Tracking P2P

They may call it "fingerprinting," but they are after your ass:

For months, the digital equivalent of a postal censor has been sorting through virtually all file-swapping traffic on the University of Wyoming's network, quietly noting every trade of an Eminem song or "Friends" episode.

The technology, provided by Los Gatos, Calif., company Audible Magic, isn't yet blocking individual file trades. But that's the next step. As the company begins testing its service with more universities, corporations and small Internet service providers during next few weeks and months, this peer-to-peer monitoring and blocking technology threatens to open the next front in the online piracy wars.

With the capacity to look inside every bit of data that flows over a network--whether it's part of a song being illegally traded or a personal e-mail--this new generation of antipiracy technology is sure to prove controversial. But some administrators at universities and corporations--deluged by peer-to-peer traffic that continues to overwhelm their networks--say they're ready for this sweeping step.

"I don't really want to be looking that closely at what people are doing, and you'd probably just as soon not have me looking either," said Brad Thomas, a network specialist at the University of Wyoming who is helping manage the Audible Magic project. "But it's getting to be the only way to control our bandwidth."

....Audible Magic's tools are among the first of a new generation that threatens to go much deeper inside the data stream, allowing a network operator to see exactly what files are being transferred.

The software lives inside a router or gateway to the broader Internet. As it is currently configured, it creates a copy of all the traffic flowing past, identifies those bits that are using FTP (file transfer protocol) or the Gnutella technology, and then re-creates those files to identify them.

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Article Author: Eric Olsen

Career media professional Eric Olsen is honored to be the founder and former publisher of Blogcritics.org, and former publisher of Technorati.com, which both rule. He is now editor, co-founder, and CEO of The Morton Report.

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