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Swedish ISP Calls UK Plans to Fight P2P 'Amateurism'
Swedish ISPs line up to criticize recent news that copyright holders and ISPs in the UK have agreed to a joint effort to combat illegal file-sharing.
Last week I reported how the so-called "Big 6" ISPs in the UK - BT, Virgin Media, Orange, Tiscali, BSkyB, and Carphone Warehouse - and Ofcom, the independent regulator and competition authority for the communication industries in the United Kingdom, had signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to combat piracy in that country on behalf of copyright holders like the British Phonographic Industry (BPI), who has been the most vocal on the issue.
Signatories endorse five principles in the MoU:
* That a joint industry solution is the best way forward
* That they will work together to educate consumers about why illicit file-sharing is wrong
* That making content available in a wide range of user-friendly formats is important
* That they will engage in a 3 month trial to send letters to 1,000 subscribers per week suspected of downloading or uploading unlicensed, copyrighted material
* That they will work with OfCom to identify effective measures to deal with repeat offenders
The news was immediately criticized by a number of people in both that country and abroad for the fact that it means a third party - copyright holders - with no apparent oversight will be monitoring the data transfers of an entire population.
A number of Swedish ISPs have been quick to criticize the plan and have made plain their opinions that it's a flagrant violation of customer privacy.
“We don’t want to act like police and feel that a system similar to that in the UK is a deep invasion of privacy," said Annika Kristersson of internet and telecommunications company Tele2 to the Svenska Dagbladet (SvD) newspaper.
"It would entail us having to spy on our customers."
It's also observed that the plan negatively impacts the Internet subscribers for the sake of a mediocre return - that is that it's simply not a good idea to target Internet connections when it has become such a vital tool for education, communication, and more. Disconnecting users means also removing them from what has become a global town square and is a poor way to combat illegal file-sharing.
“To try to restrict connections and reduce connection speeds shows a high degree of amateurism,” said Bahnhof CEO Jon Karlung to SvD.
“Today there are so many tasks carried out over the internet.”
Once again the Swedes seem to realize the importance of privacy and the rule of law. With copyright holders being the ones reporting the IP addresses of suspected file-sharers it makes one realize that the whole scheme is based on their integrity and due diligence. Have these two terms ever been used to describe the entertainment industry?
Exactly. Swedish ISPs line up to criticize recent news that copyright holders and ISPs in the UK have agreed to a joint effort to combat illega... more -
UK “MP3 Police” Evidence Unchallenged, Not For Public Consumption
This week, ISPs agreed to work with the BPI to reduce file-sharing in the UK. When someone gets ‘caught’ the ISPs will send out a warning, 100% based on music industry provided ‘evidence’. Not even the ISPs know if the claims of the BPI are true, so the evidence is totally unchallenged, a perfect position for the music industry.
So in a nutshell, the BPI provide all the ‘evidence’, and the ISPs have to blindly believe it and take action against their own customers. To think that a commercial organization like the BPI is allowed to provide its own unchallenged allegations in such a completely non-transparent manner is the real outrage in all of this. If the BPI is to be trusted with such power, it has to be held accountable. If it is to remain credible in its role as the “UK MP3 Police” its systems must be opened up to public scrutiny. Once they are proved to be accurate by a panel of independent experts, then all well and good, but the fact remains that the BPI only give a vague indication of how they operate and have no intentions of elaborating. This week, ISPs agreed to work with the BPI to reduce file-sharing in the UK. When someone gets ‘caught’ the ISPs will send out a warn... more -
ISPs To Send “Hundreds of Thousands” of File-Sharing Warnings
In what will be seen by the British Phonographic Industry as a partial victory in its war against file sharers, major ISPs in the UK have agreed to music industry demands to start sending out warning letters to those it accuses of sharing its copyright works.
The report states that the deal was agreed by six of the UK’s most prominent Internet Service Providers following intense government pressure. It’s estimated that these as-yet unnamed ISPs will send out hundreds of thousands of letters to suspected uploaders of music. The ISPs - thought to include Virgin Media who already did an early deal - are BT, Orange, Tiscali, Carphone Warehouse (AOL, TalkTalk) and BSkyB.
Demands from the music industry to disconnect uploaders from the Internet have not been met by the ISPs nor insisted upon by the government as Culture Secretary Andy Burnham had already stepped back from a government implemented ‘3 strikes and you’re out’ policy. One ISP, Virgin Media, already indicated that there was “absolutely no possibility” of them disconnecting alleged pirates from the Internet.
However, it’s being reported that other measures may be taken against alleged file-sharers, including traffic management techniques being deployed to punish persistent offenders. As we reported earlier, this element is likely to be negotiated by the UK telecoms regulator, Ofcom.
The Times is reporting that other steps may be taken by the government such as the introduction of an annual £30 ‘download tax’. Peter Jenner, a music industry player who has been supporting such a plan said that the tax could bring in enough turnover to support the music industry: “If you get enough people paying a small enough amount of money you can turn around the wheels of the music industry” he said. Although UK citizens are used to this type of charge with the current TV licensing system, this type of tax seems unlikely to succeed in the current environment.
A Memorandum of Understanding drawn up by the Department for Business, Enterprise & Regulatory Reform (BERR) and signed by all six ISPs states that not only must the ISPs commit to a “significant reduction” in music file-sharing in the UK but they must also help develop legal music services too. One can see how this might be attractive to certain ISPs, such as BSkyB who just days ago signed a deal with Universal to set up an online music service “to rival iTunes”.
All this will be backed up by an educational campaign to ensure that every customer knows that it is illegal to upload copyright music.
More on this breaking news as we get it during the day.
Update: Geoff Taylor, chief executive of the BPI says reports of a levy are incorrect: “A levy is not an issue under discussion. It has not been discussed between us and government and as far as we are aware it is not on the table.” In what will be seen by the British Phonographic Industry as a partial victory in its war against file sharers, major ISPs in the UK h... more -
Musical pirates to be warned by post
According to reports, the six largest ISPs in the UK have signed a deal that will see them sending 'informative' warning letters to 'hundreds of thousands of customers whose accounts are being used to download or share pirated songs."
That means pocket money across the country will no doubt be put on hold when Mummy and Daddy find out what their little soldier has really been downloading; copyrighted games, illegal music and maybe even a splattering of 'adult entertainment'.
Virgin Media tried something similar a few weeks ago but claimed it was all a bit of a misunderstanding, but now it seems they're deadly serious since being joined by BT, BSkyB, Orange, Tiscali and Carphone Warehouse in the anti-piracy campaign.
The British Phonographic Industry (BPI) is expected to claim the deal is a victory its war on filesharing, which has dented CD sales and severely damaged the music industry. According to reports, the six largest ISPs in the UK have signed a deal that will see them sending 'informative' warning let... more -
Lawmakers Target Second ISP for Web-Tracking Tech
ISPs seeking to find new ways to make money by profiling their customer's online habits are likely reconsidering after powerful House lawmakers turned their anti-tracking ire on a second large telecom in recent months.
In June, Charter Communications -- the nation's fourth-largest ISP -- shelved its plan to make money by letting others snoop on and categorize the web-surfing habits -- including searches -- of its customers, following a May inquiry from Congress about the plan.
This go round top members of the House Commerce committee, including chairman John Dingell (D-Michigan) and top Republican Joe Barton (R-Texas) and telecom subcommittee head Reps. Edward Markey (D-Massachusetts) are targeting the Fortune 500 telecom company Embarq.
The lawmakers want to know whether the company informed its customers earlier this year that it was testing web-tracking technology that would chronicle their every move online. They also want to know whether the test of web-surveillance technology from NebuAd complied with federal communications law.
Monday's letter to Embarq comes as ISPs are trying to find ways to be more than just providers of pipes -- and trying to find new ways to raise revenues and control traffic on their network. These attempts include violating accepted internet protocol to return pages with ads when a user types in a nonexistent URL and sending fake packets to file sharers' computers in order to scale back their traffic usage. The latter tactic, adopted by Comcast to control BitTorrent video file sharing, is likely to draw an official rebuke from federal regulators in August.
Rep. Markey is clearly not waiting for answers to know what he thinks of such technology:
"Surreptitiously tracking individual users' Internet activity cuts to the heart of consumer privacy," Markey said in a written statement. "Embarq's apparent use of this technology without directly notifying affected customers that their activity was being tracked, collected, and analyzed raises serious privacy red flags."
Embarq, a Fortune 500 telecom bundling company spun-off from Sprint that employs some 18,000 people, tested technology from NebuAd, a controversial advertising firm that collects data about users from inside their ISPs and uses those profiles to serve targeted ads on pages around the net. Third-party advertising networks such as DoubleClick collect some of the same information, but only do so from select web pages. By contrast, NebuAd sits in the pipe and can see everywhere a user goes.
NebuAd pays ISPs to install sniffer boxes on the network, which then categorize users as it reads the traffic between a user's computer and websites. According to one report, NebuAd also adds rogue JavaScript to pages from Google and Yahoo as part of its tracking technology.
Some advocacy groups and privacy lawyers argue that NebuAd's snooping on web traffic in order to determine what ads to serve to a user violate federal wiretapping laws. NebuAd disagrees saying it throws away URLs as profiles are generated and that its pseudonymous profiles could not be reverse-engineered to identify a person. They also say users can opt-out, though its unclear exactly how that works or how effective it is. ISPs seeking to find new ways to make money by profiling their customer's online habits are likely reconsidering after powerful H... more -
More ISPs to block legendary alt.* newsgroups
Last month, the New York state Attorney General, Andrew Cuomo, announced that a sting operation had uncovered an indifference on the part of Internet service providers regarding complaints about child porn accessible through their networks. Using a combination of legal threats and public shaming, Cuomo was able to get three ISPs to drop access to the entire alt.* hierarchy of Usenet, a move that encouraged California to request similar measures. Now, in a sign that these efforts against child porn were becoming a movement, Cuomo has announced the launch of a web site, nystopchildporn and agreements with two more ISPs. Last month, the New York state Attorney General, Andrew Cuomo, announced that a sting operation had uncovered an indifference on the p... more
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'Tunnel Hunter' Detects Encrypted P2P Traffic With 90% Accuracy
Italian researchers say they can detect SSH tunnels with 99% accuracy and actual protocol (P2P, POP3, SMTP, HTTP) with 90% accuracy.
Italian Researchers at the Universita degli Studidi Brescia (University of Brescia Studies?) have developed a statistical method called "Tunnel Hunter" for detecting encrypted tunneling activities with 99% accuracy.
Using a naive Bayes approach to previously classify different protocols such as P2P, POP3, SMTP, and HTTP, they have used the same basic classification algorithm to detect SSH tunnels. Instead of using Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) they analyze three simple properties of IP packets: their size, inter-arrival time and arrival order.
The main theory they argue is that that a fingerprint can be derived by training the system on legitimate, non-tunneling SSH usage, and then later be used to detect application-layer tunnels that are run on top of a Secure Shell. As shown below, researchers were able to detect encrypted P2P traffic with a 88.77% accuracy. Italian researchers say they can detect SSH tunnels with 99% accuracy and actual protocol (P2P, POP3, SMTP, HTTP) with 90% accuracy. ... more -
Spam fighters lay down gauntlet
New guidelines for how internet service providers should combat spam have been published.
The advice, from the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG) recommends ISPs use separate servers for received and forwarded e-mails.
It also recommends ISPs block the port - known as port 25 - through which spam travels.
Richard Cox from UK anti-spam group Spamhaus believes the guidelines could be implemented within the year.
Forwarding spam
"These are very significant recommendations and they are coming from a well-respected body so there is not much excuse for not following them," he said.
It is estimated that over 90% of all e-mail is spam.
Even if the guidelines are taking up by a majority of ISPs, experts admit it is unlikely that people will see a drastic reduction in spam any time soon.
"Some ISPs will always remain wide open even if we succeed in closing port 25," said Matt Sergeant, a senior anti-spam technologist with security firm MessageLabs.
"But that doesn't mean that it isn't worth doing. If we don't do it spam volumes will increase," he said.
The first of MAAWG's recommendations calls for a separation between original e-mails and those that are forwarded on.
"When mail is forwarded it is often the case that spam and viruses are also forwarded," said Mr Sergeant.
Making a distinction will make stop those sending e-mail from being associated with spam.
"It will give recipients the ability to recognise spam and reject it," Mr Cox added. New guidelines for how internet service providers should combat spam have been published. ... more -
Virgin Media cracks down on torrent abusers
"Virgin Media and the BPI have announced a new campaign to crack down on those customers illegally downloading and distributing music illegally.
“As part of the campaign, customers whose accounts appear to have been used to distribute music in breach of copyright will receive informative letters, one from Virgin Media and one from the BPI,” Virgin’s press release informs us." "Virgin Media and the BPI have announced a new campaign to crack down on those customers illegally downloading and distributing m... more -
2012: the year the internet ends?
http://ipower.ning.com/netneutrality
Every significant Internet provider around the globe is currently in talks with access and content providers to transform the internet into a television-like medium: no more freedom, you pay for a small commercial package of sites you can visit and you'll have to pay for separate subscriptions for every site that's not in the package.
Almost all smaller websites/services will disappear over time and multinationals who are used to using big budgets to brute force their content into every media outlet will finally be able to approach the internet in the same way
internet providers have realized that the only way to not lose massive amounts of customers over this is to make sure there are no alternatives, that's why all major Internet providers are currently making agreements and planning to switch simultaneously somewhere in the year 2012. This is currently all going on under very strict NDA's (Non-Disclosure Agreements) because the last thing they want is the masses speaking out against it.
We were able to uncover this information because we have been well-known net neutrality activists for longer than a year now and over time have we've gotten in contact with many high-profile industry insiders. We will continue our activism and the I Power website serves as a platform for joining forces, sharing ideas and spreading awareness.
It's our responsibility to spread the word, use any sort of political or media contacts you may know. The more awareness there is, the more impossible it'll be for Internet providers to make this switch. Let's make sure that by 2012, ISP's won't even dare think about doing anything that goes against the principles of net neutrality. http://ipower.ning.com/netneutrality ... more -
The Uk's BT commited 113 million allegedly illegal acts in 8 days
nodpi.org
[EXCLUSIVE]
An article summarising an internal report by BT regarding their covert trials of PageSense (Phorm) in September 2006. IP addresses were used (despite BT assuring the public and ICO that no personally identifiable data was used) and 130 000 charity ads were hijacked and replaced with Phorm's ads.
http://nodpi.org/?p=10
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BT covert trials in 2006 - The FACTS about PageSense
I recently acquired an internal BT report regarding their covert trials of Phorm (then called PageSense) in September 2006. I read the 52 page document earlier today and the evidence it presents left me with a knot in my stomach and one part of the report concerned me so much I have fired off an email to Google’s legal department. I will try to summarise the report below without getting too technical, but if people need any clarification, please leave a comment and I will do my best to answer.
Ad Hijacking - Were Google a Victim of the Trials?
One of the most concerning aspects of the report is first mentioned on page 7 in the last paragraph which states:
“The advertisements were used to replaced [sic] a ‘default’ charity advertisement (one of Oxfam, Make Trade Fair or SOS Children’s Villages) when a suitable contextual or behavioural match could be made by the PageSense system.”
...
" nodpi.org [EXCLUSIVE] ... more -
Access your Smart Bro Motorola Canopy Page and Speed up your Wireless Internet Con...
Why will i wanna go and access my Motorola Canopy Page, you ask? Well, it can help you to speed up and manage your Smart Bro internet connection or any internet connection actually that uses the Motorola Canopy Lite or even the older Canopy. By default, your Internet Service Provider may have disabled access to it Why will i wanna go and access my Motorola Canopy Page, you ask? Well, it can help you to speed up and manage your Smart Bro internet ... more
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Time-Warner customers will have to pay for bandwidth
"This Thursday, new cable Internet customers in Beaumont, Texas will no longer have unmetered Internet bandwidth - they’re guinea pigs in a new pricing scheme being pushed by Time-Warner that will give users between 5 and 40 gigabytes in total monthly data usage (uploads and downloads combined). Data usage over that amount will be billed at $1 per gigabyte. Competitor Comcast is also considering metered bandwidth.
"The goal is to limit average data usage, allowing Time-Warner to get more customers into their existing fiber infrastructure. Since there is little or no competition for Internet connectivity, they don’t have to worry so much about losing customers."
Ah, the joy of cable and internet monopolies. "This Thursday, new cable Internet customers in Beaumont, Texas will no longer have unmetered Internet bandwidth - they’re guinea... more -
BBC NEWS | Technology | BBC and ISPs clash over iPlayer
A row about who should pay for extra network costs incurred by the iPlayer has broken out between internet service providers (ISPs) and the BBC.
ISPs say the on-demand TV service is putting strain on their networks, which need to be upgraded to cope.
Ashley Highfield, head of future media and technology at the corporation, has said he believes the cost of network upgrades should be carried by ISPs. A row about who should pay for extra network costs incurred by the iPlayer has broken out between internet service providers (ISPs) an... more -
Internet users to be banned over illegal downloads
In a new proposal broadband providers could be forced to ban people from the internet if they are caught downloading pirated files. It is being reported that a "three strikes" scheme could be implemented, which would see users being sent a warning email when they are first suspected of downloading illegal content, then a suspension for the second offence, and finally a ban for a third offence. Broadband suppliers who do not comply with the new legislation could be prosecuted and their users identities handed over to the courts.
The proposed legislation opens up many questions about how this is all to be monitored, what if someone accesses your wifi illegally and who will monitor internet usage to catch the illegal downloaders? These are points which have been debated for the last two years, but as yet there is no specific answer. A spokesman for the Internet Service Providers Association said it remained hopeful that agreement over a voluntary agreement could be reached:
“Every right-thinking body knows that self-regulation is much the better option in these areas.” In a new proposal broadband providers could be forced to ban people from the internet if they are caught downloading pirated files. It... more -
UK internet censorship law passed on New Years Eve
Did anyone notice? It seemed to slip under the radar undetected like many other laws have done over the last four or five years.
The law, or more specifically "process in action", has been designed to block child pornography from of the UK - a noble cause - but Frank Fisher, a resident IT expert type from the Guardian, has spotted some flaws its seemingly innocent sheeny surface.
Firstly, the servers which are blocked are not up to debate, they are decided by the IMF, augmented by the Home Office and then blocked by the ISP's. The list of servers blocked are not up for discussion, nor are they listed anywhere, rendering the process fairly secretive.
Are we to trust our government to block access to child pornography and child pornography only? The government has "leaned on" ISP's in the past to block sites on the word of one just one police officer and have also tried to block sites which simply embarrass or undermine the government.
As of the 31st of December you've been looking at a state censored internet, and no-one can see what is and is not getting blocked. No debate, no watchdog, no nothing. Loath it or lump it...
Now while you still can get those webcams fired up and tell me what you think... Did anyone notice? It seemed to slip under the radar undetected like many other laws have done over the last four or five years. ... more -
Municipal WiFi Faces Financial Hurdles
With layoffs and losses at EarthLink, the internet service provider that was supposed to foot the bill to build city wide wifi networks across San Francisco and Houston is backing out. In San Francisco, the company had been planning to charge $20 per month for access that is 3 to 4 times faster than the free service that was to be subsidized by ads sold by Google. But they are no longer interested in plans where they take all the up front financial risk, having faced lower than projected subscriptions in cities where the wifi network has already been built. With layoffs and losses at EarthLink, the internet service provider that was supposed to foot the bill to build city wide wifi network... more
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