Virgin Media To Trial Filesharing Monitoring In UK

Shokaster writes "The Register reports that Virgin Media are to begin monitoring file sharing using a deep packet inspection system, CView, provided by Deltica, a BAE subsidiary. The trial will cover about 40% of customers, although those involved will not be informed. CView's deep packet inspection is the same technology that powered Phorm's advertising system. Initially Virgin Media's implementation will focus on music sharing and will inspect packets to determine whether the content is licensed or unlicensed, based on data provided by the record industry. Virgin Media emphasised that records will not be kept on individual customers and that data on the level of copyright infringement will be aggregated and anonymised."

Comments

Virgin media?

[Anonymous Coward]

Deep packet inspection? All sounds like a porn operation to me.

Re:Virgin media?

[auric_dude]

Not a porn operation but a Phorm operation.

How do they know?

[Nursie]

I have a friend who's an amateur musician and devices (his mobile phone) have started to deny him the ability to play his own music due to it being "unlicensed".

How the hell do these clowns expect to be able to figure out what's unauthorised copying?

Re:How do they know?

[zonky]

What mobile phone make/model was this?

Re:How do they know?

[timmarhy]

why would they bother? all they have to do is make legal threats and demand payment or they will haul you into court which will be even more expensive for you.

people on here think they have somehow been winning this fight to control media, when they have been kidding themselfs. the fight hasn't even STARTED yet...

Re:How do they know?

[Ethanol-fueled]

The more false-positives they measure, the more they can make the case for increasingly intrusive DPI which will inevitably include personally identifying users and meddling with their traffic if not disconnecting them.

It's nice to see the military industrial complex involved in the music industry's problem.

Re:How do they know?

[Anonymous Coward]

Only the RIAA is allowed to distribute music there will be no other source or at least that is looking like their plan.

I suggest a boycott during the 3rd Quarter: April 1, 2010- June 30, 2010, and 4th Quarter: July 1, 2010 - September 30, 2010
Someone could set up a nice website, people could vote on a list of demands/consumer rights, and people could start an email/facebook campaign. A dent in the industries profits might get these people's attention.

I for one think the Public Domain needs to be given back the original copyright was 14 years with a one time extension.

Re:How do they know?

[twotailakitsune]

Boycotts do not work. I would think we would fingered that out after what Jefferson and Madison did in the start of the 1800's. "Free ships make free trade"

Re:How do they know?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well duh, as the article summary says, they're going to ask the music industry ... therefore, obviously, EVERYTHING that looks like music is copyrighted in their opinion.

Re:How do they know?

[Darkness404]

Look, the RIAA and their equivalents in other countries do not see losses in profit as "hey, we better do something different", no they say "PIRACY!!!11!1111!1!1" and use that to fuel more crap laws to extend copyright. Boycotts do not work. Even if indie records outsell RIAA records, the big labels would simply buy the smaller labels.

Re:How do they know?

[Dr. Evil]

Don't worry. It'll all be throttled soon. I predict that anyone who wants to produce content will need a special business line.

To use VoIP, that'll be throttled, as will non-branded chat apps. Anything that will allow a telco-style grab for features. The most expensive will be the one which permits encryption for working from home... unless you're a big company who can afford a mutual kickback relationship with the telco.

The days of the free Internet are coming to an end. It'll be as dead as devoid of creative talent as radio and television soon. Because, well, we have to protect the artist.

Re:How do they know?

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe their new policy regarding music as set by the UKRIA is...

"All music is considered unlicensed unless pre-arranged and approved by UKRIA solicitor in writing at least 4 weeks prior to attempted copying"

CAPTCHA: sucker

Re:How do they know?

[Nefarious Wheel]

The days of the free Internet are coming to an end.

Perhaps it's time we invented something else. We're still here, aren't we?

How about some peer-to-peer mechanism that bypasses the ISP's altogether?

Ok, that's at least half said in jest. But this whole matter, relative to the sheer astounding amount of information that passes between people, puts me in mind of trying to dig the sea out of a sand castle. The rough note is that we have to stay ahead of the bastards who try to limit the means of communication, or put a tap on it for control and money. The cool note is my firm belief that we always will. Samizdat brought down one global empire, and something new, morally similar yet technically astute might bring down another - and I'm not talking about the US Government, here. I'm talking about a music cartel.

Re:How do they know?

[Anonymous Coward]

And yet their revolution started on a boycott.

Re:How do they know?

[jimicus]

How about some peer-to-peer mechanism that bypasses the ISP's altogether?

Easy enough if you're using dialup. Kind of hard, however, when the ISP owns the line going into your house.

Re:How do they know?

[the_womble]

I have a friend who's an amateur musician and devices (his mobile phone) have started to deny him the ability to play his own music due to it being "unlicensed".

Its not his music. All music belongs to the properly recognised music industry. You see the music industry is God, therefore nothing can be created except by them or with their help.

He is clearly some sort of hippy communist terrorist music thief.

Re:How do they know?

[Hurricane78]

Simple: Everything that is not encrypted with the RIAA(-equivalent) stamp of DRM control.

Re:How do they know?

[L4t3r4lu5]

Has he cancelled the contract, sent the phone back, and moved to another company? Sounds like there's a serious issue with that telephone, and it's unfit for purpose.

Re:How do they know?

[Anonymous Coward]

i'm putting money it's an iPwn

Re:How do they know?

[TiberiusMonkey]

As I play "unlicensed" music daily on my iPhone that didn't come from iTunes and was ripped off CDs I think you're going to be out of pocket. Really have no idea what device would do what the above poster is talking about...

Re:How do they know?

[bluesatin]

Everyone seems to be presuming that his phone is at fault, but there are 2 parts to this equation, the phone and the music file.

Did your friend happen to encode his music in some god awful file format, that has DRM built in?

I can't imagine how a phone would label something as 'unlicensed' if it was in .MP3 format for example; there would be no difference between a licensed .MP3 and an unlicensed copy.

Re:How do they know?

[giorgiofr]

But not really hard when you deploy a wireless mesh network that simply disregards the existance of ISPs. That's how the internet started getting big, isn't it? Local islands of networked machines becoming more and more connected to each other until they were all inter-networked.
I don't understand why that can't be done again, except last time we needed ISPs to put down very expensive physical lines, while this time every trinket has wireless capabilities.
Last time I checked, mesh protocols had become quite good and lots of small, embedded router-thingies were available at cheap prices. So what's stopping us from building another internet?
Well in my case, national laws absolutely forbid me from doing that. Hopefully somewhere else it can be done. :( And so I answered my own question. I feel sad now

Re:How do they know?

[mario_grgic]

It would have to be one of those phones that you must use your cell service provider to upload music and files to it, without ability to do so directly from your computer. Bell Canada happily sells those to stupid customers.

Re:How do they know?

[TheRaven64]

You don't want to replace the Internet, just add more mesh networks near the edges. If you can route packets entirely over the mesh, the ISP never sees them. If you route some of your packets over your line and some over the line coming from a neighbour with a different ISP, then neither ISP can carry out man in the middle attacks and neither can get much useful information from traffic analysis.

Re:How do they know?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is exactly the problem I've had with a lot of automatic DRM schemes and devices over the years. I ranted about it related to the Sony NetMD minidisc players a number of years ago, whose DRM software assume that all music you want to put on your player is owned by Sony, is DRM'ed, and therefore disallowed to be copied to the player is prohibited. Which, if you think about it, makes the device completely useless. It does this even for unlicensed, un-DRM'ed tracks that, potentially, belong to you.

I think the insult involved with this is two-pronged: First up, the insult of not being able to do what you want with your data and your device that you paid perfectly good money for. But more insulting still is the notion that Sony (or whoever, Virgin Media in this case) are making the implicit statement that all media not belonging to them, coming from them, or not involved with their label in some way is illegitimate. Which is complete rubbish. You can't paint the world of copyright and content creation with such a wide brush because it doesn't work.

So your point about figuring out what's authorized and unauthorized is a perfectly valid one up to a point. Virgin can snoop your datastream and listen to the MP3 the bits fit together to make, and say "you downloaded a copy of X song that belongs to us." But as more and more users run encryption and/or download completely random things that Virgin can't figure out (like the standby example, Linux ISO's...) I predict that the mentality will be "you're using Bittorrent and/or running encryption, therefore you are automatically guilty of something (that we will determine at a later time)."

Re:How do they know?

[mpe]

Only the RIAA is allowed to distribute music there will be no other source or at least that is looking like their plan.

This has been an obvious conclusion for quite some time.

I suggest a boycott during the 3rd Quarter: April 1, 2010- June 30, 2010, and 4th Quarter: July 1, 2010 - September 30, 2010

At best this would do nothing, at worst it would give them "proof" that piracy was a serious issue.

I for one think the Public Domain needs to be given back the original copyright was 14 years with a one time extension.

If anything copyright terms should be shorter than they were in the 18th century, which was pre mass telecommunications and vehicles capable of speeds far in excess of any living creature.

Re:How do they know?

[EdIII]

people on here think they have somehow been winning this fight to control media, when they have been kidding themselfs. the fight hasn't even STARTED yet...

Is that a good thing, or a bad thing?

I can't fucking wait for the fight to get started. I'd be very impressed if their DPI can get signatures on what I am sending/receiving with VPN/SSL protected traffic, and usually at a minimum of 128-bit AES.

When you use hosted torrent solutions, ssl protected ftp transfers, and VPN tunnels back and forth between different locations and devices, it makes it pretty gosh darned hard to effectively inspect that traffic for content. I think the best researchers have been able to demonstrate is figuring out the type of traffic, not getting individual signatures on the content.

This is not very hard to setup. I am sure that there could be thousands of blog sites up within weeks once the fight starts showing people how to bypass the DPI by encapsulating their traffic with some form of encryption.

Of course, our methods of sharing data between each other will evolve to meet this new threats since encryption is not the complete solution for torrents, but seriously, BRING THE NEW THREATS NOW. We need to evolve past this point so that corporations and government figure out that they cannot win period.

Once we get to that point, it will be the end-game. The final decision. Outlaw encryption or let it remain free?

We need to get to that point sooner rather than later because it as that point, the point being the truly logical conclusion of our path, that our destiny will be decided with how we treat communications and the sharing of information in this brave new world.

Re:How do they know?

[EdIII]

I don't understand why that can't be done again, except last time we needed ISPs to put down very expensive physical lines, while this time every trinket has wireless capabilities.
Last time I checked, mesh protocols had become quite good and lots of small, embedded router-thingies were available at cheap prices. So what's stopping us from building another internet?

The reason why it cannot be done like that is simple: Peering and Transit Agreements.

Take 3 areas, like Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and Phoenix.

If every router and communications device in each of those cities had a reasonably powerful mesh transmitter, it is possible to construct mesh network "Internet" between all of the devices in each city allowing everyone to operate in much the same way as we do now.

How do you connect up Los Angeles to Las Vegas? How do you do it with enough bandwidth to support everyone in Las Vegas that wants to talk to Los Angeles, and vice versa? There is a rather large desert in between, both literally and figuratively. You will not have enough mesh nodes at the edges powerful enough to interconnect those two cities effectively.

Therefore, you need one or two of the big ISP's with their very expensive physical lines to transmit all of the traffic between Los Angeles and Las Vegas. Another ISP would need to involved to transmit that traffic to Phoenix.

Why would they do that? MONEY. They want to get paid. Who will pay them to send all of our mesh network traffic to Las Vegas? What is their incentive? How do they construct a business model around that?

There is your problem. All of us together essentially represent another ISP that will need to negotiate Peering and Transit Agreements (which always involve money exchanging hands) with ISP's to get our traffic to our brethren in other cities. How do you even organize all those mesh network people together and collect payments? It's like herding cats, especially since the idea of mesh networks is to free ourselves from control of the ISP's. You would be exchanging one master for another.

Mesh networks will only work when we don't need somebody to connect all of our mesh networks together to form a single entity. Until then, mesh networks could be at best a method to construct a TOR like network over existing, and paid for, traditional ISP networks. The primary benefits being anonymity and load balancing, while the primary drawback being that it requires a high level of altruism and for a very high percentage of mesh nodes to be connected to bandwidth that can support the whole infrastructure.

Maybe this could work if cities would fight back and establish their own fiber networks and public nodes, funded by taxpayer dollars. There is where you could get your bandwidth to connect Los Angeles to Las Vegas. However, from what I understand the ISP's fight those efforts tooth and nail right now. Very few cities are trying, and succeeding to roll out their own fiber and establish their own peering and transit agreements.

Re:How do they know?

[EdIII]

If you can route packets entirely over the mesh, the ISP never sees them.

Not exactly. An ISP does see them, just maybe not your ISP, if you even have one. At the very least, your ISP would not conclude those packets came from you.

At least one person in the mesh must have an ISP connection, or otherwise you are cutoff from the rest of the Internet since mesh networks most likely cannot provide contiguous coverage over the entire city, country, and much less the world.

That one person would be pretty pissed off too. Paying for an Internet connection essentially responsible for peering and transmit for every single mesh node connected to him? Sounds like fun.

If you route some of your packets over your line and some over the line coming from a neighbour with a different ISP, then neither ISP can carry out man in the middle attacks and neither can get much useful information from traffic analysis.

I dunno about that, or at least what you mean by "useful". If you are doing per-packet round robin across 3 WAN connections (2 of them being provided through a mesh link) then all of your shit is going to break instantly.
* Sessions on websites will not work.
* VOIP will not work, since it relies on UDP (most of the time) and is not setup to load balance its own transmission. That and how do you reassemble those packets to make any sense at all, especially when different connections could have different latencies?
* pretty much any secure connection will fail. Don't have to worry about MITM attacks when it does not work in the first place.

* VPN *could* work like that, but only as long as you have VPN setup to load balance across 3 different connections (IP addresses). Not a standard feature on most commodity routers I am afraid, and not even on middle to high end enterprise routers either. Setting the primary and secondary IP address won't cut it. That just provides fail-over from what I have seen on the routers I have worked with.

No, you are going to have do round robin per-session, not per-packet. You just lost most of the benefit you thought you had. ISP's can still perform traffic analysis on each one of those sessions just as if were coming from you.

Now, one thing you may not have thought of, is just how TOR like your suggestion really is. Plausible deniability is the heart of the TOR strategy, or as they put it, anonymity through doubt. If your defense is that you participate in a mesh based TOR network and that you are allowing anonymous (truly since it wireless) connections through you, they would need to prove it was *your* packets and not a remote mesh node's packets. The very worst they could do is terminate your service with claims you violated their TOS, if their TOS is setup to disallow such activity. The content owners would have an extremely hard time proving that it was you if the ISP's cannot even prove it. It would then change from copyright infringement to facilitating copyrighting infringement which is a different animal in court and the eyes of the law.

Maybe in the future we could load balance a session across multiple connections, but right now software is just not written to support that. The only way I know of doing that is through VPN setup a specific way, and only works because the webserver, fileserver, sip gateway, etc. still see all the packets coming from a single IP address and session.

Re:How do they know?

[giorgiofr]

You have a very good argument there. I must admit I am from a urban area in Europe and wasn't thinking of the logical implications of having large strecthes of land where no mesh net node would be available or the few existing ones would be overwhelmed by traffic.
Maybe the various mesh networking communities would be willing to finance long-range, possibly radio-based?, communication links to solve this issue, but then, as you point out, they'd just become ISPs themselves.
My project would fail :(

Re:How do they know?

[Anonymous Coward]

phone, and music.... What if I was listening to "elevator" music prior to a conference call. What if there was "music" in the background. What if the kids were singing "White Christmas" to Grandma?

I say lets try to confuse them.

[bintech]

Quick, everyone start sharing Barry Manilow songs.

Re:I say lets try to confuse them.

[Fex303]

Mr Manilow, this is an outstanding viral marketing campaign. I congratulate you on your forthcoming resurgence among the hard to reach tween/teen demographics.

Re:I say lets try to confuse them.

[IBBoard]

Or flood it out - everyone share public domain versions of classical music etc! (Stuff that will be recognised as "a known song that doesn't need a license").

Either that or everyone should just torrent large amounts Linux ISOs so that the DPI system generally has to monitor loads of stuff anyway before it determines that it isn't relevant.

encryption

[LividBlivet]

obfuscated connection in 3..2...1

Six months from now

[Ynot_82]

27th May 2010

Just 6 months after the announcement to monitor their network for illegal filesharers, Virgin Media has seen a dramatic decline in subscribers.
90% of their top tier customers (renting 20Mb/sec) have canceled their subscriptions
This figure is similar (82%) for their 10Mb/sec tier

Furthermore, the cost of the controversial detection methods (Deep Packet Inspection) has meant that the company has had to increase monthly subscription costs across all tiers by 10-20%
This has seen decline (albeit much smaller, at 47%) in their lowest tier of service

Re:Six months from now

[Anonymous Coward]

Only in your fantasies. Nothing will change. They'll keep the same subscriber level, and if there's any changes in level it will be due to deteriorating economic conditions.

Face it: the average schlub doesn't give a rat's ass about the security of their internet connection from the ISP itself. In their thoughts: "Why should I? I've got nothing to hide!"

Re:Six months from now

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree with the AC above me, and moreover: not only do people not care, but they don't generally even *know*. They don't understand the issues involved and have about as much understanding of their network connection as my cat has of internal combustion engines.

Plus, there's often not much choice. Where I live there's exactly ONE choice for broadband. Some of my friends have two, both fairly evil. What does one do when all the available choices suck?

Re:Six months from now

[flameproof]

True enough, but they still have to "grow" their business - ie, make new, future customers.

As an "unlicenced" musician with free stuff on the web which might be blocked, I don't plan on using Virgin now, do you? Would you recommend their service? How about just a little office smack-talk on behalf of how 'wonderful' Virgin Media is for sniffing your ass every time you decide to connect to their servers?

Yeah - that's the pro-active ticket.

Re:Six months from now

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed. I'm a Virgin Media customer and I won't be leaving because they're still the cheapest deal for me. I guess I'll be encrypting my torrents from now on.

Re:Six months from now

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, you mean their biggest bandwidth hogs will be going to other ISPs? Newsflash: Virgin Media would be cracking open the champange and dancing in the streets if that happened. And the other ISPs would be falling all over themselves to implement the same DPI system.

It's funny how little people understand how the Internet works, even on Slashdot.

Re:Six months from now

[causality]

Only in your fantasies. Nothing will change. They'll keep the same subscriber level, and if there's any changes in level it will be due to deteriorating economic conditions.

Face it: the average schlub doesn't give a rat's ass about the security of their internet connection from the ISP itself. In their thoughts: "Why should I? I've got nothing to hide!"

When are people going to learn that it's not about whether you have something to hide? It's about what they want to find and it always was.

Re:Six months from now

[Attaturk]

Well here's one Virgin cable customer (£30/month) that'll definitely be cancelling next week and specifying the reason for cancelling as deep packet inspection. Hopefully I won't be the only one with the sense to send that message.

Re:Six months from now

[Ynot_82]

Try Be
www.bethere.co.uk

Excellent service

Re:Six months from now

[Lord_Jeremy]

Except the average schlub is probably illegally downloading movies or music. So when they find out that their internet company is going to stop them from doing it, they're going to react badly. Piracy is very quickly becoming a mainstream phenomenon. It's not only "cool" to pirate stuff, it's practical and often expected.

Re:Six months from now

[Artifakt]

What about people who have some problem such as laggy connections and, not being too technically minded, make the jump in their minds to deep packet inspection being the hidden cause? Maybe deep packet inspection isn't even really slowing things down or glitching connections or whatever, but doesn't it sound like it would to the average person? What happens when these people think the real issue can be summed up as "This company is lying through their teeth to me", and not some technical explanation? So Virgin's most dumb but honest customers will be going to other ISPs? (And talking accordingly?)
      And what about the people who decide they don't need high speed at all if they can't be a bandwidth hog? They aren't going to call support and say, "I'm a bandwidth hog and you probably are glad to get rid of me!", they're going to say something such as "My needs have decreased, and you want too much for the kind of service I need now." Virgin won't see their least valued customers leaving, they will see a mix of problem customers and others leaving.
      Maybe over six months they lose 20% of their base. Half of that could be high demand, make problems users, great! But maybe the other half is bedrock customer base, moms and pops, and they are talking about how the company is like Sirius Cybernetics.

Re:Six months from now

[Lincolnshire Poacher]

> I'm a Virgin Media customer and I won't be leaving because they're
> still the cheapest deal for me.

Good service has a value all of its own.

There are several ISPs in the UK that have stated that they will never implement DPI; their services generally cost from 17 to 32 UKP per month with no throttling, no port-blocking and no IWF censorship. Is that *really* too much to pay?

Instead we see Virgin, BT and TalkTalk prospering with over 4 million customers each because they spend vast fortunes on advertising, despite even greater sums spent on abusing their customers.

Re:Six months from now

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, on May 27th 2010 all UK headlines will be:

"Tories. Sheeeeeeit."

Re:Six months from now

[Anonymous Coward]

My thoughts exactly. Most people have no clue. Even if they don't like it, changing your ISP is too cumbersome for most.

The few providers with a modicum of moral integrity usually are small local providers you can't get everywhere. Nation-wide providers usually are subsidiaries/resellers of the 1 to 2 big ones; so it doesn't matter.

Since I live in Germany, laws will soon require EVERY ISP to monitor everything (no DPI yet, but it's just a matter of time). My solution? Get a cheap, decent ISP and a VPN account from another (preferably non-EU) country.

Re:Six months from now

[jimicus]

Virgin are in a strong position in the UK and they know it.

Firstly, ADSL 2 has yet to see widespread rollout. If you're in a cabled area, they hold a nationwide monopoly over that cable and it's far and away the fastest option for Internet access.

Secondly, every time something like this is announced virtually every other ISP is not far behind. It's unlikely - nay, unthinkable - that the company flogging this to Virgin isn't trying to flog it to every other ISP and with the government seriously advocating a "three strikes and you're out" rule, I can see such a product being quite attractive.

Re:Six months from now

[jimicus]

I think you overestimate the anger that would be experienced.

While most people may do it, they usually know full well it's illegal. It's just that the risk of suffering any serious consequences is miniscule.

My guess is that most people will shrug their shoulders and say "Ah well. It was nice while it lasted".

Be interesting to see how many people continue to subscribe to the most expensive, fastest deal though...

Re:Six months from now

[vrai]

Be fair: TalkTalk have their problems but they are leading the charge against Mandelson's latest attempt to turn the entire UK population in to criminals. Obviously they're doing so out of self interest; but we all win if they are successful.

Re:Six months from now

[severn2j]

As a Virgin subscriber, the reason I stay with them is that they give me a good 20Mb connection, which unlike most ADSL subscriptions is actually 20Mb.. I dont know of anywhere else that can offer me that kind of bandwidth for a decent price.

As for DPI, I stopped using P2P a few months ago, and now all my downloads are SSL encrypted over usenet.. In my case the polices fear that these measures will push people to encryption are completely justified.

Re:Six months from now

[Anonymous Coward]

"not being too technically minded" ...
"make the jump in their minds to deep packet inspection being the hidden cause"

Ahahahaha, you're so funny!

The chavs would probably think Virgin Media was x-raying their crisps if they heard the phrase "deep packet inspection".

Re:Six months from now

[freddej]

Well, I've heard operators think that getting rid of the top tier customers is a good thing, since that means that the other customers would have more bandwidth to play with, and the can postpone investments in network upgrades (and node splits)

Re:Six months from now

[Bert64]

And where is the usenet server hosted?
At the moment the *AA are interested in torrents and don't care much about usenet because relatively few people use it, but sooner or later they will go to the companies hosting these servers and sue them for the server logs which implicate you.

Re:Six months from now

[LordAndrewSama]

Even if they don't like it, changing your ISP is too cumbersome for most.

Actually, in the UK, you just go to the ISP you want and subscribe, they handle everything for you, unless they have to ask you to ask your old ISP for your MAC code. then there's a few hours of downtime on the day of the switch. not cumbersome at all. I shall be going from virgin to talktalk very soon, and emailing them telling them why.

Re:Six months from now

[Hurricane78]

You’re the master of self-fulfilling prophecies aren’t you??

Half the reason that sometimes nothing changes, is the people constantly repeating that, taking all belief of the possiblility out of people.
That again is half the strategy to keep people from rising up.

Because in the end, it’s all in the mind. If ten million people want to rise up, but believe they are the only ones, then it will be much more unlikely that they really do it.
But if ten people believe that they really can change things, they will rise up, and change things. By showing others that they are not the only ones, and thereby starting the avalanche.

Re:Six months from now

[imakemusic]

I would wager that's got more to do with their service being crap and getting worse. I recently moved house between two houses with Virgin media broadband. One was 10Mbps the other was 2Mbps. Guess which was quicker.

Re:Six months from now

[LordAndrewSama]

Talktalk seem to be the lesser of 3 evils though, unless I understand nothing. can you tell me what other ISPs are out there please? I shall be from virginmedia soon.

Re:Six months from now

[sakdoctor]

"Be" is a weird ISP.
I signed up my grandmother because it was cheap.

Unfortunately they seem to think modem settings, email settings, in fact any settings are TOP SECRET, for management only.
The modem comes pre-programmed and doesn't have a user-name and password. I couldn't be bothered to figure out exactly how they had watermarked it, and it didn't appear to be MAC address.
They also force their out-going mail server (Which is completely secret so I don't know it), although I got around this nonsense using SMTP/SSL.

I'd spend a few quid more and get a real ISP.

Re:Six months from now

[Anonymous Coward]

The chances are the DPI won't cost that much as the hardware is already mandated for RIPA compliance and this will likely just be a software load on top of that.

Re:Six months from now

[Anonymous Coward]

Being a VM customer I would actually like to see this happen if they insist on exploring this avenue.
However, it would something more profound to tip the scales for me to leave VM.

The problem - I dare say - most VM customers like myself face is that we're effectively joined at the hip with VM as a telecoms provider; the reason being that VM are by and large the only one that their business over cable (which is great).

This means that, to leave VM for another provider, one would be facing hefty fees for getting connected (ADSL) with another telecoms provider.

Unless you're lucky enough to live in an area where you can jump provider using the same cable. I am not even sure if this is possible.

In a nutshell; VM have most of their customers by the ghoolies.

Re:Six months from now

[bluesatin]

Actually I doubt the average shclub will know this scheme is coming into play.

And anyone thinking about joining Virgin Media will just be thinking "Oh cheap interwebz, bargain!".

Re:Six months from now

[Anonymous Coward]

If they have nothing to hide, then they're not file-sharing, and the music industry is not on the decline.
Thus there is no need for DPI !

Re:Six months from now

[puthan]

I reccomend Andrews and Arnold (http://aaisp.net.uk)

Been with them since 2001.

Re:Six months from now

[andrewbaldwin]

Interesting...

I signed up for Be a few years back after absolutely APPALLING service from my previous "broadband supplier"*** and the router supplied by Be is totally configurable.

Furthermore they have always been very open in announcing changes to the network (even such things as a potential slow down during the middle of the night on a date a week away whilst they upgrade - thus giving you a chance to reschedule cron jobs etc). They have also been very helpful over the phone.

*** in quotes because the use of both words would be ironic in that context

Re:Six months from now

[turing_m]

Because in the end, it's all in the mind. If ten million people want to rise up, but believe they are the only ones, then it will be much more unlikely that they really do it. But if ten people believe that they really can change things, they will rise up, and change things. By showing others that they are not the only ones, and thereby starting the avalanche.

If those ten people get sent to jail, get shot, fall down an elevators shaft, get kneecapped, or even just lose their job, the next hundred people take exceptionally good notes.

Two factors can start off those first ten. If the alternatives are just as bleak, there is no downside to revolution, only upside. The second - if those first ten have wealthy, powerful benefactors bankrolling the "revolution".

Re:Six months from now

[smoker2]

Rubbish. No really.
I'm with Be and their modems while not the best are very accessible. The devices are not pre-programmed, at least not to the extent of having user name and passwords built in. They know who you are by the simple expedient of knowing what your land line number is (just like BT). And none of the configuration details are secret, in fact you can find them on their user community site or by chatting to an online rep.

They distribute firmware updates, when they are needed, and offer command line access to modify settings. You only have to use their smtp servers if you have a dynamic ip, and if you get the unlimited or pro service, you get a free static ip with no port blocking whatsoever. They are happy to tell you how to configure your machine to act as a server, and there are built in port forwarding defaults for roughly 30 services.

I suggest you get somebody else to set up your grans modem, but it's possible she's already worked it out herself.

https://www.bethere.co.uk/web/beportal/homepage
https://www.bethere.co.uk/web/beportal/technicalguides
https://www.bethere.co.uk/web/beportal/beboxdownload
http://beusergroup.co.uk/
http://blog.bethere.co.uk/2009/11/three-strikes-and-impact-on-be-and-our.html

Re:Six months from now

[Anonymous Coward]

Other ISPs need to move in and offer a reasonable alternative. I don't know of any other Home Broadband ISPs willing to provide without a BT line in the UK, which makes Virgin the most popular choice for students in the area I live in

Re:Six months from now

[Anonymous Coward]

And where exactly did you get those figures? 90% of their top customers have cancelled? 82% of mid and 47% of low?... I smell BS.

Re:Six months from now

[mdwh2]

I'm on cable, but my "20Mb" connection is still stuck at 4Mb, according to all the tests I've done :/

Re:Six months from now

[mdwh2]

That would be the bandwidth hogs who are paying the highest rates for the fastest connection?

And if Virgin Media are implementing this invasive system because their business model is so broken that they can't provide the service that people are paying them for, I think that says all we need to know.

Re:Six months from now

[TheRaven64]

Only if you're on ADSL. I'm currently a Virgin subscriber on their cable network. I don't have a landline telephone, and I can't currently buy naked ADSL from anyone, so I'd have to pay BT £10/month for the privilege of having a telephone that I'd never use on top of whatever the ISP decided to charge me. I'd also have to pay around £60 to have the landline reconnected.

Re:Six months from now

[TheRaven64]

their services generally cost from 17 to 32 UKP per month with no throttling, no port-blocking and no IWF censorship. Is that *really* too much to pay?

Is that including line rental? I currently pay £25 to virgin per month for a 10Mb/s connection (which actually goes that fast, although they do throttle me if I upload a lot at peak times, which was inconvenient when I had to send 10GB of video to my publisher in the USA). I don't have a phone line; my mobile supports SIP and WiFi, so I use that when I'm in my house and it's cheaper than most landline telephones, and uses the same address book when I'm not at home. No one apart from Virgin seems to offer broadband that isn't bundled with a phone service. OFCOM refuses to require BT to offer naked ADSL and none of the LLU providers seem to offer it.

Re:Six months from now

[LordAndrewSama]

60? that's gone up i'm afraid. We moved in in jan, and I had to pay BT £100 to reconnect the line to the house. can't get virgin cable in my area, so I have to have the BT line then ADSL account on top of that.

Re:Six months from now

[alexo]

When are people going to learn that it's not about whether you have something to hide?

Probably never.

Re:Six months from now

[Anonymous Coward]

> Is that including line rental?

No, you are correct: I did not include that cost in the earlier post. The ceiling price that BT Wholesale can charge for the exchange-to-premises line is indeed set by OFCOM and is 108 UKP per annum, IIRC. With VAT added this equates to 11.50 to 11.75 per month for a bare line.

So for those ISPs such as Zen, ID Net and A&A that do actually care about their customers you will have to factor that cost if the price is a consideration for you.

Personally I'd rather sacrifice a couple of pints of beer a month and put that money into a quality ISP.

Re:Six months from now

[AmiMoJo]

I'll be calling them to demand a £5 reduction on my monthly bill, or I'll change ISP. The £5 is to cover the cost of a VPN service in a safe country and the slow-down from using Tor.

Re:Six months from now

[CrossChris]

Funny you should say that - Virgin (on the ridiculous) lost almost 30% of their users when they announced the introduction of "Phorm". They continue to lose customers at an alarming rate - this neighbourhood used to have over 95% of homes connected to the cable service before the Virgin takeover, and the old service was superb. Since the arrival of Virgin, the quality fell, outages became commonplace, prices rose, and their user base dwindled so that they only have about 5% of the households around here nowadays!

Virgin are a disaster, and the sooner the British cable network is broken up again into small, competitive companies, and as fibre is introduced, so we'll be able to get proper cable TV and ISP services. As long as Virgin are there, we'll all stay with satellite for TV and ADSL for internet....

More details here:

[D-R0C]

"Virgin Media executive director of broadband, Jon James, told ZDNet UK on Thursday that the trial will go live "within days". He added that the use of such traffic-monitoring technology was part of its distribution deal with media company Universal." http://news.zdnet.co.uk/security/0,1000000189,39906062,00.htm

Re:More details here:

[Anonymous Cowpat]

So now I know what their engineers have been doing instead of upgrading the upstream infrastructure so that my 10Mbit connection can provide better than 500kbit with 33% packet loss. Trebles all round.

Re:More details here:

[martin-boundary]

Excellent! I presume that Virgin Media have also built the infrastructure to comply with EU/UK privacy regulations?

Such as, e.g., a facility to allow *every* broadband customer to be informed of and if they so choose to view *all* the information being gathered about themselves, and allow *any* of this data to be edited for accuracy by the customer, and allow *all* of this data to be deleted from *all* their servers if the customer decides to end the contract with Virgin at any time, etc.

Moreover, I presume that Virgin Media have ensured that the nature of the data they do collect is technically necessary for the provision of their ISP service to each customer, and not simply a gratuitous and illegal collection of data that is requested for a completely independent purpose set out in a completely different contract with another entity, and to which the customer himself is not actually a party.

These are bad economic times, and it would be a pity if some idle British lawyer were to look a little too closely at this announcement...

Re:More details here:

[BiggerIsBetter]

So are they an entertainment delivery company or an ISP? Do you want to buy content or connectivity?

Re:More details here:

[Anonymous Coward]

I know this comment will sound like an insult but I'm genuinely curious when I see this type of (sarcastic) musing.

If you really are getting a substantially lower transfer rate irrespective of location and see 33% packet loss, can't you complain to whatever agency you have locally for looking after consumer's rights?

If not, why not? Are they ineffective? Non-existant? Corrupt?

There have been several rather high profile cases here in Norway lately where people have complained to the governmental consumer's rights oversight agency and the agency has slapped the telco with instructions to fix the problem. In at least two, where the journalists have bothered to do a f

Re:More details here:

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn you, Candlejack! You shall not get away with this any lo

Re:More details here:

[Anonymous Coward]

A VM 10mb connection has a stated upload speed of 512kbit.

If you want more than that, upgrade to 20mb (gets you 768kbit up), or 50mb when available in your area (1.5mbit up).

Re:More details here:

[mario_grgic]

This is what the banks have been doing for decades. They are happily giving details of your credit card transactions to a privately owned third party company that keeps this record about you and sells digested report about you, popularly known as credit rating, to interested other parties.

If you wish to see the information they collect about you, you have to pay money to them, and correcting wrong information about you (since it otherwise can ruin your life) is not easy or even possible either.

Re:More details here:

[Anonymous Coward]

Ugh... somebody please mod Offtopic. These Candlejack jokes are not funny and neve

Re:More details here:

[AmiMoJo]

The Data Protection Act does allow you access to this data for a nominal £10 fee. In a month or two I'll be sending them a cheque with a request for all data held about me.

What is not clear is how this works with anonymous data. It's still my data, even if it can no longer be associated with me.

Re:More details here:

[Anonymous Cowpat]

we were getting ~500kbps down (ironically, we were also getting ~500kbps up, and sometime more up than down). However, I would like to withdraw my post and say how wonderful VM are - it turns out that it wasn't the upstream network, but a dodgy >6 year old power adapter for the cable modem.

Encrypted Anonymous File Sharing

[Anonymous Coward]

Which is worse: All data being free, including data you don't personally like? Or regimes of data control?

Re:Encrypted Anonymous File Sharing

[Hurricane78]

That is not a serious question, for anyone who ever heard of something else than his own egocentrism. So I think you must be kidding, or think you are god or something.

I personally don’s like you for stating that. But so what? I still let you make a fool out of yourself, ain’t I. ^^

Time to encrypt everything.

[pushf popf]

If they thought DPI was expensive, wait until they try real-time decryption

Re:Time to encrypt everything.

[phpster]

Vuze / Azerus already does this. Uses RC4 as the algorithm. But it should be enough to stop the virgin in it's tracks. Especially if they encode each download with a different key, like a random hash

Re:Time to encrypt everything.

[Nerdfest]

I've got a better idea. Have your legislators ensure they stay the hell out of your content. They aren't allowed to listen to your phone calls, wy the hhell should they be allowed to look at your data. Seriously ... if they suspect people of committing a crime, they should get a warrant.

Re:Time to encrypt everything.

[davester666]

And by "aggregated and anonymised", they mean they will send all the records to the record labels grouped by address. They won't even send the DSL subscribers name to the record label. Promise.

Re:Time to encrypt everything.

[Cryacin]

if they suspect people of committing a crime, they should get a warrant.

But that would involve due process and presumption innocence, and well, we can't have that now. What's next? Right to a fair trial?

Re:Time to encrypt everything.

[QuantumG]

Wouldn't using encryption be "circumventing a copyright protection mechanism" .. oh, UK, sorry.

Re:Time to encrypt everything.

[Dunbal]

Wouldn't using encryption be "circumventing a copyright protection mechanism" .. oh, UK, sorry.

      Wouldn't trying to crack my encryption be "circumventing a copyright protection mechanism"? After all you can't know what's in the packet until you "open" the packet.

Re:Time to encrypt everything.

[rts008]

Vuze / Azerus already does this. Uses RC4 as the algorithm. But it should be enough to stop the virgin in it's tracks.

Indeed, from the linked artcle:

Klein added that encryption of data would cause major problems for CView. "Encryption of the data packet would defeat us," he said. "We're not going to put the processing power into defeating it."

Most p2p software is able to encryption now days....use it.

Re:Time to encrypt everything.

[Darkness404]

They aren't allowed to listen to your phone calls, wy the hhell should they be allowed to look at your data

Yeah, and look at how well governments followed that law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_warrantless_surveillance_controversy

Any human rights documents from any western country (UK, US, Canada, etc) are quickly becoming no more than toilet paper.

The only way we have to stop them is to make it physically impossible for them to trample our rights. Encryption is one way we can stop this abuse of power. Laws only get us so far when "national security" is on the line.

Re:Time to encrypt everything.

[cellurl]

agreed,
so whats the plan?

Re:Time to encrypt everything.

[rundgren]

"circumventing a copyright protection mechanism" is illegal in most of Europe as well... Thanks for the inspiration, Mr. Sam.

Re:Time to encrypt everything.

[cellurl]

they will always win, they have unlimited money.
You have to fight legally and technically, mainly legally. I too am guilty of thinking, "well I can beat that with this technology and that scheme, but I know in my heart it is temporary only". So, write a letter to someone/anyone and bitch, and I will do the same....

Re:Time to encrypt everything.

[Anonymous Coward]

Only if the data is yours and copyrightable after they decrypt it since you aren't the copyright holder of the music in question and only the copyright holder is protected by the DMCA.

Re:Time to encrypt everything.

[Anonymous Coward]

Any human rights documents from any western country (UK, US, Canada, etc) are quickly becoming no more than toilet paper.

Isn't that an interesting coincidence that they all became this way at (relatively) the same time? You'd think that the ones who don't become this way would enjoy a degree of economic and social prosperity that would give them quite a competitive edge against the other nations.

When are you guys going to wake up and realize that sovereign nations hardly exist anymore? If you want to understand who really pulls the strings of our puppet politicians, look no further than the global bankers, the ones who run the Federal Reserve and similar institutions that every major Western country has. These guys are the ones who decided that basic civil rights are inconvenient obstacles, and they have caused all of the Western nations to march in lockstep with their intentions. Their immediate goal is to run the USA into the ground both financially and legally, because the sovereignty of the USA and its "superpower" status is an obstacle to them. Their next step will be to group Canada, the USA, and Mexico into an American Union with one currency, called the Amero, and the arrangement will be quite similar to the EU except far less voluntary.

You can say whatever you like about the problems caused by and shown by the USA. Right now, its sovereignty is about the only thing holding us back from a one-world government. The idea of a one-world government all by itself isn't that bad. The problem is that it's not being ushered in by popular demand or anything remotely resembling a democratic process. It's being ushered in by deception and manipulation.

Re:Time to encrypt everything.

[John Hasler]

> Wouldn't using encryption be "circumventing a copyright protection mechanism"

Not in the USA, but of course this is in Europe.

Re:Time to encrypt everything.

[MichaelSmith]

If they thought DPI was expensive, wait until they try real-time decryption

Encryption can get you into trouble in the UK/

Re:Time to encrypt everything.

[MichaelSmith]

But unless client and server agree on a private key in advance, by offline means, a Man in the Middle can still proxy the key negotiation and access the plaintext.

Re:Time to encrypt everything.

[Anonymous Coward]

Encryption is one way we can stop this abuse of power.

Yeah, but you know that they'll end up throttling encrypted traffic down to 56k speeds.

Re:Time to encrypt everything.

[base3]

Two words: Diffie and Hellman.

Re:Time to encrypt everything.

[MichaelSmith]

Well yeah but reading up it seems that A person in the middle may establish two distinct Diffie–Hellman key exchanges, one with Alice and the other with Bob, effectively masquerading as Alice to Bob, and vice versa, allowing the attacker to decrypt (and read or store) then re-encrypt the messages passed between them. A pre-arranged certificate could be used to exclude the man in the middle but then the client may proceed with the negotiation anyway (to get their stuff) and the cert can be comprimised if it is sent in the clear over the same link, ie, by apt-get or similar.

Re:Time to encrypt everything.

[Anonymous Coward]

How about Diffie-Helman + Interlock? I thought that was supposed to be immune to MITM.

An All-or-nothing transform could also increase the amount of storage that Virgin would have to keep.

Re:Time to encrypt everything.

[jamesh]

But unless client and server agree on a private key in advance, by offline means, a Man in the Middle can still proxy the key negotiation and access the plaintext.

I can't help but think that that might be just a little illegal unless it was done by law enforcement with a warrant, as would any form of decrypting an encrypted transmission.

Re:Time to encrypt everything.

[Cimexus]

I fully agree. The rise of surveillance of telecommunications (of whatever method) in the West is getting a bit alarming. Ubiquitous encryption will become the standard I feel. We are moving towards a word where all new software, systems and protocols that get developed, will include encryption to a greater or lesser extent.

It started with the widespread logging and monitoring of all phone calls entering and leaving the US after 9/11 (this really irritates me as a non-American - that my calls TO America are getting logged and possibly intercepted). Since then though I feel that it is the UK that is becoming the worst offender. AU and NZ are still pretty much surveillance-free ... although that's mostly a product of them being isolated and not having suffered a direct attack, rather than them having stricter protections against this kind of thing. I'm sure if there were an attack or threat there, there would be impetus to implement similar systems to the US/UK.

So yeah, I would urge everyone to use encryption in their daily lives as much as they can. Of course, most of us have nothing to hide in this respect, but it's really the ~principle~ of the thing that is at stake here, rather than an actual need to encrypt. If we make it technically or financially unfeasible to monitor communications en masse, then Governments will be more reluctant to do it, and will return to concentrating on tapping into only particular, suspected communications, by way of a proper warrant. Like they ~should~ be doing.

Re:Time to encrypt everything.

[MichaelSmith]

It can tell you that an eavesdropper is in the middle of the link, but this doesn't help you if you know your link is compromised by the company which operates it. In that case you can only look for alternatives or fall back to keys arranged over other channels.

Re:Time to encrypt everything.

[base3]

Fair enough, but that's beyond mere "deep packet inspection" and into the realm of impersonating user traffic. Not that there's not precedent for that (e.g. Comcast), but doing that at line speed would likely be quite expensive.

Re:Time to encrypt everything.

[Anonymous Coward]

Trusted Third Party to verify both parties

Re:Time to encrypt everything.

[Kjella]

Of course, then the fingerprints will be wrong. Granted, very few people check them but there are cases like you having a laptop locally and ssh stores the fingerprint. Then you take your laptop on a trip and suddenly ssh throws nasty "this fingerprint doesn't match" because you're being MITM'd, or paranoid people verifying it via email or phone or obfuscated in the message - the last could be replaced, but then they've have to have a perfect obfuscation search and replace, unlikely. So yeah, MITM works but mass MITM surveillance would be noted quite quickly. And once it's off by default, you risk that the keys have been cached up already and will throw nasty warnings before you turn on MITM. So yeah targeted attacks are possbile, but it's not as big a threat for the masses as one might think.

Re:Time to encrypt everything.

[Anonymous Coward]

>If you want to understand who really pulls the strings of our puppet politicians, look no further than the global bankers,
>the ones who run the Federal Reserve and similar institutions that every major Western country has.

The Jooooooos are responsible for this ISP implementing deep packet inspection!!

Re:Time to encrypt everything.

[TikiTDO]

How about some sort of signing system. The host can provide a signed file with payload info and a certificate, then the client can verify that it is from the actual host that you are connecting to. Any sort of public key system would work for this.

From this point, you should already have secure communication channel though the certificate to the server, and can join the "net of trust". Secure connections can then be negotiated by someone already in this net of trust, be it the server, or another client.

Going further, could even make the entire system distributed over an alternate addressing system, with requests routed through other clients in the mesh. This way you could hide the IPs of any systems in the mesh that you are not directly connected to.

Re:Time to encrypt everything.

[jimicus]

Unfortunately, it's not practical to keep the public keys of every single organisation on the planet you may wish to trust.

So instead, certificate authorities (a trusted third party) vouch that the public key you are being presented really is from who it claims to be.

Which is well and good but unless you have a certificate authority which only ever grants certificates to people who are not part of the ISP or the music industry, it's more or less useless for this purpose.

Re:Time to encrypt everything.

[TikiTDO]

Well, you could use something like GPG. If the ISP really wants to devote the resources to tracking down and faking certificates for every single torrent file, then matching them to specific connections, then they probably have a lot more processing power than I would expect from an ISP

Re:Time to encrypt everything.

[Anonymous Coward]

May, but likely won't. Altering communications is a much bigger no-no than simple eavesdropping.

Re:Time to encrypt everything.

[StripedCow]

should not be too difficult. you see, the government has nothing to gain from people switching to encrypted forms of communication, in fact it would make their intelligence operations much more complicated.

Re:Time to encrypt everything.

[StripedCow]

If we make it technically or financially unfeasible to monitor communications en masse, then Governments will be more reluctant to do it

or... governments will switch to more radical forms of tapping, like pointing a directional microphone at your house...

Re:Time to encrypt everything.

[Hurricane78]

What’s a trial?

— Your Guantanamo inmates.

Re:Time to encrypt everything.

[L4t3r4lu5]

I'd love to know what they're listening for. To terrorists often call up American telephone numbers with "Ah, hello my brother Ahmed from the Helmand Province Al Qaida training camp! I'm just calling to tell you that your plan to perform $terrorist_act is excellent, and we'll be shipping you the required items and instructions via $importsystem on $date at $time! Hope everything goes well, Your firend, Benji at the Helmand Province Al Qaida training camp, Makalakadaka Street" etc etc.

I was under the impression, as the movies have shown me, that they use code words like "November Rain" or "Broken Arrow" or "Hi mum, I don't think I'll be back for supper. Just leave some in the oven. Thanks, bye."

Re:Time to encrypt everything.

[Jurily]

I don't think they can justify MITM attacks with a contract. Sure, they can find out it's an encryption handshake, but that's it.

Re:Time to encrypt everything.

[Xest]

I think the reason Australia/NZ and also Canada see much less of this is for another reason- the governments of these countries are much more easily toppled by the political system.

The problem we have in the US and UK is that they are two party states, and whilst Canada also uses first past the post, the layout of voting areas is less of a problem right now.

In the UK and the US the two major parties are extremely similar, the first past the post system exist right now in such a way that it's absolute majority, and that in the UK a third party holding balance of power is not common enough.

The fact is in the US/UK it's just too hard to topple the leading regimes, and they're too similar for a change between the two to matter. This means they can do whatever they want to the voterbase with no real repercussions.

Canada has a minority government and New Zealand and Australia have much better spread of votes between different parties such that a change in leadership (both in name and policy, rather than just in name as in the US/UK) is much more feasible.

Countries where there is actually something for leading political parties to lose by screwing the citizen are generally more liberal because if a party in the UK wants to lead it has to get the citizens on board.

To be fair, this is actually why in the UK, Labour now basically has no chance of winning the next election and why the Conservatives are pretty much guaranteed a win, because even under our system the Conservatives realise reversal of the mass rape of civil liberties by Labour is a good selling point for their party that will gain them millions of votes.

Re:Time to encrypt everything.

[Anonymous Coward]

The idea of a one-world government is so atrocious that I cannot find the words to criticize it. Yes, it *is* that bad, and much worse. In fact, I think it would be the worst thing ever to happen to humankind, and I'm not joking.

Re:Time to encrypt everything.

[Anonymous Coward]

Can someone explain if DPI can determine the difference between an MP3 media stream from tinterweb radio and bit torrent traffic?

Thanks

Re:Time to encrypt everything.

[Anonymous Coward]

If they thought DPI was expensive, wait until they try real-time decryption

When they'll figure it out, they'll just ban encryption.

Re:Time to encrypt everything.

[coofercat]

I agree with everything you're saying - clearly, our legislators are the problem here. Being, as we are, British, there's an extremely good chance this whole thing will eventually tie itself in knots (legally, publicly, legislatively, or just technically).

However, for all Virgin Media customers, now's the time to fire up your bittorrent client. I'm not a NTL/Telewaste/Virgin Media customer, but maybe I'll just fire up the bittorrent client on my NAS anyway. Now's the time for us to all start sharing Linux distros, random bits in files, and as much Creative Commons music as you can squeeze onto your hard disk.

If they won't listen to reason, perhaps a slew of false positives in a veritable barrage of extra traffic which makes vast chunks of their customer base eligible for disconnection will make them think differently?

Of course, since this is /., I'd hope any readers who were Virgin Media customers would just move elsewhere. Think Broadband is your friend ;-)

Re:Time to encrypt everything.

[rtb61]

Actually one word or, acronym to be precise, the DMCA. Once the work is encrypted unless you are the person legally entitled to decrypt it or a law enforcement agency operating under a warrant, you are committing a criminal act by breaking the encryption of protected content. Juts because you can decrypt it doesn't mean your are legally allowed to do so.

The same goes for Virgin this is all about testing the legality of monitoring all digital transmission for commercial purposes. All your privacy bough and sold, all your children's digital thoughts exposed to highly skilled adult marketing paedophiles who will twist them into the obedient consumer addicts of the 21st century.

Virgin is feeling the economic growth pinch brought on by the recession and is spreading it's wings into become the perverse version of big brother who will monitor all your digitals thoughts to more effectively target you with the a subtle and subconsciously driven 24/7 marketing assault.

The executives at Virgin will decide for you what you should or shouldn't see and they'll monitor you to ensure that you adhere to their approved thoughts any failure will result in guilt by accusation for what ever crime they decide you are guilty of.

Re:Time to encrypt everything.

[Tom]

Of course, most of us have nothing to hide

I hear that all the time and it's time to stop this lie by the surveillance fanatics once and for all.

Of course we all have something to hide! It's called our private life. You have no business snooping around in it. Not if you're a cop, not it you're an ISP, not if you're god.

Re:Time to encrypt everything.

[earthforce_1]

You also need Steanography software, so they don't even know a message is there.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography

Time to hide torrents in home movies and baby pictures.

Re:Time to encrypt everything.

[Anonymous Coward]

Because nuclear winter is better?

We just have to start develop spiritually. Have more leaders like Obama step up. It's either going to happen, or we're toast.

Re:Time to encrypt everything.

[L4t3r4lu5]

Steganography is no guarantee; The guy who was jailed used PGP for encryption, and a piece of steganography software (unsure which). They broke the steg, but not the encryption. That's why he's in jail.

Re:Time to encrypt everything.

[J.Y.Kelly]

Which is well and good but unless you have a certificate authority which only ever grants certificates to people who are not part of the ISP or the music industry, it's more or less useless for this purpose.

I don't see how that follows at all. The point about a signing authority is that as long as you trust the authority then you can check that a given site certificate really belongs to that site. It's not sufficient to substitute another site's certificate, even if it's one signed by the same authority.

To compromise the system then CertsRUs would have to issue a signed certificate for thepriatebay.org to the RIAA. Whilst the tinfoil hat bridge may choose to believe that this might happen I can't see it. As soon as this was discovered (and the signatures from the RIAA certificate for thepiratebay.org and the real cert for that site would differ, so they would be disovered) then CertsRUs would rapidly be removed from the list of trusted signing authorities for a vast chunk of the internet, at which point their business goes down a hole.

Re:Time to encrypt everything.

[jimicus]

Which is fine if you're downloading a file which comes in its entirety from a single source (eg. an HTTP download).

It's not, however, quite so useful when the file is coming from a number of sources simultaneously (eg. BitTorrent).

Re:Time to encrypt everything.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, it's sad. I've been talking about this with my GF, and she says - "well, if you've got nothing to hide..." I'm thinking whether I want to stay with this person anymore.

Also, would it make Watergate 'okay' if there was nothing to hide?

AC for obvious reasons.

Captcha: CIRCUS

Re:Time to encrypt everything.

[Anonymous Coward]

When are you guys going to wake up and realize that sovereign nations hardly exist anymore? If you want to understand who really pulls the strings of our puppet politicians, look no further than the global bankers, the ones who run the Federal Reserve and similar institutions that every major Western country has. These guys are the ones who decided that basic civil rights are inconvenient obstacles, and they have caused all of the Western nations to march in lockstep with their intentions. Their immediate goal is to run the USA into the ground both financially and legally, because the sovereignty of the USA and its "superpower" status is an obstacle to them. Their next step will be to group Canada, the USA, and Mexico into an American Union with one currency, called the Amero, and the arrangement will be quite similar to the EU except far less voluntary.

Wow. Illuminati much?

Re:Time to encrypt everything.

[Anonymous Coward]

Tell her some guys on Slashdot want to see her naked so that they can be sure she's not a terrorist. She'll understand.

Re:Time to encrypt everything.

[Anonymous Coward]

In fact, we need to examine her very closely in order to make sure she doesn't hide anything in... body cavities.

After all, she's got nothing to hide, does she?

(posting AC for very obvious reason... :-) )

Re:Time to encrypt everything.

[Anonymous Coward]

Add the Netherlands to this list. After gaining the record amount of phone taps per person per year, we now also have obligatory data retention by any isp, a big brother public transportation monitoring...ahem payment system and our soon to be road network monitoring...ahem road pricing system.

I'm sad it's come to this and no one I speak to seems to give a damn.

Re:Time to encrypt everything.

[DaveGod]

Mail is the most difficult to snoop. Telephone is fairly difficult. Electronic transmissions (other than internet) is complicated - it depends. Data going over the internet is easy to snoop (and there is a lot of pressure to make it easier still).

Am I talking about practicalities or the legal position?

Pre-empting the inevitable, no correlation does not require causation (but causation does require correlation).

Re:Time to encrypt everything.

[Anonymous Coward]

You assume that their inspection device will be a man-in-the-middle. Having worked on network analysis solutions for large networks before, I can tell you that this is highly unlikely to be the case. Rather, those kinds of devices tend to be passive listeners, either on a tap or spanning port.

Re:Time to encrypt everything.

[mpe]

If they thought DPI was expensive, wait until they try real-time decryption

So is the entertainments industry paying for this, together with a speed increase to compensate for the slowdown any kind of DPI causes? Or is VM taking money from customers to give them a worst service than if they had done nothing...

Re:Time to encrypt everything.

[mpe]

I've got a better idea. Have your legislators ensure they stay the hell out of your content. They aren't allowed to listen to your phone calls, wy the hhell should they be allowed to look at your data.

They arn't just "looking at" your data they are introducing a delay in sending it to it's destination. That being somewhat against what their customers are paying them to do. The DPI device(s) may also introduce a bottleneck which reduces the usable bandwidth of a link.

Seriously ... if they suspect people of committing a crime, they should get a warrant.

Rather they should complain to the police then the police can consider getting a warrant.

Re:Time to encrypt everything.

[mpe]

So yeah, I would urge everyone to use encryption in their daily lives as much as they can. Of course, most of us have nothing to hide in this respect, but it's really the ~principle~ of the thing that is at stake here, rather than an actual need to encrypt. If we make it technically or financially unfeasible to monitor communications en masse, then Governments will be more reluctant to do it, and will return to concentrating on tapping into only particular, suspected communications, by way of a proper warrant. Like they ~should~ be doing.

Which is also the only effective way for law enforcement to work. Mass snooping tends to be ineffective because the signal to noise ratio is low and it enables law enforcement to "look busy" by going after "small fry", whilst ignoring anyone who might actually look dangerous.

Re:Time to encrypt everything.

[mpe]

I hear that all the time and it's time to stop this lie by the surveillance fanatics once and for all.
Of course we all have something to hide! It's called our private life.

You also don't tend to have many of the "nothing to hide, nothing to fear" crowd offering to give up their private life. Then you have people who, work for the public, expecting to have more (rather than less) "privacy" than the average person.

Re:Time to encrypt everything.

[mpe]

or... governments will switch to more radical forms of tapping, like pointing a directional microphone at your house...

This puts things back to where they were. This can only be done it a limited number of cases so each case has to be justified.

Re:Time to encrypt everything.

[mpe]

I'd love to know what they're listening for. To terrorists often call up American telephone numbers with "Ah, hello my brother Ahmed from the Helmand Province Al Qaida training camp! I'm just calling to tell you that your plan to perform $terrorist_act is excellent, and we'll be shipping you the required items and instructions via $importsystem on $date at $time! Hope everything goes well, Your firend, Benji at the Helmand Province Al Qaida training camp, Makalakadaka Street" etc etc.

Most likely only as a method of feeding false information to law enforcement. (Is it even possible to make IDD calls from Afghanistan.) Anyway Ahmed is probably actually called Paddy and Benji is Murphy from Belfast.

was under the impression, as the movies have shown me, that they use code words like "November Rain" or "Broken Arrow" or "Hi mum, I don't think I'll be back for supper. Just leave some in the oven. Thanks, bye."

Most likely the last one. They'd probably avoid "Tube Alloys", "Broken Arrow", "Bent Spear", etc since they are no longer effective codenames.

Re:Time to encrypt everything.

[Anonymous Coward]

not if you're god.

Enjoy life while you can. I'll be waiting!

- God

Re:Time to encrypt everything.

[Anonymous Coward]

If we make it technically or financially unfeasible to monitor communications en masse, then Governments will be more reluctant to do it, and will return to concentrating on tapping into only particular, suspected communications, by way of a proper warrant. Like they ~should~ be doing.

Or they will just raise taxes until they can afford it.

Re:Time to encrypt everything.

[Anonymous Coward]

"AU and NZ are still pretty much surveillance-free"
No see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echelon_%28signals_intelligence%29
ECHELON is a name used in global media and in popular culture to describe a signals intelligence (SIGINT) collection and analysis network operated on behalf of the five signatory states to the UK-USA Security Agreement (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States, known as AUSCANZUKUS).

Re:Time to encrypt everything.

[misnohmer]

The key is proper implementation. Properly implemented secured system cannot be attacked this way (man-in-the-middle). And sending certs in a clear does not compromise the security either (assuming they signed client certs, not the CA certs). The process if fairly straightforward. The clients have a built in trust cert. When installing, they connect to the central server, authenticate it using the built in trusted cert (which is freely available to anyone). They generate their own certificate request, have it signed by the central server. Central server knows not to never allow two clients of the same name. From now on, when downloading content you must use the name of the source and verify its certificate with the trust cert. If it fails, you STOP, don't allow the "go ahead anyways" like the browsers so. Note that clients must be downloaded via https or else the ISP can feed you a trojan (modified client which will report all your activities, no need to intercept your data). Also, the assumption here by the way is that there is a central "trusted" server which can sign all client's certs - if it's compromised, all communications are. All this of course doesn't work if there are holes in the implementation, like the CN null prefix bug published earlier this year, or other bugs. Also, it cannot prevent the malicious software from setting up "honeypots" - their own nodes which will list available content. The latter exploit however is much harder to deploy in p2p networks (and may have legal "entrapment" type ramifications).

Re:Time to encrypt everything.

[Vombatus]

Actually one word or, acronym to be precise, the DMCA.

As far as I know, the laws applicable in the USA do not apply to the rest of the world...

Yet!

Re:Time to encrypt everything.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is exactly what NoDPI have been trying to do (with some success) over the past 2 years:

https://nodpi.org

Will they track their own usenet server?

[Winckle]

Here's a bit of a dilemma, they crack down on filesharing, yet run a free usenet server for their customers with alt.binaries included with 5 days retention.

Will they issue a takedown to themselves?

Re:Will they track their own usenet server?

[Bandman]

Frankly, I find it amazing that Usenet is still on anyone's radar. Even the alt.binaries groups. It's been a long time since I've found an ISP that includes a free usenet server. The reliable ones are the ones that you have to pay for, and honestly, if you're going to pay to pirate things, you're probably doing it wrong.

Re:Will they track their own usenet server?

[Winckle]

Actually usenet is probably the best way to go, and the rates for premium servers are incredibly cheap.

Re:Will they track their own usenet server?

[Bull_UK]

Please dont mention use*** the last thing I want is for them to realise they still have it.

Re:Will they track their own usenet server?

[nulldaemon]

Frankly, I find it amazing that Usenet is still on anyone's radar. Even the alt.binaries groups. It's been a long time since I've found an ISP that includes a free usenet server. The reliable ones are the ones that you have to pay for, and honestly, if you're going to pay to pirate things, you're probably doing it wrong.

Here in Australia most of the major ISPs provide a free Usenet account. My current ISP has a link straight to Giganews with 300+ days retention. TBH I'm surprised people still use torrents when Usenet is so much faster, easier and safer.

Re:Will they track their own usenet server?

[syousef]

Here's a bit of a dilemma, they crack down on filesharing, yet run a free usenet server for their customers with alt.binaries included with 5 days retention.

Will they issue a takedown to themselves?

Due to the repeated issuance of takedown notices (by our own company but we're not telling you that) we regret that we have been forced to remove free access to alt.binaries. If you wish to use that service please subscribe to our new service - PayPerViewBinaries - for just 12.99 per month (well until we increase it to 30.95 next month but we won't tell you that either).

Re:Will they track their own usenet server?

[the_womble]

Paying to pirate solves a lot of problems, like things not being available in your country, or only in an DRM'd format. It could be well worth it.

Re:Will they track their own usenet server?

[Bert64]

Why should they?
They can inspect the server logs and see exactly what their users are downloading, no need for packet inspection.

Re:Will they track their own usenet server?

[Bert64]

Using a service which has all your contact details and can log exactly what you download, is the way to go?
It only works because its a niche right now, very few people use it so it hasn't caught any attention from media groups... Once they notice, it won't take long for them to subpoena the premium service providers to hand over their logs.

Re:Will they track their own usenet server?

[L4t3r4lu5]

You've forgotten the first rule, and you've given them an idea of how to shut it down very quickly.

You should stop going there.

Re:Will they track their own usenet server?

[Inda]

a.b.* hasn't worked on VM for a long, long time. They did crack down. They also removed the top 20 groups within months of taking over NTL. It was always on the cards.

Mod this up as informative.

Re:Will they track their own usenet server?

[zwei2stein]

Usenet is filesharing Usenet is free movies Usenet is porn Usenet is new p2p to go Usenet is torrent replacement Usenet is rapidshare in steroids. Usenet rocks for music, mp3 Usenet manga anime naruto. Usenet mininova Usenet thepiratebay.

I hope you do not mind mentioning Usenet along with few unimportant keywords and phrases. Its not like this will show on google. You are quite safe :)

Re:Will they track their own usenet server?

[Winckle]

Use a false name to register, and they don't keep logs.

Re:Will they track their own usenet server?

[TheRaven64]

It's been a long time since I've found an ISP that includes a free usenet server

As the grandparent pointed out, Virgin Media, the ISP in question, hosts a usenet server which carries the binaries groups. They closed it down a few years ago, then saw their external bandwidth usage shoot up and restarted it a few weeks later. The only people that can track you downloading from it are Virgin Media themselves, and given that they are the ones serving you with the material, they'd be quite foolish to report this activity, especially if they are doing traffic analysis like this and so don't qualify for the safe harbour provisions in the EUCD...

if you're going to pay to pirate things, you're probably doing it wrong.

Actually, if people are willing to pay to pirate things, then it is a good sign that the media companies are doing it wrong. If they offered their content in a format that these people want, at a reasonable price, then they would get more money. The company that I rent DVDs from now include an all-you-can-watch streaming service with the same monthly fee that I pay them, but the amount of available content is limited. I presume that the media companies get paid a small amount every time I watch something on this service (except for the few public domain films, like Night of the Living Dead). The companies that don't make their content available in this way get no money from me. If I can't watch their stuff, then there are a few hundred other interesting looking things to watch...

Re:Will they track their own usenet server?

[TheRaven64]

They did that a few years ago. People started using p2p programs and third-party usenet servers instead and their off-network bandwidth usage shot up and became very expensive. They brought back the usenet servers a few weeks later; the cost of not having them was a lot more than the cost of having them.

Re:Will they track their own usenet server?

[TheRaven64]

Really? I've not looked at their usenet server for a while, but I just connected to it and listed the groups and it shows 104,727 hosted groups. A lot of those seem to contain no posts, but some contain a lot. For example, alt.binaries.games contains 2,472,863, alt.binaries.movies contains 812,073, alt.binaries.mp3 contains 1,384,778 and alt.binaries.tv contains 1,077,237.

They did turn off the usenet server a few years ago, but the massive increase in off-network traffic that this caused made them turn it back on a couple of weeks later.

Re:Will they track their own usenet server?

[Anonymous Coward]

Shut UP!

Within days?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm pretty sure that it has already started. Today, my torrents were so slow that I was considering checking to see if other people were having problems too.. I visit /. and lo and behold, I see this story. Could be a coincidence, but compared to more usual speeds? Hmm, makes me wonder.

Re:Within days?

[some_guy_88]

Ring them up and complain. Tell them you'll switch ISP.

No one believes the promise of anonymity

[erroneus]

I guess I'll fill in some space down here because slashdot will not likely let me post a subject-only comment, but seriously, what more needs to be said? I can't believe they are even saying that with a straight face. Governments barely have anyone or anything to answer two when they lie to people. Businesses like Virgin media most certainly do not. The only thing that their bullshit proves is that they are aware of what the public response will be and that they are afraid of it at some level.

Re:No one believes the promise of anonymity

[Anonymous Coward]

Definatly my first thought.

Yeah, you're anonymously aggregating data about filesharing, just for the heck of it, eh?

Re:No one believes the promise of anonymity

[aj50]

No, dipshit, they're anonymously aggregating data about filesharing to give to Universal as part of a deal they made.

This sort of thing is probably valuable to them since it's likely to be more accurate and complete than the stuff gathered by MediaSentry and their ilk.

Do you really think they believe the ludicrous numbers they've been putting out? Wouldn't they want to know the truth themselves, even if they keep it hidden?

Good pressure

[Anonymous Coward]

Good. This will put the pressure on filesharers that's long been needed to finally encourage everyone to switch to encrypted protocols. :D

there BIG LACK of HD is killing off subscribers as

[Joe The Dragon]

there BIG LACK of HD is killing off subscribers as well and this maybe to topper as people will give faster internet for FULL INTERNET.

Could this cause legal problems for them?

[BitterOak]

Ok. They're monitoring their customers for illegal file sharing, even going so far as to identify whether or not the copied material has been licensed by the copyright holders. Does this not make them guilty of contributory infringement? They are providing the networks which allow users to infringe copyright. They know that infringement is taking place via their deep packets inspection, down to the level of individual acts of infringement. Then they are destroying data which can identify infringers, but they continue to provide them with networks service. How is this legal?

Re:Could this cause legal problems for them?

[John Hasler]

> How is this legal?

In the USA they would be protected by the "safe harbor" provisions of the DMCA. In the UK, however...

Re:Could this cause legal problems for them?

[d36]

because they have enough money to buy the government?

Re:Could this cause legal problems for them?

[master811]

Unlikely considering they have £4bn+ of debt.

Re:Could this cause legal problems for them?

[Shakrai]

Right, and from a politicians point of view that's the same thing as rolling in a pile of money ;)

Re:Could this cause legal problems for them?

[Anonymous Coward]

Easy, Governments work with negative numbers. Hence minus 4 or 5 (-4/5) million/billion are good numbers.

Re:Could this cause legal problems for them?

[Hurricane78]

Legal! What laws? There is only one rule: The law of power. The law of the jungle. Everything else is only a result of those in power letting you do it.

Ever heard of “double standards’?

Re:Could this cause legal problems for them?

[Xest]

Yes, I think it's actually illegal, but for different reasons. From what I can tell this is exactly why the UK is facing legal procedings from the EU over Phorm.

It's effectively a breach of the European Declaration of Human Rights which we are signatories to, specifically it is a clear breach of the right to privacy.

I think realistically this will end up in European courts. It wont end up in British courts or be looked into by the police here because they are merely puppets of the Labour government here which supports this as demonstrated by the new supreme court refusing to hear McKinnon, the refusal of investigations into Phorm even though it was blatantly illegal and so on.

Nowadays in Britain we have to rely on the European courts for any semblance of justice on these sorts of things, but on the upside they do generally rule in favour of the citizen on things like this where it is a clear breach of law. God knows where we as citizens of Britain would be if it weren't for Europe, I'd imagine it would resemble something like Germany circa 1937. In fact, there's a certain irony in that whole sentence, how times change eh?

Re:Could this cause legal problems for them?

[Xest]

Actually, it's because they're doing it for the government who are pushing it for the music industry.

Re:Could this cause legal problems for them?

[Anonymous Coward]

in the UK, however... they are protected by the "incidental copying" and similar provisions that they themselves had amended into the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Encrypt

[some_guy_88]

Everything.

Re:Encrypt

[dbIII]

Everything.

Ok
cewqqwavkbqfycpligfbnoppilrsbmfDshcaswlpgjxyeuwhkz2gejdtx6wzhutcofalcwTl

Re:Encrypt

[Anonymous Coward]

KS##FGSkl#KL@%$^2452kjfsDk;12012iflkjds235235asd0-di23j=-=-2ls,.s`1#%fdkl

Re:Encrypt

[Bios_Hakr]

It won't help much. Thanks to Bit Torrent, it's rather easy to identify file sharers; they connect to thousands of peers. You draft a AUP that states file sharing will not be tollerated. Then you use NTOP to identify potential file sharers. Finally, you redirect them to a web page explaining what they need to do if they want to get back online.

For repeatr offenders, you kick them completely.

Re:Encrypt

[miffo.swe]

The biggest hurdle for the content companies is that encrypted BT makes it almost impossible to see what people share between them. Its impossible to distinguish a bittorrent of a Linux ISO from your latest blockbuster. Disallowing filesharing alltogether wont make an ISP that popular.

Re:Encrypt

[cyclomedia]

- The biggest hurdle for the content companies is that encrypted BT makes it almost impossible
- to see what people share between them. Its impossible to distinguish a bittorrent of a Linux ISO
- from your latest blockbuster. Disallowing filesharing alltogether wont make an ISP that popular.

Except for the web page with the link to spiderman4-xvid-ROTFL.avi.torrent. Your ISP's DPI will be able to report if you clicked that link or not. Until both traffic AND searching are anonymised via onion routing, and your connection is filled to your rate limits with random garbage upstream and downstream even when you're not transferring then the encryption of the traffic is meaningless.

Re:Encrypt

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

How?

Not many programs support encryption of any kind. PGP requires setup that most email clients simply do not support. Thanks to Mozilla's self signed certs policy, we are farther away from encrypted web surfing than we have been at any time. The currently most accessible form of file encryption for most is to use password protected zip or rar files. All chat clients operate in plain text mode by default. The most common form of actually useful encryption most people use is that on bittorrent clients, and that is putting a strain on on the Tor network that cannot be sustained.

The internet is wide open; the geeks have failed. Where are the encryption add ons for apache? Why don't thunderbird clients try to use PGP by default? Where is distributed and secure DNS? Why has bittorrent still not been decentralized from trackers?

Geeks have failed users. People should be enjoying a freer net. Instead, we've thrown them to the wolves while we spend our time editing Wikipedia, writing aps for Google APIs, and playing World of Warcraft. The disruptive encryption technologies that should have arrived by now are conpicuously absent. These technologies need to be developed and need to be present by default on most FOSS software. Anything less simply perpetuates the status quo.

The status quo is that everything you do online is recorded, archived and owned in full by your ISP, Google, marketers, and whichever governments pay enough to intercept the traffic. The status quo is that the Great Firewall of China has succeeded in censoring the internet where so many scoffed that it would fail; and now the technologies behind it are being brought to bear on the countries and societies that developed them. I suppose it's poetic justice in that sense. We spent our time developing technologies that restrict freedom instead of promoting it; small wonder we should see the weapons we created turned against us.

Re:Encrypt

[L4t3r4lu5]

That's what she said!

Re:Encrypt

[Anonymous Coward]

First guess: you have a qwerty keyboard or a very clever way to hide the randomness of encrypted data.

Re:Encrypt

[drspliff]

Why has bittorrent still not been decentralized from trackers?

It has... The Pirate Bay shows magnet links along with the regular .torrent file and they've shut down their tracker. Torrent Freak as usual have a nice writeup on the action.

Re:Encrypt

[TheRaven64]

Unless you use HTTPS to browse that torrent site, then your ISP won't know the difference between your downloading the torrent and your retrieving the images on the site. They will know that you connected to some torrent site, but not whether you downloaded a torrent (or what torrent).

This won't work

[sammydee]

This won't work, most modern bittorrent clients use encryption by default now anyway. Shame they don't just save the money and spend it on upgrading their infrastructure instead...

Re:This won't work

[Anonymous Coward]

They'll start throttling all encrypted traffic.

Re:This won't work

[MightyMartian]

That will be a thrill to their business customers. I'm in Canada, and if Telus or Shaw started throttling encrypted traffic, we'd be well and truly screwed. DSL and cable uplink speeds suck enough already, but holy fuck, that would be bad.

Re:This won't work

[Imrik]

It wouldn't be that difficult to only throttle encrypted traffic for residential customers, having a side effect of giving further incentive for businesses to get a business account.

Re:This won't work

[Malc]

I don't fully understand how BT works, but it seems that most people accept all peers, so does that mean they can use a modified BT client to connect to your system and get information irrespective of encryption?

Re:This won't work

[sammydee]

Most clients use encryption by default, but will accept plaintext incoming connections yes. It's fairly easy to configure your torrent client to only allow encrypted connections if you are feeling paranoid.

Deep packet inspection does not extend to joining swarms with a modified client. At least I'd hope not...

Re:This won't work

[Bert64]

Only they wouldn't because that would cost more...
They will just have less people working from home, which will cost their staff more and cause more environmental impact (more travel, more cars etc)

Re:This won't work

[Malc]

Deep packet inspection does not extend to joining swarms with a modified client. At least I'd hope not...

Why wouldn't it?

Re:This won't work

[Toy G]

DPI is exactly that: a technique to monitor packets in transit on specific connections / routers which belong to the ISP. It's protocol-agnostic. It's like your postal office opening all your mail, reading it, and then carefully closing it again exactly as it was, before delivering it.

Joining a swarm with a modified client is something completely different. It's akin to the postman coming to your house to watch you while you write the letter, saying he's a friend of the friend you were writing to. It's impersonation, or even stalking. It's something you would expect from the likes of MediaSentry etc, but it wouldn't be done by an ISP, there are major legal risks.

Re:This won't work

[Xest]

This is why the whole "Digital Economy Bill" is a complete farce. All measures that would improve connectivity and the digital economy have been removed/indefinitely delayed, whilst the only measures that remain are things like this which require investment in technologies that inevitably have to slow down the network and that sidetrack money away from infrastructure improvements.

The net effect of the "Digital Economy Bill" is to lessen innovation and worsen the UK's internet infrastructure. The fact this bill goes completely against what is intended demonstrates how hopelessly incompetent government ministers, and the opposition that also support this are.

Re:This won't work

[Anonymous Coward]

People who use VPN's to connect to work would be pissed. Not to mention that https is pretty common these days.

It wouldn't fly.

Re:This won't work

[Wicko]

I'm also in Canada, and they already do throttle it (Bell/Rogers/Cogeco). Bell throttles your download speed during busy hours, and Rogers/Cogeco throttle your upload speed 24/7. I've gotten around it thanks to a feature offered by a reseller of Bell's lines. Not entirely sure how it works. It's called MLPPP, and I think that its usually used to bond 2 DSL lines together, but you can use it with a single line and for some reason clients aren't throttled when they have it enabled (requires a custom firmware however, eg. http://fixppp.org/). Who knows how long this will last though..

misnomer

[Anonymous Coward]

Judging by their behaviour they should probably rebrand themselves Whore Media.

Re:misnomer

[sa1lnr]

"rebrand themselves Whore Media"

http://home.clara.net/lesmcdm/images/virgin.jpg

Re:misnomer

[Nerdfest]

Why ... it's not them getting screwed.

Well I am leaving.

[vosester]

That's all, no long post about rights,ethics and shitty ISP's. Terminating my line tomorrow, I am done with this stupid company.

Re:Well I am leaving.

[Anonymous Coward]

I tried that, but BT couldn't even manage to take a customer off Virgin without screwing it up - so I'm still on Whore Media.

Bring back NTL - good times...

Re:Well I am leaving.

[TheDarkMaster]

Modern companies do not care about people rights, ethics or even human lives. All that matters to them is only... profit.

Re:Well I am leaving.

[dcarmi]

Modern companies do not care about people rights, ethics or even human lives. All that matters to them is only... profit.

It is more than profit matters. Profit is an obligation and everything else is secondary. That is why you have legislation and monitoring bodies to limit the excesses caused by the prime obligation.

Awesome !

[Anonymous Coward]

I, for one, welcome our copyright-infringement-detecting overlords.

Suck it, pirates.

Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics

[turtleshadow]

The project is solely designed to bolster the corporate/industry agenda. Their lack of intent to immediately prosecute show their intent is to datamine to build up their overall case.

Even if it was found that 95% of the traffic was legitimate they would hold up the 5% as proof of the devastating loss to their profits and will ask for more severe legislation and fiscal relief in tough economic times.

Until governments and real people understand the recording industry's practice of not paying the artists in a "normal" arrangement this will continue endlessly.
Really would any engineer just hired at YoyoDyne agree to a 5-10 year exclusive contract, the company immediately deduct all profits off his work to pay off his "advance," be willing to pay for all the publicists, agents, middlemen, nepotism in the exec's office, sycophants of their entourage, etc... Have their evaluation based on popularity polls given by radio/tv/internet which sometimes are skewed with payola.

What is the biggest of the 3 big "sinks" of copyrighted data in the internets - Pirated Binaries, p0rn, or music and associated videos?
We only hear 2 out of three industries most of the time never all three united before the Govenment.

I feel for Prince (whatever his name is now) as he is both artist and producer personally defending his copyrights but most of it is by nameless lawyers on behalf of their clients.
I'd take a few big names to give up a few hours to film some adverts just saying - when you DL my album I thank you, When you pay for that DL I will eventually get paid by the record company so I can pay all the people in the band and that support us in making music (soundstudio, roadies, catering, babysitting, mistress (ahem)...) I encourage you to pay for it and tell your friends to please pay for it else I can not produce more because Im a indentured to the music industry.

For the music industry I meh at their pathetic grasp for money, for the p0rn producers and "artists" I laugh because they can not even do the same thing and are being "driven out of business" will all their copyrighted stuff being the flotsam in the internets.

What sort of overhead would be need to encrypt BT?

[ShooterNeo]

For torrents, encrypting them to block this sort of thing would appear to be straightforward. Just include the encryption key in the *.torrent file itself. Make it a nice long randomly generated key using lots of bits with whatever freely available encryption algorithm is thought to be the most secure.

What sort of CPU overhead is needed for this kind of encryption processing, though? Would it add up to anything significant on modern 1 GHZ+ multicore CPUs at the current data rates?

Implied

[Shadyman]

"Virgin Media emphasised that records will not be kept on individual customers and that data on the level of copyright infringement will be aggregated and anonymised."

For Now. Later? Who knows.

Re:How do they know?Christmas sale, free shipping

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember to take a look at http://slashdot.org/journal/241542/Coolstuffonline-spam for some tips on how to get back at these particular spammers.

That'll violate their immunity

[Anonymous Coward]

The inability to inspect cargo is the principle behind common carrier status. If they can inspect their traffic for copyright infringement then they can police their traffic for everything else.

Re:That'll violate their immunity

[Malc]

Do they have this concept of "common carrier" in the UK?

Remember, everything the...

[soporific16]

Nazis did in Germany was legal. DO NOT BUY INTO THE LEGALITY ARGUMENT. If for some reason hell freezes over and Big Music proposes legal limits to the profits they can make out of the changing face of music distribution, then and only then would they begin to have an argument for their 'laws'. I'm not holding my breath.

Packet Inspection

[Rocketship Underpant]

Not only that, those packets they're "inspecting" could be for anything. If you back up your Mac (including your music collection) to MobileMe, does it flag your file transfers as unauthorized filesharing? What about if you access your files over a VPN? What if you email your favourite music to your Gmail account so you can listen to it from work or on vacation? What if you upload them to your phone to use as a ringtone?

Re:Packet Inspection

[ShakaUVM]

>>What about if you access your files over a VPN?

If they can tell what files I'm sending over an encrypted VPN link, then they have some impressive technology indeed.

But your point is valid - how do they know if the music I'm sending is an authorized transfer or not? What if I'm the person who owns the content?

Re:Packet Inspection

[jimicus]

If they can tell what files I'm sending over an encrypted VPN link, then they have some impressive technology indeed.

At the risk of being branded a tinfoil-hat wearing nutcase, my employer used to use CIPE for a VPN between two offices. At the time I started, CIPE had already been discredited as being fundamentally insecure but nobody really thought it was going to be intercepted unless you had pissed off a government somewhere.

Then we had a problem. SIP traffic of any description going over that VPN link didn't make it across. (Kind of important when your employer produces SIP software).

Everything else made it fine. And there wasn't a firewall on the traffic going over the VPN. But SIP? Nope, ethereal on both ends proved that what went in one end didn't make it out the other - and it wasn't random packet loss. Just one protocol. The only plausible explanation we could think of was that someone was intercepting and decrypting traffic in real time and filtering what they didn't like.

We stopped using CIPE shortly after that.

Re:Packet Inspection

[turing_m]

The only plausible explanation we could think of was that someone was intercepting and decrypting traffic in real time and filtering what they didn't like.

What would be the motive?

Re:Packet Inspection

[jimicus]

The only plausible explanation we could think of was that someone was intercepting and decrypting traffic in real time and filtering what they didn't like.

What would be the motive?

The only one we could come up with is that SIP is used for VoIP, and one of the offices was in a country well-known for protecting the national telco.

Re:Packet Inspection

[turing_m]

The only one we could come up with is that SIP is used for VoIP, and one of the offices was in a country well-known for protecting the national telco.

Ah, that seems logical. Thanks.

Re:Not much

[Anonymous Coward]

Most bittorrent clients nowadays support encryption though they allow unencrypted legacy connections by default. All anyone using such a client needs to do change two settings, one to force encryption for outgoing connections and the other to only accept encrypted incoming connections. As for overhead, nothing noticable even on this fairly old Athlon box underclocked to 800MHz via SpeedStep/PowerNOW.

I see a larger motive:

[prograde]

The cynic in me thinks it will go this way: They make this announcement today. For the next few months, they do absolutely nothing. Then, they fabricate a bunch of data, and announce that they've determined that 99% of all P2P traffic is protected by copyright. Authorities cowtow, and those "three-strikes" laws get put in place (and enforced) everywhere.

It doesn't matter that the data was faked...they expressly stated that it would all be anonymised and not linked to any specific customer...so how can anyone prove it's been faked?

Re:I see a larger motive:

[jimicus]

The cynic in me thinks it will go this way: They make this announcement today. For the next few months, they do absolutely nothing. Then, they fabricate a bunch of data, and announce that they've determined that 99% of all P2P traffic is protected by copyright. Authorities cowtow, and those "three-strikes" laws get put in place (and enforced) everywhere.

It doesn't matter that the data was faked...they expressly stated that it would all be anonymised and not linked to any specific customer...so how can anyone prove it's been faked?

There is another way of looking at it. Though I can't see it gaining much traction on here.

I don't imagine most ISPs really want to start cutting off their customers by the thousand. Particularly not when it's a tough enough business with very slim margins as it is.

What if their numbers (fabricated or otherwise) showed the exact opposite? That 99% of P2P traffic is not illegally traded copyright material? Suddenly that "3 strikes" rule is starting to look a little harder to defend...

Re:What sort of overhead would be need to encrypt

[Anonymous Coward]

openssl speed aes-128-cbc aes-256-cbc

type 16 bytes 64 bytes 256 bytes 1024 bytes 8192 bytes
aes-128 cbc 93137.34k 124663.87k 140590.61k 144921.90k 145808.33k
aes-256 cbc 60556.97k 91740.58k 103621.96k 107994.02k 108521.49k

Those benchmarks are on a 3 year old CPU (single core only). Hence encryption is not a limiting factor for end users - instead, network bandwidth is the limiting factor. I'd argue that encryption isn't a limiting factor for mass data surveillance either. In public anonymous networks without any sort of trust between users, encryption is not overly beneficial.

Some reasoning why:

1) You can rotate your taps between your customers so that they may only be monitored twice a year for a day at a time. You're still going to catch MANY people this way. And for the stated purpose of this system they're installing, they're apparently only after statistics (I doubt anyone is stupid enough to believe this though). For statistical (and scare tactic) purposes, taking small samples from different customers at different times is just as effective as maintaining a 24/7 tap on everyone's connection.

2) The eavesdropper can bulk purchase cheap dedicated ASIC chips that are optimised for decryption of encrypted file sharing traffic. End users have to put up with CPUs that are designed for other purposes and thus they have to spend more per encrypted byte than the eavesdroppers do per decrypted byte.

3) Imagine an eavesdropper that plants 1000's of fake monitoring peers onto the network. These peers would be indistinguishable to you from other legitimate anonymous peers on the other side of the world. These fake monitoring peers would behave exactly like any other legitimate peer would, except that they make a record of who is downloading files.

No matter what technical solution you use (such as encryption), at the end of the day you're still communicating and sharing with random anonymous people on the internet. You haven't established any sort of trust with them. Without trust, that other party in your communication could just as likely be a fake monitoring peer.

In Other News...

[florescent_beige]

All public and private communications of all executives of companies in the UK valued at 500 million or more will be monitored for illegal, unethical, and undesired behaviour.

"If we had only known what certain Wall Street bankers had been up to the world could have avoided financial losses in the trillions. In a world of high speed communication and free flowing capital, the expectations of privacy have to be balanced against the interests of all stakeholders." said noted expert florescent_beige.

Re:In Other News...

[javilon]

On one hand they tell us to forget any expectation of privacy, and on the other hand governments, politicians, companies and executives are very effective at using copyright, trade secret laws and national security laws to protect their own privacy.

Regardless of what happens with regular citizens privacy, we should start removing any and all expectations of privacy from corporate entities and politicians. Every payment they make or receive, all external and internal communications and all contracts they sign should be recorded and kept for later inspection by law enforcement. If they have nothing to hide they should't worry. And in a post Lehman Brothers world, this is completely justified.

Nobody talks about this, of course.

Re:In Other News...

[jimicus]

Great idea - I think we should apply it to MPs as well. Particularly after the expenses scandal.

Re:In Other News...

[mpe]

On one hand they tell us to forget any expectation of privacy, and on the other hand governments, politicians, companies and executives are very effective at using copyright, trade secret laws and national security laws to protect their own privacy.

Witness how British MPs tried hard to prevent their "expenses" being published and how they are not being treated as "benefits cheats".

Regardless of what happens with regular citizens privacy, we should start removing any and all expectations of privacy from corporate entities and politicians.

They'd probably claim something about this would make them more vulnerable to terrorists or some such nonsense. As if a) politicians are actually more valuable to society than the average person and b) terrorists can't impersonate lobbyists...

Every payment they make or receive, all external and internal communications and all contracts they sign should be recorded and kept for later inspection by law enforcement.

It would have to be "inspection by the public" unless law enforcement is completly separated from corporate interests, politicians and lobby groups.

If they have nothing to hide they should't worry. And in a post Lehman Brothers world, this is completely justified.

More like "post Enron" or even "post BCCI"...

Is any form of trivial encryption sufficient?

[atmurray]

The way I see it, the problem with encryption is that it's generally computationally expensive and there are bandwidth overheads in performing strong worthwhile encryption. BUT, with the DMCA and other localised laws forbidding cracking of encryption, is strong encryption needed? Is it worth just encrypting things using a trivial dictionary or some such computationally trivial and zero bandwidth overhead system? That way if someone wants to look at the data, they'll need a warrant or else they'd be breaking the law. Is my thinking here valid?

Re:Is any form of trivial encryption sufficient?

[Totenglocke]

You're assuming that the RIAA/MPAA/ISP's/governments care about the law -- they don't.

Re:Is any form of trivial encryption sufficient?

[u38cg]

It might be if the DMCA applied outside the US.

Re:Is any form of trivial encryption sufficient?

[wvmarle]

Governments don't have to worry because they make the law. They can change any law, any time, including the constitution (if there is any; not all countries have one). Making and changing laws is actually their job.

Re:Is any form of trivial encryption sufficient?

[Bert64]

Modern CPUs are fast enough that for any typical connection, a relatively modern cpu is able to do wirespeed AES256...
For users on the service described on the article, the most they will ever have is 50mbit downstream and considerably less upstream, unless you're trying to torrent from an embedded device like a phone almost anything should be able to handle that... I'm sure even the atom based netbooks could handle encrypting that without issues, and some of the embedded cpus like the ones from via have hardware aes engines.

Re:Is any form of trivial encryption sufficient?

[Skapare]

Generally speaking, it takes more effort to crack encryption than doing it with the known keys. How much more depends on the algorithm. If you do encryption at a level sufficient to just use up a modern CPU (all cores), then it will take a lot more of them to crack it.

But there catches. File sharers are not always communicating continuously, but their cracking computers would be available for that purpose all the time. And they only need to detect if you are doing something suspicious and can batch the cracking until later in many cases. My summary would be: go ahead and use encryption. Once a PK exchange is done, the core cipher is not that much. This stuff is done in integers and GPUs can help speed it up, too. Would they start buying all that compute power just to do the cracking?

Re:Is any form of trivial encryption sufficient?

[Totenglocke]

Making and changing laws is actually their job.

No, their job is to uphold / enforce the law.

Re:Is any form of trivial encryption sufficient?

[wvmarle]

The police and judiciary are enforcing and upholding the law (that's why the police is called "law enforcement").

The government is making the laws - members of parliament are therefore also called "lawmakers". And this makes total sense if only you think about it: the government, by governing, tells what they want to happen in a country and how things should work. Those rules are written down in laws. After that it's up to the police and the judiciary to make sure the laws are followed by the people, and to punish people for breaking those rules, if necessary. The limits of punishment are usually prescribed by the government in said laws. The actual punishment is either fixed (e.g. a fine for running a red light), or decided upon by a judge.

Re:Is any form of trivial encryption sufficient?

[atmurray]

Correct. However, evidence collected illegally generally isn't admissible in court.

Re:Is any form of trivial encryption sufficient?

[atmurray]

I think you've all missed my point. My point is, by using any old encryption, no matter how strong/weak the encryption is, it makes it illegal to decipher what the content of it is without a warrant. The idea is to make any evidence collected inadmissible in court. Furthermore, if a warrant to raid your premises was obtained using evidence that was tainted (due to being collected illegally), the warrant may be deemed invalid and any further evidence collected maybe also inadmissible.

MitM = DRM circumvention

[AliasMarlowe]

a Man in the Middle can still proxy the key negotiation and access the plaintext.

But wouldn't this be illegal?
Let's leave aside P2P, in which you may or may not have the right to transfer particular copyright material (depending on the material, of course). If you protect your personal communications - in which copyright belongs to you - with a DRM scheme such as a non-trivial encryption, then decrypting it would be an unauthorized circumvention of that DRM. The mechanism used, whether brute-force or Man in the Middle, is merely a technical detail.

It would be an outrage if ISP conditions included signing over your copyright privileges over your own communications, or restricting your ability to use encryption on communication. It would have many repercussions for legally-privileged communications which are often encrypted today. For example, legally privileged communication includes: attorney-client dialog relevant to a trial or investigation; negotiation of proposed terms for a commercial contract; discussion of trade secrets among a group privy to such secrets; exchange of material related to an invention prior to filing a patent.

Legally-privileged communications are not confined to email with attachments. I occasionally have to send fairly large files (up to about 100MB) to my patent attorney; they are sent by ftp and are always encrypted using pre-arranged keys. There is a legal duty to maintain secrecy of an invention prior to filing a patent application. Having an unknown third party who is likely to read all of one's secret communications would grievously undermine this duty.

Re:MitM = DRM circumvention

[asdf7890]

I occasionally have to send fairly large files (up to about 100MB) to my patent attorney; they are sent by ftp and are always encrypted using pre-arranged keys. There is a legal duty to maintain secrecy of an invention prior to filing a patent application. Having an unknown third party who is likely to read all of one's secret communications would grievously undermine this duty.

They are likely, if they ever did try to monitor encrypted P2P traffic, to try differentiate between your pre-encrypted FTP transfer example and P2P transfers using some sort of "expectation" clause, stating that as their newly found stats from this investigation say ~80% of P2P traffic infringes and ~5% of FTP/ traffic does (warning figures plucked from thin air). Whether this would hold *any* water legally would depend on how much money they have available for throwing at legal teams and politicians.

That is moot though as they couldn't do it anyway (at very least not practically) and the stink generated would cost them so much that winning any such argument by any means simply wouldn't be worth it.

Also in your FTP example: the pre-shared keys, assuming they were shared by means not involving the IPS(s) that are doing the monitoring, would circumvent the MITM scenarios the parent poster mentioned.

Re:What sort of overhead would be need to encrypt

[Anonymous Coward]

No, not at all. Encryption can be heavy on an Atom, but fine on most other CPUs.

At least 60-70% of torrent traffic is already encrypted, it's on in uTorrent by default, and if you change it to "Forced" and untick accepting legacy connections, it'll always use it. You probably won't notice any noticeable CPU usage; this is 2009, not 1999!

Torrent's obfuscation scheme uses the RC4 stream cipher, RSA-1024 key exchanges and uses the infohash of the .torrent to authenticate the key exchange, if I recall. It's there specifically to deter DPI. There are some possible issues: I don't know what the UDP transport uTP uses (if anything), and I don't know how this affects DHT (it probably doesn't, that's probably in the clear). Also, tracker communication can be by https: and this is probably the right way to do it, but with DHT enabled and people moving to UDP trackers or none at all, it's going the other way.

However, I don't think these boxes are as smart as Sandvine (because they handle much higher volumes). They look at the transfer payloads, and I don't think they look at the .torrent or tracker communications like Sandvine does.

Also, they only handle torrent, eDonkey (does this include KAD or not?) and Gnutella (I don't know if this includes G2). I note eMule's KAD traffic is also often encrypted now, and Gnutella (i.e. Bearshare, Limewire) is full of shit anyway.

Frankly it sounds as though they're being peddled out-of-date, easily-crashable equipment...

Two Other Words Then

[srussia]

Cat and Mouse

Deltica isn't real

[Anonymous Coward]

It's Detica not Deltica

How do you suggest we do this?

[jonaskoelker]

Encrypt everything.

That's fine, except slashdot.org:80 doesn't think "jqncugir8o486" looks like a valid HTTP request. I've also had problems on other sites, and with torrenting linux ISOs, world of warcraft, streaming media, SMTP, IRC, instant messaging and many other applications.

I could of course force the other end to decrypt my stuff, but that involves controlling computers I don't own, which means if that's how we play I should expect others to take control of my computers. No. Bad. Very bad. (It's probably also illegal.)

We can only encrypt our communication when we're talking to people who want to decrypt what we send them. Given that this costs CPU cycles (electricity, money), we shouldn't expect profit-driven organizations to do this much; given how complex IT security is and how we want HTTPS to protect our slashdot password, we might come off as paranoid ("why are you making a big deal out of it? It's just another internet forum, why would anyone steal your account, and why do you care so much?"). That makes it a hard sell.

Saying "encrypt everything" is fine, and I think that's what we ought to be doing. But how do we get to there from here?

Re:How do you suggest we do this?

[s7uar7]

VPN. It won't make you completely anonymous as your VPN provider will have your billing details (although some claim to decouple these from traffic logs), but all your ISP will see is an encrypted VPN tunnel.

Re:How do you suggest we do this?

[Toy G]

It is an evolutionary process. Browsers and http servers didn't all support HTTPS from the very beginning, but serious ones gradually accepted it as a critical part of the web infrastructure, and now you wouldn't dream to do ecommerce on HTTP.
The same is slowly happening for other applications where secrecy and data integrity increasingly get to be seen as essential. Pretty much all serious torrent clients already support encryption, but they haven't switched off "legacy" support in their default configurations yet. It will take for a "big country" (like France or the UK) to start seriously enforcing laws through DPI for plaintext-mode to be disabled by default. Then they will start doing the "mediasentry thing", impersonating peers etc etc, which is where webs of trust will come into play. Until someone will come up with a better business model for producing and distributing entertainment, making loads of bucks and showing the old cartels as irrelevant.

We predicted all this a decade ago, and it's happening exactly as we thought it would: centralized nets -> decentralized nets -> decentralized and encrypted nets -> decentralized, encrypted and trusted nets. Cat&mouse will continue. It will take another decade or so to get rid of this particularly evil sort of candlemakers we now call "the entertainment industry", because they wasted the current one on doomed strategies.

They do!

[jonaskoelker]

[RIAA/ISPs/gov doesn't care about the law]

Oh they do! They care about the law so badly they're willing to break it to enforce it, when said enforcement is aligned with their motives---either directly as profit profit, or as part of a strategic profit-enhancing terrorism campaign.

Yes, terrorism---they want you to feel terror (fear) that you might get caught and put through the courtroom meat grinder.

Re:They do!

[IBBoard]

I feel groups like the RIAA care very strongly about laws, but in a very selective way - i.e. "the ones that help us are very important, but the ones that hinder us should be ignored or bought away". ISPs have some dodgy ground to stand on, and the government tends to be above a lot of laws (or at least have exceptions and caveats that they claim and use).

Typo: its Detica not Deltica

[Anonymous Coward]

see www.detica.com/ for more info

Make encryption mandatory

[Anonymous Coward]

If enough file sharers use encryption Virgin will report back that DPI is a waste of money. Then we can all move on to the anonymity problem.

To make encryption the norm ordinary people need to enable it.
Sadly the average joe will not even read about this and also tends to ignore things like bug fixes and security patches so the chances of them downloading an update to enable encryption is not high enough.

But maybe the makers of the most successful apps could release a patch that offers potentially improved download speeds (so average users will actually get the thing) and more importantly enables forced encryption, sets it to the default and gives lots of warnings if you disable it. (sneaky I know but hey desperate times). that way the user is as unlikeley to disable encryption as they were to enable it.

If they already do, my apologies. I've been out of the windows p2p world for a long time and transmission comes with encryption enabled by default with my operating system :)

Incidentally, I really hope virgin do publish statistics on the percentage encrypting their traffic!

Doesn't that just forward the problem?

[jonaskoelker]

So instead of trusting an ISP, you have to trust... an ISP?

If the VPN provider is lax and/or manages to dodge the laws and regulations you want to avoid, won't they also be great hosts for your spam/DoS endeavour? Won't the VPN provider be blocked at the sites where the spam/DoS hits? How will it affect latency and bandwidth? Can the internet sustain a substantial number of users doing weird triangular routing (increasing the packet path length)?

I'm not trying to say it's ironclad that VPN'ing won't work. But I think there are some questions one should answer before declaring this to be the long-(or just mid-)term solution for the future.

To trial?

[Porchroof]

To trial? To trial?

What's wrong with "to try"?

God, what is happening to our language?

Encryption???

[mario_grgic]

Don't you know that in the UK you must hand over your encryption keys to the government if asked or face prison?

That law passed long ago before this. So, if you encrypt your data stream, all they have to do is ask for your encryption keys really.

Re:Encryption???

[TheRaven64]

Note that RIPA, while an abomination, does have a get-out for this kind of use. If you can demonstrate that you do not know the key then you can not be asked for hand it over. Most network encryption protocols use ephemeral keys which are generated by the software at both ends randomly, exchanged, and discarded periodically. You can not be forced to hand over these keys, because you never knew them and you can easily get an expert witness to testify to this.

This probably illegal under EU law

[Anonymous Coward]

The EU directive 2002/58/ec does not permit
content monitoring without prior consent.

Re:This probably illegal under EU law

[internewt]

That's why contracts with big, faceless, corporations are full of clauses that ultimately allow the corp. to do what they want. They do things like say that the agreement can be changed at any time by VM, and that you agree to be bound by documents other than just the contract, like terms and conditions, acceptable usage policies, etc..

I think VM will have made sure they covered their arses this time, after the Phorm bullshit.

DIY MUSIC COPYRIGHT

[oxanag]

The world of music copyright is evolving. Monopolies of collecting societies are under pressure. Songwriters complain about a lack of benefit, music users about non-transparent and high tariffs. Collecting societies are old-fashioned. Now is the time for online DIY copyright management. VillaMusicRights is a website in English, Spanish and Dutch, and plays a role as a facilitator in the contacts between songwriters and users of their music. This means you can upload your music and arrange your rights. The music will be stored in a database and users can download it. Downloads for home users are free, but business users have to pay a modest amount of money. Both songwriters and users have to register. Songwriters have to declare to own the rights to the music and users have to declare that they won’t use the music for other purposes than agreed. VillaMusicRights takes care of payments between songwriters and business users and receives a commission in remuneration of the cost of display, advice and transactions. A lot of music genres already are represented in the database, from rock to reggae and from blues to easy listening. Website: http://www.villamusicrights.com/