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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."

8 of 280 comments (clear)

  1. Re:How do they know? by zonky · · Score: 4, Interesting

    What mobile phone make/model was this?

  2. Encrypted Anonymous File Sharing by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

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

  3. Will they track their own usenet server? by Winckle · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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?

  4. Re:More details here: by Anonymous+Cowpat · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

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  5. Re:Time to encrypt everything. by MichaelSmith · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  6. Re:Time to encrypt everything. by Cimexus · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  7. Re:Could this cause legal problems for them? by Xest · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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?

  8. Re:How do they know? by TheRaven64 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

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