Slashdot Mirror
Cisco Develops System To Automatically Cut-Off Pirate Video Streams (torrentfreak.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Pirate services obtain content by capturing and restreaming feeds obtained from official sources, often from something as humble as a regular subscriber account. These streams can then be redistributed by thousands of other sites and services, many of which are easily found using a simple search. Dedicated anti-piracy companies track down these streams and send takedown notices to the hosts carrying them. Sometimes this means that streams go down quickly but in other cases hosts can take a while to respond or may not comply at all. Networking company Cisco thinks it has found a solution to these problems. The company's claims center around its Streaming Piracy Prevention (SPP) platform, a system that aims to take down illicit streams in real-time. Perhaps most interestingly, Cisco says SPP functions without needing to send takedown notices to companies hosting illicit streams. "Traditional takedown mechanisms such as sending legal notices (commonly referred to as 'DMCA notices') are ineffective where pirate services have put in place infrastructure capable of delivering video at tens and even hundreds of gigabits per second, as in essence there is nobody to send a notice to," the company explains. "Escalation to infrastructure providers works to an extent, but the process is often slow as the pirate services will likely provide the largest revenue source for many of the platform providers in question." To overcome these problems Cisco says it has partnered with Friend MTS (FMTS), a UK-based company specializing in content-protection. Among its services, FMTS offers Distribution iD, which allows content providers to pinpoint which of their downstream distributors' platforms are a current source of content leaks. "Robust and unique watermarks are embedded into each distributor feed for identification. The code is invisible to the viewer but can be recovered by our specialist detector software," FMTS explains. "Once infringing content has been located, the service automatically extracts the watermark for accurate distributor identification." According to Cisco, FMTS feeds the SPP service with pirate video streams it finds online. These are tracked back to the source of the leak (such as a particular distributor or specific pay TV subscriber account) which can then be shut-down in real time.
Who would ever think of this?
The watermarking will just be removed and life will go on.
So every single stream is going to have a unique watermark embedded in the audio or visual data? The original will be decompressed, the mark added, then recompressed and streamed to each specific subscriber to allow identification? Tens or hundreds of thousands, simultaneously?
I don't buy it.
And even if it did, will it survive recompression? Or averaging with a few other subscribers streams then recompression?
It's either some metadata tag that won't survive stripping, meant to catch out naive stream cloning, or they're talking shit.
...personally I dont pirate movies or games myself, Im perfectly happy with paying for indie games and watching netflix for a few dimes a month, that aside...Cisco must seriously want to die. Not did they get accused of that built in backdoor sometime back in history, but now they want to do this as well? Jeeze Cisco, you guys produce some serious quality hardware but youre literally begging the world to never ever endorse your products ever.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
...this will only be effective if the software is installed on the backbone/tier 1 switches and routers. I can't see operators at that level willingly paying for this.
Maybe the goal is to have the content producers pay for extra boxes, and have them installed by court order...
This sig left unintentionally blank.
They'll lobby the undemocratic parts of government to make it compulsory (e.g. EU Commission, all 5 eyes governments). Which in turn will mean your ISP is required to supply such a modem to you, for which you'll pay the bill.
Did you buy a PS3 or PS4?? That contains the exact same mechanism. It's called Cinavi, and its a watermark embedded in the audio track of movies. If PS3 or PS4 detects that, it will refuse to play the rip of your DVD.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinavia
Detection would become impossible if the stream is embedded in some (simple) kind of tunnel.
Its not legal. That's a wiretap and blocking a service without a DMCA notice is criminal.
Don't see many installing that one...
Now tell me how that's going to work with Fair Use Exceptions. Oops, someone legally included up to 30 seconds of content-protected A/V as part of a review - their review will not be viewable through any participating Cisco devices.
Honestly, after all the NSA backdoors and intercepting packages to install spy devices, who is installing new Cisco equipment?
If the history of the internet has proven anything, it's that iron-fisted DRM is the answer to all our problems.
This is for Pirate movies. Cisco has issue with pirate movies. I guess they really hated Cutthroat Island with Mathew Modine and Geena Davs. It's a bit of an over reaction, but if I could, I'd do the same for the Star Wars prequels.
There's huge untapped amounts of money in not enabling communication.
I guess they'll just do deep packet inspection on all traffic to discover that it is uhm, encrypted.
Next step is to further de-prioritize encrypted traffic so to "discourage" this behaviour. Or just make it easy to read transmission content.
This is useful because it will encourage us to encrypt all our traffic. Then there will be little alternative but to give a fair share of bandwidth.
Thank you Cisco and good luck.
A 'singular oddity' is an event that cannot be explained and only happens when you are alone.
It's interesting that England is increasingly becoming the source of useless, authoritarian tools. They're good at failing Mars missions, but I'm not sure that they've produced anything much of technical and social interest for the end user since the Raspberry Pi.
But where there is demand, there is supply. Video sharing sites will provide tunnel services and perhaps reduce the time from the ~60 seconds it takes to set one up now. Or, you know, TLS with some dummy packets for obfuscation.
But the purpose of "anti-piracy" measures are never to solve the problem of piracy - that's always doable by making accessible pay services that provide value for money. These measures exist rather to sell snake oil or to restrict other behaviours.
Since the internet has been running so smoothly lately, with absolutely no items of growing concern, I can understand why Cisco would be taking the chance to focus on frivolous, user-hostile, bullshit for a while, since all the real problems have clearly been solved...
What would someone need to stream?
A little encryption on the pirate streams and the watermark is illegible.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Shiver me timbers.
As described, this is actually a way to identify the streaming service subscriber who is copying it and uploading it as pirated content. See a recent story about someone uploading 11,000 pirated books. It can very easily become Cisco and friends deciding which of your files must be deleted: Instant censorship by a third-party in the name of profits.
But if you would pay if you could, then the conclusion that "money spent on preventing piracy has a negative ROI" is still true -- perhaps they would make more money rearranging things so that you had a chance to acquire the content legally.
FWIW, I believe you, and I believe you are fairly representative, yet I can believe there are others for whom the original argument does actually apply.
A restated version of the argument is this: money spent on content protection (a) may coerce some pirates into paying for content, (b) will deter some pirates who wouldn't pay anyway and who will simply stop watching, thus giving your content less mindshare in the world and reducing your available free advertising, (c) will deter some who only pirate because they have no available legal means of acquiring the content, and (d) may actually encourage some to pirate because now it's a challenge.
This means that content protection is only viable if its cost exceeds the revenue gained from (a) by more than the lost revenue and lost opportunity costs from not dealing with (b), (c), and (d) properly.
I would argue that Cisco (and others) should make a greater investment in developing methods to prevent distributed denial attacks and other forms of network attacks. In many countries the Internet is no longer a nice to have (like broadcast television) but rather a critical infrastructure (like the power grid).
I remember ages ago, drivers for computer scanners suddenly had MANDATORY checks for those patterns you see on banknotes and refuse to scan if it was a positive. I had a CanoScan 6000 at the time and remember seeing a patched version of the then-latest driver that disabled the check. Now I don't see any patched drivers anymore, by the way. Then there were the laserprinters that printed "secret" identification-dots, providing forensic information leading back to the specific printer that was used to print it. Then there are the MANDATORY (as per the LA) checks for the Cinavia audiomark in BD players, including the PlayStation 3.
It's just a matter of millions of dollars in 'campaign donations', time, 'VIP -package with meet&greet invitations to events', etc. before similar checks pop up everywhere where you and I, right now, don't expect them.
When the copyright term is "forever minus a day", live every day like it's the last.
Here's an easier/cheaper solution, JUST OFFER YOUR PRODUCTS AT A REASONABLE PRICE AND ON ANY PLATFORM THAT WILL HOST THEM. This garbage about certain programs only on Hulu, others on Netflix, still others on [name platform] and many times at exorbitant costs (digitally rent a movie for $4 or buy the DVD $6, heck in some cases you can get the DVD for cheaper than online) push people towards piracy. Stop throwing roadblocks in front of people trying to buy your product and don't try to extort them for every penny you can and you'll watch piracy die quickly and quietly.
that sixteen digit number overlaid on your video screen will seem invisible in just a few months
The device will check for watermarks, and block everything that has it by default. The software running on this box will be updated directly from RIAA with no user interaction required, thereby giving them a veto over what you can watch (with no DMCA notice or counter notice possible). And they will bribe the government to make these legally required for all ISP's, world wide. The Copyright Cartel doesn't want a legal process, they want an on/off switch.
If Spike TV finds a website streaming the Garcia vs Vargas fight tonight and they can identify which of their broadcasts is being streamed.... they have every right to turn that particular broadcast off.
That's all this is about. It isn't shutting down someone's site. It isn't spying on someone's data stream. It's not a wiretap.
It's a way to put different identifiers on the service you're providing to different customers. Once you have that, you can identify which of your customers is abusing your service and stop providing that service.
B) Eliminate all the stupid users. This is frowned upon by society.
I'm sorry, but if you're going to pirate a given TV show or movie, why wouldn't you just, I dunno, download an offline copy that can be viewed whenever you feel like it? And how is this new technology going to work with re-encoded video and sound channels while ensuring there are no false positives?
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
Sounds like something that could be exploited for a denial of service attack.
Most piracy is using torrents and encrypted. Sounds more like Cisco is engaged in marketing Puffery with something that will likely later come to be abused by the government or hackers by forcing backbone providers to buy higher tier Cisco routers.
Watermarking in itself is good for studding distribution patterns but little else.
'Twill not stop the Crimson Binome! Yarr!
And no legal process either.. Nope, no potential for encroachment/abuse here.
End to end encryption should stop this.
What I wonder is if someone is smart enough to remove the watermark, how much of a stretch would it be to add a watermark back for someone else's ID and frame someone else.
I guess if I watch an NFL game outside of my market, the terrorists win. DHS seized one of the places I used to catch my team's games, because...terrorism? So I guess this means live streaming someone else's feed of free television is bad?
Most piracy is torrented, but there is one area where streams rule: Sports.
Sports fans really want to watch sports live. Which means streaming. And there's a lot of money in sports broadcasting - channels pay for exclusive broadcast rights, they want to make sure that is what they get.
Why by or support their shit. That is not what I am paying for when I buy equipment.
That with all the other problems the US is having (massive debt, illegal aliens, etc) that this seems to be the issue everyone is focused on.
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
...if the box is owned by the content providers and just co-located at the ISP, then the ISP isn't actually doing the monitoring...
That said, by providing the box with a copy of *all* the ISPs traffic, they could fall foul of whatever wiretapping laws are in place - but a few "campaign contributions" could sidestep any litigation.
This sig left unintentionally blank.
PLURAL, not SINGULAR.
They block piracy sites (specifically per Malwarebytes hpHosts as an example thereof filtration of data for it http://hosts-file.net/?s=Downl... there - broken into MANY categories for protection vs. online threats...).
APK
P.S.=> For the MOST complete custom hosts file? Look no farther than "yours truly's" own APK Hosts File Engine 9.0++ SR-4 32/64-bit https://www.google.com/search?... which gets that data above & 9 more such sites for the most complete protection & speed gains possible... apk
You are clearly confusing Copyright Infringement with Piracy. That explains why the punishments are similar.
I don't see anything wrong with piracy. I feel the Internet should be a giant library of information not controlled by IP hoarders. New stuff can be made on passion, crowdfunded, or other alternative money making approaches. I even wrote a book about God which God approved of by answering a prayer via instant message Read about a miracle And the first article in the book says piracy is okay!
God spoke to me
windows bypasses the host file now faggot
they set you up the bomb !!!
make your time
This will be used on far more than torrents. For instance, the US patent system is out of control, with most patents being gibberish, duplicates, obvious, produced by individuals and companies which have no plan to develop a product/spend the majority of their time feeding on the court system, ultimately serving as a significant barrier to economic development by actual producers. When this is fully deployed, the court system and these trolls will use it to choke off just about all development of real products without first paying license fees to non-producers. Then it will be used as politically correct speech control on top of all of that.
Kill it while it's in the crib.
See subject: PROVE Windows bypasses hosts for ANYTHING else - go for it! You? Can't... how stupid could you fuckwads BE spouting misinformation/disinformation??
* Truth be told, you're FUCKING pitiful resorting to lies...
APK
P.S.=> Good reason for it bypassing it too - just in case your hosts file is hijacked!
HOWEVER:
Above & beyond WFP/SFP, my hosts file engine protects it & NOTHING in usermode can "bust thru" that last layer of protection I provide (I've tried myself)... apk