XFINITY, A Rebrabding Effort By Comcast, Will You Buy It?

Xfinity is still Comcast snapvoip.blogspot.com
Comcast is rebranding itself as "XFinity" and marching into many markets over the country with hopes of showing a new face. Currently we can see TV ads in Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Chicago, Seattle, Philadelphia, Boston and 3 other Comcast markets.

“Xfinity will stand for the best experience in the marketplace,’’ said David Watson, executive vice president of operations for Comcast’s cable TV operations.

But we hope XFinity will not carry BitStalker home. I was surprised to find Comcast is investing in such tools at the same time looking to rebrand itself. Perhaps it is a part of the game. Comcast's $30 billion effort to get NBC Universal, a multimedia company that owns the Universal film studio and television networks NBC, CNBC, and Bravo might explain the spending on Anti Piracy software. The acquisition is under intense scrutiny in Congress. If it get approved, the limits are at Xfinity.

But for me, the best explanation about XFInity, came from SlashDot,

 "Xfinity = the amount of time you'll be on hold if you call Customer Service."

You can read more ar Boston.com

.

COMCAST, COX and Time Warner Cable Funding An Anti Piracy Tool, BITSTALKER

Comcast Anti Piracy Tool BITSTALKER snapvoip.blogspot.com
With many torrent users worldwide and MPAA/RIAA being very active, at the first glance I thought the paper was funded by them.
The paper being "BITSTALKER: ACCURATELY AND EFFICIENTLY MONITORING BITTORRENT TRAFFIC" from University of Colorado. Boulder CO.
The researchers claim that their tool is more accurate and will eliminate false positives. But people involved with torrent sites and operators seem to be less impressed by the technology according to Torrent Freak.
Like torrent freak we too wonder why ISP's, major US ISP's at that, investing in this arena, which has been the field of RIAA/MPAA. ISPs usually remained neutral to the witch hunting coducted by them.
Following is an excerpt from the paper and for more descriptive account of BitStalker and positives and negatives of it at Torrent Freak, and slashdot (link after the jump)

This paper presents BitStalker, a low-cost approach to monitoring large BitTorrent file sharing swarms. BitStalker collects concrete evidence of peers’ participation in file sharing in a way that is robust to tracker pollution, highly accurate, and efficient. In contrast, the past and present investigative monitoring strategy consists of tracker server queries and ICMP ping probes. While this method is simple, it is also prone to a variety of significant errors, especially false positive identification, since this monitoring technique does not verify participation in the file sharing. We present an alternative monitoring strategy based on actively probing the list of suspected peers to obtain more conclusive evidence of participation in the file sharing. There are several aspects of our approach that warrant additional attention. In particular, a specific definition of what constitutes “evidence” in the context of file sharing across various legal systems should be explored. Also, the general legal issues that this type of monitoring exposes should also be investigated further.
Acknowledgments. The authors thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions. We also thank Claire Dunne and the University of Colorado’s institutional review board for ensuring that this research was conducted with the highest of ethical standards. This research was funded in part through gifts from PolyCipher.

Plycypher is a  a broadband ISP consortium (COMCAST, COX and Time Warner Cable)

Torrent Freak,
Slashdot