Virgin Media To Trial Filesharing Monitoring In UK 280
Shokaster writes "The Register reports that Virgin Media are to begin monitoring file sharing using a deep packet inspection system, CView, provided by Deltica, a BAE subsidiary. The trial will cover about 40% of customers, although those involved will not be informed. CView's deep packet inspection is the same technology that powered Phorm's advertising system. Initially Virgin Media's implementation will focus on music sharing and will inspect packets to determine whether the content is licensed or unlicensed, based on data provided by the record industry. Virgin Media emphasised that records will not be kept on individual customers and that data on the level of copyright infringement will be aggregated and anonymised."
Re:How do they know? (Score:5, Interesting)
Encrypted Anonymous File Sharing (Score:3, Interesting)
Which is worse: All data being free, including data you don't personally like? Or regimes of data control?
Will they track their own usenet server? (Score:5, Interesting)
Here's a bit of a dilemma, they crack down on filesharing, yet run a free usenet server for their customers with alt.binaries included with 5 days retention.
Will they issue a takedown to themselves?
Re:More details here: (Score:4, Interesting)
So now I know what their engineers have been doing instead of upgrading the upstream infrastructure so that my 10Mbit connection can provide better than 500kbit with 33% packet loss. Trebles all round.
Re:Time to encrypt everything. (Score:2, Interesting)
Isn't that an interesting coincidence that they all became this way at (relatively) the same time? You'd think that the ones who don't become this way would enjoy a degree of economic and social prosperity that would give them quite a competitive edge against the other nations.
When are you guys going to wake up and realize that sovereign nations hardly exist anymore? If you want to understand who really pulls the strings of our puppet politicians, look no further than the global bankers, the ones who run the Federal Reserve and similar institutions that every major Western country has. These guys are the ones who decided that basic civil rights are inconvenient obstacles, and they have caused all of the Western nations to march in lockstep with their intentions. Their immediate goal is to run the USA into the ground both financially and legally, because the sovereignty of the USA and its "superpower" status is an obstacle to them. Their next step will be to group Canada, the USA, and Mexico into an American Union with one currency, called the Amero, and the arrangement will be quite similar to the EU except far less voluntary.
You can say whatever you like about the problems caused by and shown by the USA. Right now, its sovereignty is about the only thing holding us back from a one-world government. The idea of a one-world government all by itself isn't that bad. The problem is that it's not being ushered in by popular demand or anything remotely resembling a democratic process. It's being ushered in by deception and manipulation.
Re:Time to encrypt everything. (Score:4, Interesting)
Well yeah but reading up [wikipedia.org] it seems that A person in the middle may establish two distinct Diffie–Hellman key exchanges, one with Alice and the other with Bob, effectively masquerading as Alice to Bob, and vice versa, allowing the attacker to decrypt (and read or store) then re-encrypt the messages passed between them. A pre-arranged certificate could be used to exclude the man in the middle but then the client may proceed with the negotiation anyway (to get their stuff) and the cert can be comprimised if it is sent in the clear over the same link, ie, by apt-get or similar.
Re:Time to encrypt everything. (Score:5, Interesting)
I fully agree. The rise of surveillance of telecommunications (of whatever method) in the West is getting a bit alarming. Ubiquitous encryption will become the standard I feel. We are moving towards a word where all new software, systems and protocols that get developed, will include encryption to a greater or lesser extent.
It started with the widespread logging and monitoring of all phone calls entering and leaving the US after 9/11 (this really irritates me as a non-American - that my calls TO America are getting logged and possibly intercepted). Since then though I feel that it is the UK that is becoming the worst offender. AU and NZ are still pretty much surveillance-free ... although that's mostly a product of them being isolated and not having suffered a direct attack, rather than them having stricter protections against this kind of thing. I'm sure if there were an attack or threat there, there would be impetus to implement similar systems to the US/UK.
So yeah, I would urge everyone to use encryption in their daily lives as much as they can. Of course, most of us have nothing to hide in this respect, but it's really the ~principle~ of the thing that is at stake here, rather than an actual need to encrypt. If we make it technically or financially unfeasible to monitor communications en masse, then Governments will be more reluctant to do it, and will return to concentrating on tapping into only particular, suspected communications, by way of a proper warrant. Like they ~should~ be doing.
Re:Packet Inspection (Score:3, Interesting)
If they can tell what files I'm sending over an encrypted VPN link, then they have some impressive technology indeed.
At the risk of being branded a tinfoil-hat wearing nutcase, my employer used to use CIPE for a VPN between two offices. At the time I started, CIPE had already been discredited as being fundamentally insecure but nobody really thought it was going to be intercepted unless you had pissed off a government somewhere.
Then we had a problem. SIP traffic of any description going over that VPN link didn't make it across. (Kind of important when your employer produces SIP software).
Everything else made it fine. And there wasn't a firewall on the traffic going over the VPN. But SIP? Nope, ethereal on both ends proved that what went in one end didn't make it out the other - and it wasn't random packet loss. Just one protocol. The only plausible explanation we could think of was that someone was intercepting and decrypting traffic in real time and filtering what they didn't like.
We stopped using CIPE shortly after that.
Re:Could this cause legal problems for them? (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, I think it's actually illegal, but for different reasons. From what I can tell this is exactly why the UK is facing legal procedings from the EU over Phorm.
It's effectively a breach of the European Declaration of Human Rights which we are signatories to, specifically it is a clear breach of the right to privacy.
I think realistically this will end up in European courts. It wont end up in British courts or be looked into by the police here because they are merely puppets of the Labour government here which supports this as demonstrated by the new supreme court refusing to hear McKinnon, the refusal of investigations into Phorm even though it was blatantly illegal and so on.
Nowadays in Britain we have to rely on the European courts for any semblance of justice on these sorts of things, but on the upside they do generally rule in favour of the citizen on things like this where it is a clear breach of law. God knows where we as citizens of Britain would be if it weren't for Europe, I'd imagine it would resemble something like Germany circa 1937. In fact, there's a certain irony in that whole sentence, how times change eh?
Re:How do they know? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:More details here: (Score:3, Interesting)
The Data Protection Act does allow you access to this data for a nominal £10 fee. In a month or two I'll be sending them a cheque with a request for all data held about me.
What is not clear is how this works with anonymous data. It's still my data, even if it can no longer be associated with me.