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Copyright Alert System To Launch Monday
An anonymous reader sends this excerpt from the Daily Dot:
"Starting next week, most U.S. Internet users will be subject to a new copyright enforcement system that could force them to complete educational programs, and even slow their Internet speeds to a crawl. A source with direct knowledge of the Copyright Alert System [said] the five participating Internet service providers will start the controversial program Monday. The ISPs — industry giants AT&T, Cablevision, Comcast, Time Warner, and Verizon — will launch their versions of the CAS on different days throughout the week. Comcast is expected to be the first, on Monday."
Of course, there are many ways around the Copyright Alert System, so it probably won't be terribly effective.
This is actually a pretty moderate approach compared to just suing single mothers for millions of dollars for downloading an MP3 once.
To offset political mods, replace Flamebait with Insightful.
Security is NOT sexy.
For VPN providers.
I'm partial to AirVPN since they accept Bitcoins for payment and let you connect via Tor if that's what you want.
Can we PLEASE keep referring to it as "Six Strikes system"? Not the Industry-concocted, innocent-sounding "alert system" crap? Thank you.
This will only speed up the race to fully encrypted comms.
Good-bye
Because I'd have to say I have a problem with that.
I don't use Bittorrent very often, but when I do, it's to download content that is entirely legitimate. I have to say that if they accuse you of infringing on copyright, you should be permitted to at the very least be able to say "No I didn't", and have that actually mean something.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
The Obama Administration pressured ISPs into adopting this scheme. Now we get private enforcement of copyrights without the usual defenses against such. No government involvement, so no due process. People should be more worried about this than they really are, especially considering the government's involvement.
"In prison you just have to shut your eyes and take it. Here you have to shut your eyes and give it."
"... or slow their Internet speeds to a crawl."
So, pretty much business as usual then?
like phone lines, water, and electricity. Would you accept an unelected corporate group like Hollywood policing your phone conversations and throttling the line if they didn't like what they overheard you saying? Or throttling your water supply if they objected to the flowers growing in your yard?
Inform your elected officials. Make it clear that we will not tolerate these for-profit commercial groups invading our privacy and abusing public resources. Apply citizen utility rights to internet access.
(By the way, expect small captured governments like New Zealand to bend to corporate influence, but how is this stuff not struck down in modern social leaning nations such as France?)
State of the art copyright 'protection' methods use signature databases. Companies acting as 'agents' on behalf of copyright 'owners' scan various forms of their clients 'property' to create signatures that can be tested against video/sound streams, or against packet streams intercepted at the ISP using 'deep packet inspection'.
Now, here we are talking about the later- the ISP inspecting the 'signature' of data traffic to the users. Firstly, false positives will swamp the system. We have already seen have legal live video streams have been closed down by automated signature testing systems. But let us instead consider the 'valid' matches.
To fight back, users will need packet streams that are unique to the user. While this is frequently described as 'end to end' encryption, simpler solutions also work. The 'deep packet' signature test fails if the data stream suffers ANY per user modification, and that can include a simple XORing of most of the packet via an XOR key at the head of the packet. This really isn't 'encryption' but data 'morphing' where the same data can have a massive number of different forms, confusing or defeating a 'signature' based approach.
Data morphing can be done with near zero computational processing, unlike proper encryption. The goal is simply to ensure the same data has a vast number of different forms. And included 4-byte XOR key, for instance, has 4000 million variants, if memory serves, requiring this number of signatures in the database to dumbly recognise ONE packet.
Now, today, governments benefit greatly from the mostly open nature of data transmitted across the net. Intelligence agencies must be doing their nut over useless proposals that simply have the effect of moving us ALL to obscured forms of net traffic. The new US system will ensure EVERYONE will come to the conclusion "I do not want my ISP sniffing my traffic".
PS Automated (or Human) takedowns of non-live material can never work. If the worst comes to the worst, people will simply post encrypted 'zips' with no description, and tell people to "watch this space". Seven days later (or whatever), the password will be posted alongside a description of contents. Sure, this still allows the uploaders to be targeted, but their has NEVER been a time when uploaders were unable to be targeted.
Since survey after survey shows that 'pirates' are also the biggest purchasers of 'legal' content, we already know that the solution is in providing the legal services people want (which means EVERYTHING available EVERYWHERE for use on ALL devices). The tech war should not be wasted on 'downloaders' but on finding better ways to get paid content available universally.
I got a nasty letter from my ISP telling me "No peer-to-peer". I called them, and said "WTF guys? I download Linux distros and OpenOffice ISOs via torrent, all kinds of 100% legal and legitimate content." "We don't care. No peer-to-peer."
So I signed up for a VPN, of course.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
What were those, the famous last words of a few Anonymous script kiddies right before they got arrested?
Finding someone who is "anonymous" on the Internet is hard, in the same way that cracking a new hardware-based DRM scheme is hard. It can take a lot of work, at least if you're the first person trying to do it, but ultimately trying to establish two-way communications over the Internet and yet remain completely anonymous is just as futile as trying to lock up content that you're also showing to someone. There may be many levels of indirection that are difficult to follow, but it's impossible to do what you actually need to do and yet still remain 100% safe from hostile activity.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Any excuse to limit the usage by high-bandwidth users. Comcast would be much happier (and profitable) if, despite all the adverts about the speed Comcast offers, you used your connection only to check your email a few times per day. No streaming media, etc..
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
From the 2nd fine article:
If you feel "wrongly accused" then there is a $35 'review fee' to see precisely what you are accused of. It's refunded if you win, but if the Copyright Alert System is so sure of itself then why charge at all? Why not let individuals know what they are accused of without this stipulation that the fee is to stop "frivolous appeals?"
You actually have to pay money to see what this non-government cabal is accusing you of? It costs them next to nothing to tell you what the exact accusation is. It's just a few more bytes in the warning email or in a web page linked to by the email. I could maybe understand having to pay a fee to contest the charges but it is truly Kafkaesque to have to pay a fee just to find out what the charges are.
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
DUDE! That thing sticking outta the side of his head... is his tongue in his cheek... next you're supposed to laugh... and now we know why there are no savant comedians...
I got a nasty letter from my ISP telling me "No peer-to-peer". I called them, and said "WTF guys? I download Linux distros and OpenOffice ISOs via torrent, all kinds of 100% legal and legitimate content." "We don't care. No peer-to-peer."
So I signed up for a VPN, of course.
I wonder if they also go after all the folks that are just trying to download the latest WoW patch. Seems like most MMORPGs these days use P2P updaters.
Fortunately or unfortunately, only agents of the *AA can report infringement. The system cannot be turned against itself. Arguably this is unfair to all copyright holders who are not part of the *AA, but the flip side is that you can pirate non-AA content with impunity.
...it would bankrupt all these corps...
And they'll come back at you with, "You're putting people out of work!"
Meanwhile, company officers will simply shift their portfolios, and write down the losses onto the smaller investors and the taxman.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Not everyone gets the luxury of choice.
"We don't care. No peer-to-peer."
This is unacceptable and unprofessional, can I please speak with your supervisor?
Encrypt everything by default, and allow nothing unencrypted, just needs to become default behavior in all operating systems, and become the de-facto standard, for everything, for security purposes, before anyone else can act.
The trouble is, while passing good laws often requires a lot of time and debate, passing knee-jerk reactionary laws based on lobbying in technical fields that most legislators frankly don't understand can be done almost in moments. It's already a criminal offence here in the UK to refuse to hand over a password if the Powers That Be want to know what your encrypted communications say, and the law was widely criticised for (among other things) being about as black-and-white as you could possibly be. For example, minor details like whether the password you've been required to provide actually exists tend not to be relevant to any defence.
So in my admittedly pessimistic view of how these things currently tend to work in practice, I don't see your "default behaviour in all operating systems" as being even remotely possible until the authorities and in particular the legislators are far, far more clued up on technical issues than most of them are today. Plausible preemptive countermeasures might include whoever first creates such an operating system being labelled an $EMOTIVE_THREAT and getting banned from trading/selling in the jurisdiction, anyone installing such an OS being labelled a criminal under those same knee-jerk blanket-ban laws I talked about before, or possibly more insidious things like Microsoft/Apple/etc. cutting a RIM-style deal where their "secure" systems weren't really secure at all (but of course any more secure/trustworthy platform like, say, Linux, is now an $EMOTIVE_THREAT, according to lots of "industry experts" probably indirectly funded by the aforementioned Microsoft/Apple/etc.).
The basic problem with this whole situation is that there is no good answer that always works. There really are bad people in the world, and there really are legitimate reasons that security services would want to intercept their communications, so any argument for universally encrypting anything is always going to run into some degree of resistance for sensible reasons that few reasonable people would disagree with even if they might feel that on balance the costs outweigh the benefits. But as we've seen on many occasions already, such legitimate reasons are all too easily twisted into mere commercial power plays when governments and big business mix. Sadly, but honestly, I see no reason to expect anything better to happen as long as the political status quo in most of the western world remains.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Drone: "Certainly Sir, just a minute", hits mute button, says to coworkers, "Who wants to be superviser today?".
I'm guessing that wasn't on their radar screen...
Are you sure it's his tongue? Might be the antenna. They're not supposed to be visible, but some people have bad reactions to the materials.
Not that this wasn't entirely predictable.