Year: 2009

Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada Reveals their Deep Packet Inspection Website

/ Christopher Parsons

200903300037.jpgThe Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada (OPC) has been incredibly interested in Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) technologies, and prominently demonstrated their concerns with the technology in the comment they filed to the CRTC about Internet Service Providers’ traffic management practices. As of today the OPC’s DPI website has gone online – it’s got a great set of mini-essays on various elements of the technology, and lets visitors leave comments and engage with each piece. They’ve done a stellar job – if you’re interesting in DPI and its privacy implications, I highly recommend visiting/bookmarking it.

As a note: if you want to get a grasp on what the Deep Packet Inspection is, and how it works, before jumping into its privacy implications I’ve developed an accessible working paper entitled “Deep Packet Inspection in Perspective: Tracing its lineage and surveillance potentials” for the New Transparency Project.

Analysis: ipoque, DPI, and encryption

/ Christopher Parsons

Package-reportipoque is one of the world’s leading Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) appliance manufacturers. For the past several years they have been producing detailed reports on the constitution of Internet bandwidth usage; their 2006 report was predominantly based on German data (100,000 German households’ data was incorporated into the study, versus 10,000 European households outside of Germany), whereas their 2008/2009 report takes data from Northern Africa, South Africa, South America, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, Southern Europe, Southwestern Europe, and Germany. In short: the study’s range of participants and associated data points have increased substantially.

While the most recent report isn’t ‘comprehensive’ in the sense that it offers a perfect picture of the Internet’s global bandwidth and protocol usage during the data accumulation period, there are interesting things that we can learn from it. Perhaps most interesting, is that ipoque learned that P2P protocol usage grew far less than during the 2007 data collection period. The 2008/2009 report routinely identifies Direct Download Sites and services such as Usenet as reasons for the decline of P2P usage, as well as increasingly rich multi-media HTTP traffic. (While it is well beyond the scope of the ipoque study, it would be delightful to see if there is a corresponding relationship between content owners providing their media through web accessible portals and decreases in the growth of copyright infringement online.)

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Update: EDLs in New Brunswick

/ Christopher Parsons

200904021515.jpgA few days ago I posted that Nova Scotia and New Brunswick both might be moving away from EDLs because of their costs and/or privacy issues. While the article discussed the issue was problematic (because of persistent factual errors), it appears as though the author was on target concerning New Brunswick’s concerns with the technology: EDLs will not be coming to my birthplace .

This means that both New Brunswick and Saskatchewan will not be going forward with EDLs, though Alberta. Quebec, Manitoba, Ontario, and B.C. are all going ahead with EDLs. I’ll be curious to see if the rest of the Atlantic provinces follow New Brunswick’s lead, and how this might shape the national discourse on EDLs.

The Role of Digital Surveillance in Stopping the Past’s Rebirth

/ Christopher Parsons

Vader Sings!Most of the music that I listen to clearly borrows from the past, takes technologies of the present, and creates the music of the future again. To be clear, I’m not suggesting that the electronic beats that I listen to are going to be what everyone listens to, or that Bossa Nova and Samba are going to be predominant music genre in your home (though they should *grin*). No, what I’m saying is that digital technologies facilitate the appropriation of past cultural artifacts that were produced for consumption, and then subsequently modify and make them the artist’s own. Take a look at the below YouTube video for a demonstration of taking up a past cultural artifact (part of an episode from the West Wing) and modifying it to make a contemporary political statement:

Taking the past and making it one’s own isn’t anything new; artists have been reinterpreting prior songs/artwork/performances and making a buck off their reinterpretation for a long, long time. What is new is:

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Demonstration: Another Awesome Mashup + Constituent Part

/ Christopher Parsons

200903292246.jpgFollowing up on my post two weeks ago (Demonstration: Why Mashups are Awesome), I felt obliged to put up another awesome mashup that I just came across. The first video below shows guy playing a trombone piece, whereas the second demonstrates how it was integrated into a reggae mashup. Depending on the copyright regime that you live in, the mere act of viewing a mashup like the one in this post could constitute infringement. The audio mashup linked in the image at the head of this post most definitely would constitute infringement in some jurisdictions, but in both cases aren’t citizens just taking up the cultural artifacts surrounding around them and making something new? Amateur creativity like in these mashups is categorically different from professional mashups; shouldn’t we really have different categories and legal expectations depending on what category you sit in?

Trombone Set

 

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Three-Strikes to Banish Europeans and Americans from the ‘net?

/ Christopher Parsons

200903281552.jpgThroughout the Global North there are discussions on the table for introducing what are called ‘three-strikes’ rules that are designed to cut or, or hinder, people’s access to the Internet should they be caught infringing on copyright. In the EU, the big content cartel is trying to get ISPs to inspect consumer data flows and, when copywritten content is identified, ‘punish’ the individual in some fashion. Fortunately, it is looking that at least the EU Parliament is against imposing such rules on the basis that disconnecting individuals from the Internet would infringe on EU citizens’ basic rights. In an era where we are increasingly digitizing our records and basic communications infrastructure, it’s delightful to see a body in a major world power recognize the incredibly detrimental and over-reactionary behavior that the copyright cartel is calling for. Copyright infringement does not trump basic civil liberties.

Now, I expect that many readers would say something along this line: I don’t live in the EU, and the EU Parliament has incredibly limited powers. Who cares, this: (a) doesn’t affect me; (b) is unlikely to have a real impact on EU policy.

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