party for fun and profit, but they are most certainly not protecting copyrights. It's a little disingenuous.
It seems to me to be more along the lines of, there's no real legal need for AT&T to do this, as they're already immune to prosecution by copyright holders if users transmit copyrighted information across their networks. Thus, the only reason they would have to implement something like this involves the crisp, green lining in their pockets getting a bit thicker.
But IANAL either, so the cycle of speculation continues.
This is kind of like my idea for torrents. Back when SuprNova was crashing under the pressure of too many users, I thought they should just make a daily torrent of all the torrents, and have a web server with static links to those torrents. So, you download the torrent list over bit torrent, and browse and search it on your own computer. Then you just download the stuff you want. Simple, with no websites needed to distribute the actual torrents, and the authorities have nobody to shut down.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
How is it that they think they can judge intent? Even if they're only going to look at major Hollywood productions, how do they know that a given transmission is pirated, and not the exact same transmission, but with license agreements in place to allow the distribution? What's the difference between a download from iTunes Store and a download from another host online? Are they going to maintain a whitelist of "legitimate" sites that can distribute copyrighted material?
Nevermind the fact that if they're going to start protecting the interests of the major studios, why aren't they going to "protect" the interests of the rest of us? How do they know the difference between me uploading my photography to my website and someone else sending copies around that infringe on my copyrights?
The entire concept is ridiculous. There is technically no difference between a legal and an illegal transfer. It's all in the offline licenses and agreements that have (or have not) been made.
I am British - but what right does AT&T have to invade an Americans privacy?
Isn't privacy protected in the Bill of Rights - or has that all gone out the window now, since 911?
I thought that even the police have to get a judge to authorize a warrant to search - and only if there is reasonable grounds against an individual (not the populace of whole country).
Why is this not like the US Postal Service looking in your mail or DHL opening your packages to see if you have anything illegal - without a search warrant?
Because there is no money to be made by saving the children.
But IPsec (FreeSWAN is an IPsec implementation) didn't exist when Microsoft was copying all the Internet protocols into Windows. FreeSWAN also existed as a set of patches that you had to apply yourself to the Linux kernel sources and recompile. You also needed a fair number of user-space tools and a fair bit of knowledge to set it all up. Not even your average Linux user routinely builds his own kernels, and (as we know) only a small fraction of computer users run Linux.
At least VPNs (which also use IPsec) are already widespread in telecommuting. Any move by the ISPs to block them would be met with an immediate user outcry, and even better, heavy pressure by the affected employers wanting to know why the ISPs Hate Business, and by extension, Hate America...
By blocking illegal content, they save money through not having to have as much bandwidth for the customer side of their business. I'm sure there are numbers around that say X% of traffic is illegal content being thrown around. Remove that X% and profit.
In the non perfect world of being a last mile carrier (monopoly), users have no real choice but to go along with it. Even if there was competition, I'm sure the other provider in the area will be doing the same filtering.
I've said this 1000 times in the past 15 years. Until we can separate the line from the service, we are all getting screwed the whole way around. This applies to channel packages, lack of specific channel choices, internet filtering, internet bandwidth, cost for cable, cost for internet, cost for phone, having to keep a phone number to get DSL, long contracts, blocking ports, half assed roll outs to only very select areas for "new" and "improved" services, screwed up bandwidth limits (you have 1.5/128 but next county over has 6.0/384) and all for the same price by the same company, the carrot and stick of give us, the monopoly carrier a long term contract for your city and we will upgrade (wink wink), hidden monthly limits redefine unlimited, unknown rules and practices for data retention etc..
We as tax payers and monthly bill payers to these monopoly carriers already pay for the last mile from our own pockets. Why not pay a third party instead of being tied to same company that also provides the service? Verizon is not more efficient at laying lines then a third party company would be, I'm sure that third party would end up hiring the same contractors that already lay the line anyway.
There are wrong ways to do it as well. A 7500 unit housing development in my area does not use Verizon for the last mile, they ran it themselves, the bad part is the people that live there only have one choice for internet access and that is whatever company the HOA decides to go with. I guess the good side is they can switch providers at the gate if the service is not what they were promised and they still control the last mile themselves.
AT&T Announces Plans to Filter All Mention of Illegal Wiretapping.