This link has been bookmarked by 1 people . It was first bookmarked on 06 Apr 2008, by Jonathan Bailey.
So you’ve heard that a number of organizations - namely the MPAA, RIAA, and the more global IFPI - have been trying to get ISPs to implement filters to prevent the illicit transfer of digital files through peer-to-peer technologies, most especially BitTorrent. Well, it turns out that those groups’ wishes to circumvent piracy are going to be quite a bit harder to fulfill. The reason being that companies hawking the software required to bring about a future of nonproliferation don’t quite pass the strength test. As Janko Roettgers of NewTeeVee has found, a number of vendors, given samplings of encrypted and unencrypted transfers to detect, have delivered mixed results.
The team which conducted the study, a partnership between SNEP (the French music industry association) and Internet Evolution, first asked some 28 software vendors to put their products through their paces. All but five refused. Of the five which took part in the experiment, 3 requested that their respective results not be published. So the two parties that emerged from the trenches and allowed themselves to be temporary guinea pigs on public display, were Arbor Networks in the US and a German outfit called Ipoque.
Roettger’s outline of the findings is quite comprehensive and telling of what ISPs will likely encounter if they so choose to implement filters on their networks. With an average of the data from both Arbor and Ipoque, one can assume that unencrypted data is very likely to be swept away before it reaches its destination (97% detection rate recorded in this two-party study), while digital material laced with encryption may only be detected roughly 1/4 of the time. I imagine that would be best case scenario, too. (Or worst, depending on one’s vantage.)
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