AT&T to crush copyrighted network packets

let's make some money :)

First produce something with copyright, tel AT&T to filter it and have a contact with an AT&T account download it. Then sue AT&T for not filtering it. Of course your contact has to be sure they can't be found or sued, but if that's sorted, lets start making money :) who is to say My work isn't worth in access of 200.000 dollar? I know that about 3 pounds nowadays :D

Ass. of America

Recording Industry Ass. of America

i think u got it right, at least the ass part lol

hardyharhar

In our humble opinion: James Cicconi is a wanker

AT&T seems to have drunk the kool aid or at least snorted the coke at the RIAA/MPAA parties because it seems to think that it is now in the spook business.

How can you be "friendly" about mass censorship and mass intrusion?

As AT&T attempts to do deep packet inspection to recognize "protected content" who knows what other treasures will they find to sell to the the US government or any government (AT&T is a multinational) for taxpayer dollars?

@David W and friends

Of course the only way that Comcast, AT&T et al stay in business is that they *only* do business where they have effective monopolies, or cushy oligolopolies with close friends. They're banking on the idea that consumers (they're not 'customers' any more; customers have choices) won't want to unplug their 'connection to The World'.

The guy who said it was already too late.... you're an optimist.

@Steve Medway

For the last five years, my job consisted of intercepting email transmissions. This past year, my group intercepted and blocked around 98% of the email which was sent to addresses my company controls.

Was this illegal? I don't think so. I am actually quite popular at work for my success at blocking this traffic.

Note that, while the numbers are much less, we also redirect a certain portion of traffic, instead of sending it on to its original destination - and, again, I've received kudos for this work rather than being charged with crimes.

Admittedly, I am acting as a representative for the corporate entity to which 99% of the intercepted (blocked or rerouted) traffic was sent. However, other places, traffic is blocked by companies who are not representatives for the recipient. For example, I've so far thanked Google for every email they've blocked which was sent to me (at least, I've not been made aware of any false-positives yet.)

Thanks to the scourge of the modern internet, the precedent is out there: blocking traffic is not necessarily illegal.

Next Up...

We "copyright" all the names of Democratic and Liberal/Socialist candidates and politicians. We "copyright" all movie star names. Then we say we don't want our "Intellectual Property" which includes all those "copyrights" used for any news we consider "bad". Which means then all you hear are happyhappyjoyjoy puff pieces about Senator Palpatine Clinton and her Minister of Propaganda, Michelle Moore. Anything sounding like criticism gets "filtered". Which means, the only bad news is from their opposition, further spinning the belief that somehow it's the "other side" that's really the Bad Guys.

Then we register all the non-western country names. No bad news about them either. And everyone still goes on about this supposed free press. Free from only our government's interference. Everyone else's government can bribe and interfere all they want.

Kind of like mainstream media today. Find a story *without* Bill or Hillary in it. "Hillary wins" or "Hillary loses" or "Hillary didn't even play". Hell, Bill gets as much or more coverage than Obama and he isn't even running. You'd think Obama was a Republican or something...Guess all that Chinese cash for weapons technology really paid off...

@ED

I've no issue with blocking traffic to a *private* network, hell I don't like Spam either.

Would you find it acceptable for your firm's ISP to snoop your private email sent over the net to a colleague in another firm? Get a grip mate. Packet inspection should be illegal.. in the UK it is...... well sort of......

Check out http://www.swarb.co.uk/acts/1985InterceptionCommunicationsAct.shtml

Basically an ISP can snoop on your packets in the UK because of section 1.3.A - An ISP can claim that that packet inspection is to prevent the network falling over - it's a deliberate loophole.

You get away with what you do because of section 1.2.B.

So don't be a muppet and actually read what I write in future.

MMORPG's

use P2P file sharing for patches

@Tier1 & Jon Green

In the USA, AT&T owns nearly all of the loops that make up our network. For example, if I buy T1 service from Megapath, they lease access from Verizon, who leases their loops from AT&T. So, it's not about creating a new ISP or finding a way to work around AT&T's cabling ... they have access to all of it because of their unique position in this country. Maybe even in your country.

This makes Jon Green's comment about losing "common carrier" status more relevant, because AT&T is classified as a common carrier, here. It just might force a showdown over the classification of the Internet itself ... private enterprise or public infrastructure? Paid for with taxes and usury fees, or by subscription? Required by fiat to be available to the public to freely use, or restricted by policies drafted by a single corporate entity?

This type of incident may be a grand opportunity to finally equate the Internet's wiring with the asphalt upon which we drive our cars. Where it has been the property and under the control of those who built it, now may be our chance to force its classification into the public realm, and force AT&T to give up any control it has over the system, making them publicly-funded stewards rather than privately-controlled overseers.

BWAA

The Buggy Whip Ass(ociation) of America would like you to know that while buggy whips are now obsolete, you must still pay them a levy for accelerating your vehicle...

Aren't AT&T still

on the hook for illegal billing inflating charges I believe, and aren't they still worried about all those illegal wiretaps I think they are, this is just a very legally vulnerable pastiche of a company trying to find legal allies in it's corner like mpaa or the riaa.

@James Butler

AT&T don't own any where near all the fiber in the USA or anywhere else.

Look Hibernia who have proper transatlantic cables and USA networks covering Atlanta to Montreal all the way to London. For their Atlantic system they won't carrying AT&T traffic prior to this news.

Or Level 3 who have 47,000 miles compared to AT&T with about 40,000 max.

Man are you guys slow...

First, lets clear the air. How will AT&T know which packets are carrying copywritten material, and which packets are not?

Do you not think that they know this?

Do you not think that there's been enough pressure by the RIAA and MPAA (or whomever) on Congress in an *election* year to force them to do something?

By having AT&T say that they're willing to work on a solution, that they're buying time?

Do you also not think that AT&T also know that if they quash based on content that they *may* lose their common carrier status?

Note: They could just block bit torrent and damn the rest of us who use it to download utilities, software and data... (legit uses of bit torrent).

And as the anonymous poster points out, you can switch carriers. (Wouldn't this filtering be a material change in their contract which would allow you to break any contract early?)

So until they start doing this, be patient. Plan your next move, and then move on.

AT&T is probably considering that if there's FCC pressure and they're the first ones to cave, others will too.

The reality is the reverse. AT&T and comcast cave, you then go WiMax or to a different T1 carrier.

HAHAHA. Network Neutrality opponents, reap what you've sewn!

My, what a large Singer you have!

Quick way to loose ma as a customer

The day they try content filtering is the day I cancel my DSL, Phone, and long distance and move to another vendor.

This is just an excuse

This is just an excuse to install packet monitoring boxes and software just about everywhere on the US internet. The UK equivalent is the Internet Watch Foundation list that all UK ISPs have "volunteered" to check every browser request against. No ISP would want to be "named and shamed" for "catering for perverts" now would they? But we "just happen" to end up with the infrastructure for logging all those requests, as will be legally required in the near future. Just like the man from Sun said: Privacy's gone, get over it! (I paraphrase 'cos I'm too tired to look it up). As someone said a long time ago now, Nineteen Eighty Four was supposed to be a warning, not an instruction manual!

Speaking as a firewall dork

Filtering by header is really quick, really cheap in terms of resources. When my evil corporate masters market their product, the throughput figures quoted are for header-based identifiers. No mornitoring of mime types, content file types is possible.

Actually opening up the packet and making decisions based on this reduces possible throughput by up to a factor of ten, depending on the efficiency of the software doing it.

I'd rather be with an ISP that won't be slowing down my traffic to spy on me.

And to echo many others, how the hell are they going to determine copyright? look for DRM tagging?

@Lee Jenderko

Whose ma?

Mine, for one, is really not all that bothered about bootlegging pop songs...

What Other Packets Would M$ Like To Bury?

I can see Bill Gates rubbing his hands with glee as he starts destroying Open Office and Firefox packets whizzing around the Globe.

Prohibition ahoy!

As with the sex and drugs, there are two ways of dealing with the distribution of copyright infringeing material - either ban it or liberalise it. The US government is a serial banner of anything it doesn't approve of, and is why the US is now an alcohol-free nation where no-one does drugs or has pre-marital sex. The UK has a rather bi-polar attitude and flips between liberalism and authoritarianism, and unfortunately we heading towards a Stalinesque 'every citizen must report five law-breaking citizens in their housing zone' type society at the moment.

However, the old system of physically controlling the distribution of music and multimedia content is now obsolete. Just as society has to adapt to the tens of billions of pounds lost every year to drink, drug and sex related illnesses and crimes, so it will have to adapt to the losses incurred by copyright infringement. You can make file sharing illegal, but you can no more stop it that you can stop people looking at pr0n, drinking alcohol or smoking dope.

Note: one of the arguments against prohibition is that by criminalising drugs, sex etc you put money into the pockets of criminal gangs. Strangely, the 'money for terrorists' argument is made AGAINST infringing of copyright! Ironically, stopping people file sharing will drive UP demand for pirated material and increase funding for criminal and terrorist organisations. A victory for DRM is a victory for terrorism!!!!

p.s. Notice how the big RnB acts are going all dancey? I wonder if this is anything to do with the large underground (copyright infringing) dance remix scene?

@peter

AT&T is one of Level 3's top 3 partners, so while they may not own those loops, they control them. Not to mention that they are Level 3's #1 wireless partner. You'll discover the same sorts of partnerships with every major backbone provider, here in the US. And Hibernia doesn't even count, unless you live in a very small sector of the country. I realize that there are other providers on the partnership same level (Comcast, etc.), however AT&T is by far the biggest, and that's not even counting the loops they were forced to divest which were picked up by Level 3 and others. Are you sure AT&T has no opportunity to apply this plan to those networks? I'm not.

Aside from that, I agree with those who are coming out against this type of packet spying. While the speed issue might come into play at some point, it is far more irritating to know that any packets are being analysed for these types of indicators.

Stop dreaming

>First, lets clear the air. How will AT&T know which packets are carrying >copywritten material, and which packets are not?

> Do you not think that they know this?

There are many ways for this.

This easy way is to do like comcast: stop uploads.

Then you can filter by IP address. Probably 99% of p2p traffic is between residential ips.. ( lot of blacklists already available, and ISPs do not even need blacklists.. just whitelists! ).

Then you can filter tagged packet: when amazon / iTunes delivers copyrighted content, their packets are marked & signed as copyrighted ( so they have a priority, and At&t can bill them for "improved service", that's where the money comes from ).

When the content is on your vista 64bit computer, the OS recognizes the content ( the document is not encrypted, not drm-ised, just flagged as being copyrighted ), so when you want to upload it, your network driver marks the packets as "copy of copyrighted material".

Anything not copyrighted going on the ISP network is not flagged as such, so easy to filter. Eventually if you ripped your CDs vista can flag the mp3 files as being "ripped" and run some fingerprint algorithms to retrieve the legit copyright holder..

Your crypto packets sent from your linux box will just be dropped or at best throttled to a 33.6K modem line.