Will AT&T Start Filtering Your Connection? 213
I think this is a crucial distinction, because efforts to filter end users' connections (as opposed to making them pay consequences for their actions after the fact) have always been controversial, even when the content is illegal. The Center for Democracy and Technology successfully overturned a Pennsylvania law that required ISPs to block overseas child pornography sites, partly on the grounds that the filtering included many third-party Web sites as collateral damage. I've argued that a similar private-sector initiative called Canada Cleanfeed, where Canadian ISPs attempt to block child pornography Web sites, would do more harm than good. On the other hand, nobody's fighting very hard for the cause of child pornography downloaders who were caught and arrested. Web sites get sued and shut down all the time, but it was bigger news when Canadian ISP Telus blocked the Web site of a Telus labor union for three days. So it's a big deal whether we're talking about "pre-emptive" filtering, or fighting piracy "reactively" by going after violators.
AT&T Senior VP James Cicconi said in e-mail that "discussion about what the technology will or won't do is premature until we can invent it", but most of the hints so far have been that the anti-piracy technology will be "pre-emptive", i.e. filtering users' connections. Cicconi said on a conference panel that AT&T has to spend billions on network maintenance to carry illegal pirated traffic -- which they probably couldn't recoup by suing people, so the only way to prevent that would be to block it. And Cicconi has referred to the technology several times as a "network-based solution" -- but what else could that mean, except filtering?
So let's assume that's what's on the horizon. Interestingly, Cicconi said that AT&T did not plan to block actual Web sites. However, he said in e-mail, "If one could, with a high degree of certainty, spot and isolate illegal traffic from an offshore site, would you not think the copyright holders would have a reasonable argument for a court order to block that traffic (as opposed to the site itself)?" Presumably this could refer to a Web page with an index of links to BitTorrent files -- so they'd be willing to block the BitTorrent links, but not the Web page? But from that point of view, why not just block Web sites too? If an overseas webpage has a list of links to pirated content, and that content is served over http from the same Web server, wouldn't they want to block it?
But I doubt this would stem much piracy in the long run, because connection filtering to fight piracy became more commonplace, then the next generation of p2p file-trading programs would all just have circumvention capabilities built into them, that let you route your connection through a friend at an unfiltered ISP. You're on AT&T, you upload a file to your friend on Verizon which earns you some "credits" with his node in the p2p network, and instead of redeeming those credits to download a file from him, you use his node as a proxy to download a file indirectly from a site in Russia that AT&T is blocking you from accessing. Advanced users can do this already with tools like Virtual Private Networks and Tor, and some tweaks in a p2p program would just bring it within the range of the casual user.
On the other hand, if AT&T starts filtering traffic, it could set a bad precedent that any time a party in a legal proceeding wants a site declared "illegal", they can demand that AT&T (or other ISPs) block the site. It could be a site libeling a person, or a site hosting a decryption tool that breaks some company's poorly-designed code, or pretty much anything that some powerful person wanted to go away. Meanwhile, if an AT&T customer did get accused of downloading pirated content, now they could invoke the "AT&T didn't stop me" defense -- they thought that AT&T was filtering illegal content, and if they could get to it, then that meant it was legal! In both cases the problem comes from someone using the argument that once AT&T started doing any filtering at all, they should have gone further.
So I would watch the situation closely, even if you're not an AT&T user, and don't assume the situation will take care of itself. Cicconi said, "If a company like ours does dumb things and upsets our customers, we will lose them to someone else," which is something I'm skeptical of whenever I hear it used to defend various draconian anti-spam measures, but in this case I think it's even less applicable. When you're talking about spam filters, at least they always bring some benefit to the user (less spam), and the question is whether the free market weighs those benefits properly against the costs (more lost mail). On the other hand, if an ISP filters the user's connection, that brings no benefit to the user, and in a truly efficient market, all customers of such an ISP would just switch to an unfiltered one -- if that doesn't happen, it simply means the market in that case is not efficient. Is your ISP filtering your connection right now? Probably not, but how could you tell if they were? Right now we assume that ISPs don't filter connections because generally it's "just not done" (except when it is). In a few years we might not be so sure.
Simple answer: (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Simpler answer: (Score:2)
Tie the tubes!
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but my computer already had a vasectomy!
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"No, of course not because I am never going to use them."
I used to work for them, and wouldn't willingly let anybody that works there bag my groceries, let alone control anything critical.
(No offense to you grocery-bagging slashdotters.)
This will hurt their bottom line (Score:2, Insightful)
The main reason I have such a fast connection is P2P. If they block it, why would I need a connection that fast? I could then move to a slower connection and pay half what I am paying now.
If AT&T does this, it will hurt their bottom line. THAT will get these asshole's attention!
It's all a ploy for AT&T to Cover their ass (Score:2)
their involvement with the illegal NSA spying.
It's all part of the plan by the darkside to
put the computing and communications jenie
back in the bottle. These 'problems' that they
want to 'manage' were created by the darkside
so they can 'manage' the problem. These 'problems'
were created over 10 years ago.
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Part of the charm of "the internet" is that the ability exists to route around "broken" parts of the network, correct?
Lets use my ISP for example:
If CableOne customers (such as myself) start noticing problems with certain areas, and these areas go through AT&T lines, we will start calling our ISP to complain. When enough pe
Re:Simple answer: (Score:4, Interesting)
i am hopeing that AT&T is dumb enought to do this - that atleast their techs are not completely evil.
an example would be.. they don't want traffic from say a specific ip block coming accross their network..
if they do it right and just remove the route than any isp that goes to their network will get a route error and will defualt to the next route and the net will route arround them - allowing AT&T to only effect it's network and the rest of the world is happy
on the other hand - if they jsut decied to drop the packets and not issue a routeing error for the subnet then routers will keep sending traffic that way and AT&T will effectivly black hole that block for all of AT&T and the other ip's that happen to route through them
black holeing is very very very very bad
FP! (Score:5, Funny)
These are MY letters!
I didn't copy them!
Damn it...
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I didn't copy them!
Damn it...
The earliest Roman scholars would have something to say about that.
Glad someone is sorting this stuff out (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Glad someone is sorting this stuff out (Score:5, Interesting)
It's one thing to provide client side filtering, but if they're doing it, they're responsible for what slips through.
I really wished the essay addressed that issue.
Re:Glad someone is sorting this stuff out (Score:5, Funny)
Never (Score:5, Insightful)
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Dumb question... (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course not (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Of course not (Score:5, Interesting)
To say that rules like this don't apply to big corporations is simply not accurate. And while it sometimes seems like big corporations are terribly evil and can get away with anything... the laws often *DO* prevail. They can't pick and choose which laws apply to them no matter how many senators they have in their pockets. This debate is *very* public, so its not like it can slip through the cracks. AT&T will have to duke this one out on their own I suspect.
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Then comes the question ... must they filter all illegal content? If you are allowed to filter P2P stuff and not lose your common carrier, what about spam, death threats, goatse, and kiddie porn?
The whole reason they have common carrier status is so they can't be held accountable for what people transmit over their wires. Selectively blocking stuff opens up the door to force them to block al
Re:Dumb question... (Score:5, Informative)
AT&T, the phone company, is a common carrier.
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common carrier land line, and also for information
service ISP, does that mean that AT&T is really
two separate legal companies?
And since both are providing signal over the
same copper pair, which of those two AT&T is
paying the other to carry bandwidth?
AT&T can't have it both ways legally.
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Next year same time, i expect a class action suit filed against AT&T, which they will settle and continue going on.
The TOR proxy gives us a better option.
Re:Dumb question... (Score:4, Informative)
Filtering by type (Score:5, Interesting)
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Here in Argentina lots of people got broadband as soon as it was available, and I think one of the main reasons was the possibility of downloading music and movies (illegally of course, we hardly have any legal downloadable content offerings and CDs and DVDs have a very high price compared with the average income). That's the reason I don't think ISPs can start blocking illegal traffic... it'd remove one of the main reasons driving demand.
Of course there's people that occasionally turn on e-
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I'm not a movie pirate. That said, I suspect my activity would set off all sorts of red flags---serving an open source OS distribution (MkLinux) and people downloading ISOs from my FTP server, downloading torrents of Ubuntu ISOs from other people (two different versions in a single weekend), etc. Even if it didn't set off red flags, though, I'd still probably feel the effects.
For example, I assume that this content filtering would be implemented through something like a mandatory web proxy. That transl
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And when the pirate havens are blocked... (Score:4, Funny)
We may get our ability to legally backup and/or convert movies and music back...
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Crucial correction (Score:5, Insightful)
You will watch what they want, when they want, how they want, and you will pay for it every single time, plebe
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Liberty or death. Might as well be the battle cry of the next civil war again. I mean, it has som
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As to another thought in this thread... yes, what about backups? Some people do backups to online storage sites. If you thus back up your *legally ripped* copies of this "protected content" -- is that now blockable?? What about when you go to download YOUR OWN BACKUPS??
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Jack Valenti, former head of the MPAA, said once that if you want a backup of a movie you should buy two. The MPAA and RIAA both want to maximize revenue for their member companies. MPAA companies tried disposable, few-view discs, a while ago. Neither company will concede anything that could cost them a dime. These are people who would, to use an old phrase, steal the pennies from a dead man's eyes. I don't usually like the "X corporation is evil!" or "Y company is satan!" type discussions on
A /. Message from the Future (Score:5, Funny)
Headline (30 mins laters) - "Hackers have found a way to circumvent AT&T's Multi-million dollar anti-pirating program"
Or worse... (Score:2)
Headline (30 mins laters) - "Slashdot blocked by AT&T Big Brother Anti-Pirating Program". 0 views.
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And it isn't really incorrect, either. (Score:3, Insightful)
Resolution of Filter (Score:4, Insightful)
Will I be filtered because it sees a 700meg file being transfered? What about ISO's? Will it assume and iso is a pirated CD, when in reality it's a Linux distro?
Definitely a complex problem.
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lol, well it's actually endgame tablebases (database of move to mate for all permutations of pieces 1-6 in the endgame). Fun stuff if you're into Chess, or an AI researcher. The set use to be hosted on Dr. Hyatt's ftp server but it died a couple years ago, and a source for the material kinda vanished till this project started up here [nig.ac.jp] which uses emule (p2p) for distributing the dataset. To help the community and since I barely use
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Simple, they degrade/block all encrypted traffic. A big ISP in Canada has already started doing this.
Rogers Fights BitTorrent by Throttling All Encrypted Transfers [torrentfreak.com]
Rogers Must Come Clean on Traffic Shaping [michaelgeist.ca]
Cheap DSL at what price (Score:3, Interesting)
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against traffic restrictions are so full of loopholes
as to be meaningless.
ISP (Score:2)
What recourse does the consumer have (Score:2)
Answer: They don't. Color me pessimistic, but I can only view this as a very bad thing. I had already sworn off ATT for anything beyond 911, but given how prevelant they are I understand I don't have much of a choice: My traffic will cross their networks at some point.
Compensated (Score:5, Informative)
They were compensated.
The $200 Billion Broadband Scandal
New investigative ebook offers micro-history of Verizon, SBC, Qwest, and BellSouth's (the Bell companies) fiber optic broadband promises and the consequence harms to America's economic growth because they never delivered and kept most of the money, about $200 billion.
This is one of the largest scandals in American history. America is 16th in the world in broadband and the US DSL current offerings are 100 times slower than other countries such has Japan and Korea. How did we go from Number 1 in the web to 16th in broadband and falling?
Starting in the early 1990's, with a push from the Clinton-Gore Administration's "Information Superhighway", every Bell company -- SBC, Verizon, BellSouth and Qwest -- made commitments to rewire America, state by state. Fiber optic wires would replace the 100-year old copper wiring. The push caused techno-frenzy of major proportions. By 2006, 86 million households should have had a service capable of 45 Mbps in both directions, (to and from the customer) could handle over 500 channels of high quality video and be deployed in rural, urban and suburban areas equally. And these networks were open to ALL competition.
In order to pay for these upgrades, in state after state, the public service commissions and state legislatures acquiesced to the Bells' promises by removing the constraints on the Bells' profits as well as gave other financial perks. They were able to print money -- billions of dollars per state -- all collected in the form of higher phone rates and tax perks. (Note: each state is different.)
* ADSL is not what was promised and paid for. It goes over the old copper wiring, can't achieve the speed, has problems in rural areas and is mostly one-way.
* 0% of the Bell companies' customers have 45 Mbps residential services.
The fiber optic infrastructure you paid for was never delivered.
http://www.muniwireless.com/article/articleview/5
Mod parent up. (Score:2)
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Insight Broadband offers 10
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They took BILLIONS of OUR DOLLARS with the promise that they would upgrade the infrastructure, and then DID NOT DO IT! They swindled the tax-payers out of an insane amount of money!
God, I hate you free-market trolls; I don't know why I bother replying.
Jesus Fucking Christ...
What the hell? (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah and you also have to spend billions maintaining a network so that morons can blather on about inanities! That's what being a telco with common carrier status is all about! You're supposed to recap your expenses with a user fee structure, while being completely disinterested in the nature of the transmitted content, you dumbass! If you don't know that then obviously you're the wrong man for the job!
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Hey, I'm blathering on about important stuff you insensitive clod!
are they filtering backbones, or just DSL? (Score:2)
Trained monkeys (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Trained monkeys (Score:4, Interesting)
The masses want cheap newspapers. They usually don't care about content, they care about their funnies not costing more than 50 cents. And that's quite possible, with companies paying insane amounts of cash for ads.
Here, it is already very blatantly so that companies (banks and car manufacturers, usually), "buy" newspapers. Indirectly. By buying double page ads, often twice or thrice per paper. I once had the chance to ask a higher up at a local bank why the heck they do that. I mean, there can't be any advertising value in doing a double-full page ad twice in the same newspaper.
Answer: "Well, we got a security breach and they know about it, and we don't want them to report it".
He didn't even try to hide it! I mean, here I am, some tech goon and he just says that as if it's normal everyday business to bribe newspapers to suppress some news. I was rather
And soon working somewhere else.
Today "pirated" content, tomorrow dissidence (Score:5, Insightful)
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Then they came for the w@r3z, but I did not speak up because I'm not 1337.
Then they came for the pirates, but I did not speak up because I don't download movies on AT&T's network.
Then they came for my free speech, but nobody could speak for me.
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shouldn't your post have been made AC via a anonymous proxy?
Try your best AT&T! (Score:3, Funny)
Common Carrier Status? (Score:2)
This is to be expected though because *everyone* who has some kind of legislative play in Washington wants to make sure the Internet is a one-way sh!t pipe into the American home. The policy wonks want it too because they can't keep the insanely talented black-hats out of their networks. The third strike is that a two-way Internet is too Democratic for all governments.
In today
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And when the day comes that they realize that dream, I'll be firing up a BBS with a bank of good-old 56k modems. "One-way" can go fuck itself. To poorly paraphrase some founding father or another and misquote Microsoft's asinine PR schmucks, "Welcome to the social, bitches."
distributed peer to peer web surfing (Score:2)
The great firewall of America (Score:2)
AT&T upset about bandwidth useage. (Score:5, Insightful)
"Somebody running a server in their basement on our network and uploading illegal copies movies raises the costs for everybody else and jams the network in ways we're not compensated for,"
Uhh bullshit. We pay for the connection, we get to use the connection. If you don't like that quit selling us "Unlimited" Service and then crying when we actually use it as such.
It would be funny to have an national protest by uploading, legal things of course, all over the world just to see how badly we could cripple the internet. Say you entire photo library to your favorite photo site, or a nice modest ten gig transfer through chat programs such as Skype, or a few hundred emails with a files attached to them to everyone you know. Just for 24 hours or so and watch all this "unlimited" bandwidth grind the system to a hault.
As a follow up trick start up few hundred class-action lawsuits for fraudulent buisness practices and false advertisment.
How the hell is this redundant? (Score:4, Funny)
More to this than meets the eye (Score:2)
I predict AT&T's first step will be to block BitTorrent sites like Pirate Bay. It's frightfully easy for them to do and they'll prepare a press release in conjunction with the State Department or som
Rogers Canada Does this already (Score:2)
Don't you just wish (Score:2)
So you could cancel it.
Start the Protest!! (Score:2)
I will create an account with AT&T, cancel it, and then smash all my computers in front of their corporate headquarters!
That will show those Cyberpunks...
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Alternatively, I've been thinking of meeting with the board of my HOA and suggesting we all chip in for a T3. (200+ units in the HOA, so a T3 would be just about right, and even downright affordable if everyone was aboard.)
woe unto those... (Score:2)
I'm not an AT&T customer. But my experience with Shaw is a good example of how bad decisions yield bad implemenetations that mess people up.
I am a small business user that hosted all email etc on site out of my home office. Mail started bouncing outbound. I still received mail, but I couldn't send it. After talking with various target sites, and man you wouldn't believe how hard it is to get to talk to a person on the inside of i.e. Yahoo!, I went thro
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I run a small business at home. Programming services.
I use Rogers as my ISP. My other choice is Bell Sympatico.
But Bell isn't sympathetic at all. Bell blocks port 25 outbound AND INBOUND. No mail for me, unless I use a
Rogers only blocks port 25 outbound. Started a couple of years ago, with no warni
BS, the numbers don't add up (Score:2)
Verizon said it expects to invest $18.0 billion in net capital from 2004 through 2010 in deploying the nation's largest network that brings the broadband capacity of fiber optics all the way to customers' homes and businesses. http://www.tvover.net/Verizon+FiOS+Profitable+ [tvover.net]
So no broadband? (Score:2)
Not really dumb...
One of many WTF lines from a linked FA... (Score:3, Funny)
Right, because pirate bytes are... bigger? I guess they're all wearing hats and carrying parrots or something.
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wait for it... wait for it...
And pirates send more bytes because they rate them ARRRRRRRRRRR!
(Kill me now. I deserve it.)
And people think net neutrality is about content.. (Score:2)
Sure encryption helps, but they will simply throttle bandwidth for encrypted channels. Who's going to hold these carriers accountable. Oh your Tor isn't working? Must be a problem with the program,
Re:And people think net neutrality is about conten (Score:2)
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And as phone lines continue to deteriorate (may
AT&T's Favorite Pirates (Score:2)
Regular users will be spied on by AT&T, and their content selection determined by AT&T. An AT&T that is now practically a monopoly again (one of a duopoly with Verizon), and gearing up to duopolize all multimedia delivery including "Internet", phone and video.
This
l7-filter (Score:4, Informative)
Is the l7-filter's approach something that p2p software's next generation can get around? Maybe, but it won't be as simple as port hopping. There will always be ways to get a few files though, but the question is whether large-scale p2p operations will remain viable in a context of widespread packet filtering.
Spam? (Score:2, Funny)
Geeks will find a way (Score:2)
Geeks will find a way get out from under providers like AT&T. It'll be something like self-discovering mesh networks over wifi, packet radio or some other type of hobby system that will grow until it becomes a carrier and this nonsense will start all over again. But, until then, it'll be a wide open frontier.
Sometimes I think retardedness like this is a good thing because it pushes geeks to start looking around for an alternative. Or, if none exists, developing one.
Encrypted Content?? (Score:4, Funny)
1) If I share an illegal copy of a movie using an encrypted p2p service
2) AT&T somehow busts me (i.e. they decrypt and analyze my shit at layer 7)
3) I can sue their asses for violating DMCA or whatever right?
AGAIN AT&t, OVER and OVER (Score:2)
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The most you can do is point to some sort of puritanical sort of view regarding moral imperatives.
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This is dangerous! The US must be strong and keep their pirated sites in the country where they can e
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No, because they're actually complaining that all the botnets are slowing down their music, movies, and game downloads.