Safemedia's CEO Tells Congress He Can Stop P2P 288
palewook writes "Yesterday, Safwat Fahmy appeared in front of the House Science and Technology Committee. During Fahmy's testimony [PDF], he claimed Safemedia's "P2P Disaggregator" technology uses traffic-shaping systems and network-filtering systems that can destroy contaminated P2P networks. And their Clouseau product will make it impossible to send or receive any illegal P2P transmission on any installed network. However, Clouseau allows tunneling and SSH and never opens packets to determine file legality."
'Bout time! (Score:5, Funny)
I Can Stop Democracy: (Score:2, Insightful)
with the help of the United States CONGRESS.
Yours sincerely,
W [whitehouse.org].
Yes, but that's what it's about. (Score:5, Insightful)
I Can Stop Democracy
If you can't have democracy without a free press, the above is correct. Destroying the internet won't stop "piracy", kiddie porn, or any of the other horsemen of the infopocolypse, it will only protect the corrupt from the truth. "traffic-shaping systems and network-filtering systems that can destroy contaminated P2P networks" are all the rage in China, and they could care less about music and movie sales. The free flow of information on the internet is starting to take it's toll on government and corporate propaganda. That free flow is the target of this and other attacks on the internet [slashdot.org], because it makes corruption harder.
Re:'Bout time! (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:'Bout time! (Score:5, Funny)
Not to worry. I'm immediately at work now, to invent a Cato program, that will periodically, and without warning...repeatedly attack his program.
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I oppose.
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everyone else: Oh shut up, now you're just being ridiculous!
Does this need (Score:2, Funny)
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http://youtube.com/watch?v=OxljftDEOXQ [youtube.com]
Isn't the US Military 88% Republican/Conservative? (Score:2)
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A) there are no FBI agents knocking on people's doors here
B) if there had been, they would be sliced in a claim of self-defense by the almighty chef's kitchen knives
C) knocked down on the floor by blue-eyed women's big n
Huh (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Huh (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Huh (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Huh (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Huh (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Huh (Score:5, Funny)
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Getting caught lying to congress is illegal.
Getting caught by the dominant party, if they don't like you, is illegal.
Well.. (Score:3, Informative)
Snark aside, the same situation is happening here. He can destroy some p2p networks, at least temporarily. He's not perjuring himself.
WOW! (Score:3, Funny)
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There's nothing "morally superior" about trying to change things within a nation that isn't yours. If you don't like the actions of that nation's government, bombing the nation is one allowable reaction. Changing the government is the job of the people of that nation. If they're not willing to change their government, then it's on
Re:Well.. (Score:4, Insightful)
There's nothing "morally superior" about trying to change things within a nation that isn't yours. If you don't like the actions of that nation's government, bombing the nation is one allowable reaction. Changing the government is the job of the people of that nation. If they're not willing to change their government, then it's only their own fault if they get bombed.
Hmmm... It seems to me that Al-Quaeda make about that same argument as a justification for 9/11...
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Right because firing cruise missiles into a nation without putting your own people at risk is morally so much more superior to actually trying to change anything in that nation.
Yes. The idea was to contain Saddam, not overthrow him, which even Bush 1 knew was a bad idea. As far as trying to change Iraq, Dubya campaigned against nation-building. He should have listened to his own advice. Containing Saddam worked. He wasn't a threat and he wasn't building any nuclear weapons. So yes, Clinton lobbing some
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"And we never ever ever keep a body count
We're killing so efficiently we can't keep count"
--Michael Franti & Spearhead, Light Up Your Lighter [care2.com] , from the album YELL FIRE!
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1) Are sanctions against things that are necessary for water treatment but could possibly be used for chemical weapons better than war? Even when they kill thousands of kids a year and provide no end in sight?
2) Was there any way to responsibly end the sanctions?
I also think that there
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That depends on whether you're serving as an elected official.
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That's what I mean -- if you're an elected official, you can get away with it.
Typo (Score:5, Funny)
Isn't lying to Congress illegal?
It's a French word, easy to misspell. The correct spelling is, "de rigueur."
Re:Huh (Score:5, Funny)
I'm sorry but I dont recall.
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Who cares? Just believe what you say. You do want it to be true, don't you? Well, with a little bit of a perfectly ordinary technique known as "wishful thinking," your wishes can come true, as far as your belief in them is concerned!
You get to reap all of the benefits of sincerity, too.
Clouseau? What an odd choice for names. (Score:5, Interesting)
Clouseau was a terrible detective: any success he had was purely by chance. I can't help but wonder if this is a joke, just based on the name.
Re:Clouseau? What an odd choice for names. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Clouseau? What an odd choice for names. (Score:5, Funny)
I guess it's a better name than Dreyfus though?
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Then again, considering the way the mafiaa works...
Spread toes, insert crayon. (Score:2)
kill clouseau
Kill Clouseau
kill clouseau
KILL CLOUSEAU
KILL CLOUSEAU
kill clouseau
Kill Clouseau
kill clouseau
KILL CLOUSEAU
Kill Clouseau
Re:Clouseau? What an odd choice for names. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Clouseau? What an odd choice for names. (Score:4, Interesting)
I thought the same thing. It's like using the Rocky theme "Gonna Fly Now" during a sporting event. Rocky lost that one, folks. Playing that song in support of your team is the musical equivalent of loser talk.
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Sounds like a perfect WMND (..network destruction) (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Sounds like a perfect WMND (..network destructi (Score:3, Funny)
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3 days? I can't even begin to imagine the horror.
I bet ... (Score:3, Funny)
Link to RFC... (Score:3, Informative)
Can he thwart terrorists too? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd ask him if he can filter out TOR.
Hmmm. (Score:5, Insightful)
Basically, no chance in hell. The ingenuity of one little company pitted against every single person who wants them to fail? Look at AACS? Weren't they going to end movie piracy? How's that workin' for them?
Re:Hmmm. (Score:4, Funny)
AACS is an impenetrable fortress, standing against the efforts of our piratical enemies! Do not listen to reports that our encryption has been breached. Like golden armor, our DRM will never be broached, never tarnish, and never fail. These movie pirates will surrender or die. They will surrender, it is they who will surrender!
- Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf,
AACS Information Minister
er, huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
So wait, it blocks P2P sharing, but not BitTorrent, or it only allows legal torrents? If I'm reading this correctly, it assumes all bitTorrent is legal, so therefore allows it to pass. Isn't BitTorrent that majority of file-sharing anymore? I can't see this tool being extremely useful.
Re:er, huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
On the other hand (nearly?) every other p2p system is completely illegal, often sharing anything you happen to have on your pc, in some cases including stuff you don't want to share, and as most of them are stupid enough to use unencrypted packets and the same port every time, they are stupidly trivial to block.
Add a little marketing spin (99% of illegal p2p = 99% of illegal p2p networks instead of 99% illegal p2p traffic for example), and a cool name and you have something you can sell to the government.
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Accuracy: Clouseau is fully effective at forensically discriminating between legal and illegal P2P traffic with no false positives (i.e., identifying another protocol as the targeted protocol) whether encrypted or not. It prohibits sending and receiving all illegal P2P files, and prevents the flow of copyrighted digital files from legal Internet services, DVDs and CDs to P2P networks where they are totally accessible to millions of users to pirate.
Is it just me, or is this me
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Emphasis is mine.
Maybe these guys should license their technology to DHS, NSA and CIA?
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"no false positives" Okay, do you mean 100% accuracy, 100% of the time? Or do you mean something less than that?
"prevents the flow of copyrighted digital files from legal Internet services", wouldn't that be a "false positive" if it is "legal" and yet is still prevented from flowing?
"millions of users to pirate." Arrgggh, shiver me timbers if ye can stop us, matey. That be our loot ye be talkin' about.
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Selling Congress snakeoil (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Selling Congress snakeoil (Score:5, Funny)
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Who is Safwat Fahmy (Score:3, Interesting)
So one may think that this Safwat Fahmy is an authority in the field.
Absolutely not. This person has not published a single document in any single respectable publication venue (including academic ones).
A simple google search reveals that he has not been involved in any important project and his only previous experience in Information Technology was founding an utterly failed company called WiZ
But it's not illegal per se... (Score:5, Interesting)
File sharing of copyrighted works is. But how does he know which P2P traffic to stop without examining the content? What stops us from just encrypting everything anyway? Or it's just going to stop all P2P traffic without caring about its legality? Wouldn't that actually be illegal?
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Most of the schools have a line about non disruptive non illegal usage. Everything else goes. Some go beyond that and give usage quotas (X GB a month) some give transfer rate limit
Re:But it's not illegal per se... (Score:5, Insightful)
Pedantic correction: File sharing of copyrighted works without permission is illegal. The emphasis is important because pretty much everything is copyrighted but in many cases the public has permission to share (e.g. linux distros, game demos, CC licensed materials etc).
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Illegal? No, I don't think so. This isn't going to be forced by the government upon the whole internet, it's something this stupid company is trying to sell to colleges for use on their campus networks. While arguments could be made about whether it's allowed by contracts and such, I doubt there's any laws preventing colleges from filtering traffic on their networks.
However, it makes me glad I'
I haven't read TFA (Score:5, Informative)
P2P is not inherently illegal (Score:5, Insightful)
However, I use P2P networks for downloading things such as Linux distributions, particularly opensuse and kubuntu. If P2P networks are broken up like this, they are interrupting totally legal activities and any ISP which engages in such traffic shaping should immediately lose their privileges/protections they enjoy as common carriers. By discriminating traffic they are no longer merely carriers deserving of protection against liability (for activities such as carrying terrorist communications, kiddie porn, and other illegal communications) because they are going out of their way to stop some illegal activities by blocking traffic, so they should immediately become responsible for blocking ALL illegal traffic. When a terrorist or pedophile or ebophile successfully sends illegal communications, the ISP should be held at the same level of responsibility as the purpetrators themselves.
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Maybe this is why this snake oil salesman was talking to people who make laws (Congress) instead of vict^H^H^H^H customers (Universities). It's not Congress' job to help universities with their network congestion, but maybe someone thinks it's their job to add exemptions to what disqualifies one as a common carrier.
Psychic software (Score:2, Insightful)
The true innovation here is clear. Their product has the psychic ability to determine what is legal and illegal without actually inspecting the traffic. With a little tweaking of this psychic software they can finally create computers that do what we mean and not what we say.
Safe Media (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.safemediacorp.com/Internet-Piracy/Dirt
Basically it seems they are mostly targeting the mostly obsolete networks like Kaazaa, iMesh, Limewire and eMule. The fact that internet piracy has since moved on to the mostly legal bittorrent network seems to be lost on them.
They also spout strange things like that the 2 billion songs sold on iTunes are being traded over P2P. I thought the point of iTunes was that it was heavily DRM'd?
Read and enjoy
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Yeah, but in fairness, you have to keep in mind that because of their efforts, not *one* copyrighted work was ever illegally downloaded from any of those websites.
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Yes, that was the joke.
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BT is great if you're looking for some gigantic 500MB or multi-gigabyte file that everyone wants right now, such as some new movie trailer, some new TV episode, some new Linux distro on DVD, etc. It sucks if you're looking for small files, or old files. It's all because there has to be a separate
Not intended to curtail intentional piracy (Score:5, Informative)
The technology this fellow talks about in his testimony is pretty clearly intended to primarily protect users from doing things like sharing their entire hard drives (he names one example of a woman who shared a directory containing credit card information) and thereby becoming unwitting contributors to copyright infringement and identity theft. He comes right out to say that it doesn't target BitTorrent (even though everybody knows BitTorrent is used primarily for "piracy") at all, nor does it block tunnelling or encrypted traffic.
Anybody who was trying to crack down on piracy in general would make a box that would effectively unplug the internet connection by blocking everything suspicious in the least. This is about curtailing inadvertent contributions to piracy and identity theft, to help better target the willing contributors (as he says, BitTorrent peers require identification and consent before participating in a network).
Programs like Kazaa (I haven't used any of those for a while, so please forgive the lack of examples) often take users through a wizard to find things they want to share on the P2P network, or have a default of sharing all media files found, or worse, sharing the entire hard drive or user directory. Uninitiated users won't realise this, and might just want to download one or two songs -- they end up sharing their music collections with the world.
This is about making it easier for the {RI,MP}AA and their government helpers to target the "problem users," and helping their image by cutting down on litigation against six-year-old kids, stay-at-home moms, and dead people.
Don't question the magic! (Score:4, Interesting)
How is it going to detect 'contamination' by copyright material? AFAIK there's no watermarking yet. Maybe something like a signature database (ala anti-malware scanners?). Yup, I'd love to see the footprint of that little file.....
Users simply plug it in the subnet as a bridge and it goes to work without altering their network topology."
Without changing the logical topology perhaps. The physical topology is altered by introducing a whopping great single-point-of-failure and potential bottleneck.
will detect and prohibit illegal P2P traffic while allowing the passage of legal P2P such as BitTorrent.
...
"That is why our P2PD implemented in Clouseau never opens any transmission packets. Rather, we monitor the ever-changing and adapting myriad of illegal P2P protocols/networks and continually update our systems to block only these illegal transmissions."
So... BitTorrent P2P good, other P2P bad?
It must be using the Evil bit (http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3514)
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So, would that make his whole presentation on the topic sort of a "smoke and rim job" treatment?
Uh... dear congressmen (and -women, of course) (Score:3, Funny)
Remember kids! (Score:2)
Got a bad feeling about this (Score:2)
Let's destroy it in order to save it (Score:2)
I can stop P2P too! (Score:2)
For a good time, read his testimony (Score:2, Informative)
It's the Anti-PeerGuardian (Score:2)
Quote from the SafeMedia website (Score:4, Interesting)
Virtually everyone who uses file sharing programs appear to use them exclusively to download infringing files.
The only solution to making this free, copyrighted material unavailable to these masses is to eliminate peer-to-peer file sharing programs altogether.
There is not and will almost never be a legitimate business or governmental justification for use of file sharing programs.
Mission Statement
SafeMedia's Coalition Against Internet Piracy (CAIP) is committed to increasing the understanding of the negative impact of Internet Piracy and advocating for the successful implementation of "Clouseau(TM)" by working with Congress and the administration; Departments of Justice, Commerce, and Education; and Copyright Holders and their Associations, Unions, and Organizations to drive greater government-wide efforts to address the serious issue of Internet piracy and the violation of the copyright laws and to recognize that there is now a solution (Clouseau(TM)) to the serious unresolved issue of Internet Piracy.
Mmm... RIAA shill? Just block everything that it can't recognize? Basically a way to push their personal firewall application to have it installed by law? They can't sell enough of their product by themselves?
Coalition Goals
As Congress and copyright holders are in a stand-still watching the erosion of copyright laws, SafeMedia product solutions must emerge as the technological solutions to a political, legal, and social problem created by technology advancement.
Somehow, those persons sound a lot like Hitler. The erosion of copyright law is not in the consumers advantage. With the current status of DRM, DMCA etc, the spirit of the copyright law does indeed get eroded and congress doesn't do anything about it. We as customers are duped by stupid businesses that don't want to change the way they work.
Snake Oil (Score:2)
"I Guarantee Victory" (Score:2)
Careful with those Acronyms (Score:3, Funny)
Joke? (Score:4, Funny)
On the other hand, its CEO is testifying in front of Congress...
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problem is he's totally full of fucking crap.
Re:Congress? (Score:5, Insightful)
Worrying about wars, Katrina or public infrastructure doesn't do nearly as much for the campaign war chest as worrying about business profits. I've said it once and I'll say it again (and again, and again...): if you want to know why things are the way they are in this country, follow the money.
Except that businesses don't like the civil courts. Civil courts cost them money. They are merely necessary evils. Criminal courts, OTOH, from the corporate perspective, are free. So why make laws like the DMCA, which, among other things, criminalizes some forms of copyright violation, within limits? Yup. Follow the money.
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As for Katrina, why should Congress care about that? How is helping Katrina victims going to help earn them "campaign contributions"? Congresspeople won't make any money that way; by getting involved in "piracy" and helping the big entertainment companies with some handy laws, they can make far more money.
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For example, with Linux through iptables and IPP2P [ipp2p.org] it's possible to block eDonkey, FaskTrack (KaZaA), Gnutella, Direct Connect, BitTorrent, AppleJuice (?), WinMX, SoulSeek, and Ares. I have not used this, so I don't know how well it works.
Re:Sued merely for downloading? (Score:5, Insightful)