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

Skype, Largest International Communications Carrier

Number one call carrier
If you thought AT&T joining hands with RIAA id bad news, now the news is that it is loosing to Skype in international call carrying business. Now I wonder if Skype users get letters from AT&T and RIAA, after all it is a peer to peer application and one can share files with it!
Skype has been a talk of the town for years now and looks like making some money for Ebay, who paid hefty price for it. Skype made $550 million in 2008, which is peanuts for companies like AT&T.

TeleGeography estimates that Skype's international traffic jumped by 41 percent in 2008 and topped 33 billion minutes of use, most of that in free calls. Traditional international calls grew only 12 percent in 2008.
But now with Skype joining with companies like Digium, the creator of open source IPPBX software Asterisk (Skype for Asterisk) and the latest Skype drive Skype for SIP which targets small and medium business PBX and VoIP Phones, will be pulling in business customers everywhere and we might read in 2009 report that it is the number one local carrier.
As many mobile hand sets now are capable of running mobile VoIP apps, I am sure executives of big phone companies spending more time talking about Skype than talking with AT&T Talking With RIAA.
ARS Technica has a very good article on this subject.

Tags: skype, RIAA, ATT, digium, Asterisk, Skype For SIP, Skype for Asterisk

RIAA, AT&T, COMCAST, And COX

RIAA, AT&T, COMCAST, COX
AT&T, one of the nation's largest Internet service providers, confirmed on Tuesday the company is working with the recording industry to combat illegal file sharing, according to CNet News.
Despite those shiny ads, looks like these big ISP's are playing along with RIAA. From all the articles I read so far it looks like the ISPs are just sending out letters and have no idea how they monitor or detect users who breaks the law.
Perhaps some light into the subject would help. But looking at back and forth and back responses by executives seem that is just a dream. So far Verizon seem to be the only one not following RIAAs orders.
You can read more at CNet which I reached via Gizmodo.

Tags: RIAA, AT&T, COMCAST, COX