AT&T Inc. has joined Hollywood studios and recording companies in trying to keep pirated films, music and other content off its network — the first major carrier of Internet traffic to do so.
As AT&T has begun selling pay-television services, the company has realized that its interests are more closely aligned with Hollywood, Cicconi said in an interview Tuesday. The company’s top leaders recently decided to help Hollywood protect the digital copyrights to that content.
But critics say the company is going to be fighting a losing battle and angering its own customers, and it should focus instead on developing incentives for users to pay for all the content they want.
unless they have some fancy filtering software, I can imagine a way to block all the content will be the same way my junior college prevented this. Block all ports except 81 (http) and 443 (https), and monitor every piece of traffic that goes back and forth otherwise and tie it to you via a user account. Naturally, this will break 90% of the internet functionality, and then AT&T will just charge more to open each other port. And only unblock each other port after the customer signs some sort of agreement to have all their traffic shaped and throttled and crap.
I said it before and I’ll say it again, FUCK AT&T! If Comcast tries this garbage, I’ll get rid of them like a pair of old socks.
#2 has the right answer. I’m just glad that I use a local ISP whose attitude is what every ISP’s should be. “You payed for the bandwidth, use it however you want.” Aside from a handful ports that should obviously be blocked over the cloud like NETBIOS, my DSL is completely open and unrestricted. And the other week when my modem died, I actually was able to WALK IN to their office and pick up another one. Try that with your big name ISP.
If it works they’ll incur a lot of cost and lose business, if it doesn’t many customers will do it all the more to spite them.
I worked in telecom for years. They’ll take some cosmetic measures, if any. Most of the time these sort of things are nothing more than a press release.
#2 – I said it before and I’ll say it again, FUCK AT&T! If Comcast tries this garbage, I’ll get rid of them like a pair of old socks.
I agree… But who will you switch to?
#3 – If it works they’ll incur a lot of cost and lose business, if it doesn’t many customers will do it all the more to spite them.
I would normally disagree based on the idea that most people aren’t paying attention and can’t possibly be bothered to think about political issues so long as they are fed their steady stream of digital bullshit.
Then I realized, this would cut off their stream of bullshit. So yes, they probably will lose business…
—
But I think we all know the truth. Bush is to blame.
Since AT&T wants to be the first “nanny” ISP, here are a few other types of activities it may decide to block.
1. Sites with political content (political affiliations that AT&T contributed to exempt)
2. Sites critical of the U.S. government
3. Porn
4. Sites with religious content (sites approved by AT&T exempt)
5. Any web site not approved by the newly formed Moral Committee of AT&T
Nice to know you don’t have to think about all of that nasty content on the above sites. AT&T will let you know what is “right and true”.
The fact is that none of the ISPs in Canada that I know of will even spend the money to monitor bandwidth usage, let alone somehting like the above. I’m sure the US ones are no different.
6,
Rogers does traffic shaping. Caused some problems with bit torrents for a while. But, people just started porting though the VOIP port and speeds were back up. Of course, once people started shifting to Bell, which was unencumbered, it seems that Rogers dropped it.
no way in hell this will work…
possible? yes.
feasible? no.
Its what #5 says that scares me….block this…..what is next? Everyone is knocking China and other countries for censorship, but this idea is dangerously close to it.
I’d also have to agree with #6 to a point – most ISPs won’t want to spend the money and be bothered but if a couple of the big ones decide to, the smaller ones may have to play ball with them or have their own services possibly affected. I mean, as #8 says, its not feasible. The money, systems, and infrastructure required would drive costs up. I think all these music and movie organizations are getting far to arrogant and demanding – if only enough people could wake up long enough to affect their business.
#4, OFTLO
But I think we all know the truth. Bush is to blame.
Comment by OhForTheLoveOf — 6/14/2007 @ 12:50 pm
WRONG !!! Everyone knows the blame really belongs with Gore. If that scoundrel hadn’t invented the darn tubes in the first place then we wouldn’t be having this discussion.
#10 – 🙂
Comcast already does this kina bullshit. They will send you e-mails showing you were “caught” sharing a movie on bit torrent, and ask you to stop.
Your ISP doesn’t have to do anything to see who’s sharing these files on p2p services. Lawers will sit online browsing P2P servies, and all they have to do is see your IP listed with everyone else, and send out a warning to your ISP and they will forward it to you.
Chances are that they are going to force consumers to DL content through the iTunes store.
Would a more appropriate headline have been, “AT&T promises to flush a lot of money trying to filter pirated content on its network”?
Cox, back then @Home tried dropping binary newsgroups a few years ago. So I signed with another provider for news groups and was unhindered. A year or so later they had pissed off enough people and had enough complaints that they started carrying binaries again. Since then they have relaxed the bandwidth throttle so that binary news groups are the best way to obtain ‘materials’.
Most people now days are not aware of this ‘best kept’ secret. I’m not sure that AT&T could do much about NNTP, users just need to spend a little extra for a premium service to get around them.
Premium news services in my opinion are better than bit torrent and SAFER.
They can log your NTTP port usage, and either throttle it, you send you a nasty letter stating you’re abusing the terms of service. There’s a lot of users that has had service terminated for this. If you use bittorrent they’ll accuse you of maintaining a file server against ToS. Even if you’re paying for a usenet service, you’re using the providers bandwidth to snag the files. The good thing about paid services is they purge their user records frequently, and will not just roll over for the FBI. Not to mention more than 3 days retention for binaries that’s typical of ISP’s
#13 – I use comcast and i torrent like a mofo, have never ever got anything like that
On a different note…I laughed out loud when I read this on the AT&T DSL web site: “Dynamic IP Addresses – Every time you log on to the Internet, your computer is assigned a new, unique IP address, making it more difficult for hackers to find you.”
If they can do this, how about doing the same thing to block users on their network with zombie systems sending out spam and ddos attacks. I can’t believe they could do one but not the other.
But then, improving the Net doesn’t give them a chance at some fat preferential deal with record labels.
Disgusted as always.
If they’re planning on blocking all bittorrent traffic, I wonder if they’ve though about the “legitimate” uses of bittorrent. For example, World of Warcraft uses bittorrent in its downloader to send patches out. Sure, you can download the patches directly using http, but it’s a non-trivial process for those that aren’t as savvy as us geeks.
One way to encourage people to pay for services is to shut down the free stuff. Most users won’t notice. If they’re successful, they can throw out ten percent of users and knock out 50% of the bandwidth. Then they can lower their price or sell higher bandwidth.
Many carriers have already started doing “traffic shaping” where bandwidth hogs like usenet and peer to peer filesharing are throttled down. Time Warner’s Roadrunner service is already doing it.
#7, 8 In Canada … shaw.ca limits bandwidth on home accounts to about 60 GB per month. They even let you monitor it on a day-by-day basis. Shaw also has a pretty good (knock on wood) nntp server with binary groups (knock again).
It is funny that Americans can’t see the bigger picture to complain about Why the hell are there only usually two high speed ISP’s per market (cable and DSL)? If AT&T does this many people will have nowhere else to go and if their cable company does this they really will have no place to go. There is almost no competition in this space, there should’ve been regulations to prevent this.
I live in Germany and I have at least 10 ISPs to choose from. Personally I have 16 Mbps DSL for about $30 a month. I also have at least 4 cell phone companies to choose from and that is not counting the resellers (which adds about 10 more companies to the list).
#5 — I’ll switch to satellite HughesNet or WildBlue. I’m willing to sacrifice speed in order to keep my internet freedom.
What’s truly funny , about the B from Germanys’ post is the legislation he mentions being needed was passed to limit competition not promote it..HAW !!
Once again, this type of discussion is turned upside down because of the high number of peer to peer users on DU. Most people are not zealots about stealing their digital content instead of paying for it. The fast increase in purchased content is going to grow even more by the end of the decade.
It is also important to remember that legal action against P2P sites continues unabated. Torrent Spy is currently in the hot seat. So, you guys had better run over there and erase your accounts or footprints, eh?
For those of you who say ‘well my ISP doesn’t do this!’ I’d be a bit more careful in your posting. Most ISPs are working with the RIAA and MPAA to reduce/eliminate pirated material.
And #6, your leaps in ‘logic’ are terribly irrational and have no basis in reality. Please take off the tin foil hat and stop posting.
So I wonder how long it will be before VPN services start taking hold.
I already know of a couple of NNTP services which let you VPN in.