[ILUG] A win for us

[paul at clubi.ie]

On Tue, 12 Oct 2010, Mark Dennehy wrote:

> and into users by stating that the majority of P2P downloads are 
> illegal; and he certified (paragraph 87) the IRMA tool for tracking 
> downloads as being accurate despite encryption; and overruled the 
> technical opinion of the CS professor called to testify. The 
> judgement's a travesty.

To be fair, the judge does seem to have put effort into learning 
about the tech, and he does seem to have listened to Paddy Nixon.

Encryption was introduced to deter packet-inspection, which must be 
done at ISPs. It clearly makes no difference to people joining in on 
public P2P networks and observing.

A lot of the counter-arguments are actually on the business side:

- the Aslan argument is factually incorrect:

    http://taint.org/2010/10/11/231501a.html

- it's far from clear that record companies are actually losing
   money. Their CD sales might be down, yes, but those who bother to
   try sell music electronically are not necessarily down (there were
   figures releases for UK industry a while ago - dont have URLs
   handy). Those which have refused to adapt to the 21st century of
   course may well be losing money - just as the horse carriage makers
   before them did, who didn't get into building cars.

On a technical level, it's clear that today's network protocols are 
compromised when it comes to privacy. Deep packet inspection and 
logging is now possible, even for very high-speed lines.

It'd be nice if we all encrypted our data, and tried to make DPI 
computationally infeasible...

regards,
-- 
Paul Jakma	paul at jakma.org	Key ID: 64A2FF6A
Fortune:
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
 		-- Benjamin Franklin, 1759