Broadband Service as P2P Distro Experiment 71
Not another doctor wrote to mention a PC Doctor article about the Sky by Broadband service. In addition to providing access to the internet, the service also helpfully downloads and installs the Kontiki P2P service. From the article: "What this really means is that Sky in all their advertising are making out that you are downloading content directly from them rather than other users. Also, the P2P link continues to run in the background after you've shut down the main application, eating up bandwidth by allowing others to download the files from your PC. Kontiki also collects and sends back to Sky a lot of information about your PC. There is no mention as to how this data is protected from unauthorized access, however, initial examination with Ethereal seems to show that all data is at least encrypted during transmission."
Mod Story -1: Troll (Score:5, Informative)
How does Sky use Kontiki's secure peer-to-peer technology to deliver videos to my PC?
Sky by broadband displays the video content available for you to download. Kontiki offers the underlying peer-to-peer technology which delivers the videos you choose in a secure, efficient manner, enabling very large, high-resolution videos to be delivered to your computer.
Specifically, the Kontiki technology determines how to download the video you selected by searching for sources of that video on locations which may include Sky's own network, or other users of Sky's Kontiki network or "grid". If the video can be delivered to you more quickly and efficiently from another computer, that's exactly what Kontiki will do! Conversely, your computer is also part of Sky's Kontiki grid, so your computer might be used as a source location for transferring a video to another Sky user.
Pretty much says it's doing what TFA is bitching about them not saying.
Re:they ARE being honest.... (Score:1, Informative)
No, that's from the article, written by a third party. The website [sky.com] says no such thing. No marketing department would be so foolish as to say their service has a "darker side". The FAQ answers some questions about the P2P nature of the system (quite reasonably, I think), but if you just click through the "Experience Sky Broadband" and "Sign up" links, you'll never know it's P2P.
The problem is the software (Score:5, Informative)
Uninstalling Sky By Broadband does NOT uninstall the Kontiki peer to peer. So, anyone who tries Sky By Broadband, doesn't like it, and uninstalls it, is still participating in the P2P network - and most likely doing so without their knowledge. I bet they're all wondering why teh internets have gone all slow...
I wrote some uninstall instructions on my blog last month for the Sky By Broadband Kontiki P2P server:
http://www.opinionatedgeek.com/Blog/blogentry=001
And here's another set of uninstall instructions:
http://www.nanagram.co.uk/sky.htm [nanagram.co.uk]
The big question in my mind is whether it is incompetence that makes the software hard to uninstall, or is it a deliberate attempt to grow their network.