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Comments: 280 +- Your Rights Online: Virgin Media To Trial Filesharing Monitoring In UK on Thursday November 26, @07:15PM
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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."
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Virgin media? (Score:4, Funny)
Time to encrypt everything. (Score:5, Insightful)
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And by "aggregated and anonymised", they mean they will send all the records to the record labels grouped by address. They won't even send the DSL subscribers name to the record label. Promise.
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But unless client and server agree on a private key in advance, by offline means, a Man in the Middle can still proxy the key negotiation and access the plaintext.
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.
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Re:Time to encrypt everything. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Time to encrypt everything. (Score:5, Insightful)
if they suspect people of committing a crime, they should get a warrant.
But that would involve due process and presumption innocence, and well, we can't have that now. What's next? Right to a fair trial?
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Re:Time to encrypt everything. (Score:4, Insightful)
They aren't allowed to listen to your phone calls, wy the hhell should they be allowed to look at your data
Yeah, and look at how well governments followed that law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_warrantless_surveillance_controversy [wikipedia.org]
Any human rights documents from any western country (UK, US, Canada, etc) are quickly becoming no more than toilet paper.
The only way we have to stop them is to make it physically impossible for them to trample our rights. Encryption is one way we can stop this abuse of power. Laws only get us so far when "national security" is on the line.
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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.
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Re:Time to encrypt everything. (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, most of us have nothing to hide
I hear that all the time and it's time to stop this lie by the surveillance fanatics once and for all.
Of course we all have something to hide! It's called our private life. You have no business snooping around in it. Not if you're a cop, not it you're an ISP, not if you're god.
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Wouldn't using encryption be "circumventing a copyright protection mechanism" .. oh, UK, sorry.
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If they thought DPI was expensive, wait until they try real-time decryption
Encryption can get you into trouble [theregister.co.uk] in the UK/
How do they know? (Score:5, Insightful)
I have a friend who's an amateur musician and devices (his mobile phone) have started to deny him the ability to play his own music due to it being "unlicensed".
How the hell do these clowns expect to be able to figure out what's unauthorised copying?
Re:How do they know? (Score:5, Interesting)
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people on here think they have somehow been winning this fight to control media, when they have been kidding themselfs. the fight hasn't even STARTED yet...
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It's nice to see the military industrial complex involved in the music industry's problem.
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Only the RIAA is allowed to distribute music there will be no other source or at least that is looking like their plan.
I suggest a boycott during the 3rd Quarter: April 1, 2010- June 30, 2010, and 4th Quarter: July 1, 2010 - September 30, 2010
Someone could set up a nice website, people could vote on a list of demands/consumer rights, and people could start an email/facebook campaign. A dent in the industries profits might get these people's attention.
I for one think the Public Domain needs to be given back
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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.
Re:How do they know? (Score:4, Interesting)
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I say lets try to confuse them. (Score:2, Funny)
Re:I say lets try to confuse them. (Score:5, Funny)
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Six months from now (Score:4, Insightful)
27th May 2010
Just 6 months after the announcement to monitor their network for illegal filesharers, Virgin Media has seen a dramatic decline in subscribers.
90% of their top tier customers (renting 20Mb/sec) have canceled their subscriptions
This figure is similar (82%) for their 10Mb/sec tier
Furthermore, the cost of the controversial detection methods (Deep Packet Inspection) has meant that the company has had to increase monthly subscription costs across all tiers by 10-20%
This has seen decline (albeit much smaller, at 47%) in their lowest tier of service
Re:Six months from now (Score:4, Insightful)
Only in your fantasies. Nothing will change. They'll keep the same subscriber level, and if there's any changes in level it will be due to deteriorating economic conditions.
Face it: the average schlub doesn't give a rat's ass about the security of their internet connection from the ISP itself. In their thoughts: "Why should I? I've got nothing to hide!"
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You’re the master of self-fulfilling prophecies aren’t you??
Half the reason that sometimes nothing changes, is the people constantly repeating that, taking all belief of the possiblility out of people.
That again is half the strategy to keep people from rising up.
Because in the end, it’s all in the mind. If ten million people want to rise up, but believe they are the only ones, then it will be much more unlikely that they really do it.
But if ten people believe that they really can change th
there BIG LACK of HD is killing off subscribers as (Score:2)
there BIG LACK of HD is killing off subscribers as well and this maybe to topper as people will give faster internet for FULL INTERNET.
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Try Be
www.bethere.co.uk
Excellent service
More details here: (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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Re:More details here: (Score:5, Insightful)
Such as, e.g., a facility to allow *every* broadband customer to be informed of and if they so choose to view *all* the information being gathered about themselves, and allow *any* of this data to be edited for accuracy by the customer, and allow *all* of this data to be deleted from *all* their servers if the customer decides to end the contract with Virgin at any time, etc.
Moreover, I presume that Virgin Media have ensured that the nature of the data they do collect is technically necessary for the provision of their ISP service to each customer, and not simply a gratuitous and illegal collection of data that is requested for a completely independent purpose set out in a completely different contract with another entity, and to which the customer himself is not actually a party.
These are bad economic times, and it would be a pity if some idle British lawyer were to look a little too closely at this announcement...
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This is what the banks have been doing for decades. They are happily giving details of your credit card transactions to a privately owned third party company that keeps this record about you and sells digested report about you, popularly known as credit rating, to interested other parties.
If you wish to see the information they collect about you, you have to pay money to them, and correcting wrong information about you (since it otherwise can ruin your life) is not easy or even possible either.
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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.
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:Will they track their own usenet server? (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Will they track their own usenet server? (Score:4, Funny)
Usenet is filesharing Usenet is free movies Usenet is porn Usenet is new p2p to go Usenet is torrent replacement Usenet is rapidshare in steroids. Usenet rocks for music, mp3 Usenet manga anime naruto. Usenet mininova Usenet thepiratebay.
I hope you do not mind mentioning Usenet along with few unimportant keywords and phrases. Its not like this will show on google. You are quite safe :)
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No one believes the promise of anonymity (Score:4, Insightful)
I guess I'll fill in some space down here because slashdot will not likely let me post a subject-only comment, but seriously, what more needs to be said? I can't believe they are even saying that with a straight face. Governments barely have anyone or anything to answer two when they lie to people. Businesses like Virgin media most certainly do not. The only thing that their bullshit proves is that they are aware of what the public response will be and that they are afraid of it at some level.
Could this cause legal problems for them? (Score:5, Insightful)
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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?
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Encrypt (Score:5, Insightful)
Everything.
Re:Encrypt (Score:4, Funny)
Ok
cewqqwavkbqfycpligfbnoppilrsbmfDshcaswlpgjxyeuwhkz2gejdtx6wzhutcofalcwTl
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It is an evolutionary process. Browsers and http servers didn't all support HTTPS from the very beginning, but serious ones gradually accepted it as a critical part of the web infrastructure, and now you wouldn't dream to do ecommerce on HTTP.
The same is slowly happening for other applications where secrecy and data integrity increasingly get to be seen as essential. Pretty much all serious torrent clients already support encryption, but they haven't switched off "legacy" support in their default configurat
misnomer (Score:5, Funny)
Judging by their behaviour they should probably rebrand themselves Whore Media.
Implied (Score:3, Insightful)
For Now. Later? Who knows.
In Other News... (Score:5, Insightful)
All public and private communications of all executives of companies in the UK valued at 500 million or more will be monitored for illegal, unethical, and undesired behaviour.
"If we had only known what certain Wall Street bankers had been up to the world could have avoided financial losses in the trillions. In a world of high speed communication and free flowing capital, the expectations of privacy have to be balanced against the interests of all stakeholders." said noted expert florescent_beige.
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Most clients use encryption by default, but will accept plaintext incoming connections yes. It's fairly easy to configure your torrent client to only allow encrypted connections if you are feeling paranoid.
Deep packet inspection does not extend to joining swarms with a modified client. At least I'd hope not...