Roy Schestowitz <newsgroups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> espoused:
> AT&T and Other ISPs May Be Getting Ready to Filter
>
> ,----[ Quote ]
>| For the past fifteen years, Internet service providers have acted - to use an
>| old cliche - as wide-open information super-highways, letting data flow
>| uninterrupted and unimpeded between users and the Internet.
>|
>| But ISPs may be about to embrace a new metaphor: traffic cop.
>|
>| At a small panel discussion about digital piracy here at NBC?s booth on the
>| Consumer Electronics Show floor, representatives from NBC, Microsoft, several
>| digital filtering companies and telecom giant AT&T said the time was right to
>| start filtering for copyrighted content at the network level.
> `----
>
> http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/08/att-and-other-isps-may-be-getting-ready-to-filter/
>
> Copyrighted content? Nope. They do political censorship already. Microsoft is
> always on their side (look at the bottom).
>
It's about creating and selling a new generation of network-side boxes.
The idea is to proxy everything, so that there can be no end to end
flows, and then filter. There are plenty of existing examples even now,
with several companies making a fortune by trying to "classify" the
whole of the internet and offer web filtering services which are mostly
entirely ineffective, but it doesn't matter, because senior folk think
that they're getting a useful service, and the supply company gets to
trouser some cash. It's all very Dilbert.
For the likes of Microsoft, they will be beavering away, probably
starting with the BSD codebase, on new filtering engines which they will
sell as network-side appliances to ISPs. In order to "create" or "seed"
this market, they will put huge pressure on governments to legislate for
this kind of filtering, ideally using "protect the children" and
"terrorism" as the excuses, sorry, justification, for legislating for
the purchase of even more equipment from Microsfot and other companies.
Part of this will, naturally, push Microsoft and others to attempt to
*ban* encrypted traffic. They need to do this, because if traffic is
encrypted, then they cannot claim to be filtering and protecting the
children and finding terrorists.
--
| Mark Kent -- mark at ellandroad dot demon dot co dot uk |
| Cola faq: http://www.faqs.org/faqs/linux/advocacy/faq-and-primer/ |
| Cola trolls: http://colatrolls.blogspot.com/ |
| My (new) blog: http://www.thereisnomagic.org |
|
|
