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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!
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... 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.
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
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.
ISPs are not common carriers. There is a difference between voice and data, according to (stupid) law.
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.
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.
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.
Glad to see the US ISPs joining the ranks of Chinese ISP
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.
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)
So...actually, I am curious: can you avoid AT&T networks? Maybe Google will need to start using all the dark fiber they were supposedly buying a while back?
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.
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 ?
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 ----
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.
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.
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.
AT&T Announces Plans to Filter All Mention of Illegal Wiretapping.
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