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UK Broadband ISP TalkTalk Opposes Illegal P2P File Sharing Measures

By: MarkJ - 7 June, 2009 (7:54 AM) - Score: 2329 - Piracy

Charles Dunstone, CEO of The Carphone Warehouse and UK broadband ISP TalkTalk (at least until next summer - news), has warned the government that plans (here) aimed at forcing Internet Service Providers to halt illegal file sharing (P2P) are "naive" because pirates will always find ways around such measures.

Dunstone, while speaking to The Guardian newspaper last week, said: "If you try speed humps or disconnections for peer-to-peer, people will simply either disguise their traffic or share the content another way. It is a game of Tom and Jerry and you will never catch the mouse. The mouse always wins in this battle and we need to be careful that politicians do not get talked into putting legislation in place that, in the end, ends up looking stupid."

"If people want to share content they will find another way to do it," he added. "It is more about education and allowing people to get content easily and cheaply that will make a difference. This idea that it is all peer to peer [P2P] and somehow the ISPs can just stop it is very naive."

Dunstone doesn't touch on the fallibility of using Internet Protocol (IP) addresses to identify illegal file sharers but his broad message about the overall problem is similar. Still, he neglects the fact that most surfers probably lack the technical competence to know how to disguise their traffic, albeit nothing a quick Google search or two couldn't easily solve.

Elsewhere Dunstone confirmed that TalkTalk will be taking part in North London trials of BT's next generation Fibre to the Cabinet (FTTC) up to 40Mbps broadband technology, which begins on 1st July and lasts for a period of up to 6 months. He also anticipates that pricing for the top tier 40Mbps product will be less than the £40 per month tag given to early ADSL services.

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Comments: 8

SP
Posted: 8 June, 2009 - 9:41 AM
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Consumers, regardless of their technical knowledge will find a way around the "limiting" and "tracking" of P2P, wheather this is from their own technical understanding or via a smarter torrent management application.
I totally agree with Charles Dunstone. If media was readily available at a REASONABLE price P2P wouldn't be as "big" as it is.
If the governments "plan" goes ahead and ISP's need to implemenet a very complex system at a large cost, it's only going to increase prices for consumers and businesses(or cost the tax payer), and in the long run won't solve anything. I think it all comes down to having reasonably priced music and films.

daweezil
Posted: 8 June, 2009 - 10:15 AM
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Once disguising traffic becomes "important", then the masses will soon learn how to do it, and that knowledge will be propagated amongst friends ect leading to an "arms race" between the public and the ISP's in terms of hunting down this content.

Control is not the answer. It needs a sea change in the attitude of the IP rights holders, who need to understand the old ways are dead.

iZools
Posted: 8 June, 2009 - 11:35 AM
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Still, he neglects the fact that most surfers probably lack the technical competence to know how to disguise their traffic

It's not the surfers that require the technical knowledge. Dunstone is referring to the software developers, like those that developed uTorrent, LimeWire, mIRC, etc.

THEY will develop new ways of sharing conent that has new encryption techniques integrated into the client. Joe Downloader doesn't need to do anything other than start using a new file sharing program. Simple.

Dunstone doesn't touch on the fallibility of using Internet Protocol (IP) addresses to identify illegal file sharers

The fallibility is thinking that you can easily identify a sharer by collating IP addresses. IPs can be masked, re-routed, appear as someone elses, and how will you know the IP of someone using protocols that're undetectable by DPI?

Dunstone is clearly clued up!

otester
Posted: 8 June, 2009 - 1:43 PM
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Can always just get a VPN, unless they can beat 256-bit encryption, you'd be fine.

Problem is politicians at the moment are retards, getting to be an MP doesn't require much, then they just do what the lobbyists want.

JezTheNetworkGuy
Posted: 8 June, 2009 - 3:14 PM
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I did network analysis at University and have to say that allot of ISP say they do check traffic, the actual process of checking traffic on a node (in this case a huge node probably a DNS server) thats responsible for allowing us on the what was once called the ARPA net, a mesh style network (very expensive to setup) configuration of nodes connected by Fibre Optics, the routers that these route by are manufacturered by Cisco.

When we where doing utilisation checking, where you in a test environment, deliberately make traffic from a packet generator application (we used Network Instruments Observer), the amount of traffic generated was that much that it was hard to even look at what people where browsing on.

Allot of ISPs will pritty much just diagnose a problem, after a few hours work out why this happened up to the time that it failed and just get it working and leave it, cutting cost

Jez
Posted: 8 June, 2009 - 3:18 PM
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Just wanted to finish what I was saying.

My above comment would cut costs, at the end of the day they just want to make their costs as little as possible, and simply dont have the time to do this network monitoring required, we dont currently have a system setup for detecting torrents, if your using P2P apps like LimeWire or Morpheus they appear as apps on SNMP applications like Observer or even packet capture utilities like Ethereal, but I dont quite know about torrent clients such as Bit torrent or a one I use for distributing Fedora constantly, like bit tornado a Perl based bit torrent server in PHP, quite an advanced web site based torrent server I have installed on my own personal server, running Fedora Linux (free legal version of RHEL)

Jez
Posted: 8 June, 2009 - 3:22 PM
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Some form of SSL would work 'otester' going through a professional network admin book at the moment myself with fedora so I can cache my web address (wont say which one it is here for obvious reasons), but I am wanting to cache that domain on my LAN.

And this book goes through the compiling, installation, configuring and securing of server security, quite a good book, think its taken directly from Fedora 10 as all the fonts and logos are that of their interface and official site.

Its just a pain to setup

otester
Posted: 8 June, 2009 - 4:06 PM
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@Jez

~£15 for an encrypted VPN service.

Easier to use encrypted Usenet though.