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.

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?

[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?

[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?

[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.

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!"

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...

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?

Time to encrypt everything.

[pushf popf]

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

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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

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?

[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?

[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 :)

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.

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?

[d36]

because they have enough money to buy the government?

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?

Encrypt

[some_guy_88]

Everything.

Re:Encrypt

[dbIII]

Everything.

Ok
cewqqwavkbqfycpligfbnoppilrsbmfDshcaswlpgjxyeuwhkz2gejdtx6wzhutcofalcwTl

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.

misnomer

[Anonymous Coward]

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

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.