The Day The Internet Died – AT&T Considering Mandatory Content Filtering

Time to start that VPN account, eh?

Dan settle down…. all this means is better encryption algorithms on the horizon ;)

They can’t stop it, this will cause mass effect “what do we look like, china” syndrome and all the money they’ll waste will make them look like idiots…. cause when it boils down to it, by the time they crack the encryption on one of your packets your download will be complete and they are sitting there with their thumb up their ass …. right where they started.

Relax… The Major networks are desperate to make content deals with the studios and producers and are saying this to apease them. Fact of the matter is that encryption will mask any content being sent. AT&T and their partners would have to break the encryption schemes in order to verify what is being transmitted.

There will always be a marketplace for Internet Access that is not filtered.

The thing to worry about is this: If the backbones begin prohibiting encrypted traffic, then we have a problem.

that is just ridicilous

It’s that damn Patriot Act…

EVerybody I don’t mean to scare you, but what we got going here is an Orwellian Reality that is becoming all the more real.

Please check us out at dailypaul.com

ronpaul2008.com

No more big Government. No more World Banks. Obey the Constitution. Taxation without Representation

“People should not be afraid of their governments; governments should be afraid of their people.”

As a fifteen year old genuine nerd, this filtering would be unwelcome.

I value the fact that I can be serving a webpage from my home computer to school. If they block encrypted traffic, will this be the end of my SSH connection that I use to tunnel applications? Or what about online banking. Or the fact that people pay their Internet bills ONLINE, and I sure as hell wouldn’t be comfortable transmitting my bank info across the net unsecured.

Plus, isn’t it rather illegal to filter at the ISP level? I’d consider it a huge invasion of privacy if suddenly the conversation with my girlfriend was being read by someone else.

If the record labels and movie companies can control what we do online, It’s a sad world we live in. Pierre Elliot Trudeau said this “The state does not belong in the bedrooms of the nation.” I believe this applies here. The companies should not be allowed to act in place of the government. The government of the United States of America needs to step in and say “No. This has gone too far.” After all, the record companies are posting record profits, yet claiming piracy is killing them. Every lawsuit they have filed and won, the monies recieved have gone to the labels, not the artists.

To sum everything up, we must make the decisions, not the companies. It should be like this: Once a CD leaves the possession of the label and arrives at the store, it is the store’s property. Once that CD is purchased, it becomes the property of the consumer. If that consumer decides to post a song on Limewire, and people download it, it is his choice. The labels do not own the CD anymore. They may have the master copy, but they do not own the distributed copy. But it won’t be like that. We won’t ever have the freedom that we should have. I hope if they’re filtering/monitoring my traffic right now (probably not, using proxy), that they take a good long read at this.

Chris

P.S. I be Canadian. If that’s a problem, it shouldn’t be :) Also, you can probably see where I stand on a few issues.

“Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right…” Between the fret over whether the authorities are going to nab you, spy on you, sniff your packets, etc. and the concern over whether you’re being hacked (this just means “other private, random folks” doing those same things), who has time to worry about the big companies sticking their fingers up your ass? This is a good fight, fellas, but it is a passing era — hacking will have to take on an entirely different form once new obstacles have been set up. You can’t steal long distance the way Steve Jobs did, anymore, just like you can’t waltz down the street with a six-shooter strapped to your chaps. Last time I tried joining a pirate ship, I noticed that there were none sailing.

If global warming doesn’t kill us all, and the powers that be don’t resort to the extremes of Orwell’s 1984, then this will just be one more stop along the historical highway in the fight between the lawful and the lawless, the proletariat and the bourgeoise, master and slave, =pwner and =pwned.

at&t’s internet may die for other reasons. Go to google and type such words as “at&t” “pension” “lawsuit”. What you get are tens of thousands of hits on why the at&t employees are unhappy with at&t’s policies on treating people. If the employees are unhappy, what kind of service can you expect? The executives don’t seem to be listening. Will employee disatisfaction cause their network to stop on occasion to prove a point to the at&t executives? Why take the chance; if you have an equal choice between service providers go with the less risk.