Dropsafe

by Alec Muffett

AT&T have not heard of Ranum’s Law

Ranum’s Law:

“You can’t solve social problems with software.”

Compare with the quote from James Cicconi, senior vice president, external & legal affairs for AT&T:

BoingBoing:

AT&T is considering adding content filters to its network. These will try to figure out if your network connection contains a copyrighted work, and censor any communications that are believed to be infringing.

What we are already doing to address piracy hasn’t been working. There’s no secret there,” said James Cicconi, senior vice president, external & legal affairs for AT&T.

Mr. Cicconi said that AT&T has been talking to technology companies, and members of the MPAA and RIAA, for the last six months about implementing digital fingerprinting techniques on the network level.

“We are very interested in a technology based solution and we think a network-based solution is the optimal way to approach this,” he said. “We recognize we are not there yet but there are a lot of promising technologies. But we are having an open discussion with a number of content companies, including NBC Universal, to try to explore various technologies that are out there.”

Maybe the RIAA/MPAA should talk to the Chinese Government for some tips? Or perhaps we could convince America to outsource the internet entirely to them, because censorship and enforcement of music and video copyright are clearly the most important thing going on in the network today…

⊞

Comments

2 responses to “AT&T have not heard of Ranum’s Law”

  1. Melodie Neal

    Hi Alec

    You may be aware that down here in Australia, our government is looking at implementing “ISP filtering”, to keep violent and p*rn*grahic content away from children. Civil libertarians suspect the government of direr motives, and a large number of my colleagues suspect that this is being driven by some vendor peddling “filtering technology”. Many column inches have been expended on this in the popular press.

    I have the gravest doubts that this can be done effectively. However, one of the loudest (and most effective) proponents of this scheme is a prominent member of the child-advocacy lobby. The position of the child-advocacy folks (who seem to be social workers, for the most part, and know little about IT) is that:

    “Sweden, Norway, Denmark and the United Kingdom have ISP-based filters in place blocking child pornography to the majority of Internet users in those countries. Reports show that these filters are very effective, with the UK system operated by British Telecom blocking over 35,000 attempts per day. During 2006, the Norwegian system blocked 1.7 million attempts to access child pornography. The Swedish system blocked 15,000 attempts during its first few weeks of operation which resulted in a 40 per cent drop in reports of child pornographic sites to Sweden’s internet hotline.”

    and that anyone who opposes their wishes to implement filtering in Australia is anti-child, and probably a pervert to boot. My suspicion is that any filtering implemented in other countries was effective for exactly as long as it took the smut peddlers to implement encryption, and in the long term will have done little to disrupt this disgusting business. It will, however, have allowed the various governments and ISPs to say “we’ve done our bit, problem solved”.

    I am trying to arrange a direct chat with the child-advocacy folks for next month, and this may be my one chance to insert a bit of technical reality into the discussion. Can you direct me to anyone in the above listed countries (or elsewhere) who could comment knowledgeably about what was really implemented, and if/how it worked?

    rgds

    Melodie

    Reply
  2. dropsafe : British Government have not heard of Ranum’s Law

    […] Same old, same old… […]

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