Monthly Archives: February 2009
Announcement: Working Paper on DPI Now Available
The abstract is below: Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are responsible for transmitting and delivering their customers’ data requests, ranging from requests for data from websites, to that from file-sharing applications, to that from participants in Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) chat sessions. … After discussing the potency of contemporary packet inspection devices, in relation to their earlier packet inspection predecessors, and their potential uses in improving network operators’ network management systems, I argue that they should be identified as surveillance technologies that can potentially be incredibly invasive. Drawing on Canadian examples, I argue that Canadian ISPs are using DPI technologies to implicitly ‘teach’ their customers norms about what are ‘inappropriate’ data transfer programs, and the appropriate levels of ISP manipulation of consumer data traffic. Continue reading
Thoughts: Irish Newest Victims in the Copyright Wars
More substantially, I question Eircom’s ability to effectively identify particular individuals who are infringing on content; they can (likely) identify the home modems that are piping data to and from the ‘net, but a modem is not the same thing as the person who is committing infringement. … If many of the proposals to ‘fight piracy’ actually: (a) dealt with the sources of piracy; (b) didn’t have disproportionate effects on people’s lives, I think that I’d have fewer issues with how media corporations are trying to address infringements. Until the companies start using a scalpel do deal with problems (or we see a real reform in copyright law that ends the criminalization of the digital generation), it’s going to be almost impossible for digital natives, network neutrality advocates, privacy advocates, or ‘regular folk’ to support attempts to divorce citizens from the dominant communicative medium of the Western world. Continue reading
DPI Deployed for Mobile Advertising
( Source ) Deep Packet Inspection is being deploying by an increasing number of operators for a host of purposes, including content analysis, flow analysis, network management (broadly stated), network management as integrated with policy management, and behavioural advertising (to name a few). … The Guardian is reporting that in a recent GSMA trial to collect information of where mobile users’ are browsing, that “the UK’s five networks – 3, O2, Orange, T-Mobile and Vodafone – used deep packet inspection technology to collect data covering about half the UK’s entire mobile web traffic” ( Source ). … Even in the case of Phorm, there are countermeasures that individuals can take to mitigate their data being identified and sorted – what solutions will be made available to mobile consumers, or is the fact that these are ‘different devices’ mean that old solutions will be seen as not applying? Continue reading
Update: Repatriation of EDL Database
( Source ) What strikes me as interesting/weird about this is that under Phase 1 of the BC EDL program no Canadian data was turned over to the American authorities! … This seems to suggest one of two things about the Canadian Press’ article: They are using old/bad information – the database has never been located in the US, and the Canadian Press is just spinning last year’s news about where the Canadian database was to be stored (i.e. on Canadian soil); Between the end of BC’s EDL Phase 1 and February 16, 2009 the database was offshored to the US. This suggests that the administrative issues that were limiting BC and CBSA from sharing data with American authorities was cleared up, and data sharing began, only to be subsequently modified in light of Ottawa’s decision last November. Continue reading
