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."
How to beat it (Score:5, Funny)
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Hasn't the argument flashed on here that once something is created it's copywriten? Or would the timestamp [wikipedia.org] from the email server create a poor man's copy write [wikipedia.org] and therefor they'd be violating a copywrite anyway.
we've already done this to death (Score:3, Informative)
Nothing new here
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Re:we've already done this to death (Score:5, Funny)
I don't know about you, but I much prefer using carrier creole.
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Re:we've already done this to death (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:we've already done this to death (Score:5, Informative)
Because AT&T is so large this will affect a good chunk of the Internet - especially US networks.
Hell their backbone runs the entire length of the us.
This map is from 2000 so it's probably much more invasive now:
http://www.cybergeography.org/atlas/att_backbone_large.gif [cybergeography.org]
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No, I think station wagons full of tapes will do a better job...
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!
xor traffic with your own copyrighted material! (Score:2)
Encryption... (Score:5, Insightful)
True, most traffic is not encrypted, but with encryption technology more accessible than ever I think that the whole effort will be a waste of resources.
I can imagine whole sub-networks cropping up that uses VPN, exchanging traffic with immunity to AT&T's traffic analysis.
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What we need is something that cryptographially switches the ports around and the server all to have a copy of a few books from project gutenberg so the ISP can't be sure it the material is copyrighted or not.
Re:Encryption... (Score:5, Informative)
I think you misunderstand how a Virtual Private Network works. The first thing you must understand is that there is not spoon^W ports. Once you realize that there are no ports, then you only need to route packets over a secure channel that's indistinguishable from valid business. Is this user networking with his small-business employer, or a pirate spreading illegal wares? Impossible to tell from the traffic itself.
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Wow... Just wow... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out-of-band [wikipedia.org]
And the original poster was saying "I can imagine whole sub-networks cropping up that uses VPN, exchanging traffic with immunity to AT&T's traffic analysis." To me that says a small private network between a few friends where everyone shares there content. Something Like I have a VPN to John, Steve, and Bill's house, and we a
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How about the first paragraph... "Out-of-band is a technical term with different uses in communications and telecommunication. It refers to communicati
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Looking for copyrighted material is one thing. Grabbing anything which could be a public key is another.
Re:Encryption... (Score:5, Insightful)
This is the nature of the internet. The people that innovate in this field are problem solvers, often with a penchant for resiting authority and control. Whenever something like this happens, no matter how detailed or iron-clad the barrier is, someone eventually (or rapidly, more often than not) finds a way to overcome it. Bad code on CDs cause PCs to be unable to read them? Take a felt tip pen and mark the last 1/8" of the disk. DRM protection on DVDs? Here's about 2 MB of code that will overcome any known keys. It's all a matter of time.
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If the tracker starts using SSL, and has valid certificates, then there's no risk of man in the middle there (assuming the CA hasn't been compromised, and let's face it, we could easily set up our own for this purpose...). If we extend the tracker protocol to handle the key exchange for us as well, then we have a *secure* key exchange system, that AT&T cannot intercept, filter or screw with, without being relatively
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...
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That probably doesn't really impact man in the middle attacks on P2P systems, but it surely does impact MITM attacks on financial institutions.
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.
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Not necessary. The DMCA provides this wonderful protection:
" 1201. Circumvention of copyright protection systems
"(a) Violations Regarding Circumvention of Technological Measures.--(1)(A) No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.
Now I just need
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Mod Parent Up (Score:2)
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-sigh.. Why Man-In-The-Middle is easily stopped (Score:4, Informative)
In a nutshell, a "man-in-the-middle" attack is no more to be feared than a "dictionary" attack on a password: the attack only works if the security is implemented poorly. In the same way that you wouldn't say, "They use a password? How useless --simply do a dictionary attack!", you would not say, "Encryption? Just do a man-in-the-middle attack!"For the same reason that they warn you when you change your password: "Your password is too short!" or "Your password is dictionary-guessable!" etc. Why would it bother doing that if dictionary attacks aren't possible?
You said:This is a common question about public key encryption. I'm going to quote my own post:
Hope that clarifies things for anyone who's still confused about WHY public key encryption works. The GP poster is correct.
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don't like the law? They'll change it (Score:3, Interesting)
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I don't understand how anyone can object to the previous law. If you build a method of transfering information, you are not liable for what people send over it. Should gun makers be liable for what people do with their products?
AT&T commit corporate seppuku? (Score:3, Funny)
No, really. I mean it
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Nah, maybe not. I've seen how those "guy walks into office wielding sword" news stories usually go. Don't tase me bro.
time to fund some campaigns (Score:5, Insightful)
So they will just write another law. Do you really think that will be a problem for them to get a "children's internet safety" law passed. The government has been practically wetting themselves wanting a seemingly legal way to inspect all internet traffic, this is the opportunity. Nevermind "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated" because this a non-government entity.
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I'm not one for protests or taking part in debates, so I show support by donating. I give these guys and stealthisfilm.com [stealthisfilm.com] a little $$ now and then, because they speak in a voice that can be heard better than mine. It's a lot more effective than online petitions, but should also be used in conjunction
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.
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Who do I use for Internet access now then?? (Score:2)
I've been looking into switching to AT&T DSL and a satellite provider to try and save money and get a better product. The DSL looks like it would be about $15/month cheaper, and
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That company is evil. You're bills will be wrong. If you think you are saving $15 a month, you'll actually be saving more like $5, because of random fees and charges. Customer service will be incredibly slow and rude. Not to mention that even AT&T's Fiber service is capped at 6mbps.
Don't use AT&T. I tried out AT&T DSL about two months ago, just to see if they had improved.
Short story? I now have ongoing billing dispute with them, even though I only had service for 3
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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 sayi
Re:Who do I use for Internet access now then?? (Score:5, Informative)
Nick
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Oh, you don't have to switch to AT&T. Just keep your current provider - as soon as AT&T gets this working, everybody else will follow suit.
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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.
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Of course, one could always be paranoid and start thinking the feds are working with them on this and trying to write in exemptions to the laws for the bug hunt against copyright infringement. After all, they made it illegal to sue them for assisting in widespread eaves-dropping on everyone's communications, so why not get them t
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.
Even stupider than everyone is saying (Score:2)
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FIOS Video is not carried on the Internet.
First, regular FIOS Video, your TV channels, are not even video over IP.
Second, any video that is IP (an on-demand service, for example) is carried solely on Verizon's internal network. How is T going to block what's on VZ's internal network?
Really, if you're going to comment a
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They're closely [eff.org] related [opensecrets.org]. In fairness, though, AT&T is much more competent than the Bush administration itself, otherwise we might not have much to fear. "We know where the infringing packets are. They're on the internets and north, south, east, and west somewhat."
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
If they start to block stuff and you get sued for. (Score:2)
I think the Prodigy ruling applies as well... (Score:2)
They didn't even argue that controlling content meant responsibility for that content: their defense was that a volunteer paid in kind was not an agent because they were not an employee.
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.
They just buy NEW LAWS (Score:3, Informative)
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Well, they're doing it for the copyright holders.
Or, did I miss the point where downloading copyrighted material kills babies?
Not that I disagree that they'd just buy themselves a new law they wrote.
Cheers
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Just be glad... (Score:3, Funny)
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Another Reason Why AT&T is EVIL..... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Another Reason Why AT&T is EVIL..... (Score:5, Insightful)
Remember, this is the same American public which allows (even cheers for) the FCC to decide what you can and can't see and hear.
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Wow, I'm psychic... I *knew* somebody was going to post something along the lines of "this is the same American public who voted for GWB". Don't you think Bush-bashing is getting a little worn out? And honestly, do you really think either of the two alternatives would have been any better? Gore would have signed the patriot act and Kerry would have authorized warrantless wiretaps just like GWB did.
I'd vote for him in 2008 if he was running again... if he were running against Hillary (actually, I'd vote
The real point of the move....; (Score:4, Insightful)
They just want to block file sharers!
The corporate weasels just dressed this up in a load of crud about copyrioght protection, protecting kittens from microwaves and otherwise keeping the planet safe for CEOs who havent yet earned thier first billion.
Thye dont need any fancy technoligy to do this -- just a list of port numbers.
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Considering how trivial it is to route P2P traffic over any port you so desire, including port 80 which they certainly aren't going to shut off, I think they know it'll take a little more than a list of ports. Most P2P apps I've seen have this functionality built right in - uTorrent, azureus, eMule, etc. Want to hide your traffic? Encrypt it and run it over port 22.
But even traffic run in this way is trivial to filter for
How and Why AT&T probably wants to do this... (Score:5, Insightful)
Time-Warner cable supposidly has 50% of the bandwidth used by 5% of the users. Who wants to bet that of this bandwidth, it is almost all pirated material?
The strength of piracy on the Internet is the ease of getting the pirated material, and the ease of distribution. Thus pirated material must be easy to find. So all the MP/RI-AA has to do is find it, and do something about it. Rather than playing Whak-A-Mole on Torrent tracker servers (which are largely offshore), with ISP cooperation from AT&T it becomes possible to play Whak-A-Mole on the users of the torrents themselves...
So the MP/RI-AA or their contractor surfs the Torrent sites, and connects to the torrents with a manipulated client, verifies that a particular torrent is a copyright violation, maps the users of the torrent, and then sends an automated list of the nodes to the ISP saying "This graph is bad, any edge between two nodes in this graph should be killed", and the ISP simply RST-flood any edge in the graph which crosses its network, or just put in a router ACL to drop that pair for a while. Because the strength of the system relies on it being public and P2P, the MP/RI-AA can easily get this information.
AT&T has multiple incentives to cooperate, and can probably do it safely. It has a second party (MP/RI-AA or a company they create/contract for) do the deciding, so they dont' have the liabliity.
It keeps the content providers happy for when they are negotiating their compete-with-iTunes/Netflix video on demand and cable TV services.
It keeps the content providers from pushing through very draconian legislation, or at least draconian legislation you aren't happy with. (It can F-up your competitors, but thats just a bonus)
Its very easy to implement (short-lived router ACLs which are automatically injected and revoked).
And it drops their bandwidth bills by 30-50% by eliminating a large amount of deliberately-noncacheable (both politically and because of bittorrent encryption) traffic.
I wouldn't take it as a guarentee, but I'd almost be willing to bet that AT&T does something like this in the next year. Who wouldn't leap at a chance to reduce your costs by 30%, keep a group of "partners" you have to deal with happy, and without any real work on your part (just an SNMP-manager program)?
This won't stop closed-world pirates, but those are far less annoying to the ISPs simply because there are so many fewer of them, and less important to the MP/RI-AA because they are less likely to be users you can convert to paying customers if you make the illegal content sources unusable.
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There are a lot of torrents and a lot of torrent sites, and they'd never be able to keep up.
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If Google can't find it, the pirate users can't find it.
Oh, on the liability: according to the original article, this messes up one set of liability protection AT&T has, but they might still be able to retreat to the DMCA safe harbor provision, because they actually aren't making a decision about copyright, just enforcing someone else's decision.
But since they are enforcing someone else's decision, they can probably avoid lia
Re:How and Why AT&T probably wants to do this. (Score:5, Insightful)
But the P2P community will fight back. It will become an arms race. For example:
-Trackers inject all kinds of bogus data into the trackers, crafted so that humans skip over it but automated crawlers choke on the massive amount of data (and RST packets!) they must deal with. For added fun, the bogus data includes IPs of legitimate company services, so AT&T will be interfering with, e.g. Blizzard downloads.
-ISPs adjust their software to differentiate "real torrents" from "fake torrents."
-Trackers begin accumulating lists of IP addresses and other signatures that detect the ISP bots, and feed them bogus data.
-ISPs use their control of IP blocks to fake requests from different IPs.
-P2P software starts ignoring RST packets, and uses a different (encrypted) protocol to open/close sessions.
-ISPs give up sending RST-floods, and instead drop all packets.
-Trackers implement algorithms that keep track of "user contribution" based on swarm participation (transmitting valid packets), and block/throttle clients with no "reputation." This makes it difficult for the ISPs bot to browse the torrent listing without actively participating in valid torrenting.
-ISPs switch to checking what IP addresses a person connects to, and simply stalls any connection (all traffic) that connects to a tracker site.
-Trackers switch entirely to TOR: they have no public IP address or domain name. All tracking requests go through TOR routing using the ".onion" pseudo-TLD.
And so on...
My point is this is a crazy arms race, and one should not enter that kind of battle until analyzing all the possible counter-attacks. And the difference here is that hackers will view this as a challenge, whereas AT&T will be spending literally millions of dollars implementing technologies that become invalidated over and over.
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You don't just take the tracker at its word, but instead actually verify the nodes. This means the graph is "correct", preventing the joe-job defense.
You aren't blocking the tracker, but the actual P2P communication within the system.
And Tor so throttles ones' performance that only the truely paranoid use it for their BitTor
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.
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Maybe NSA plans to let AT&T use a portion of whatever mining tool they've got up in those secret data rooms as payback? Or, maybe AT&T saw what NSA put into those secret rooms, and figured, "oh, so that's how you can filter the entire Internet."
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
Here's how it'll go down... (Score:5, Insightful)
And all the legislators will nod their heads and murmur to each other "hey, yeah, they've got a point," while a bag of money passes quietly underneath their tables, and voila, they're allowed -- hell, probably required by the government -- to monitor all traffic and report any and all Violations of the Right to Corporate Profit, and completely immune from prosecution if they happen to miss something.
It'll happen, and the typical "America, Fuck Yeah" voter will grin and gleefully agree that it's for the Good of the Nation, and if you're innocent you should have nothing to hide anyway, so what's the big deal?
The legislators who draft and vote for the bill, meanwhile, will be hailed as patriots and re-elected, again and again, for Protecting the Motherland while simultaneously paying lip-service to smaller government and less federal intrusion into our private lives.
I abhor the fact that my daughter is going to grow up in this pathetic shell that America is today.
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As little as it might help, I vote in every single election, based on the candidates' views and records rather than the party they belong to. I've written letters to congresspeople when they make decisions I'm opposed to. I plan to donate to the EFF once my tax rebate comes in this year.
My anger comes from the fact that I am trying to do something about it, and it doesn't seem to help, when the winners of elections are decided b
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.
Policy (Score:3, Funny)
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Meet my buddy AT&T, aka 'man in the middle'. (Score:3, Funny)
So if modern encryption techniques are so secure, what is to stop everyone from encrypting all their traffic?
Once that happens, how does AT&T propose to filter traffic it can not examine?
Your ISP: the ultimate man in the middle. You want real security, hand deliver your public key to all your contacts after first encrypting *it*. With a one-time pad. Which you then proceed to burn. And eat the ashes.
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To give a very abbreviated answer, the network effect [wikipedia.org] for this has not yet taken off. There has been no technical barrier to widespread encryption for over a decade, but there are two social barriers which remain to be overcome:
In order for you to use crypto, you have to know how it works. Most other technologies are not like this, in that they can just kind of operate in the background. But cryptographic communications operate be
Comcast BT filtering? (Score:2)
Finally, Step 2! (Score:3, Funny)
Step 2: Sue AT&T when it's inevitably pirated.
Step 3: Profit!
This is only going to get worse, and it's wrong. (Score:4, Insightful)
It's ability to bypass the propaganda and behavior control traditionally handled by TV news and (now corporate) newspapers; the ability for people to organize worldwide and share information and files in real time; obviously the IP debate - all of this is the antithesis of where government and corporations are pushing societies in every other aspect of our lives.
They want to turn the net into an interactive place much like a cross between early AOL and the home shopping network....They will snoop on everything you do, download, view, etc.
You've already seen the endless barrage of stuff in the media about "how dangerous the internet is" lurking with pedophiles and terrorists, viruses and those who want to steal your identity; when in reality none of those things are real threats if you take the most basic of precautions.
It may take a catalyzing event, like a virus that shuts down a financial network or turns off a power grid or plays a part in some "terrorist attack." They may even try to require that everything you do online is stamped with a virutal confirmable ID that you have to renew like a drivers license.
This is coming, make no mistake about it. The only hope we have to prevent it is to fight fiercely on both the corporate front (against non net neautrality, because if they can't legislate it directly, they'll do it in a defacto manner) and against laws like S1959 which criminalize thoughtcrime and dissent; make organizing a boycott and other such actions a crime and involve the internet.
Re:Not just copyright .... (Score:5, Informative)
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We've seen far worse laws drafted in the name of protecting "commerce".
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AFAIK, most internet traffic in the U.S. goes over AT&T's backbone, which is a damn shame. Hopefully Sprint, MCI, and maybe even Google will take over that load, and someday the behemoth that is AT&T can collapse.
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