FCC Allows Film Studios To Block Your Analog Ports! Breaks Millions Of TVs

MPAA Gets the rights to block your Analog ports, Selectable Output Control http://snapvoip.blogspot.com/
Looks like anothe home invasion by the likes of MPAA. According to the FCC grant the film industry now can block outputs without copyright control, on home entertainment equipment so studios can offer new movies while preventing viewers from making illicit copies.
So what is the big deal with this? For starters If you:

• Use a TiVo, any Slingbox, or a TV manufactured before 2004
  
• Connect your TV to your cable box with analog cables (either component or composite)
  
• Have a TV without a digital connection, such as HDMI
  

you will likely have to replace much if not all of your existing entertainment system to watch these movies. 

MPAA which is tickled bad by dropping DVD sales (and too expensive BlueRay disks) due to people renting from the likes of NetFlix. Now they want to send you movies over the cable but wants to block you from copying them.

Public Knowledge, a Washington, DC-based public interest advocacy organization dedicated to promoting the public interest in access to information, said this "will allow the big firms for the first time to take control of a consumer’s TV set or set-top box, blocking viewing of a TV program or motion picture,"
The Washington-based MPAA represents Paramount Pictures, Sony’s film unit, News Corp.’s Twentieth Century Fox, General Electric Co.’s NBC Universal, Walt Disney Co. and Time Warner Inc.’s Warner Bros. Pictures.
Read more at  Public Knowledge

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