AT&T Patents System To "Fast-Lane" File-Sharing Traffic

An anonymous reader writes Telecom giant AT&T has been awarded a patent for speeding up BitTorrent and other peer-to-peer traffic, and reducing the impact that these transactions have on the speed of its network. Unauthorized file-sharing generates thousands of petabytes of downloads every month, sparking considerable concern among the ISP community due to its detrimental effect on network speeds. AT&T and its Intellectual Property team has targeted the issue in a positive manner, and has appealed for the new patent to create a 'fast lane' for BitTorrent and other file-sharing traffic. As well as developing systems around the caching of local files, the ISP has proposed analyzing BitTorrent traffic to connect high-impact clients to peers who use fewer resources.

Comments

Seems ripe for abuse

[TWX]

Seems like it would be easy for the marketing people to be singing their own praises while the core network people are quietly instructed to start using this software to catalog and ultimately curtail such practices.

I really would rather not have my ISP QoS anything that I do. I want them to be a common-carrier. I'll shape my own traffic, thanks.

Re:Seems ripe for abuse

[kheldan]

'Seems ripe for abuse' is putting it mildly, there's only one reason they'd do this, and that would be to catalog and 'curtail' filesharing, and that reason only.

Re:Seems ripe for abuse

[Anonymous Coward]

While I haven't studied the bittorrent protocol in detail there has to be some likely cryptographic checksums at the heart of it. I'm guessing one per chunk. The infrastructure their talking about would also make it trivialy easy match those chunks against a list of data chunks that others do not want downloaded. Now you could trivially change a files checksum by introducing a bit error, reincoding, etc, etc, but this would still give them some impressive filtering abilities, particularly if you could say apply it to individual files in a torrent, which is likely possible.

Sure they have developed a bit of caching technology which could save them money, but I'd bet it is really about control. Charge extra to anyone who well wants to use feature X, be it the end user, a corporation, or anyone they possibly can.

They do the same idea with satellite and cable. They force you to buy dozens of channels to get one that you really want, and then make sure to break them up so you are stuck, one way or the other. They certainly are no closer to al la carte pricing than they were what twenty years ago? Heck you used to be able to get some al la carte pricing on C-band. With the internet we have, so far, managed to be able to pick and choose what we want, but for how much longer?

Oh look, you want to look at a non conservative news web site, well, we have a sponsor for those, so how about you poney up another $15 a month for our special news package? Look, you want to use that new fangled file sharing technology, well that will be $39.95 for the all you can eat buffet, but for the casual users we can give it to you for only $5 dollars a gigabyte. What? You had better before we introduced all that. Well, if you don't like it I'm sure you can choose another ISP. Of course if one moves in, we will just discount are service long enough to drive them out of business, so that won't last long...

If there was one thing important these days in America it is making sure the supreme court doesn't tilt further right... It may be that the American people will really fight to keep net neutrality, but these days, I doubt it....

Re:if you run a VPN, they can't do shit

[TheGratefulNet]

it should not matter if its a linux iso or not.

the issue is: they have no need or right to look inside our packets.

ANY of our packets.

I'm not going to split hairs about society's current view toward IP rights. its a rathole that is not productive to dive into.

just leave it at: my data is my data, I will use it as I see fit and all I ask of you is to route it to the right ip addresses and route return traffic back to me. PERIOD.

I don't want them caching. if they want to try, be my guest, but I don't WANT it and I'm just fine with getting data from the real source each and every time I request it.