AT&T Invests in Filtered Networking

Last summer, AT&T announced its intention to begin filtering copyrighted content at some point. The telecom has now bought a chunk of Vobile, whose core product is VideoDNA. "Like other systems of its kind, VideoDNA develops a unique signature from every frame of video. The signature is meant to be robust enough to survive various transformations and edits, and it can then be used to run matches against incoming content.' Vobile claims that VideoDNA is good enough to be used on video when transmitted over a network. 'Based on the complexity of the problem, we suspect that anything initially deployed by AT&T will fall far short of a robust P2P video filter. But should AT&T truly have its eyes on just such a prize, the company would be in a powerful position to impose its own policies on the entire US, since it owns major parts of the Internet backbone.'"



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I love it when the bullshits starts to flow. Video DNA eh? Yeah right!!!

Even using fuzzy logic will mean that any such sniffing will inevitably catch genuine data as well as the target data.

Also, how much sniffing can this do? Maybe several hundred frames can be profiled, from several movies, or musical pieces, but how do you store a database of all frames from ALL copyright works, then check all data packets against ALL profiles stored?

The problem for them is immense, unless they only sniff packets that are truly identifiable as torrents. What about archived material that has been zipped? If we run a virus checker on our hard drive, we know how long it takes (ages), because it needs to unzip each zip to check for a virus signature. How much processing would an ISP need.

The main question, though, is why would an ISP actively monitor internet traffic for violations that don't apply to it? Surely it is the responsibility of the MPAA and RIAA to track down violators of their property. What do AT&T actually gain from this filtering? As far as I can see it, they gain nothing except a reduction in bandwidth, which could have a negative as well as positive effect on their business. After all, unwarranted intrusion in to private corporate data being transmitted over the network could easily warrant AT&T open to lawsuits.

I think AT&T is more worried about lawsuits from the MPAA than the monitoring of private corporate data, which should be encryted anyway, since they have the ability to monitor their traffic, which, as has been stated before, is a very large portion of internet traffic in America. If they should ignore the unsolicited p2p traffic while having the ability to monitor it, in extreme cases they could be accused of encouraging copyright infringment.

So AT&T has a very real incentive to prevent unwarranted p2p traffic. Either that or the MPAA is slipping a great deal of money to them under the table to 'provide the resources neccessary' to enforce the law, as if they are reasoning from some higher philosophical purpose. That is speculation, and I cannot offer any opinion on the plausibility of this "Video DNA," since I do not have a degree in anything related to computers. To me this seems like a very real threat to the security, or rather the freedom of the use of current protocols.

This is clearly to headoff the future expansion of P2PTV. A huge underground movement is starting with TV being broadcast for free over the internet. You can watch pretty much watch any sporting event live or any TV channel (porn included :)) via P2P.

And as speed and the swarm size increases, so does the quality of the picture. They realize a large part of their future revenue lies in providing video on demand at some point down the line. If people can just download any show or movie for free, as we basically do now anyway, they will lose alot of money.

And with unlimited cell phone service providers, satellite TV and cable breathing down their neck - they are scared shitless.

all u need to do is introduce SSL into the equation and all these methods are completly fucked. It might have a effect for a couple moths untill ppl catch on and encypt everything they send over the internet

Yeah, at the end of the day there will either be some secure version of the current protocol or a new version that will (while maybe less used so a bit slower) fly completely under the radar. Think about bittorrent when it first came out versus kazaa, nobody was looking at the little BT user downloading movies while tom varsity jacket was downloading songs off of kazaa.