Virgin Media to trial filesharing monitoring system Virgin Media will trial deep packet inspection technology to measure the level of illegal filesharing on its network, but plans not to tell the customers whose traffic will be examined. The system, CView, will be provided by Detica, a BAE subsidiary that specialises in large volume data collection and processing, and whose …
Don't you realise that if you make crap like this to make a quick buck that you won't solve the "problem" of filesharing, you'll just speed up the development of tools that are totally encrypted? It's already pretty easy to use encryption but people aren't wholley aware of it yet, but if, after 3 months, a chunk of the country is attacked by law then people will simply look to learn the next step in secure filesharing? You won't stop illegal filesharing until a viable alternative is offered; a service with 100% coverage of music selling at a proper price will convert many more filesharers than putting them in jail.
I hope your system fails and you parasites come to an untidy end.
Detica has no wish to stop _unwanted_ filesharing. That's not their business. They sell boxes to the black helecopter brigade. The boxes for monitoring everyones internet connection would come from people like Detica (I was head-hunted for them; didn't take the pill).
If people add mechanisms to make it harder, Detica el al will just work harder. The boxes will get bigger & cost more. Profit as a % of cost goes up :)
"Virgin Media will trial deep packet inspection technology to measure the level of _____ sharing of copyrighted material on its network, ..."
There, fixed it for you. Of course, a DPI filter cannot determine whether permission was obtained from the copyright holder, nor can it determine if the law was broken since it is not an officer or court of law.
... whether permission was obtained from the copyright holder etc.."
They don't care. If their automated spying system chooses to limit you or block you, then that leaves it up to you to prove that the data wasn't illegal (so you can phone up their expensive technical help line, to ask to be reconnected ;) ... Its a guilty until proven innocent approach to policing. Welcome to 21st century Totalitarian Police State policing in New Labour's new Britain. :(
Genuine question - how well does DPI worth when the p2p traffic is encrypted? If it's on arbitrary ports, and encryption enabled, surely this is shutting the door after the horse has bolted - or are we going after teens/grannies again?
The PR reads like they just want better figures to prove how wonderful their new download service is going to be. "Ooh, look, 50% less piracy now!", whereas everyone will simply move on.
Bad VM. Bad.
Aren't BE now owned by Virgin or something?
Anyway, if you are looking for a place to go, Zen Internet are my ISP of choice. I've been an avid Zen user for years now and they are top notch (there is a reason they keep getting ISP of the year awards).And I know this is really sounding like an advert but I really think they deserve the publicity, they also announce that they don't do traffic shaping or DPI, and don't plan to.
Also they are not owned by some supercorp. They are one of the few remaining true ISPs.
With all the extra's a DVD would come to about 5Gb, Assuming it was a DVD .ifo file and hadn't been converted into avi, mpg or (god forbid) wmv
@Original Anonymous Coward
I'm also with Zen, and 5 gb is their basic package. They go up to 50gb. You can also buy additional Gb allowance if you use it up, so if you do go Usenet crazy they won't just cut you off for the rest of the month, they'll just ask you to pay for more allowance. Which seems pretty reasonable, bearing in mind that you're not paying for your DVD's
My hubs used to buy hundereds of CDs every year - he likes things such as country, 60s music and Abba but neither of us have bought a CD for well over five years.
Is this because of filesharing - do you "get yer music free" these days? No...
Ok then what is the reason?
1) We no longer have a stereo.
2) New CD's do not play on our computers CD drive (or try and infect the machine) The cleanup costs too much!
3) Even our cheap aldi based car stereo will not play many CD's we now have. One sony disk even managed to trash the previous car stereo!
4) There is very little music we want that we have not already bought - or should I say will not buy unless we can be sure will will nor wreck our car stereo again.
5) Many recent production CDs bought recently have 'died' whereas older CD's are still going strong - this leads me to assume they are designed to fail.
My question is - when will it be **safe** to buy music again?
I *do* use filesharing - to download linux distros and other work related FLOSS software. but dont see the point in trying to get music this way - to slow and expensive!
So Mr Sony et.al Pllease let us old folks know when it is safe to buy CD's once more.
We are being kinds and you get *one* more chance with us!
Jacqui
I always wondered why VM backed away from Phorm. And at least we can clearly see why the Govt didn't go against Phorm, given BAE's love in.
So VM they cap you and now that capped allowance is inspected, which must slow it down further. I pity the fool that pays for their super fast package. All that wasted bandwidth.
Heres to mass use of encryption and two fingers to our Facist government.
Then again, it could just prove that people aren't actually downloading and sharing music, and then the message will clearly be that record sales have dropped because music on offer today is utter SHITE.
'it will then peer inside those packets and try to determine what is licensed and what is unlicensed, based on data provided by the record industry.'
Whether the thing being transfered is licensed or not is irrelevant. The question is whether the copyright owner gave permission. A trial version of software could well be identified as licensed, but sharing that is perfectly legal, infact helping the owning company!! So, my guess is the above statement should actually say
'it will then peer inside those packets and determine what is licensed, which will be all music, video etc.etc. (even though it may not be). It will then determine that as it's peer-to-peer, the copyright holder cannot possibly have given permission and therefore it must be illegal.'
Various FREE encrypted VPN's - both openvpn and pptp (windows) :
http://www.itshidden.com/
http://s6n.org/arethusa/
http://www.peer2me.com/
http://www.cyberghostvpn.com
For pptp software:
Mac and Windows instructions on the various websites.
Linux users, use pptp plugin for network manager
FreeBSD users, use net/mpd5
For openvpn software, see: http://openvpn.net/
The Pirate Bay has switched to Distributed Hash Tables for its trackers, BitTorrent clients are beginning to enable encrypted streams by default, and more people are learning about darknets / Tor.
You're squeezing a water balloon, Mandelson; The only thing keeping everyone in one place is convenience. Squeeze too hard and the balloon will burst. File sharers will obscure and secure, and you'll be left holding the flaccid remnants and a giant clean-up bill.
Give up. Tell the music industry to adapt its business model, or fail. They are relics of a time of scarcity and limited resources. Distribution is no longer in their control, and shouldn't be their business.
I don't download unlicensed music, as I already own all of the music I like. That is the worst place for you to be, in my opinion. Improve your products so I *want* to pirate your music, and make it easy for me to buy it so I'll do that instead. Or...
[See tag]
Large concerns like Virgin (who I personally wouldn't touch with a bargepole) are only ever as bad as their mass-market customers allow them to be. The trouble with this sort of caper is that Virgin assume they can get away with it, as the majority of their customer base (present company excepted of course) won't even understand the above article. They're probably right.
Get a MAC and move, people - though where to these days as we rapidly approach a monopoly situation in our media and internet, I'm not sure.
What seems to me to be desperately needed these days is for a similar system to that for switching power and phone accounts. If we could change isps with the speed and ease we can switch power suppliers, instead of the rigmarole we suffer at present, I suspect a lot of isps would soon be feeling the pinch.
The last time I moved my electricity supplier (within the last couple of years), it took around three months for the two of them to sort out the transfer. The last time I moved ADSL with a MAC, it took less than a fortnight, so I'd say that the rigmarole thing works both ways ;-)
The difference between utilities suppliers and ISPs is that with utilities you are not held to a contract, at the moment if you want to switch ISPs then you need to either wait till the end of your contract or pay the cost...
The other problem is any change of service reuires a new contract.. I upgraded from the crappy capped connection to unlimited... new 12 month contract.
This does need to be addressed.
I have a choice:
Stay with VM and use a 10MB/s (or higher if I want to pay more) connection which stays up and at that speed most of the time and put up with this kind of crap.
Or
Escape the DPI crap and enjoy a ~500KB/s unreliable connection and hope that the company I go with isn't eaten up by someone who uses DPI anyhow.
Until someone other than VM puts in post-1950's grade copper between many homes and the exchange there will be many of us who don't have a real choice if we want to enjoy the internet.
Er, all you guys talking about encryption... who's got they keys?
If all you mean is encrypt your traffic as some P2P clients have been doing for a while, it's pointless. The Man just joins the P2P community like any other P2P user and gets to see what IPs are tracked as offering what torrents (or whatever). Where's your encryption there? All it might have done is bypass simple-minded throttling hardware.
Encrypted VPN to an overseas server and take it from there. I see a business opportunity here...
There we go. Just turned Vuze to use and allow only RC4-160 bit encrypted connections, and my speed is better to boot by about 25%. Welcome to the war Virgin, you are going to spend a lot of money to find out you can't read anything. Governments just hate it when they can't read your traffic. Soon enough all Internet apps will be using encryption and I think it is a good thing.
Every time I see comments like this I wonder if i'm missing something, probably because i'm operations not networks. I'm sure someone from networks can shed a little more light on this.
Your planning on encrypting all of the traffic from peer to peer, which prevents the ISP from seeing the contents of your traffic.
However, you then goto a random website and download what amounts to being a plain text file detailing the contents of that file, and the location of the peers to start your P2P download. Does this not defeat the object of encrypting it all? Even if you encrypt this file from the server to the desktop, if I have the URL then surely I can just download my own copy of the file?
Because, by my admittedly rudimentary understanding of P2P networks your torrent files contains the title of the download. Therefore, surely the ISP does not need to peek at what your uploading or downloading. They'd just have to look at the torrent to get the title of the file your downloading which completely bypasses your encryption.
Or am I missing something significant?
Deep Packet Inspection. It looks at the packets rather than just the headers. OK. But what I haven't been able to find is an explanation of how it actually determines what it finds in the packets is (supposedly) illegally shared copyright material.
If I share an mp3 as an mp3 then the packets are going to look like parts of an mp3. If I put the mp3 in a zip file and share it the packets are going to look like parts of a zip file. If I put the mp3 in a tar file and share it the packets are going to look like parts of a zip file. Even if I leave the file as an mp3, the packets will look different depending on how it was encoded.
So how does DPI identify what the packets it looks at are a part of?
There are already huge databases online that have signatures of music which is an excellent way of tagging your music if you don't know the title, artist, etc, just by ripping a CD or analysing an existing MP3. e.g. MusicBrainz.
It's simple. Analyse the music, generate a signature. Compare against a database for a match or near match.
Similar also to how those services work where you can get your phone to listen to music and it tells you what the track is.
Zips. No problem. They can be treated like any other file system. Password protected zips are no defence unless they are encrypted (usually aren't).
The analysis doesn't have to be real time if they're just looking for evidence to supply to the industry, they just need to DPI to flag the traffic, gather and analyse on batch later (I suspect VM are doing this in preparation for the draconian Nu-Labour laws requiring ISPs to spy on their customers).
Some ISPs (e.g. PlusNet) already use DPI to categorise the traffic and throttle accordingly, though it doesn't consider where the content is legal or not (at least not yet).
"There are already huge databases online that have signatures of music which is an excellent way of tagging your music if you don't know the title, artist, etc, just by ripping a CD or analysing an existing MP3. e.g. MusicBrainz."
It's simple. Analyse the music, generate a signature. Compare against a database for a match or near match."
The services that tell iTunes and the like what CD you just inserted work based on the number of tracks on the CD and the duration of those tracks. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDDB) None of this information is available when someone's sharing a single track.
"Similar also to how those services work where you can get your phone to listen to music and it tells you what the track is."
More plausible. They would to assemble enough of the file to get a suitably long segment to analysis. Which I suppose might be possible if the info isn't need in real time.
How do they identify dvix rips of movies?
"The services that tell iTunes and the like what CD you just inserted work based on the number of tracks on the CD and the duration of those tracks. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDDB) None of this information is available when someone's sharing a single track."
Services like MusicBrainz does indeed work just on individual tracks. That's why they're so good for tagging a mess of an MP3 collection. CDDB isn't so good as it just works on a CD signature based on headers of a CD rather than the content.
"How do they identify dvix rips of movies?"
Feasibly the same way. It's much the same as generating a signature for any kind of file. Like generating a hash signature. When it comes to content that may not be exact (i.e. depends on the ripping quality, algorithms, etc), then you just look for a confidence threshold.
I'd love to know if this DPI can "see" into encrypted P2P. Will they break the law to enforce a law?
The last time I bought a CD must have been 5 years ago. I. like others don't buy them now, because I'm not going to buy an album of filler tracks just to listen to two reasonable tracks. The music today is SHITE, mass produced industrialised SHITE. In fact we should coin a new use of the word SHITE to mean 21st century pop music. The reg needs another icon, as well as the thumbs up, the middle finger. Meanwhile i'll be trying to stay with virgin as I get a 10MB line and unlimited 24/7 UK phone calls for £25 a month. I used to be with Zen, but the copper lines in my area are shot. £25 might sound a lot, but the phone is used for a business, and gets a lot of use.
"The last time I bought a CD must have been 5 years ago........In fact we should coin a new use of the word SHITE to mean 21st century pop music."
Its 2009 mate, we were still in the 21st century 5 years ago.
"The music today is SHITE, mass produced industrialised SHITE."
Of course its mass produced, Do u even know what u are saying ??
- How do you reliably determine whether copyright is being infringed ?
- Do you have the ability to determine the payload of encrypted traffic or, when for example looking at bittorrent , do you look at the swarm around a torrent, guess the copyright status by the file name(s) and then extrapolate from there?
Our uni has just got some peerscope hardware installed, so I looked into their product. I was flabbergasted! It's so much BS, but clueless bosses, the media, and the creative industry will gobble it up without looking deeper.
On one page, they say they have a database of copyrighted stuff, which the network traffic is compared to. How? Filenames? A certain 'release' hash (that can be encoded/packaged differently a thousand times etc)? ... and the onus is on the music/film/whatever industry to inform them!
However, on another page, they maintain they can spot illegal traffic without even checking packet contents. Amazing tech!
On a product page demonstrating how it works, 'Honeypots' was a major component, and then it all twigged.
Guys like this are the people that create fake torrents, they track those fake torrents, they report on how popular the fake torrents are, and boom, we have a filesharing epidemic (fake) and a company that can monitor it (themselves!). They have a top 100 shared files, and some are not even proper pirated releases... (DVD rip of Saw 6 tracked two weeks before cinema release?)
I think the filesharing 'problem' is actually overinflated, with gullible 'normal' people being duped into downloading stuff, and then massive figures being extrapolated from the entrapments. Companies like peerscore and in the article are not helping. However, the proliferation of the idea that piracy is massive and bad helps keep media profits up in a digital age, where distribution and talent are cheap.
To be fair, there's hardly any point being pirate anymore. Any song I want from Napster/Spotify for a tenner? Any DVD/Blu Rays I want from Lovefilm for £7? Bargains, and it's easy too! In our house we have Sky and Cineworld unlimited passes as well... we're consuming probably more content than pirates, at high quality, legally and fairly cheaply!
tl;dr: piracy is overinflated, there are now decent legal services for most stuff
Copyright owners permission.
OK, yes, in theory you could have the copyright owners permission for a P2P transfer, so DPI cannot tell if the transfer is illegal or not.
HOWEVER, since the vast majority of "music" being transferred by P2P will not have the copyright owners permission, it is a reasonable measure of the extent of the problem.
The music industry needs to learn some new sports instead of using wreckingballs to crack peanuts.
Eh...? The operating system you use is irrelevant. Even Mac users have access to software that enables them to download from bit torrent sites (Transmission is an example, and even µTorrent has been ported to Mac now).
The packets whizzing across the network are still going to be intercepted, irrespective of whether they originated from or are destined for a Mac. This is all being done at the network level, it's not a client that Vermin Media are going to ask you to install on your Windows PC.
Personally, I think this approach is short-sighted. It will just speed up the adoption of encrypted file sharing, which no ISP will be able to examine - they may be able to see where your traffic is coming from & going to, and therefore assume that any encrypted traffic seen immediately after you've searched the Pirate Bay's website is going to be a DVD5 copy of the latest Hollywood blockbuster. But we all know what happens when you assume something ;o)
"Virgin Media will trial deep packet inspection technology to measure the level of illegal filesharing on its network"
As usual there is the assumption and implication here that all file sharing activity is illegal, shame on you Reg for conftributing to the industry / government propoganda, drop the 'illegal' please!
Of course, file sharing clients can / are often used for unlawful activities (there is a difference) but it is wrong to assume or imply that this MUST be the case.
While DPI can identify file sharing client activity, if user have enabled encryption (as anyone sharing data in this was should), then it cannot tell the ISP what is actually being shared and therefore does not provide any information as the the lagitimacy or otherwise of the data being shared.
The article said that technology would be used to inspect the packages and determine if the content was illegally shared files or not. You might, as others have, argue that no reliable technology exists to look at a packet and quickly determine if that is part of a legally shared file.
If you make a big presumption that the technology is reliable then actually this might show how much or how little illegal file sharing is going on. Actually persistent file sharers might even start leaving VM just to be out of site, in which case this would skew the figures to make it look like little file sharing is happening and of the file sharing that is going on little of it is illegal.
I suspect that those that argue that this will push towards encrypted sharing are right. However that will only stop the ISP from inspecting the shares, it will not stop people in the record industry setting up honey pots and polluting the shares with duff content.
>> While DPI can identify file sharing client activity, if user have enabled encryption (as anyone sharing data in this was should), then it cannot tell the ISP what is actually being shared and therefore does not provide any information as the the lagitimacy or otherwise of the data being shared.
Steve, the answer is simple, the packets aren't inspected by a piece of software, rather they have a bunch of Law Lords sat in the offices at VM who can decide what is and isn't illiegal at a glance. No doubt if they user choose to encrypt their bittorrent they can just demand the keys and if they don't receive them within a reasonable time frame they can lock the user up for being a suspected terrorist.
I perceived throttling to be a major ball ache, but pretty quickly found that it works well, for me at least.
Downloading at 20mb for about 8gb to get the night's worth of immediate 720p tv I want to watch before my tea is even half-cooked, then it's 5mb for other stuff. The throttle also lasts a few hours - then you are back at 20mb, and even then it's only throttled when you do it at "peak" times. I've had them for almost a year, and so far been much more stable than Be/o2 were when I used them.
The reason I gave VM another chance? Even at the throttled 5mb, it beats the crap out of the service my bt line is offering me - which is "up to 3mb"... so probably about 1.5mb since my street and house are old! Hilariously, the 20mb connection isn't even the fastest speed vm offer to the street.
Never been a big fan of NTL, or Virgin, but they have actually improved their broadband since I last had a go in 2006 - and I'd accept a 3-hour throttle at a faster-than-average-adsl speed, to being a BT customer again any day - and on top of that, it's cheaper than anything I buy when you add the line rental costs.
This DPI tech is useless against encryption, which I use for my copyrighted stuff... it's my unprotected stuff like facebook, messenger, work email, that worries me.
I think its true that they've improved - I've got the 10Mb & I can't believe how fast torrents come down sometimes - plus on regular downloads their speed is consistent. When downloading updates from Debian, I *always* get 1100+ kiloBytes per sec. I'm happy with this.
Bollocks to the Black Helicopters!
That's the same deal for me - downloaded 1.6GB of patches for a major Unix OS in between 30-45 minutes. (Using my own connection because the cheap b'stards I work for don't have a connection I can use from the servers directly). So I'm pretty happy with that - especially as it was early afternoon. It really pays to threaten to leave - I got a better deal and a replacement cable box (went to V+) that has proven to be a model of reliability (compared to the non-V+ box it replaced).
As to the folks going "oh dear, VM will be tracking all the valuable business information that I'm passing when I work from home" - why the f--- aren't you using an encrypted VPN connection you dummy/dummies?!
I'm no fan of any DPI (and even less so when it's done for commercial gain - a la Phorm) but can I just put up the possibility that VM have had this forced on them by the scum-sucking "entertainment" industry in return for the agreement to do their _legal_ music "product". To my suspicious mind, this has RIAA/BPI's filthy fingerprints all over it.
*slap*
He's joking about "Get a mac"... he doesn't mean an Apple Mac, he means the migration code isp's provide so you can move from one isp to another quickly.
I don't think MAC's are useful for the majority of VM customers though, since most of them will be cable customers, not using the VM adsl stuff.
Paris - because she probably didn't read the actual comment, just the title too! :)
So when will VM be seeking the consent of all parties to the communication in order to intercept it and inspect its contents? Will RIPA apply? Are they in contact with the ICO regarding any infringement of DPA? Have they taken/sought legal advice/opinion? Have any government department been comforting them recently?
How does this stand under EU law both current and proposed?
Does Commissioner Reding's department know about this?
Here we go again!!!
I use VM; switched from DSL because whenever DSL played up there was all this fingerpointing between BT, anyone with kit at the exchange, and the ISP, and when you work from home a lot you can't put up with it. It's usually pretty a good ISP.
But this, big invasion of privacy.
1. Is it legal?
2. Can I opt out?
I shall contact them and demand to opt out and say that if not I shall opt to run some kind of Tor proxy just to use up their bandwidth
"In a step beyond how ISPs currently monitor their networks, it will then peer inside those packets and try to determine what is licensed and what is unlicensed, based on data provided by the record industry"
Yeah like that's gonna work fine with no false positives then. It will all end in tears, with the innocent constantly having to plead their case while the guilty rotate through various clever methods that keep them under the radar.
Time to leave the country - or at least to leave Virgin! If they suffered a mass migration of disgruntled customers that would be a message the other ISPs could not afford to ignore.
If it is illegal for Virgin Media to listen in on my phone calls, how is it legal for them to listen in on my internet connection? I may be passing confidential information, business details or research information across my connection. They may well be 'looking' for one thing, but who knows what they are logging and storing? Am I now meant to inform my clients that their communications may well be subject to DPI and that a third party may well read, store and pass on information that they collect from our communications?
Someone needs to clarify this properly, Virgin's 'it doesn't affect customers directly' is wrong, just because they own the network that I am using, doesn't mean that they own the information that I am passing along it.
As an aside, one good thing could come of this. It could prove to the music industry that their claims of 95% of all music being pirated are absolute rubbish.
"As usual there is the assumption and implication here that all file sharing activity is illegal, shame on you Reg for conftributing to the industry / government propoganda, drop the 'illegal' please!"
You've got things a bit backwards there Steve. The "illegal" prefix is used precisely to indicate not all filesharing is illegal.
- Chris
True Chris that it can be read both ways, however, I have a serious problem with the increasingly common and unqualified use of the term 'Illegal file sharing' for two reasons:
1. The ambiguity often leads to an implication of the universal guild and general badness of all file sharers in the minds of the non technical masses, (and Lilly Allen of course)
2. Even if the term is interpreted as making a distinction between 'legal' and 'illegal' file sharing, this distinction is something that DPI software, ISPs, the recording industry and the Mandelbot have neither the ability or right to make.
Baiscally it's a propoganda term which is increasingly infesting the media and infecting minds.
Appart from that minor rant though excellent article as the rapidly developing discussion shows!
RIPA, as we now know from the Phorm debacle, makes it an offence to intercept the traffic. It doesn't matter whether you "aggregate and anonymise" it. The interception offence has already been committed.
Whether the powers that be will actually enforce this inconvenient aspect of RIPA is another matter, as we have seen in the Phorm case, where everybody was falling over each other in an effort to pass the hot potato to somebody else.
@Licensed or Not?
"the vast majority of "music" being transferred by P2P will not have the copyright owners permission"
You no doubt have evidence of this? Thought not. You're guessing (very scientific of you), which means you will have no more of a clue as to what is licenced or not in the packets than Detica. They probably won't be able to detect what is music or not in most cases, let alone whether it is licensed or not.
Made-up numbers are made up, regardless of what you'd like them to be.
1) Given the consent of Virgin customers, and the people they communicate with, has not been obtained for the interception, copying, and analysis of their traffic... Who in Government authorised this trial?
2) Detica said of telcos; "We also provide intelligence and insight that helps them better...exploit social networks within their customer base". How do you 'exploit social networks', in particular without illegally intercepting private/confidential communications or identifying individuals in that social network from their private/confidential communications traffic?
3) You say "Our clients include BT, Vodafone and 3". What is the nature of your relationship with BT, Vodafone and 3?
This trial is wrong. It is so far beyond wrong I can't believe it is happening [again].
I don't believe in sharing files illegally; but you don't need DPI to find the people who are sharing files illegally. Simply joining a P2P network and noting the IP addresses is sufficient, and the music industry have been doing that for years.
This has nothing to do with preventing piracy.
"I don't believe in sharing files illegally; but you don't need DPI to find the people who are sharing files illegally. Simply joining a P2P network and noting the IP addresses is sufficient, and the music industry have been doing that for years.
This has nothing to do with preventing piracy."
_______________________________________
This is quite true. Tracking who downloads what is not rocket science and certainly does not require DPI. But I'd refer you back to the likes of ACPO, SOCA and CEOP - all of whom have been lobbying the government hard, for some time now, for DPI to be introduced as a matter of urgency in the fight against terrorism and child pr0n (allegedly). These police organisations have been - and remain - at the very forefront of efforts to eavesdrop on private internet useage and they have an avowed mission to get their own way on these matters. They will.
Today, Virgin, by next year most ISP's. Most people won't even notice - nor will they care. And that's what the politicians and the police are counting on. If you haven't done anything wrong, you have nothing to fear, right?
Sinking, like a bug on peach.
How do all these computer / video / music exchange shops work then, as they are technically "sharing" music / video. The last time I bought a DVD it had a notice on saying something like, "not for resale. rental blah blah blah". Now when some johnny come lately rocks up to his local tat bazarr (exchange shop) and sells his last three xbox games or DVDs do they contact all the copyright owners and ask for permission to re-sell them?
I'm really curios how they get around this, anyone who can answer will certainly be on my "buy them a pint" list !
:)
do you tell if something is copyrighted or not from examining a single packet of data? Surely there isn't enough there to identify anything other than it is, in fact, a packet sent by a filesharing application. if you're lucky you might get something that identifies what type of file the packet is part of.
does it just assume everything is an mp3 and decode that miniscule bit to compare against every song in existance? Or are they aggregating packets to compare them as a whole file?
ISPs who do DPI often throttle encrypted traffic to death on the assumption that it must be dodgy because they can't inspect it. e.g. PlusNet.
Once VM realise they can't DPI encrypted channels, they'll throttle it instead (if the industry puts enough pressure on them that is, which is pretty much guaranteed).
Sucks for anyone who uses SSH or VPN for work purposes.
The answer to all of this is to teach the industry that fighting downloads isn't the answer. Embrace the technology and face up to the way consumers want to consume, and provide a legitimate alternative that still gives them revenue. Price it right instead of ripping us all off because you believe you're being ripped off, and remember that those who pirate weren't necessarily going to buy the thing in the first place so it's not a loss.
Or get the artists to bypass the rip off industry and go direct to the consumer. They're the ones really being ripped off and it's not because of illegal downloads.
I may stand corrected, but RIPA does have a clause that would allow this; but only if it is necessary and unavoidable in the normal cause of duties for an ISP.
The spin here is that the ISP claims DPI is necessary in order to meet the requirements of both the upcoming EU three strikes policy and the monitoring requirements of the Digital Economy Bill. This is quite probably justifiable in principle. Whether it works or not is irrelevent - once DPI is in place it's other uses will far outweigh any concern over it's ability to correctly identify illegal filesharing.
In order to defeat this latest attempt at mass surveillance I suspect you would either have to argue that it is not necessary/proportional to the requirement of the EU/DEB or (trickier) prevent those directives/bill becoming law.
There is always switching ISPs, but eventually the new laws will be used as an excuse to require all ISPs to do this once it's proven to 'work'.
Really it is like BT listening into your telephone calls to see if you are speaking about something illegal. What next, will VirginMedia be listening to telephone calls? What pray happened to "innocent until proven guilty" did that also end when Labour Govt came into power ? I think so.
The problem is that once Virgin does this once they will opne up a can of worms and like Phorm bit BT this will bite Virgin.
Everytime you aren't using your connection, just download anything that /is/ legal.
If everybody did this, the amount of traffic that would need to be checked would be so huge that they might not have enough resources to monitor everything.
And as it's bene pointed out that VM throttles, and doesn't cap, it will not affect your usage.
I recently used BitTorrent to download an Ubuntu ISO. As a matter of course, I have it set to secure. Will VM therefore analyse this as dodgy? Even worse, I always try and share twice as much as I downloaded.
OK I don't download ISOs every day, but there are those who do. I don't download films or copyright music. It makes it easier to teach the kids not to steal if I don't. Except that stooges of the media parasites won't be able to tell.
Ooooh good. This news is heart warming.
As a Virgin Media customer, I give them my permission to sniff any of my packets, delve deep into my communication stream and generally analyse it.
I have nothing to fear. It is sad that piracy has brought us to this state of affairs, but that is what it has done. Again, my thanks to the pirates for these draconian measures.
You'll regret those words when they disconnect your service because:
- You're behind on payments on your credit card (online banking)
- You're looking up information on cancer medication, using your name to sign up (risk of bad debt)
- You have a bad customer experience with their Tech Support department, post about it on a forum, and have your service terminated with a demand for the full amount, or a court summons for libel.
- Your daughter received a phone call from an employee as they saw her picture on Facebook after monitoring your bitstream for the credentials.
Not saying these happen, or will happen, just hypothetical situations.
"Nothing to hide" is a fallacy. Nothing *illegal* to hide is more accurate, but everyone has secrets and personal information you don't want looked at.
If I were a Virgin user I would be up in arms about now.
They want to monitor you and sell you legal alternatives - its like being in a fish tank with Virgin being the owner who refuses to feed without cash.
I'm on ADSL, never have trusted Virgin but it might be worth keeping an eye on ISPs which insist in messing with their users in this way.
Remind me how Virgin are any different than BT with Phorm and their secretive trails.
Mike
"try to determine what is licensed and what is unlicensed, based on data provided by the record industry."
Is this:
!> Byte for byte identical with their copyright material, and proven not licensed for transmission
2> Has a bit of the file name in common with something they once copyrighted, or is authored by somebody with a similar name to one of their artists
Or
3> Isn't on their list of things which they will condescend to permit people to share, and is therefore obviously illegal and will be included in the deliberately warped statistics which they will shout from the rooftops as evidence that they need to be given total control of everything.
"a senior civil servant suggested that a crude estimate based on the level of illegal filesharing observed by rights holder organisations could be used."
Why does this 'senior civil servant' still have a job?
Anyone see this going the same way as RIPA III, where it does nothing but target the wrong people and when the music and film industry realise that its not file sharing but just the sh*t they produce that has caused there down fall will they go quitely?
Hey dumb sh*ts i can get 24 hour music channels on my free view box same as everyone else in the country, so can all the teenage girls that use to support your bloated industry.
I propose randomly (without looking at the address so you can't tie it back to a person) we open people’s mail.
We have a look at the contents to see what is and isn't illegal, that of course will be decided by a random group of people who'll never be held accountable for their choices.
That will give us a good indication of the level of horrible plagiarism that must be going on in these letters.
Think of all the starving artists who aren’t getting any money from lines of their songs or films that you steal to either try and pass off as your own or in bad poetry to a loved one!
Eventually with a new law if we find something that's 'illegal' we'll send a letter to them asking them to stop and after a few of those letters if they don't stop they'll simply never get letter again.
I, too, would be interested in hearing how VM intend to identify what song is being transferred.
Surely, if they are calculating some form of hash from well-known mp3 files, then re-sampling, or adding 1/4 second of silence at the beginning of the track or even changing the id3 tags could prevent them from correctly identifying a track. And if they are just sampling the bit-steam, and trying to match sequences of bytes, then this would be even more fragile.
I suspect that in their naivety they may try to use something like CDDB, and we all know how good that is!
Unless they have some sophisticated music analysis program that will identify beat, melody and harmony elements of music, but I would guess that if this technology was reliable, then it would be announced as a major advance in music analysis.
with packets suddenly going missing or suffering unexplained delays in transmission once on the VM Wan#er NET and connection slowdowns at random times, VPN traffic being heavily curtailed if not being actively being blocked by them.
with friends like this who needs enemies
especially when they are sniffing ur packets on wiffler road!
http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?hl=en&ie=UTF8&ll=52.650432,1.265989&spn=0.000976,0.002224&t=h&z=19
is the local VM/(cough cough)GCHQ packet intercept and processing center.
notice the stack of Generators parked outside...
with some anonymouse black cars parked in the car park...
no doubt a heli pad somewhere nearby... for when the dark sith lord mandy is wanting an inspection of his black project of suppressing the little yolkes into dust....
<flame>
"It would be counter-productive because it doesn't affect customers directly," Iam sorry but if the information is mine YOU can F*ck off as you don't have the right to spy on it. If you think I am sharing files illigally then get a warrent for my arrest if not F*ck off. If the F*cking Govenment or EU wants to monitor my internet access they can F*cking pay for it!
</flame>
I think dephormation.org.uk makes some exelent points perticcly "This has nothing to do with preventing piracy".
@AC "Who gains anything from this? Virgin Media don't so what the hell? Way to lose customers Virgin Media" Lets face it Virgin will get the record industry off its back it will probaple lose high use file sharers and be able to profile what its customers use their conection for so they win on a number of levels. As for the record industry we have seen how inaccurate they are at finding illegal file sharers so they will probably take the data and assume all music shares are illegal and so force the Government to force through laws to stop file sharing.
From next week 40% of Virgin Media staff payslips will be inspected regardless of the employees' positions in the Company. The staff concerned will not be informed because it would be counter-productive as it does not affect them directly.
How long before those staff find a good place for Mandelson's stick?
How they can tell what is copyrighted and what is not by DPI? Seriously if I rip a CD or DVD its checksum and bit arrangement will be different than another person's ripping the same item, and unless they take every packet and reassemble it completely (good luck seeing bit torrent doesn't transfer pieces sequentially) and view it I do not see how this is possible.
Only things I can come up with is that they are using piratebay(and popular trackers) to download the torrents and using those files as a basis to search for. Or just basing if somethings pirated or not on the file name that is transferred.
OK, the usual stock response from either side. There is certainly an issue about legality here. VM should be careful as the govt are currently about to be hauled over the coals for the Phorm debacle.
As for VM, there is a rationale to provide their own take on the levels of piracy. Think about it. The media companies want to inflate the piracy problem to ensure that the suspension of accounts comes into play, i.e. if piracy doesn't drop by 70% by whenever. It isn't in VM's interests to cut pirates off or even scare them away, that's attacking their income-base. And come on, let's be honest, why else would anyone have any more than a 2Mb connection? So by monitoring the situation themselves they can counter whatever massaged stats the content industry provides to the govt. Ofcom are supposed to be doing the analysis but I'm sure the content industry will be lunching with Mandy again if they don't get their way.
In my experience VM has been canny in the past. They talk a tough game but their throttling regime is a clear green light for pirates to download at night and not to thrash the network when the sheeple are facebooking and watching hysterical videos of dogs chasing balloons. As other posters have noted the VM service is the best on the market for the price.
The ironic thing is that there may well be a drop in piracy as less techy people will get letters and will keek their pants, whereas many others will start using encryption or, better still, VPNs. Good luck Ofcom!
Please quantify this for me. I read nowhere in this article about the direct impact it will have on VM customers (aside from the bit that says it doesn't affect them directly). I would like to know what basis you are using to determine that my connection will be significantly affected.
I have a very adequate cable connection which is never throttled (on account of me not pirating things) and wouldn't mind if my packets take a couple more microseconds to arrive at my network adapter.
You may have read in the article that they plan to use the same underlying technology that Phorm employed during 'The Great BT Whitewash'.
In the BT trials it was shown that the process significantly slowed down people's datastreams whilst it was re-assembling packets to inspect.
And Kudos for not rising to the Muppet jibe :)
It's worse than you think. Unless they have all the parts you're downloading, how can they ever compare what they are seeing to a full product.
If you don't have a full MP3, you just have 4000 little bits of it, have you actually broken copyright? after all, isn;t it perfectly legal to record songs from the radio, and they are legal because they are not of high enough fidelity to constitue a true copy. So if you don't even have a copy of it, at all, then how can you be liabel.
Seen as how lots of stuff p2p is mislabeled anyway, they can't even set you up with intent!
It's all a load of shite, once in place there is nothing stopping them 'realising' that their amazing anti pirate kit has 'other' uses.
Is this designed to look for copyrighted material, or the popularity of different protocols? Will it, say, flag an unauthorised use of a song on a youtube video? or is it just to see how many songs get downloaded over, say, gnutella?
Is they hint from virgin media here that users should be encrypting their data traffic?
"Unless they have some sophisticated music analysis program that will identify beat, melody and harmony elements of music"
With a lot of the dross that the record companies turn out trying to identify tracks by beat, melody and harmony would probably flag up about half of the music they released over the last year as the same track as it all sounds the same with the same autotuned robot voice on to try and cover up the artist cant actually sing.
"You can have 20mbit, as long as you don't actually use it"
Throttling is a crock. How can you people feel that you get a good deal when they won't allow you to use the advertised speed (at certain arbitrary times)?
Would you like to buy my imitation Ferrari? It goes just as fast as the real thing, as long as you don't drive it faster than 60.
Tools.
I just had a quick chat with a virgin media representative, here is what happened.
You asked:
Are you planning a Deep Packet Inspection trial?
Jenny said:
I'm sorry, I didn't quite understand your question. If you want some help with any of our services, please visit our Help pages. Or you could also try rephrasing your question.
You asked:
Ok. What are your thoughts on the Data Protection Act?
Jenny said:
I'm sorry, I didn't quite understand your question. If you want some help with any of our services, please visit our Help pages. Or you could also try rephrasing your question.
Hope that answers alot of questions.
P.S. Jenny is still answering questions at http://www.virginmedia.com/help/
see goes to show why virgin sucks and yet customers like virgin il never go to virgin even if they gave me free broadband for life wouldnt touch it with a barge poll
least im with sky which offer trully unlimited broadband on there max package never had any issues with copyright but if sky is one of thease isps that decides to do this cview crap thing then i may consider canceling broadband altogether
So, as only a mild techy (know enough to make it look like I know a lot to non techs). Are we saying TOR? Freenet?
Will download sites such as Megaupload, Storage.to etc etc be inspected or is it only gonna be p2p?
Not worried per se, but would like to know best prevention if anyone has any ideas.
(And before anyone gets any ideas, any movies or music that I actually want, I also buy)
Generally it relies on 'digital fingerprinting' in other words it compares your chunk of the file to some chunks in its database to work out if you're doing things you shouldn't be. This is all well and good, apart from the fact it's a piece of piss to change the fingerprint. The obvious method would be encryption, which most people *should* have on bit-torrent (yes, i know you can still get caught because your ip is present on the tracker) and they won't have the resources to break encryption on the fly. But an even simpler (and rapidshare friendly method) is to simply compress the file with the password. This changes the fingerprint sufficiently to confuse dpi systems.
Do they have copies of every song, stored in every file format, at every possible bit rate?
Obviously not. So they could be looking for people sharing 128kbps mp3s and catching n00bs, while the serious downloaders will be getting 320kbps or lossless versions and going entirely undetected?
From my understanding of the Phorm technology, they looked at a request that didn't have their tracking cookie. If so they routed it to their servers and placed the cookie. Then they used that to track what you were doing.
If like me you whitelist your cookies this would have the effect of bouncing me to and from their server until I hit a timeout, at which point they would put my on an exclusion list and let me get my actual request back from the place I actually wanted to talk to.
If it's based on the phorm tech, will it be using this mechanism? Given this mechanism would be useless to track TCP traffic, what are they really up to? As has been pointed out, individual packets of a torrent are practically noise, so I can't believe that the DPI will actually provide the required information. This in turn suggests that the DPI will be used to in some way place further tracking information onto the user.
Can you get those chaps from FIPR in on your interview? They did quite a nice technical write up of the phorm tech.
People have suggested that as a result of the way packets are transmitted Detica will not be able to grab enough of a stream to reconstruct the download. That's 'obviously' not right. If they are sitting in the pipe, which they will be, then since the stream comes with all the routing information in the headers and all the reconstruction information in the packets then grabbing 'enough' if not a significant part of the download and reconstructing it will be 'trivial'. They 'see' what the end user 'sees'.
Given the majority of the material they are looking for is time referenced and represents a 'known' pattern, a sequence of noises or pictures, then matching that to a reference is largely trivial using Cross-Correlation....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-correlation
Ignoring encryption.... It does not matter whether you re-sample or otherwise bugger about with the basic data. They are not looking for exact or precise matches just trends. By the time you have mucked about with things to the extent that cross-correlation will not 'reliably' flag something as being a copy of an original you would not recognise it yourself.
For their purposes they don't have to do this in real time or on all the data that is available. They can just 'sample' analyse and then extrapolate a final percentage figure for the level of transmitted data that represents 'copyright infringment'. The answer will be 'accurate' and they will probably have the technical explanation to back up and verify that accuracy to a degree that would satisfy a 'court of law'.
Ask them. I'm sure they would be pleased to boast about it.
Of course that just deals with the technical side of things and ignores legal and rights issues should they decide to do anything with what they have found. They can probably 'justify' doing it in the first place if they manage to weasel word their way around other issues by claiming to be 'investigating' the possibility of a crime and blather on enough about 'anonymisation' and other rubbish......
Sorry to say but I think it is going to be hard to prevent them going ahead with this shit. Obviously it's not intended for the purpose they are suggesting but getting them to say otherwise is not going to happen.
Sure, having our data torn apart and inspected is better for all our sakes, because obviously, they'll only use it for illegal file sharing right? No to inspect any other data, i.e. personal data being transmitted too and frow like CV's etc?
Get real and stop supporting the 1984 culture! Look at the bigger picture!
"All you techies - what is the best technical (or other) way to disrupt this invasion?"
SSL pipes and VPNs to everything.
Encrypt the shit out the internet - good look decrypting the 256GB/sec running through LINX right now, forget that, who knows how much data is being pushed around - I think the terrorists just won.
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