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AT&T Invests in Filtered Networking
Filtered Coward writes "Last summer, AT&T announced its intention to begin filtering copyrighted content at some point. The telecom has now bought a chunk of Vobile, whose core product is VideoDNA. "Like other systems of its kind, VideoDNA develops a unique signature from every frame of video. The signature is meant to be robust enough to survive various transformations and edits, and it can then be used to run matches against incoming content.' Vobile claims that VideoDNA is good enough to be used on video when transmitted over a network. 'Based on the complexity of the problem, we suspect that anything initially deployed by AT&T will fall far short of a robust P2P video filter. But should AT&T truly have its eyes on just such a prize, the company would be in a powerful position to impose its own policies on the entire US, since it owns major parts of the Internet backbone.'"
This seems to imply that copyright-infringing video is being streamed over the network. Does this ever happen? More likely it is broken up into completely arbitrary chunks, which may or may not contain an entire frame and are unlikely to be delivered in sequential order. Furthermore, any form of network or P2P encryption currently in use ought to be able to defeat this. I wonder how much AT&T will be spending on this plan?
Breakfast served all day!
noooooooooo!
to use encryption.
Encryption can beat this, but should it have to? Now we've got to throw a lot of computing power at a problem just to get around our nominally "common carriers."
I think we can all agree that there's a problem: lots of illegal video transmission is happening online. And while some of the slashdot crowd consists of "information wants to be free" hippies, there is also a good community of people who reasonably understand the value of intellectual property rights. But I don't think anyone is excited about a solution like this, which clearly removes the user's fair use rights and common sense.
So where's the balance? Can a technical solution exist that will simultaneously stop the illegal pirating of movies and TV shows (which would be good), and allow other uses (even short clips, parodies, etc)? I think the answer is no. The determination of fair use relies heavily on intent, and no technical system will be able to determine that very effectively.
--
NerdKits: Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation.
"the company would be in a powerful position to impose its own policies on the entire US, since it owns major parts of the Internet backbone."
It does not take too long for customers to abandon any company, which does not serve them the way how the customers want to be served.
Any "volunteer policing" company is at risk...
If they can filter "coprighted" content, then they can "identify" said content. They could flag users and/or collect info for the *AA.
I thought telecoms were immune to certain types of litigation because they are neutral carriers of data. If a person makes a phone call or uses a bulletin board to commit a crime, the teleco is not part of the conspiracy. They are neutral. If AT&T starts filtering out "criminal" activity (and what jury of peers determined that anyhow?!), then are they giving up their neutral status? If they try to filter any material, will they be liable for all the material that inevitably slips through their net?
Also, how do they pick out copyright material for which a license has been granted compared to material that is "criminal" activity?
So.. there is NO possibility of a false positive occuring with this technology?
-Myke
Ok, following that logic, free yourself from the oil companies. And while you're at it, the food distribution monopolies. Tired yet? How about freeing yourself from the power company?
Two of the above were supposed to be public-serving municipal utilities. They were granted breaks to serve the public. This concept is now abstracted by the FCC, which no longer needs to recognize utilities in this way, rather, based on recent telecommunications law and the whims of the NTIA are what govern what AT&T does.
Go ahead; try to escape them. We no longer have the constructs to do this. These are also the same companies that are willing to, without a warrant, give up your calls, your Internet usage data, and anything else the current administration asks for. Do you think that they're going to listen to YOU-- especially when you might have nexus to sue them? I hardly think so.
Volunteer policing? What do you think they're doing NOW?
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
You know what is next, they're going to throttle anything that is encrypted lest it have any illegal content that they can't scan. comcast was nothing just wait until the new overlords take over. Not only that but I'll bet they'll try to get the support of the legal system somehow...
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
What about Fair use?
or, what if frames are the same between 2 different movies. (Fade to black, fade to white, common things like FBI warning, etc...)
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
Allows you to fairly use content in a situation which merits it, for example:
* Educational material
* Parodies
* Licensed use
* Short clips
* Lots of others
I'm not in the USA, but say for example I own a hard copy of a movie or TV show on DVD, am I "allowed" to stream it from home during my lunch break or after work when this system is possibly live?
Remember, if they are doing filtering it means they are no longer a common carrier, what is the legality of this in regard to third party content; if I were to transfer illegal content over their connection will they be liable for this because they haven't filtered it out? Or will the law apply to them when it suites em.
There are so many holes in this I couldn't possibly see this implemented, not to mention the resources that'd be required on their end to keep up with the constant change in codecs/compression methods and to be able to decode it in realtime.
Yeah, it's just speculation at the moment, but in a really dark and unfunny way I can see PHBs combined with RIAA/MPAA mafia seriously pushing something similar based on their draconian previous tendancies.
Dear AT&T,
I have been a voice customer with you for many, many years, and I have chosen to get my internet service from you in the days of yore - 1996, with a 56k modem, and four years later, I upgraded to your residential ADSL product. I've always been content with your service - sure, the random two-hour downtimes at 1 AM every four or five months piss me off, but I understand that sometimes, you just gotta do it.
I've done my part in being a loyal customer; I only call when I'm sure the problem lays beyond my DSL modem, I don't torrent often, and I've never tried to do anything shady to your other customers. Over the past decade, you've treated me well by not blocking inbound port 80 traffic. That's why I haven't ever moved to a much faster Cable connection. Hell, I even work for a CLEC and if I was so inclined, I could have a free 1.5 SDSL line - but I haven't done that because you've given me no reason to go through the hassle of set-up.
You might have spied on me. Don't get me wrong - I'm plenty pissed off about that. But I know it wasn't anything personal. I know how upper management can be when the NSA comes knocking. The way things are going, I think you'll ultimately answer to us for what you did, so I won't stress too much about it. Anything important is encrypted, anyways.
But now, my dear AT&T, for the first time in a decade, I don't know what to think about you. Your problems with torrenting and streaming video are that you don't have enough bandwidth to accommodate all of your customers. You've grossly oversold your network's capacity, just like my company does, and now you're being bit for it. It's an unpleasant situation for you - trust me, I know exactly how that feels.
But now, how many billions are you going to spend on this fingerprinting system for video? How many people will work on this project? How many legitimate packets of mine is this going to slow down or drop? And, in the first week this system goes live, won't everybody just turn crypto on and use YouTube over https? Billions of dollars...flushed right down the toilet in an instant!
Now, as I said, I'm just a humble legacy customer. I started out at SNET, then get assimilated into SBC/Yahoo, finally ending up as a customer of the Great Bell Company. But, might I, a meek twice-legacy customer, suggest that you ax this project and ***invest the fucking money in buying more fiber, thereby solving the actual problem***?
I mean, come on. What the fuck do you care if people are stealing the latest blockbuster using your network? You're not in the business of being moral guardians, and there's no way in hell a court would ever hold you liable for something like this.
Just know, my old friend, that if you do end up implementing this, the first time one of my packets gets dropped mistakenly, you damn well better believe I'll take my company up on that free SDSL line. And I'll be living here for a long time to come.
Sincerely,
Anonymous
The Happiest AT&T Customer Ever
It's taken under 30 mins since this story was posted and the obvious is already been pointed out
a) this technology can't work - too much overhead looking through all those packets
b) will probably flag several false positives
c) can be circumvented with encryption
AT&T doesn't have to do anything though - they just have to appear to be looking out for the media companies. Perhaps even catch a few dumb people who upload a lot and don't use encryption and hand them over to the media companies to sue. Makes many people appropriately scared of Ma Bell. And who do you think the media companies will choose to deal with to distribute their content on the mobile and internet platform. Well its not like they will have much choice really - IIRC the FCC relaxed rules that prevented AT&T from charging more for access to its lines. Remember when the government broke AT&T up - probably not which is the problem.
Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.
What do they gain from this? Last I checked, they produced no media, just conveyed it.
show.01 show.02 show.03 show.04 show.05 show.06 show.07 show.08 show.09 show.rar show.sfv show.nfo Can't match video inside multiple rars now can ya? And thats the main for of video transfer over p2p anyway, at least in the scene.
Based on the relative "robustness" of past DRM-like encryption schemes - I expect this to be voraciously cracked within a couple of days upon release.
The people impementing said encryption schemes are not the same individuals cracking them. Because of that, the schemes will be continually cracked.
Think: narcotics officer whose never done drugs.
http://rtfm.insomnia.org/~qg/trolls-need-attention.php
What would stop someone from, before making a torrent, putting a video file inside an encrypted RAR? What would stop video sites from streaming over TLS?
You don't even have to encrypt.
It's a PITA for torrent users, but you could simply RAR the video files.
How long is it before movies start being watermarked in a way to send up blatant and non-ambiguous flags? I feel like that would be the best situation for both parties, putting aside the issue of whether or not AT&T has any right to filter content based on whether some program thinks it's copyrighted.. The watermarking would be to ensure a constant and distinctive signature for the film in any format rather than the current privacy invading nonsense of being able to trace copies back to individuals. The hit rate in various formats would improve and the false positive rate would go down, because the film would be encoded to produce a similar signature in all formats and because that signature could be chosen to be something truly statistically insignificant (messing with various brightnesses of pure black for instance - all would appear the same but have different digital signatures, creating something truly distinctive). Of course, such systems would be circumvented eventually by those with know-how, and it's useless against encryption...
Seriously, if this will catch all "illegally traded" video, I guess it will no longer be necessary to load it full of DRM software to ensure its not transmitted.
Also, what about the legitimate transmission of copyrighted video? Say from NBC.Com to me? Is it gonna be blocked because its copyrighted?
If Yes: You've just eliminated the need for streaming video on the net.
If No: Then all you need to do is copy video from sites that don't use this process on it and start streaming that.
Wow, ATT proves its intelligence yet again.
This filter will only apply to plain video information,
but what about encrypted video files? It's enough to
zip the archive with a strong password and nobody will
be able to understand what's inside. If they are going
to deploy this technology worldwide, the p2p will evolve
into an encrypted only network with some password database
somewhere.
It's an escalation and drives nowhere.
They seem to be betting the future is an un-free internet. Interesting, eh?
expandfairuse.org
Not sure if I missed another comment, but can anyone please explain to me how this system would KNOW for a fact that a movie I was downloading wasn't coming from a legitimate source? Is it strictly a white-list? If so, how could they possibly keep track? Sure, knowing when traffics coming from Apple or Amazon is easy enough, but there are far smaller carriers of copyrighted digital materials. Maybe I'm wrong. And if there are not any currently, are we resigning ourselves to a world where there are exactly 2 (or 5) outlets for digital, copyrighted entertainment?
If a school gets permission for their students to log in and view a video online - will their filter flag this as violating traffic?
Is this the end game? No more FYEs, no more Record & Tape Traders (insert your local music shop,) no more middlemen whatsoever (except Apple who snuck in the back door?) Just major content owners, restrictive rights management (many if not all major companies opposing mere cross-device interoperability,) and 'the rest of us' who must do their bidding thanks to our wonderful friends at AT&T, Cisco, et al?
If somebody doesn't step up and put an end to it all, this will be one of the greatest business coups of modern times. Sorry, just pissed, don't mean to be preachy, but srsly.
And the war continues.
"The fight for freedom has only just begun." - Geert Wilders
How does this affect legally paid for streaming movies, such as the ones provided by netflix and legitimate online video services? How is AT&T going to be able to tell the difference between an authorized stream and an illegal one?
AT&T, and every other big LEC, buys one of everything. They've got equipment and software from thousands of vendors, and this probably isn't the first filtering system they've developed.
To paraphrase an ex-Baby-Bell engineer I worked with: AT&T will probably ride this horse as far as it can, decide it's not the right horse, shoot it, then walk back to find another horse.
I have had a Bellsouth now ATT fiber optic connection for about 5 years.. It was one of the fastest Bellsouth connections for a long time.. Then ATT happened... It got real slow and then the shutdowns started to happen... Multi-call to what used to be Customer Support fell on muted ears... Well.. This is where it gets interesting.. I had two different ATT techs come out to check the lines.. BOTH TOLD ME THE SAME THING AS TO WHAT MY ISSUE CAUSE WAS and IS.. ATT deliberately throttles the fiber lines in Georgia... Once upon a time I had 3 up and 3 down.. Now I am lucky to have 1.5 down and 700 up... So I expect them to get even worse before it gets better... My neighbor, who works for ATT has twice the speed I do and ATT tells me I cannot get that.... Frankly and this in my opinion, ATT sucks.. They did b4 they were busted up and now again since they were allowed to reestablish their monopoly on the US telecom market.. and yes they have control of most of uunet via the Worldcom suck up...
Brilliant! So, when someone BUYS copyrighted content from ITunes, or Amazon, or some other content provider, AT&T's filter will detect it and block it.
[Insert pithy quote here]
I tried to create my own one time pad by XORing the Windows install CD with the Ubuntu install.... My computer burst into flames...
Comcast does the same damn thing, in Georgia. So you won't have any luck with them either. Picking a broadband provider, in this area, is like choosing between the mumps or the measles.
He who laughs last...probably didn't get the joke.
Why should AT&T even care about bittorent? Sure it uses a lot of bandwidth but so does YouTube, and downloading music "legitimately" they shouldn't care what I am using my network that I payed for, whether that is bittorent, YouTube, downloading Linux ISOs, iTunes or whatever, they are the ISP Internet Service Provider not some arm of the *IAA. Their goal should be to provide internet at a fast speed and not care at all whatever you want to do, and unless in the contract it said so, that means don't give bittorent or other P2P networks lower priority, seriously, what is with all these companies fighting innovation.
There is no "disagree" moderation, and troll, flamebait and overrated are not valid substitutes
Steps like this are going to drive the encryption of all traffic, which is going to increase the utilization of the network. besides the overhead of encryption, it eliminates the possibility of compression and caching, which are very important aspects to WAN acceleration.
The question remains is this something that will have a greater financial impact on the consumers or AT&T. It certainly make thing much more difficult for organizations that are sniffing traffic.
AT&T will sell / lease this service to other - media company related - ISPs. "Want to download a movie from iTunes, Amazon, or even TPB? Sorry, not if it's one of ours - but here's a link to our video store..."
What part of "a well regulated militia" do you not understand?
I wonder how A Fair(y) Use Tale would be flagged by the "Video DNA" system. For those who don't know, this is a video consisting entirely of tiny clips from Disney movies. Most clips provide only a single word. When strung together, they explain what Fair Use is and why it's important. The use of the Disney copyrighted material clearly falls under Fair Use, yet Video DNA might flag it (and thus AT&T might block it) simply because the material is copyrighted.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
1. reconstruct a tcp stream and figure out what is bittorrent traffic and what is ssh, ssl etc.
2. decrypt Bittorrent encryption.
3. put the psuedo-randomly-ordered chunks of torrent data into the final file[s] (requires downloading the whole thing).
4. put the rar files most p2p movies are contained in into one piece and decompress.
5. compare the divx with the footprint for the dvd they have (remembering that its all been recoded n-times and possibly editted/cropped a bit so the divx timescale/image is not much like the vobs).
and all in real-time/wire-speed! riiiiiiiiiight. good luck with that one videodna.
oh anyone know if stargate atlantis s04e08 is on thepiratebay yet?
#include <sig.h>
Of course no court would find them liable. But that's not the issue. The issue is that AT&T wants to enter the entertainment business, just like all the other big facility based providers. They want to become your "one stop source" for everything in audio, video, gaming, and reading (and bill you for everything on one big bill). But they face TWO obstacles to that. The content industry has probably already made it clear to them what they must do in order to acquire the right to "broadcast" their content. And they also worry their own revenues might be impacted by the same material coming over from other sources.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
This sounds similar to how the Great Firewall works, instead of ip blocking, it filters and replaces censored sites.
AT&T is a traitor to America and the principles of freedom.
Revoke their fucking charter for the sake of our children.
Spying bastards.
If anything, in light of duplication technology that can copy even more stuff even better, copyright is even more relevant that it was before. Before any duplication technology existed, there were only physical things. There were no recordings of medieval "Britney the Spear" and no way to copy them, so of course there would be no need of law to protect them.
Your argument is: "Well it wasn't illegal to shoot people before guns were invented, so I should be able to shoot anyone at any time" (note I said shoot, not kill don't go off on a tangent)
As far as the teleco companies are concerned, you can be assured that the only thing they really give a shit about is network throughput, overall availability, and efficient use of their bandwidth. At this moment in time, the transfer of large-scale video (Read: HD-DVD and the like) is really ripping into their bandwidth. Also, with broadband communications starting to open up even more, their once seemlessly talking network is starting to stutter, and they realize that the only way to get the gal talking right again is by increasing her bandwidith -- and you don't need me to tell you how expensive that endeavor is going to be! On top of all of this, the vast majority of the telcos' bandwidth is being used for illegal transfer of copyrighted materials. Thus, they are more than willing to throttle specific P2P traffic, especially when they are well aware that 99% of the files being transfered are copyrighted material. By doing this, the telco's do a few things that make a lot of people happy: 1) They increase the their overall throughput, making the other non-P2P users much happier, even though the vast majority don't realize that their connections are much smoother and faster because of this situation. 2) They make the copyright holders' a bit happier (pun intended :^)),
knowing that the major tool being used for piracy is being throttled. Time
to market is everything to thier industries.
In closing, all I can really say and expect to be somewhat heard is this:
if bittorent continues to dominate in network traffic un-throttled, you can
take it to the bank that the government is really going to step in
and lay down the law, forcing the ISP's to monitor and report all
illegal traffic to local and international authorities. As a matter of fact,
I think it's down-right frickin' stupid that most of you people aren't
throttling your own connections yourselves, trying to make sure that you
fly in under the radar before this situation elevates. Lack of foresight
and frickin' dumb.
I eat spaghetti code out of a bit-bucket while sitting at a hash table, and I pay for the meal with cache!
That's the problem with every video fingerprinting system. It first has to be able to see the content. So while you have to upload unencrypted video to YouTube where it can be checked, I hardly expect that this will have a chance against the next round of encrypted P2P transfers. Even now, share an encrypted ZIP file with the decryption key as part of the filename.
In the end, a whole lot of money on fingerprinting software will be spent. Only the rawest newbie users will be blocked. The ISP's will point out how they're "Doing everything possible." Your rates will go up. And only the filtering software makers will be making money. So what else is new? News at 11.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Learn how to use the signature function on Slashdot and stop spamming those of us with signatures disabled.
I find your post painful to read. You are a tired, cynical, resigned coward. America doesn't need you. The world doesn't need you. You are part of the problem. A spoiled middle class cock who never stood up and fought for anything their life. Everything you say, you could have put in a positive way instead of that sarcastic snivelling tone. The whole reason your country is in such a mess is because of people like you.
I find your post painful to read. You are a tired, cynical, resigned Anonymous Coward. America doesn't need you. The world doesn't need you. You are part of the problem. A spoiled middle class cock who never stood up and fought for anything their life. Everything you say, you could have put in a positive way instead of that sarcastic snivelling tone. The whole reason your country is in such a mess is because of people like you.
His secret key consisted of the choice of CDs and the fact that he XORed them together. Since he posted it on Slashdot, it's now it's his public secret key. As opposed to his secret secret key. Unfortunately, publicity and secrecy are not commutative.
Any hash algorithm, coupled with any compression algorithm would run past this like diarrhea past a sphincter! It would also mean shorter, faster downloads and checksums to show whether AT&T or any other meanies were screwing with the download, and potentially re-transmit or optionally, fix the damage on arrival, no matter how much AT&T tried to destroy it (gimmie that forward error correction baby!). Satellites use FEC all the time (retransmits are expensive), and the technology has been in use for more than 20 years. So thanks for the idea, and please forgive me if I smirk (ok Bellylaugh) in your general direction.
If ATT starts policing some content, then they are responsible for all content trafficed over their network. It would be interesting to see how they handle that much responsibility. Surly, illegal content will slip through, which they will be responsible for. I hope they do it.