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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.
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.
...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...
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I'm wondering how liars (like governments) will be prevented from interrupting streams they shouldn't have any right to interrupt (like viral videos of government corruption). And then there are the other Big Liars, claiming copyright over things about which they have no right to claim copyright.
Add to it all false positives that will suddenly create problems on the net.
This will just cause the streams to go encrypted instead.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
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.
Encrypt to your heart's content. Under our new President and Leader Hillary Clinton non-government approved encryption will be outlawed. Disobeisance will be punished severely. Expect SWAT teams to implode your door with C4, spray your family and pets with MP fire and parade your feces-covered corpse down the lane.