AT&T's Plan to Play Internet Cop 272
Ponca City, We Love You writes "Tim Wu has an interesting (and funny) article on Slate that says that AT&T's recent proposal to examine all the traffic it carries for potential violations of US intellectual property laws is not just bad but corporate seppuku bad. At present AT&T is shielded by a federal law they wrote themselves that provides they have no liability for 'Transitory Digital Network Communications' — content AT&T carries over the Internet. To maintain that immunity, AT&T must transmit data 'without selection of the material by the service provider' and 'without modification of its content' but if AT&T gets into the business of choosing what content travels over its network, it runs the serious risk of losing its all-important immunity. 'As the world's largest gatekeeper,' Wu writes, 'AT&T would immediately become the world's largest target for copyright infringement lawsuits.' ATT's new strategy 'exposes it to so much potential liability that adopting it would arguably violate AT&T's fiduciary duty to its shareholders,' concludes Wu."
don't like the law? They'll change it (Score:3, Interesting)
How to tell your management structure is broken (Score:5, Interesting)
When really stupid ideas start seeing the light of day. That means most of the management team has insulated themselves from criticism by surrounding themselves with toadies and have, effectively, separated themselves from any semblance of reality.
Usually the case when you see corporate behavior and wonder, "How could they be that stupid?" Because on their little planet what they're doing makes sense. Just not on this world.
In my experience it also means upper management has divided themselves into warring camps.
How much does this affect non-ATT people? (Score:2, Interesting)
"The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."
I could see a massive boycott of AT&T if this is possible, but I admittedly don't really understand too much how the infrastructure works.
Well, they could ... (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, neither of the criteria contains any mention of the transfer rate. They could limit "offending" downloads to 1 kB/s.
Re:How to tell your management structure is broken (Score:4, Interesting)
1. Side with the consumer. In the end it's their money that will make you surpass your competition.
2. Side with legislation. You can legislate yourself a consumer base, that's where the money will be.
It's sad when a company thinks they're so big that they can take option 2. It's fun when option 2 basically kills a company. I wouldn't be surprised if this type of move kills them. Think about it- they're talking about censoring the very basic service that's being offered. It's like they're trying to sell a damaged highway to people, expecting them to take it because the potholes are on purpose. People will vote with their wallets, I hope.
Re:Encryption... (Score:3, Interesting)
Don't most (all?) VPN systems rely on public-key cryptography and thus vulnerable to man in the middle attacks? It might not be possible to do a MITM attack against your VPN to work (presumably you have some system in place to verify the encryption keys) but how are you going to prevent it on a p2p network when you have no way to verify the keys of the hosts you are communicating with? A piratebay-type certificate registry hosted in a country that isn't friendly to copyright law? What happens when they block access to it?
There's a more insidious possibility (Score:4, Interesting)
It looks as if there's a good chance the telecoms will get retroactive immunity for aiding in breaking the law and eavesdropping on customer's communications without warrants; it doesn't seem to be a stretch to imagine that they will plan on their congress-critters to help them out in their fight against digital piracy.
This all about the 'success' of MediaDefender (Score:2, Interesting)
They have seen how MediaDefender has made huge profits out of the rabid desire of the music industry & hollywood to stop the perceived 'theft' of music and movies to illeagal downloads particulary torrents through technological techniques.
AT&T see themselves in excellent position to tap into this market through traffic monitoring and MediaDefender's recent stock crash after leaked emails reveal they were pwned by a bunch of high school kids http://torrentfreak.com/mediadefender-stock-plunges-due-to-leaked-emails-071222/ [torrentfreak.com] and http://www.portfolio.com/news-markets/national-news/portfolio/2008/01/14/Media-Defenders-Profile?print=true [portfolio.com] couldn't have come at a better time
This a big and growing market and one of its major players just took a nosedive, the market share is up for grabs.
I can't see big music & hollywood coming to their senses about the whole thing anytime soon so the 'fight' will go on and the likes of AT&T will be there to profit and drive the market.
So if you've got no morals and an idea for a good algorithm or counter-pirate technique give AT&T a ring...
Death to the Death Star (Score:3, Interesting)
If it gets away with those many and flaming FISA violations, AT&T will write new laws to allow, even encourage, more spying like this one.
But if AT&T doesn't get amnesty (even if it convinces a court that it isn't liable for breaking the FISA, because "the devil^WExecutive made me do it"), then maybe it will be stopped. Not just from spying, but from doing whatever it damn pleases to prey on America, both regular people and the many people who've been trying for several years now to compete with new technologies like VoIP and other open networks.
Death to AT&T. Maybe a lawsuit right up its heat exhaust will do the trick.
Re:Encryption... (Score:5, Interesting)
For one thing, I imagine financial institutions are not going to take kindly to that kind of action, and could probably mount a very successful class-action lawsuit.
The thing about encrypted traffic is that it could be anything, from confidential business data, to financial transactions, to launch-codes, to a screener of a new movie. As crazy as they are, AT&T will not start playing that game.
The blocking of IP addresses is a more likely counter-attack to widespread encryption, but even then solutions exist (e.g. the TOR network allows routing to servers that have no "non-tor" domain name, so the real IP address is never exposed). It will quickly become a ridiculous arms race...
Re:we've already done this to death (Score:5, Interesting)
And as many replies stating that AT&T's internet service is not common carrier, dammit! They lobbied hard to make sure it was that way, because maintaining common carrier status is fucking expensive (what, you think having a dialtone every single time you pick up your phone without having a window where the phone company can say "ok! nobody make a call, we're going to reboot some switches!" is cheap?!), and because violating the common carrier rules doesn't mean you "lose common carrier status", it means you go to jail. Think about that, some guy at the post office reading your mail doesn't mean the post office stops being a common carrier, it means the guy goes to jail.
This is why they have to have special laws with exceptions written just for them that protect them from being sued!
Re:Who do I use for Internet access now then?? (Score:3, Interesting)
AT&T does offer dry loop, but they won't admit it, and most of their call center drones don't know that it exists. I ordered it a few months back, and after being transferred all over the place just to find someone that would admit that it existed and knew how to set it up, I finally got someone to actually hook it up.
After I got my first bill, I jumped online and set up automatic payment, and everything was fine. Then, two months later, I get a nastygram saying my bill was overdue. The notice had a completely different account number. So, I call AT&T and tell them I'm getting double billed with two account numbers for the same service. Two hours of transfers later, I get a lady who tells me that this happens "ALL the time" and agrees to close the past due account and credit back the charges.
A week later, my DSL is disconnected. Of course, when they closed that one account, they disconnected the service as well. After another couple of hours on the phone, I finally got my DSL turned back on under (I hope) the right account number. Good times.
Re:Encryption... (Score:2, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
confusing the content (Score:4, Interesting)
Something I've noticed happening a few times which I thought was interesting. I can see the screen & url that the person is looking at, and it has very questionable content.
I pull the URL from my logs and go to that page and it serves up an entirely different site.
Sort of like the webpage that has a breakout game that looks like you are working in Excel, escalation has many fronts. If you make it difficult for people to get the content one way, they find a different way. While we dis-allow e-mail for personal use while at work, and blocked webmail - people can now surf the Internet on their phones.
Why spend all this money on a war? Why not adjust the cost of a CD or DVD to be more in line with what the multitude will pay?
How is it a DVD costs $12.99
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?id=31042&skuId=3776596&type=product&ref=06&loc=01&ci_src=17588969&ci_sku=3776596 [bestbuy.com]
But the same CD costs $12.99?
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?id=124207&skuId=2830565&type=product&ref=06&loc=01&ci_src=17588969&ci_sku=2830565 [bestbuy.com]
Shouldn't the CD be cheaper? I know I'd go back to buying CD's if they price were $5.
Re:time to fund some campaigns (Score:4, Interesting)
One that will force every backbone owner to filter traffic. Because if one can do it, all of them can.
And henceforth, it will be named: The Great Firewall Act.
It doesn't have to be implemented directly by the government to be oppressive.
Re:Encryption... (Score:3, Interesting)
Looking for copyrighted material is one thing. Grabbing anything which could be a public key is another.
ATT (via NSA) already filtering all the traffic... (Score:2, Interesting)
Welcome to the American Stasi.
Re:time to fund some campaigns (Score:3, Interesting)