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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!
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
Dateline: June 13th, 9:04PM
Today, a group of hackers calling themselves "The Army of the Night" have announced that they've defeated AT&Ts recently announced content filtering scheme.
... when AT+T takes down an iTMS download of a purchased movie for being a copy. Which, of course, it would be. Merely one being paid for correctly.
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.
I had been considering switching from Comcast to AT&T as soon as DSL became available at my house... so much for that idea.
Encryption forever!
This is not surprising in the least. AT&T has a dishonourable history of sticking it to the consumer whenever anyone asks them to.
Most notable is the current lawsuit against them alleging collusion with the NSA in massive illegal domestic wiretapping.
Call me old fashioned, but I like a dump to be as memorable as it is devastating - Bender
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.
Not to mention loss of common carrier service.
Watch a snuff movie that came via a AT&T subscribed line? Blame them. ("Well, I knew that AT&T blocks illegal content. And I was allowed to download it. Therefore it must be legal.")
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
If Firefox and Apache both made HTTPS their default protocol instead of HTTP, AT&T wouldn't be able to invade any of our private traffic that happens to get routed over their WANs. Then they'd have only their Net Doublecharge, preferential routing between IPs paying their extortion fees, to work against us, and that gambit will likely get killed by the government that otherwise protects AT&T's resurgent monopoly.
If we act now, while we still can, before AT&T and their telco/cableco cartel shuts us down.
--
make install -not war
Would previous attempts at net-neutrality legislation have prevented this?
This makes total sense, if they dont do this they are underutilizing their networking spying equipment. You need to keep that gear operating for a certain number of years in order to make the total cost of ownership values work out.
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.
...who your real customers are.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
When AT&T has only Hollywood Movie Companies subscribing to their internet service, they may change their mind about censoring/blocking Zero's & One's. The Almighty Dollar is what dictates any techno and when the money goes, so will the censorship.
By actively filtering content, I would think that AT&T would be giving up it's legal protection as a common carrier and the safe harbor protection that status gives them under DMCA and other copyright laws. It may make the copyright cartels happy, but I think it'll be opening up a whole lot of other liability issues.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
So, they're going to give up their common carrier status? I guess they want to be legally liable when child porn is distributed over their network. Can't wait to see their top execs go to prison for sex crimes.
At the very least if we all start encrypting everything we send, the overall effect will help improve net security.
One could argue that if AT&T can filter copyrighted content, they can filter p0rn. When they don't, some lawsuit will argue that they should have: Why won't AT&T think of the children?
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
ISPs are not common carriers. There is a difference between voice and data, according to (stupid) law.
Doesn't every large ISP these days already do some amount of content filtering? i.e., anti-spam?
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Uh, I suspect that "few" means that "the few who have examined the industries claimed 'losses' and compared them to actual revenue".
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
The big question is whether this filtering is just for their DSL and F2P customers, or also for the huge chunk of the backbone that they own and operate. The articles that I have read seem to suggest the latter.
I am beginning to have images of the ATT Deathstar and an X-Wing... wait for it.... wait for it.... Well we all know what happens next. If they couldn't possibly decide to be more bone headed about their network, here they are trying to police their network for content. The only way this is going to work is if they put that CIA/NSA installed hardware to use, and analyze EVERYTHING. So instead of respecting their customers privacy, they are going to be watching people's personal IM p0rn and getting high on people's privacy. Yes, just like those pesky Geek Squad guys! Anyone want to ponder what's going to happen to SPeakeasy now that the same company that ruined GSquad owns Speakeasy? I can't wait to hear of the privacy intrusions! I'm just glad I'm a Verizon FiOS snob (for now...)
Unless you believe that companies (AT&T, Google, MS) and government agencies (Big Brother) have a right to listen in on every conversation you have, review every site you visit, and examine every transaction you make, then either don't let them or stop complaining.
Instead of sending everything by postcard, send everything by envelope (encrypted), and stop expecting every lawyer, politician, company, government agency, and identity thief to respect your privacy.
I'm guessing they're not going to like a file transfer of casablanca.mov
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
I think you meant to say, "Everything here is nice and polite, jackass."
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.
Oh, right, if you're lucky you can pick between the cable company and the phone company. So the "choice" most people get around here is between AT&T or Time Warner. Now which one do you pick if you don't want to support needless censorship on behalf of the media industry?!
The enemies of Democracy are
If a number of your friends and acquaintances talk about how many thousands of songs and hundreds of movies they have downloaded, you can easily extrapolate the potential loss caused that group of people.
Now in some instances they claim to be sampling the works before buying, which is fine. I just wonder about the sample vs purchase ratio. Do they actually buy or do they just do lip service?
It would be ironic if some of the chronic downloaders ended up creating marketable materials and got filtered out because of problems. They would then have to take AT&T to court and possibly reveal that they are violating various laws concerning copyrighted material.
I wasn't looking for anything in particular, but when I put the url of piratebay in my browser a blocking service page came up. First time I saw anything like this. I get DSL in Chicago thru, I guess it's AT&T now...
This is all well and good if it's like a parental control thing but I'm a 50 year old paying customer and I'm not used to getting flipped off by my ISP. I suppose I should be looking over my shoulder.
I guess that AT&T can pull the plug on the internet right away. Since there idea is never, ever going to work in the real world. How ever did get this idea over there is almost as stupid a George Bush (the idiot president how can't even speak properly).
So does this mean anything that makes is past their filters is OK to use how ever I want?
-ted
Glad to see the US ISPs joining the ranks of Chinese ISP
Watch as their customers drop them like the plague.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Luckily, At&T customers can usually get their DSL from several different resellers.
Speakeasy is available in the bay area I beleive. There is also Earthlink, DSLExtreme and Sonic.net.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
I'm slightly apprehensive at the AT&T brand name ever since they sold their wireless business to Cingular (forcing their former customers to eventually switch phones) and then reacquired Cingular to become AT&T again.
Absolutely ridiculous.
Did you ever wonder what goes through a person's mind when they make a post like this? Is it, "I'm just going to think of something random to post"? Or is it even worse -- they somehow thing their comment is appropriate to the subject at hand?
I was considering going with Cingular for cell phone and a laptop card. Scratch that idea.
I guess it's a tossup between Sprint and Verizon. Oh well...
AT&T is not AT&T now, because the name was sold to an abusive west coast telephone company named SBC.
My understanding is that everything else of value in the original AT&T was sold piece-by-piece, and SBC bought mostly just the name. My understanding is that the SBC trademark was worse than useless because the company is so abusive. So, the managers bought another name.
Apparently, for $16 Billion SBC got AT&T's VOIP customers, and the AT&T name.
AT&T's VOIP customers were Sheila and Gerald Funk, who have since moved to Elbonia. Wait... That last sentence my contain an error.
So, what we are seeing is SBC mismanagement under a new name. Soon just saying the name AT&T will cause people to become upset.
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.
Real time is the KEY here. They promise to block and not to just detect.
Sure, you can detect ssh, etc, known protocals and block them.
But if today the server encripted an MP3 file with rot13 no computer would automatically detect it as an mp3. And tomarow they just do it different. Tomarrow they make a jpg out of it. Change the extention and Bob's your uncle.
An application is written that everytime it starts it downloads a plugin with todays encription standard. There is no way they could even think of keeping up without breaking things for there customers on a daily basis.
Plus, it's not really the same thing since all you'd have to do is encrypt the data, and they'd be unable to economically filter it.
You'll have that sometimes...
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.
...that in many countries, when a carrier censors content, it automatically loses "common carrier" status and becomes liable for what it carries. In other words, AT&T probably can't be sued right now for movies on their lines, but if they censor those lines and miss something - however accidental - they are liable. In the UK, carriers have been sued into bankrupcy after losing common carrier status. I don't know if this is true in the US, but if it is and someone wants to go digging for gold, they would be doing everyone a huge favour.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
AT&T is the main carrier out here and coincidently I was just about to sign up with them, this is just plain disappointing though. Well at least there is no contract now, if I start noticing my service degrading it might be time to move on even if it ends up being a little more expensive and inconvenient.
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.
If we are forced to post original material, because otherwise it is filtered, then theres a huge motivation? to be creative, and to ceate for ourselves. How iwerd is it that so many human beings are toiling to, in essence, line up a couple of billion little on/off switches in jsut the right sequence
Darwin Hawking Blackmore
The article doesn't mention AT&T as an ISP. It merely states they plan on filtering this content as it runs across their network. Well, the bad news is that most ISP data in the US traverses the AT&T network in the form of optical longhaul systems ( Read that Sonet ) at some point in it's journey. Your ISP leases lines from Company X who, in turn, leases their lines from AT&T. Is similar to when your WoW session is hit with a lag storm and you start yelling at your ISP to ' FIX YOUR SH*T ', when it's actually an optical level issue on lines owned by someone else that is taking the data longhaul across the country. Sprint, AT&T, whatever ) Given the technology that allowed the NSA to split the optical signal so they could watch traffic, I wonder if they're considering applying their ' filtering ' technology in the same manner. In other words, would they act as big brother over all the data packets that travel ' their ' pipes and filter anything they feel is necessary ?
Man, how often did I read such announcements from german politicians in the past 2 years or so?... nothing came so far...
as always I say: JUST TRY AND FAIL
within a week p2p would go over ssl encrypted, anonymized connections tunneled over port 80... try to filter that!
but since there is a little problem called undecidability I guess they're all not even really trying - they're just trying to scare the non-computer-scientists away from p2p ("uh, I better stop downloading - that system might catch me")
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
Wonder how many false positives will be generated for Iphone users downloading itunes video? :-)
Quote from the Business Week article, linked above: "It isn't clear whether or not AT&T CEO David Dorman, who will earn about $20 million from the sale of AT&T, will stick around."
So, a manager who presided over the failure of his company made $30 million (not $20 million) from selling the company to other managers who are reputed to be just as inept.
The Wikipedia article says, "Dorman's management finesse can be ascertained by tracking the value of AT&T stock during his tenure.". Dorman became president in 2000, Wikipedia says. The stock performance tanked beginning just before that, and continued down until the AT&T name was sold to SBC.
It looks from the stock quotes that AT&T is doing well now, but apparently that is only because the AT&T name was pasted on a new company. (It's like unscrewing the radiator cap and driving a different car underneath. That's not real car repair.)
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 ----
Sedition or copyright infringement. How is this filtering different than what is going on in China? (Other than the obvious -- liberty vs. profit)
I don't really care. Many of my friends have 500GB external SATA drives full of all music and movies ever made.
at 3Gb/s, it copies in minutes. Sure beats any download.
We could even call it a library, and make sure only the number of copies that are owned are used at any one time, and it all is fair use.
You could even put up a WiFi AP on your roof, and share with your neighborhood. 108Mb/s actually gives 57Mb/s, but that is still 20 HD quality broadcasts for *each* wifi channel.
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
I've not regretted it -- ever.
They hand over subscriber and call information without a warrant and now they do this.
I don't pirate movies either.
[ http://www.eff.org/news/archives/2007_06.php#00530 4 ]
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
If you'd like to see what a bang up job they're doing, ask them to turn off all their spam filters (not that they would, mind you). You would drown in spam. :)
My comment was directed at why would doing this sort of content filtering cause a loss of Common Carrier status since ISP's are already doing content filtering.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
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.
This rules out AT&T (formerly SBC here) and Comcast is ...
... it's still SBC. Unfortunately. Crap by any other name still smells like crap.
No
My apologies to the Bard.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
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?
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...
Wired News, with help from some readers, attempted to get real answers
0 07/05/isp_privacy
from the largest United States-based ISPs about what information they
gather on their customers' use of the internet, and how long they
retain records like IP addresses, e-mail and real-time browsing
activity. Most importantly, we asked what they require from
law-enforcement agencies before coughing up the data, and whether they
sell your data to marketers.
http://www.wired.com/politics/onlinerights/news/2
But after negotiations with AT&T, EFF has filed newly unredacted documents describing a secret, secure room in AT&T's facilities that gave the National Security Agency (NSA) direct access to customers' emails and other Internet communications. These include several internal AT&T documents that have long been available on media websites, EFF's legal arguments to the 9th Circuit, and the full declarations of whistleblower Mark Klein and of J. Scott Marcus, the former Senior Advisor for Internet Technology to the Federal Communications Commission, who bolsters and explains EFF's evidence.
"This is critical evidence supporting our claim that AT&T is cooperating with the NSA in the illegal dragnet surveillance of millions of ordinary Americans," said EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn. "This surveillance is under debate in Congress and across the nation, as well as in the courts. The public has a right to see these important documents, the declarations from our witnesses, and our legal arguments, and we are very pleased to release them."
http://www.eff.org/news/archives/2007_06.php
Open Source needs to find some way to infiltrate corporate America, because these bastards are really giving it to us in the ass. Then again, that's just good business, and 99% of the people seem to like it.
I guess I should just admit I think democracy and capitalism are as insane as communism and autocracy.
Anti-Globalism
We were too concerned about major-league threats like active man-in-the-middle attacks and not concerned enough about simple, transparent and totally automatic encryption that would still be 100% effective against passive eavesdropping.
As soon as that happens, Cisco et al will start selling specialized boxes that do MITM attacks, can handle OC3 bandwidth, and provide the unencrypted traffic for inspection, filtering, and recording. There would certainly be a lot of demand, as there are lots of network administrators with more-or-less legitimate reasons to want to filter their traffic (university network admins, for instance).
90% of a solution is not a solution.
Even if the service is being purchased from, say, EarthLink instead of AT&T, the initial connection is still going through AT&T's backbone. Now, it may branch off at some point relatively soon into EarthLink's backbone network, but the initial data is still going through part of AT&T's infrastructure.
Do you really believe that AT&T is going to bypass their FBI/NSA-mandated sniffing kit just because you're paying a different ISP for your connection? Remember, in this example EarthLink is still paying wholesale prices to AT&T for using their last mile hardware and other services. IMHO AT&T wouldn't have *any* problem with still redirecting a copy of your traffic to their NSA kit before passing it along to EarthLink's backbone.
And even if not, remember the Carnivore/EarthLink stink from a while back? EarthLink was eventually able to convince a judge that they didn't need to have "Carnivore / SBS-100" (or whatever the hell its named now) on their network because they already had the technology in place to do what the NSA/FBI needed to be done without their hardware that was screwing up their network. Once they had a court order they could provide all of the data the govt wanted using their own kit.
One of these days i'm going to find this 'peer' guy and reset HIS connection!
As for traffic filtering and shaping, the battle between ISP and user will end only when they agree on QoS markings and policies that are advantageous to both. This can happen.
"That's odd, every time I try to read a negative story about AT&T, the link doesn't work . . . "
It's a good idea, just the tech hurdles and economic hurdles are awesome, let alone the political ones, as in, the government and big biz will not like this idea *at all*. But..it is something to contemplate as the internet-as-we-know-it-today gets turned into a series of pay per view walled gardens. . The OLPC machine has built in automagical mesh networking, I'd say look there for tech clues to begin your peoples' net. FON is somewhat what you are looking for that is out there now.
No, just the ones that have both a personal God and sharp definitions of right and wrong. Not as many as you might think.
There is a fine line between recklessness and courage... -- Paul McCartney
And as I read this thread, there is a huge AT&T banner ad at the top of my screen...
[Content blocked - contains material for which the poster holds the copyright to]
This is the American way to censorship with out the public really knowing it
So no more music store sample clips? Or they propose a system where approved clips are registered and watermarked like the whole song? Or only downloadable from approved IPs or what? What's the difference between an approved sample clip and 5 bootleg clips that can be cat'ed into the whole song?
If I were cdnow.com wouldn't I think this has potential suckiness?
AT&T Announces Plans to Filter All Mention of Illegal Wiretapping.
Chain-Stokes
No offense, but it's Cheyne-Stokes. Too much ER/House/Gray's, my friend.
Love and Kisses,
A medical professional.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
As soon as AT&T purchased Cingular I received a notice in my bill informing me that I had "volunteered" to give up my constitutional right to a jury trial. I could have forced them to cancel the contract, but my contract is up in 2 days, so it was easier to wait than spend hours on the phone explaining that making a material change to the contract gives me the right to cancel it it. I am quickly running out of good choices for phone/data carriers. I will not return to Verizon. And Comcast just purchase my Roadrunner connection.
Very interesting video. Should be +5 Informative.
You might be right, but perhaps losing tons of customers will encourage At&T to rethink their stance.
Who am I kidding. The masses are ignorant and apathetic. We're screwed.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
Of course the exciting content from AT&T servers and media friendly sites will zip right through them pipes at top speed, but the nasty old traffic from anywhere else will have to crawl through the filters. I reckon they are trying to kill net neutrality through the back door.
Or it could be the RIAA/MPAA suggesting to AT&T that cracking down on piracy would be a good way to avoid dealing with hordes of high-priced entertainment industry lawyers for many years....
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
What AT&T plans to do moves them squarely onto the bullseye. Of course, some money will change hands and the Justice Department may choose not to prosecute - and there will be new laws slipped in as ammendments to "pony and puppy" bills to make this legal retroactively.
It doesn't take a lot of imagination to figure out who's behind this latest outrage; too bad that they'll escape from it with little more than a black eye.
Here's how it's likely to play out: AT&T starts "filtering" traffic based on content - that's exerting editorial control and their safe harbor is lost. The media companies will sit by quietly, but some other copyright holder with big plans will see the opening and hit them with the mother of all lawsuits. AT&T has deep pockets; they're an attractive target. Stepping out into the line of fire probably isn't the best idea that's ever come out of their headquarters.
Too bad (for AT&T) that the current megacorp friendly administration won't be around to protect them...
Reach out and strong arm someone.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Not just telecommuting but also the tens of thousands of POS systems that are running over VPN's. When all of a sudden Starbucks or someone like that sees 10K sites stop processing credit cards transactions for a day or two they are going to scream bloody murder.
Better question, if you had encrypted data and they scanned it for certain patterns ( or just had a mega cluster / back door ) and blocked YOUR encrypted packets are they in violation?
To err is human; effective mayhem requires the root password!
You are right. SBC has a bad reputation in California, but it is not a "west coast" of the USA company.
Does everybody get body X-ray when going out of a shop - JUST IN CASE they might have stolen something?
Garry Anderson - wipo.org.uk
And does it apply only to direct sales (to individuals who get their access from AT&T) or does it also apply to resellers?
Frex, my wireless ISP is thru a local company, but their connectivity is direct from AT&T. Does AT&T therefore get to dictate what my ISP can offer me??
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
What if I want to remote login to my home computer which may host my legally purchased media and view/listen them from my laptop when I'm away from home? Granted with today's technology I won't be getting a good speed on that, but it should be easily possible in the near future. Or is even that against some retarded part of the mess that is copyright law these days? But how does AT&T know that that data transfer is any different from making an illegal copy?
Well,that's a drag about the blob. Still though, it is possible albeit complicated. I played with their little interactive connect the dots demo and can see how hard it must be to pull off.
"The internet treats censorship as damage and routes around it."
Really? So what happens when the cable company (who has even more ties to the TV and movie industry) decides to join in when they look at the now risk-free benefits?
Who is your choice going to be then? Dial-up? Cell phone internet? Satellite? Don't make me laugh -- all of those are completely useless for sharing large files. Satellite is too slow on the upstream, dial-up is too slow in both directions, and cell phone service is metered by the MB and heavily capped.
Your free market "vote with your dollars" fundamentalism breaks down when natural monopolies and oligopolies like utility companies come into play. It also doesn't matter at all if AT&T decides to filter the backbone too. Welcome to the real world where customers can't just magically change to all the competitors that just spring up *pop* whenever a company does something naughty.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
In other words, privacy is not *explicitly* preserved as a right. However, there is a good bit of Supreme Court case law that preserves it. Olmstead v. United States, Griswold v. Conneticut, and most controversially Roe v. Wade. Most of the conservative hostility to the concept of the right to privacy stems from Roe v. Wade which held the right to have an abortion to be a natural extension of the right to privacy.
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).
That's actually explicitly banned under the 4th amendment, but that amendment has nothing to do with the right not to be watched like a hawk.
Futhermore, in the US legal tradition, the private property rights essentially supercede all other rights. The 1st Amendment protecting free speech does nothing to prevent censorship of speech by owners of the property the speech is taking place on. Similarly, protection against search means nothing when the owner of the property is doing the search. The post office can't search your mail because they're a government agency and they don't own your mail, but there's nothing preventing an ISP from archiving every email you send over their property.
Property rights mean more than any other form of right in the US legal tradition.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
I'm totally with you about SSH key distribution, but, for the love of dog, why don't they offer the OPTION to require signed SSH keys during the initial connection? OpenSSL can grok X.509, why the heck can't SSH???
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
So -
1) If I share an illegal copy of a movie using an encrypted p2p service
2) AT&T somehow busts me (i.e. they decrypt and analyze my shit at layer 7)
3) I can sue their asses for violtating DMCA or whatever right?
---- "Logoff! That cookie shit makes me nervous!" - A. Soprano
Filter for copyrighted movies?
Zip it up. It'll be a tad smaller to boot.
Next stupidity?
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
I hope they are ready for the "if they are filtering that, why are't they filtering X" where X = Almost anything someone has their panties in a bunch about. I predict a SHARP rise in subscription losses.
I didn't know that point-of-sale systems run over VPNs. I figured they were either dedicated networks (which I guess VPN is one form) or they used SSL. This is good to know, thanks.
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Thanks for the correction. I actually knew better, but went with speel chechque. I guess my Spell Checker was out on a date with a Wiccan. 8)
Don't make me admit where my mind went! (Two brain cells to my name, one out looking for the other, and BOTH of them too small to be out in the big wide world.)
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
What you said seems reasonable to me. Thanks for the corrections.
However, everything you said leads away from the core issues I was trying to discuss.
It is difficult to tackle a huge sociological problem in a short Slashdot comment, but here are some main points:
First, something is wrong, somewhere. I am shocked at how much people dislike SBC, now AT&T. My personal experience with SBC is that it is amazingly disfunctional.
Second, taking the name AT&T is, in my opinion, a kind of legal fraud, but fraud nevertheless. People are bound to be confused and misled. AT&T had a very good reputation. SBC-AT&T is a completely different company, and has no connection in its culture with the old AT&T. At the very least, the SEC should require the company to disclose in the first sentence of any prospectus for its stock that there is no connection whatsoever.
Third, growth in market capitalisation, in this case, apparently does not necessarily mean success. The growth is only because SBC is buying companies. (I have done little research on the history of SBC, so I say apparently.)
Fourth, to an amazing degree, managers are amazingly poor at adjusting to the technology revolution. That was the point of my original comment, titled Dinosaur Managers: Please Retire!
It appears that 1) managers find that they can personally make more money by selling their companies, whether or not that is good for their companies or the customers, and/or 2) SBC is not good at what it does, but the companies it buys are worse.
Fifth, all of this is under-reported in the media. Business magazines exist to sell ads, and often stories about businesses are so faulty as to be on the edge of dishonesty, or they are in fact dishonest.
You said, "Yes. I work for the "New" AT&T. I worked for SBC. I'll be the first to knock them, but at least do it with the true things they do wrong. There are plenty."
Could you or another SBC employee, in an anonymous comment, list some of the plenty of things that are wrong, in your view.
"Besides, the DMCA is really about the copying of material that is already publicly available to anyone who wants to buy it."
That's just not true. The DMCA is so overbroad that it explicitly covers breaking anyone's encryption without their permission for any reason or creating or distributing a system that breaks the encryption. Ownership of the content is not relevant.
Your point about them having lots of money for lawyers is a good one to heed, though.
Looking for freelance Actionscript (Flash/Flex) or ColdFusion work and/or freelance developers. Email me, put Slashdot
The company I work for does both SSL and VPN connections for corporate networks. I used Starbucks just as an example but we have clients that are similar in size and operation. It's easier to buy some cheap circuit from us or even provide your own, of virtually any type even dial up and VPN to the corporate network or credit processor than to set up and figure out your own network and related headache. Worst case if our dial backups fail they can usually spool the credit cards until a connection is made again. I think giants like Wal-Mart do dedicated networks but it isn't as feasible for a smaller franchisee.
Thank you for the info on the optical splitters the NSA installed, I figured people would create a huge uproar over it, but I've thought that about a lot of things the past few years. Apparently they wanted to put a couple boxes on our network to do probably the same thing but we didn't go for it.
In the US legal tradition, privacy is a concept that arises from the right to be left alone on your own property -- this is what the 4th Amendment supports. Privacy while on the property of others or on public property doesn't exist for the most part. There are a handful of exceptions to this carved out by law, such as the privacy of your medical records, but these rights are not Constitutionally protected and can be taken away.
It's not that contracts can contravene statutory law -- it's that statutory law itself considers privacy to be mostly a matter of the sanctity of your home and your body. Whatever actions you take on someone else's property (e.g. your ISP's servers) are Constitutionally protected as a matter of their privacy and not yours. Additional statutes may apply, but current privacy law offers no protections in the case of filtering their bandwidth that they lease to you. The rights of AT&T to do whatever they want with their property and to restrict how others use it is supreme unless contravened by an act of Congress passing laws under the interstate commerce clause. There is nothing that compels them to let you do whatever you want with their bandwidth. That's a large part of why there's the whole net neutrality flap right now.
Personally, I vastly prefer the European approach to privacy over ours.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
They do. If you set the option StrictHostKeyChecking to "yes", then SSH will refuse to talk to a machine whose key is not already in the local database. So the administrator can create the database by presumably trusted means, and the users can't connect to machines without trusted keys.
Serious, non-creationist natural history museums exist for a reason, right?
Surely anyone who believes evolution believes it happened in a certain order. You should be able to arrange all the fossils to show in what order everything evolved, more or less. (I know that it's only science if it could conceivably be disproven and just hasn't been yet, but I hope you get my idea.)
There is a fine line between recklessness and courage... -- Paul McCartney
You write "Privacy while on the property of others or on public property doesn't exist for the most part" - however you still cannot be strip searched and have your cavities examined by a jewellers shop assistant JUST IN CASE you stole some goods.
*sigh* You're not listening. That's a violation of your body, which is your ultimate property. Furthermore, that's explicitly banned by the 4th Amendment as an unreasonable search. That has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not someone can tell you to shut up on their property or publicizing a recording of you trying to rob the place that they took with their equipment on their property (at least so long as they've posted a sign that you're being recorded in some states).
Filtering your internet traffic is not the same as violating your rectum. It's the same as saying that you can use my megaphone if you're going to say rude things about my favorite sports team over it. It's my megaphone, after all. Actually, to heck with analogies -- filtering internet traffic is filtering internet traffic. It has nothing to do with your body or your personhood any more than speech, which the Supreme Court has long held can be censored by the owners of property you're standing on or using.
They are actually filtering your DATA which is carried on their bandwidth that they lease you.
So what? It's on their property, and it's using bandwidth that could be provisioned to customers doing thing that they like. Under current law, that's their right. There's no explicit protection -- unlike physical packages where there's a whole body of law preventing tampering with mail. Barring a lack of explicit legislative action, there is nothing in US law to stop them.
GET THIS THROUGH YOUR HEAD. Your analogies mean jack; all that matters is what the law IS, not what you think it should be.
That's why there's the current flap about net neutrality in the US. Many of us WANT a law that would protect us from this sort of abuse. The only reason we NEED such a law is because one currently doesn't exist. Congress has the power to regulate this under the interstate commerce clause, but without such regulation over 200 years of federal cout case law comes down in favor of AT&T. End of story.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
It is violation of YOUR privacy to examine YOUR data.
Ethically, perhaps; I like to think so, anyway. As a matter of US law, no. How many times do I have to explain to you that philosophy/ethics and the laws on the books are two different things?
Under US law, "search" has a very specific meaning. It means to search your property and personal effects. It does not mean simply to look at anything another person is doing. If you decide to go running through the middle of my store dressed in a clown suit, it isn't "search" for me to know that. If I dig through your purse because you checked it with me, that is "search."
Now, when it comes to AT&T, it's well within their right (under current law) for them to decide that they don't like BitTorrent traffic. They can decide that all BitTorrent traffic should be restricted to 1 KB/sec for each IP. Guess what? It's their bandwidth; they get to decide how to use it.
It is nothing to do with a megaphone - you are leasing bandwidth.
Yes, LEASING -- as in, you don't own it. It isn't yours. It's theirs. This is what you need to get through your head. Your data is just ephemeral, electrical states in real, physical property that belongs to them and is under their control. Your data (as a property concept) has less rights than their hardware. Which bring me to my next point...
Just as your letter is not the property of USPS and your parcel is not the property of DHL - true or false?
You act like checking your IP traffic is equivalent to opening a package. You've made this ridiculous analogy repeatedly but IP traffic has absolutely no resemblance to a sealed package. Instead, it's more like sending postcards around. All the data that's needed for AT&T to decide whether to block or restrict traffic they don't like is out there in the open for them to read -- in fact, they HAVE to read that information to get the packet to the right place.
Your data is not a sealed package. With a real package, there is some expectation of privacy because it's real, physical piece of property that belongs to you and is only temporarily being remanded into their custody, and there's an expectation that the carrier will not know what's inside because it's closed.
Your data isn't like that. Your data is wide open for anyone to see. Who it's from and where it's going is right there in the header. Heck, your data doesn't even exist except as an expression of the state of their hardware. AT&T is not breaking into your private property to steer your data around anymore than a post office employee looking at a postcard is.
But, hey, let's pretend that your data is like a package. Guess what? DHL & UPS can refuse to deliver your package or send it along as less than optimal route if they feel like it. They can tell you right up front, "No thanks; we don't deliver live animals or explosives, and we don't deliver to U.S. post office boxes or shacks in the middle of the woods. Sorry." They make the refusal of such packages part of their policy. If AT&T feels like it doesn't want to deliver pirated content, then that's their right too.
AT&T is under no more legal obligation to accept all data transmissions or to grant them all equal and fair bandwidth than UPS is under and obligation to take every package and give it equal treatment. The US post office can't really do much to refuse packages beyond what Congress has decreed is unsafe, but private carriers can.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Looking at a clown in your shop is not a search - stripping him down and examining everything about him with a fine-toothed comb is.
It's *almost* like that was my point. Good of you to repeat it in such a way as to suggest that you completely missed it.
It is a load of b*ll*cks to say it is "like sending postcards around" - you cannot read or see my emails by looking at the phone line - you need equipment to 'open' it up and sort it in order and so be able to 'read' it.
Yeah... special equipment... equipment like the router that gets your data from point A to point B. Seriously, do you fundamentally not understand how the IP transmissions work? Data is divided up into packets with each packet containing "envelope data" telling the router where to send the packet. Without reading this info, your data can't get anywhere. What, did you think that they had to close their eyes and fling packets around until they magically arrived at their destination?
That data is more than sufficient to make a very simple piracy filter. Block or degrade all traffic to The Pirate Bay and to well known BitTorrent trackers, and you've made some progress. Inside the IP envelope is the always unencrypted TCP envelope. With that information, you can begin to determine what protocol a person is speaking which can let you filter certain protocols intended for P2P file sharing.
You don't have to even actually read packets to degrade a P2P connection, which is why Bram Cohen thought that adding encryption to the BitTorrent protocol was pointless. If you notice that a user has opened hundreds of low bandwidth connections to hundreds of different IPs, then you can almost guarantee that the user is using a P2P file sharing system. It's a simple matter then to cap their bandwidth at that point without even reading their data.
You think that ISPs are going to waste the resources trying to perfectly identify who's sharing legit data and pirated data? Oh, heck no. They're just going to impede anyone suspicious, and they'll alter the terms of their agreement with you to allow it. Blacklists against known pirate sites, whitelists for business partners, and simple, false-positive prone, dragnet rules for everything else will be the rule of the day. Your privacy isn't being violated by them doing so -- you've handed them all the info they need for it.
Is it perfectly legal for phone companies to listen in to the intangible data (i.e. electronic signal) of your private phone conversations over your LEASED line?
No. But that's because there are explicit laws preventing them from listening to and recording your conversations. However, there's nothing to prevent an ISP from using the information needed to deliver your data to deprioritize it or block it so long as they aren't recording it. As long as they aren't recording it, wiretapping provisions don't apply and your analogy once again breaks down because the law is not about analogies but about specific and tightly defined acts.
You keep trying to extend laws meant for very specific situations into situations where they don't apply. Try to understand this. You're just being mulish about this. If such laws existed, we wouldn't have to be fighting for them in the net neutrality debates right now.
BTW: How do private carriers know what is in parcel to refuse sending?
Well, first they tell you up front and make you sign a contract to not send certain things. It's in the fine print of the receipt you sign that you have to abide by certain rules. Almost always, the things they bar are things that require special handling and which cause troubles if not specially handled. Live animals are pretty easy to detect at the counter as long as you're sending them in a way that intends to keep them alive at the destination. Plus, when they inevitably ignore all your "this side up" and "fragile" warnings, the squeals of pain from the animals being tossed about inside have a way of
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
I understood - it was you who missed my point.
No I didn't. You seem to think that looking at information that is unconcealed is the same as a strip search. It isn't, which was my point in highlighting the difference.
V> Yeah... special equipment... equipment like the router that gets your data from point A to point B.
It only requires steam from a kettle for USPS to open and read your letter and seal it up again - but it is illegal.
Can you really consider yourself to have a single shred of intellectual integrity after making such an argument? The post office doesn't need to open your letter to deliver it. The address is on the outside. An IP packet has no "inside" or "outside." This will probably make the fifth or sixth time that I've had to say this, but everything that is needed to filter piracy is available in the portions of an IP packet that must be read by the ISP's hardware to deliver it.
If this is a violation of your privacy, then it's just as much a violation of your privacy when the postman reads the address on the outside of your letters to know where to deliver them. These are functionally the same kind of information.
I am aware of how IP transmissions and packets work thanks - I know for example that the router doesn't need people to watch over and help direct each of the individual packets.
Neither does it need people to filter out pirate traffic, then. It's all automated once the rules are set up, much like the routing tables are.
The data is your property - the ISP is merely the carrier.
Your concept of property doesn't match US law. Deal with it.
Fact is - nobody at my ISP can read my emails without physical intervention - by examining the data processed by the router etc.
True or false?
Irrelevant. Intercepting and reading through your email has absolutely nothing to do with impeding piracy over P2P file sharing networks.
Wrong - nothing in there about it applying it only to recording - tapping does not mean just recording.
So let me get this straight: Even if you don't record the data anywhere... Even if you don't give a human access to read the data... Even if you don't track the state of the connection... Just by having hardware that reads any portion of any packet, you're guilty of wiretapping?
Hogwash. If your ridiculous assertion were true, then your ISP would be legally prohibited from delivering your IP traffic. Congratulations! You have proven that America is a police state where I am having my rights violated every time I successfully view Slashdot!
Traffic shaping is not wiretapping.
Here's a link for you to refuse to read in turn. US Code, Title 18, Section 119. Try framing your arguments on wiretapping in such a way that doesn't try to make every single thing that an ISP does in the course of its business a felony crime.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Once again, traffic shaping is not wiretapping. It does not constitute illegal "interception" under the code. Find me a definition of wiretapping or surveillance that includes traffic shaping or denial of transmission but does not also make illegal the standard delivery of such data by the same hardware that would otherwise be capable of performing the acts you don't like.
And do actually read the law before commenting further on it. After all, you might find the following paragraph interesting -- USC 2511 (2)(a)(i):
Setting simple routing rules does not constitution "service observing or random monitoring" since no data about the communications is being tracked. Monitoring the data for later analysis might unless it's meant for "service quality control checks" (i.e. improving the quality of filtering).
Also relevant -- USC 2511 (2)(d):
If the terms and conditions of your ISP demand that you give permission for them to shape traffic to discourage unlawful behavior and abuse of the service, then this section of the code might well protect your ISP from prosecution.
Next up is USC 2511 (2)(h)(ii)
This part might even be stretchable to allow the logging of piracy-related related data if the MPAA or RIAA are AT&T customers, but it would be a stretch. I could see a judge ruling either way depending on how well the lawyers on each side presented their case.
And that is the law. If you want to argue it further, take it to the judge, 'cause I don't care anymore.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
I guess it is time to get a new ISP
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks