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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.'"
AT&T the phone company is a common carrier. AT&T the ISP isn't. The ISP can do pretty much whatever it wants with "it's" network without any repercussions from the government. They never had a neutral status to begin with, so I don't see how this changes anything. AT&T has to abide by the DMCA at a minimum. This is just them being nice to the RI/MPAA and other such groups.
It's just the protocol header that is encrypted with Bittorrent, not the data and it is not particularly good encryption
and it doesn't really stop ISPs from specifically throttling Bittorrent traffic (which is the issue today).
You can route Bittorrent through an SSH tunnel which would encrypt the data as well. Presumably you'd need a VPN service provider because I don't think a shell account provider would take to kindly to widespread use of their services in this way.
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.