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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.
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.
...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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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
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.
Its not legal. That's a wiretap and blocking a service without a DMCA notice is criminal.
Don't see many installing that one...
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.
Honestly, after all the NSA backdoors and intercepting packages to install spy devices, who is installing new Cisco equipment?
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.
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...
A little encryption on the pirate streams and the watermark is illegible.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
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 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.
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.
What you just described is the old CPSA system - Content Protection System Architecture. It was envisioned by content creators as an interlocking set of DRM technologies that would protect content end to end - it included good old CSS, along with HDCP, CPRM/CPPM, and a bunch of others. The plan was simple: In order to play encrypted media, a manufacturer would need to license the encryption system used. The license would prohibit outputting of any protected content in any form other than degraded (ie, no HD) analog or encrypted digital, so the next step in the chain would have to license that encryption, and so on. A key feature was to be a watermark which would by included in all encrypted content. If any device ever detected the watermark on a non-encrypted input it would have to assume the content to be unauthorised and disable that input.
So, for example, even if someone cracked protection on blu-ray and uploaded the disc to The Bay, when you tried to play it back your monitor would detect the watermark present on your non-encrypted DVI port and disable the image.
The CPSA vision of a single unified DRM framework never really worked out. The watermark part was never completed, and so many key elements were cracked that the businesses sponsoring the initiative lost faith in it. But it does have some relics today, as a lot of DRM technologies still in common use had their origins in CPSA.
Ah but the partisan AC's prove that they both live in a fucking bubble.
Both parties support it. This is one of few things they stand together on!
https://www.wired.com/2016/04/senates-draft-encryption-bill-privacy-nightmare/
As for Hillary personally, she has no fucking clue! She rambles inchoerantly because she honestly doesn't know shit.
Trump doesn't know shit either.
Here's there stances:
http://www.zdnet.com/article/tech-policy-campaign-2016-where-candidates-stand-encryption/
It's CONGRESS we have to worry about people, the fucking figureheads are clueless!
Donald Trump, on a crusade to make Nixon look respectable