Comcast Working On 'Helpful' Copyright Violation Pop-ups 284
gregor-e writes "Comcast is said to be preparing to snoop on your internet browsing to detect when you attempt to download a copyright-protected item. On detection, Comcast will pop up a helpful window that contains information about where you can obtain a legal version of whatever you're downloading. 'While sources familiar with the new initiative emphasized that it is being seen as a complement to CAS [a.k.a. six strikes] and not a replacement, the very emergence of an alternative raises questions as to the viability of CAS, which has been criticized for myriad reasons ranging from the questionable strategic rationale of punishing subscribers to an implementation that has been characterized as scattershot. How the two systems would coexist is unclear.'"
Comcast will be inviting other ISPs to join its new system as well.
if I owned a botnet.. (Score:4, Funny)
If I owned a botnet, I would dedicate a tiny portion of the swarm's resources to simply doing an http get request for some arbitrary file from a list of know triggers, and doing everything in my power to both route the request over a comcast owned link, and suppress the popup on the zombie.
The goal? Create as much noise in the line as possible to make the effort futile. (As a botnet operator, I would have incentive to make deep packet inspection as undesirable as possible.)
It wouldn't take much. Just pull a few bytes of an MP3 here, poke an illegal video server there, and just discard the replied datagrams (occasionally pull a whole fle, just to make it hard to filter). Wait some configurable time variable, then do it again with a different random file. Make it look like piracy is radically out of control, and totally discredit any metrics they collect from deep packet snooping.
The return of Clippy (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Is this so bad? (Score:2, Funny)
I'm not up to speed with current hipster talk. Does that mean good or bad?
Re:Is this so bad? (Score:3, Funny)
I'm not up to speed with current hipster talk. Does that mean good or bad?
Yes.