Surveillance State

Update at 10:10 a.m. PDT: The titles for Tessa Sproule and Guinevere Orvis have been tweaked.

Following closely on the heels of Norway, Canada's public broadcasting service is adopting DRM-free BitTorrent distribution for a major prime-time show.

On March 24, CBC will use BitTorrent to distribute this year's broadcast of Canada's Next Great Prime Minister. This will make Canada the first country in North America to release high-quality, DRM-free copies of a prime-time show using the popular P2P file-sharing technology.

(Credit: CBC)

Canada's Next Great Prime Minister, an annual competition in which young adults propose ways to improve the country in hopes of winning 50,000 Canadian dollars, attracted more than 1 million viewers in 2007. While broadcast shows in the United States regularly reach more than 8 million viewers, for a Canadian broadcast program, 1 million is a huge success.

Tessa Sproule, the CBC manager in charge of the show's digital outreach, is a regular reader of the BoingBoing blog, which earlier this month highlighted the use of BitTorrent by Norway's public broadcaster for one of its most popular shows. Sproule was inspired by the Norweigan experiment and pushed for something similar at CBC.

While plenty of TV networks have experimented with offering shows online for free, it is CBC's use of DRM-free BitTorrent downloads that is the most interesting. Guinevere Orvis, one of the interactive producers on the show, told me that the motivation for this choice was their desire for the "show to be as accessible as possible, to as many Canadians as possible, in the format that they want it in." As for DRM, she said: "I think DRM is dead, even if a lot of broadcasters don't realize it." She added that "if it's bad for the consumers, it's bad for the company."

Michael Geist, a copyright guru and law professor at the University of Ottawa, hailed CBC's move, writing on his blog that "this development is important not only because it shows that Canada's public broadcaster is increasingly willing to experiment with alternative forms of distribution, but also because it may help crystallize the net neutrality issue in Canada."

Rogers Cable, one of Canada's largest Internet providers, has adopted Comcast-style BitTorrent filtering, so CBC's use of the technology is sure to heat up the debate.

CBC is conducting the entire BitTorrent effort in-house. The show will be encoded into multiple formats (including an iPod-friendly version), Orvis said, and the BitTorrent server will be running on a CBC server.

The BitTorrent version will be available for download to anyone in the world, which is a significant change from previous online TV efforts. The iPlayer platform made by England's BBC is only available to consumers with U.K. network addresses. Similarly, Hulu, the joint effort between Fox and NBC, blocks Net users who are outside the United States. Orvis told me that BitTorrent made the global distribution possible, as it meant that Canadian taxpayers were not subsidizing the cost of delivery to foreign viewers.

Sadly, here in the U.S., TV networks are nowhere nearly as enlightened. NBC and Fox have some of their shows available for free via low-quality streams online. Comedy Central, seemingly tired of sending take-down letters to YouTube, made its entire archive of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report available online, via low-quality, free streams. Even PBS provides streams for some of its content.

The only way for U.S. consumers to download high-quality shows is, unfortunately, via iTunes, which charges $1.99 for a DRM-locked copy of the show. Linux users need not apply.

Of course, Net users can always turn to BitTorrent for DRM-free, high-quality downloads. It's is easy to use--easier than iTunes in many cases--and offers a wider selection. However, it remains, for now, illegal.

When will U.S. broadcasters get a clue, ditch DRM, ditch iTunes, and adopt BitTorrent?

Cable giant Comcast seems to have moved on from its anti-BitTorrent filtering, and now appears to be engaged in a fairly low-tech astroturf campaign--which one commentator has called a "Denial of Citizen attack."

The Federal Communications Commission held a public hearing at Harvard University yesterday, primarily to discuss the cable giant's widely criticized filtering of BitTorrent traffic.

According to a number of first person reports posted online, as well as eyewitnesses that this blogger has spoken to directly, Comcast packed the room with hired warm bodies, some of which were sleeping. In addition to ensuring that there'd be a friendly audience to cheer for the company's Executive Vice President, the astroturf campaign also had an added benefit: un-Comcastic members of the public were kept out.

While the practice of paying for line sitters is fairly common in Washington DC, the $15-per-hour warm bodies typically swap their spot with a highly paid lawyer at the last minute. With the doors to the Harvard Law School mock-courtroom closed to latecomers, it's difficult to imagine how exactly Comcast's employees were supposed to come in and claim their saved seats.

A number of reports indicate that the hired mob provided vigorous, if slightly delayed, applause after the testimony of the cable company's bigwig David Cohen.

Someone at Comcast, it seems, is a fan of the opera, and has decided to bring back to life a 300-year-old tradition, the Claquer:

Claque (French for "clapping") is, in its origin, a term which refers to an organized body of professional applauders in French theatres and opera houses ....By 1830 the claque had become an institution. The manager of a theatre or opera house was able to send an order for any number of claqueurs. These were usually under a chef de claque (leader of applause), who judged where the efforts of the claqueurs were needed and to initiate the demonstration of approval.

This could take several forms. There would be commissaires ("police officers") who learned the piece by heart and called the attention of their neighbors to its good points between the acts. Rieurs (laughers) laughed loudly at the jokes. Pleureurs (criers), generally women, feigned tears, by holding their handkerchiefs to their eyes. Chatouilleurs (ticklers) kept the audience in a good humor, while bisseurs (encore-ers) simply clapped and cried "Bis! Bis!" to request encores.

Comcast warm bodies dozing

(Credit: Save the Internet)

Comcast, of course, denies any such actions, and claims that the napping dears were Comcast employees. A PR rep for the company issued the following statement:

"Yesterday's FCC hearing in Boston was open to the public and well-attended by many, including Comcast employees, who obviously had an interest in its content. Comcast informed our local employees about the hearing and invited them to attend. Some employees did attend, along with many members of the general public. For the past week, the Free Press has engaged in a much more extensive campaign to lobby people to attend the hearing on its behalf."

Which made me think... What if the hired mob were not freelancers, but were in fact a bunch of local Comcast employees who'd been given the day off. Given the fact that the company's cable technicians have a well-documented history of falling asleep on the job (and sometimes on the sofa of a customer), is it that surprising that they dozed off during a discussion on traffic shaping and RST packets?

Decide for yourself. Check out the photo of the Comcastic mob from yesterday's hearing, and a Youtube video of a dozing cable technician. Do they really seem that different?

After months of lying and evading our questions, Comcast seems to have developed a love affair with the blogosphere. Is this an early Valentine's Day present for bloggers, or is the company up to its usual tricks?

Comcast has gotten into a bit of hot water with the Federal Communications Comission over its widely criticized anti-BitTorrent filtering. The FCC Chairman Kevin Martin announced the agency's plans to investigate Comcast last month, stating that "the question is going to arise: Are they reasonable network practices?" He added that "when they have reasonable network practices, they should disclose those and make those public."

For the last month, the FCC has accepted public comments in response to a Free Press petition that will examine whether "degrading peer-to-peer traffic" violates FCC rules for reasonable network management.

Most interestingly, in a recent 80-page filing with the FCC, Comcast claims that bloggers are a sufficient enough check and balance that the agency doesn't need to get involved.

The self-policing marketplace and blogosphere, combined with vigilant scrutiny from policymakers, provides an ample check on the reasonableness of such [network management] judgments.

We at Surveillance State are flattered by Comcast's praise. Regular readers will perhaps remember that this blog was the first to argue that Comcast's actions were illegal and that the company could face lawsuits as a result of its shady filtering. We were also the first to get a politician to discuss the issue on record, in which uber-Representative Rick Boucher blasted the cable company for its sly tactics.

Comcast's gushing praise for bloggers aside, this is clearly a self-serving act on the part of the cable giant. The company repeatedly lied to bloggers and members of the press for months about its BitTorrent filtering. It was only once the Associated Press and the Electronic Frontier Foundation published independent studies that proved that Comcast was engaged in shady network behavior that the company finally fessed up, mostly. Comcast still refuses to admit that its blocking connections or forging packets, and instead sticks to its claim that it is merely delaying connections temporarily.

Bloggers and activists should not need to reverse engineer network filtering technologies in order to figure out when and how a company is engaging in shady network behavior. Comcast needs to be open with its customers about what its doing -- so that the free market can work, and consumers can vote with their wallets when they dislike an ISP's practices. Comcast has recently made a token gesture in this direction, by amending its terms of service to at least admit that filtering happens.

Comcast's past behavior with BitTorrent are clearly unfair and deceptive business practices. While bloggers should be commended for shining a light on the corporation's dirty tricks, this is an area where the government really needs to get involved. The free market simply cannot work when companies lie and distort the truth.

Hat tip to Cynthia Brumfield over at IP Democracy for finding the we-love-bloggers comment buried in Comcast's filing.

While a class action lawsuit is definitely one way to get Comcast to behave, another perhaps more productive way to do so is to have politicians step in and regulate.

On Tuesday, I discussed the issue of Comcast's anti-BitTorrent "network management" with Rep. Rick Boucher, D-Va., who is a strong supporter of consumer rights and has led the battle to undo the damage caused by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA.

He was named Politician of the Year for 2006 by Library Journal, largely due to his efforts to protect the fair-use doctrine and expand Internet technologies to rural areas.

"Comcast has made a major mistake in attempting to hinder peer-to-peer file sharing as an aspect of its network management," Boucher said. "The inability of customers to (share files) significantly diminishes their ability to utilize the Internet for one of its most important applications, which is user-to-user content." He also noted that "file sharing is already being used for a wide variety of perfectly lawful and appropriate applications."

Net neutrality nightmare ad

(Credit: Rikomatic / Flickr)

Discussing the realities of limited resources that the company faces, Boucher said, "Comcast obviously needs to engage in some aspect of network management. The company has limited bandwidth, and there are times when there is more demand for service than the infrastructure can support." However, the congressman stressed that "(the) management needs to occur in a more evenhanded way" and that "(Comcast) should not engage in a blanket disqualification of any category of lawful applications."

Until last month, the opponents of Net neutrality were doing just great. The issue, which had become one of national importance in 2006, had shrunk to a mere footnote in the annals of tech policy history.

CNET News.com's Declan McCullagh wrote about the death of Net neutrality last month, stating that "(the issue) went from being the political equivalent of a first-run Broadway show, with accompanying street protests and high-profile votes in Congress, to a third-rate performance with no budget and slumping attendance."

Luckily for fans of a free Internet, the telecommunications companies are extremely shortsighted. Thanks to a number of their boneheaded moves, Net neutrality has gone from being all but dead to a major news story--all in just a matter of weeks.

Respect BitTorrent

(Credit: Hetemeel.com)

The first company to breathe life back into was Verizon Wireless, which decided in late September to block a SMS text message campaign by a pro-choice group.

Within one day (and after having its censorship techniques compared to those of the Chinese government in a New York Times article), Verizon quickly flip-flopped.

While Verizon should be commended for realizing that it needed to do the right thing, and quickly, the damage was already done. Net neutrality was back on the tech policy radar.

In mid-August, user reports began to surface alleging that Comcast was filtering the BitTorrent connections of its broadband cable customers.

While the story got a bit of press in some tech news outlets, it was ignored by the national media, primarily due to the flat-out denials issued by Comcast.

Fast-forward one month. This past Friday, the Associated Press and the Electronic Frontier Foundation both released investigative reports, documenting the fact that Comcast is actively engaged in anti-BitTorrent behavior.

In spite of Comcast's best efforts to yet again spin the story, the truth seems to have come out, and major news outlets have picked it up: Comcast is actively sending out false data onto its network, which impersonates its customers' computers and deceitfully convinces them to terminate BitTorrent connections. Not only does the company have a major PR disaster on its hands, but it has in a matter of days become the poster child for Net neutrality.

Comcast's name is surely to come up in any future discussion of Net neutrality - which has gone from a theoretical "what if companies did this kind of thing" debate to something more akin to "do you want every Internet company to start acting like Comcast?"

In my blog post on the subject this past Tuesday, I explored some of the potential legal risks that Comcast faces. I spoke to the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Fred von Lohmann, who revealed that "(the EFF has) already been contacted by attorneys, who are considering legal action against Comcast."

I asked Boucher what he would do if Comcast stuck to its guns and kept discriminating against BitTorrent. In particular, I asked him if he would propose legislation compelling the company to treat all traffic fairly.

Unfortunately for fans of Net neutrality, the congressman said he was not ready to go down this path and instead stressed market-based methods of fixing the problems. Instead of tinkering with packets, the congressman said that in the short term, Comcast should "simply tier their offerings and engage in a pricing structure that allocates more bandwidth to those who pay more, and less to those who pay less."

However, he said "the long-term answer is to deploy more capacity. That is what municipal broadband and other telecom companies are doing. Ultimately, the cable companies will have to deploy fiber to the house."

Columbia University cyberlaw professor Tim Wu recently pointed to a historical analogy regarding Verizon's SMS fiasco. He told The New York Times that in the 19th century, the telegraph company Western Union engaged in discrimination based on the political views of people who sought to send telegrams.

"One of the eventual reactions was the common-carrier rule," Wu said, which required telegraph and then phone companies to accept communications from all speakers on all topics.

Someone who believes in a market-based solution to this problem is Jim Harper, director of information policy studies at the Cato Institute. In a phone interview on Tuesday, Harper noted that one of the main problems is Comcast's lack of transparency--something that can be seen through the fact that no one yet knows, exactly, what Comcast is doing. He said "Comcast seems to lack the capacity to communicate terribly well. They should fix that."

Harper believes that competition is the key to fixing the problem and that if customers truly care about the issue, they will choose another Internet service provider that is more BitTorrent-friendly. He did, however, note that without transparency, "consumers cannot make smart choices."

He also rejected calls for Net neutrality regulation, stating that he believes that the problem can be fixed by promoting competition. While acknowledging that the state of the market is far from competitive for many rural consumers, he noted that customers in bigger markets often have the choice between multiple phone, cable and wireless companies.

Harper said that instead of "dividing the current pie through regulation, it is far better to grow the pie" by encouraging new companies to offer service. One example of this, he said, was allocations of additional spectrum to broadband, such as the upcoming 700MHz auction.

Finally, Harper was somewhat skeptical of the importance of this issue to most consumers. He noted that Comcast is not blocking BitTorrent downloads but rather only the sharing of files--something that is not viable to most users. "If customers don't care enough to vote with their feet" he asked, "then how important is it, anyway?"

The blogosphere is abuzz over an Associated Press investigative article this past Friday on the subject of Comcast's BitTorrent filtering. Briefly, there were a number of articles in early September which alleged that Comcast was using some fairly sneaky techniques to throttle BitTorrent traffic on its network. Comcast, of course, denied any such behavior. It took a month and a half, but both a mainstream media news organization as well as the Electronic Frontier Foundation have tested and confirmed the previously reported claims. It turns out that Comcast is not only throttling BitTorrent, but Gnutella and, strangely, Lotus Notes are also suffering.

If it ain't the truth....

(Credit: technochick / flickr)

Comcast's PR people gave me the following statement on Monday: "Comcast does not block access to any Web sites or online applications, including peer-to-peer services like BitTorrent...We have a responsibility to provide all of our customers with a good Internet experience and we use the latest technologies to manage our network so that they can continue to enjoy these applications." I was also able to interview a Comcast Internet executive who would only speak on background. He bobbed and weaved, sticking to his talking points, yet a few things were clear: he would not deny that the company was sending out TCP RST packets, but stated that if it were being done, it was at a "low level" where average users would not see it.

A Comcast engineer who spoke to the Tech Liberation Front's Tim Lee confirmed this, stating that "most users wouldn't even be able to detect the traffic-shaping activities they use without special equipment and training." On the subject of why the filtering is done networkwide and not just to individual bandwidth hogs: "Comcast (doesn't) throttle on a user-by-user basis rather than a protocol-by-protocol basis, (as the company is) concerned with the privacy implications of that approach." Thats right folks, Comcast will sell network wiretaps to the feds for $1,000 a pop, but won't calculate a user's total bandwidth per month for "privacy reasons."

When your ISP receives a spam e-mail, and deletes it without delivering the message to your in-box, it is blocking access to your in-box. (This is a good thing.) When you install a firewall on your home computer and someone else tries to connect to you from another network, your firewall software "blocks access" to that other party. The packets attempting to initiate a connection to your machine will either be silently dropped onto the floor, or in some cases, a rejection message will be sent back to the session initiator telling them that their connection attempt was refused.

Comcast LolCat

(Credit: Comcast and LolCat Buildr)

If Comcast deployed networkwide firewall rules that would drop any BitTorrent packets that came in and out of its network, Comcast would be "blocking access." However, it is not doing this. Primarily, because if it did so, the BitTorrent downloads of its customers would fail, and thousands of users would complain. Instead, Comcast is attempting to only target the sharing or uploading portions of BitTorrent, which are not nearly so noticeable for end users. Comcast will still see a significant drop in network traffic by targeting uploads, but is far less likely to suffer the wrath of its users.

So what is Comcast doing? It is letting BitTorrent traffic flow across its network, and thus is not technically "blocking" anything. Instead, it is forging TCP reset packets that are misleadingingly labeled as being sent by one of the two ends of the BitTorrent connection. That is, Comcast is masquerading as its customers, and sending out data with false sender information. When the BitTorrent clients receive the false reset packets, they themselves terminate the connection, as they think the other host has told them to go away. Thus, through sneaky techniques and network-level false statements, Comcast is able to trick users' software into terminating their own transfers.

Interestingly enough, were Comcast applying this same technique to e-mail, and falsifying the header information of e-mail messages, it would soon find itself violating the Can-Spam Act. That law states that "Whoever...materially falsifies header information in multiple commercial electronic mail messages and intentionally initiates the transmission of such messages...shall be punished...with a fine...or imprisonment for not more than one year."

As for the idea that Comcast is using the "latest technologies" to manage its network--hogwash. The concept of forging TCP reset packets is at least 10 years old, if not older. Purdue professor Gene Spafford and a number of his graduate students developed a "synkill" system to defeat SYN flood attacks that used the very same technique, back in 1996.

What about the argument that Comcast has the right to "manage (its) network so that (all customers) can continue to enjoy (permitted) applications?" The tactics that Comcast is using are 1. Probably a violation of its own terms of service, and 2. are being applied blindly across the whole network, instead of targeting those "heavy users" who use a disproportionate amount of the company's bandwidth.

Comcast's own "terms of use" state that Comcast reserves "the right to refuse to upload, post, publish, transmit or store any information or materials, in whole or in part, that, in (its) sole discretion, is unacceptable, undesirable or in violation of (the) agreement." Thus, if Comcast wished to deploy networkwide firewall rules blocking all BitTorrent traffic (that is, such packets would be either dropped on the floor or rejected by the network's routers), Comcast would be perfectly within its rights as outlined in the agreement. Comcast would probably lose a large number of customers, but it would at least be acting legally and following its own published rules. However, Comcast is not doing that. Nowhere in its terms of service has the company stated that it reserves the right to impersonate its customers, and to send false and misleading data out onto the network originating from or addressed to its customers.

In addition to the BitTorrent filtering technique being discussed, Comcast uses other methods to keep the amount of data flowing over its network to a minimum. Customers who use more than their "fair share" of bandwidth will eventually be terminated. How much is too much? Comcast won't tell you.

While this latter method of network management is not so popular with the Slashdot crowd, it at least makes some sense, since it is aimed at those users who are using the most of Comcast's seemingly scarce resources. Comcast's BitTorrent filtering, on the other hand, is being blindly applied to the entire network. Users who download 10 gigabytes of data per day, and little old grandmothers who wish to share a 4.5-megabyte copy of the King James Bible (as the AP did in their test) will both equally be filtered. This is not a technique aimed at abusive overuse by a handful of users, but is an all-out war against particular networking protocols.

I discussed this issue with Fred von Lohmann, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Von Lohmann stated that "based on (our) own testing, as well as what has been reported, it seems clear that Comcast's techniques are bad for its customers and bad for innovation generally. The fact that Comcast's efforts are reportedly interfering with BitTorrent, Gnutella and Lotus Notes communications makes it clear that they are not narrowly targeted at particular users or protocols."

Regarding the effectiveness of Comcast's techniques, von Lohmann said that: "It's as though they are throwing a spanner in the works of the Internet, hoping that this will somehow reduce bandwidth usage overall.

As I mentioned in an article last month, Comcast's tactics may very well be violating the law. Many states make it illegal for an individual to impersonate another individual. New York, a state notorious for its aggressive pro-consumer office of the Attorney General, makes it a crime for someone to "(impersonate) another and (do) an act in such assumed character with intent to obtain a benefit or to injure or defraud another." (See: NY Sec. 190.25: Criminal impersonation in the second degree). I do not believe that it would be too difficult to prove that Comcast obtains a benefit by impersonating others to eliminate or reduce BitTorrent traffic. Less torrent data flowing over its network will lead to an overall reduction in its bandwidth bill, and thus a huge cost savings.

With regard to Comcast's legal liability, von Lohmann said that he could not comment as he had not yet had a chance to review the New York anti criminal impersonation laws. He did, however, state that "(The EFF has) already been contacted by attorneys who are considering legal action against Comcast." In the meantime, the EFF will "continue to perform tests in hopes of better understanding how this works and how it might effect Comcast subscribers and other Internet users."

While the EFF is holding back for now, it seems clear that other lawyers are circling in the water. They can smell blood. Not only is Comcast actively impersonating its customers on the Internet, but it has continued to deny it for the past two months. Should the court's approve a class action lawsuit, Comcast could be looking at a world of pain--and rightly so.

NBC's recent withdraw from the iTunes store leaves the millions of users of Apple iPods without a legitimate way to purchase and watch NBC's content. Could this be the push that brings easy-to-use 'piracy' to the masses? This article discusses the issues, and then provides step-by-step instructions to setup a computer to automatically download any of hundreds of TV shows as soon as they are broadcast and put online.

With Apple's recent lovers's spat with NBC making the headlines, it seems like a good opportunity to examine the state of the online TV downloads, be they paid or 'pirated'. The end result of the dispute between the companies is that NBC's shows, which currently count for approximately one third of iTunes' TV show sales will no longer be available for sale at Apple's iTunes store. Customers wishing to purchase NBC's shows will now need to go through Amazon's Unbox service. While Unbox supports users of Windows and TiVo, Mac users, as well as those millions of iPod users are left out in the cold. Linux geeks, and those customers who have purchased divx/avi capable portable music players are also excluded, but this small subset of the market were equally ignored by Apple.

The Apple/NBC dispute, of course, only affects US based consumers. Foreigners, due to the lengthy delay between a show airing in the US in markets abroad, have already been driven to illegal file sharing. In Australia, where the broadcast of US shows is typically delayed between 22-30 months, many viewers have given up on waiting for their favorite shows to appear on the tube, and have instead turned to BitTorrent. According to a report published in 2006, "Australians are responsible for 15.6 percent of all online TV piracy, bested only by Britain, which accounts for 38.4 percent. The US lags behind in third position at 7.3 percent."

The legitimate and legal online media stores cannot compete with file sharing on price. Furthermore, as iTunes, Amazon, Walmart and the other stores all wrap their media in restrictive Digitial Rights Management (DRM), they cannot compete on freedom, flexibility and the ability to transfer purchased media to other devices. The only areas where they have the upper hand are in quality, and ease of use.

Warner Brothers' China division, in a rare act of intelligence on the part of a major media company, demonstrated significant savvy last year when they began selling cheap, legitimate, high quality DVDs of movies within days of the theatrical release. By pricing the discs at around 12 yuan (approximately US$1.50), Warner is hoping to make cost a non-issue, thus allowing them to compete in one area where they hold the upper hand: Quality. Instead of taking a chance with on a low quality, shaky-camcorder copy of a film, Chinese consumers can get a high quality copy of the movie at a reasonable price, all while enjoying the warm fuzzy feeling that you can get knowing that you've helped to pay for some small portion of a a Hollywood star's private jet.

Apple's iPod makes up more than 70 percent of the overall mobile player market. With those customers now completely cut-off from NBC's offerings, the ease-of-use advantage of legitimate purchase has been lost. While camcorder copies of films still make up a decent portion of movies on file sharing networks, the widespread availability of digital television and TV tuners in PCs means that it is trivially easy to find high-quality copies of TV shows on BitTorrent sites such as The Pirate Bay.

It's taken some time, but the 'piracy' path has finally gotten to be more user-friendly and easy to use than iTunes and the other pay-services. Miro, a multi-platform RSS and BitTorrent enabled media client is now very stable, polished and fast. Using a tool such as this, and a couple minutes of configuration to subscribe to your favorite shows, it's now possible for users worldwide to wake up to the latest episode of The Daily Show, without paying a penny, or being locked into a restrictive DRM scheme. It's still illegal of course, but that hasn't stopped the millions of file sharers who have made BitTorrent responsible for more than 25% of all Internet traffic.

It's worth noting at this point, that for people in India, the Middle East and other markets ignored by the major players, Linux users (for which iTunes, Amazon and Walmart's media stores do not work), Apple customers who wish to watch shows made by NBC or another network that won't play ball with Apple, or Windows users who are simply not willing to submit themselves to the shackles of DRM, illegal downloads are the only way to watch TV shows on their computers and portable media players. I'm not advocating illegal activity, but merely stating the facts.

If a user wishes to break the law (or they live in a country that doesn't respect US copyright law), lets see exactly how they could go about setting up their computer to auto-download their favorite TV shows. This information is, of course, for educational purposes only and I in no way encourage anyone to violate copyright laws.

Step 1: Download and install the Miro media player, which is available for Linux, Mac and Windows.

Step 2: Locate an RSS feed for a TV show you want to watch. One fantastic source of these is the website tvRSS.net

Navigate through the list of TV shows on the tvRSS website, and find a desired show.

Screenshot of tvRSS website

(Credit: tvRSS.net)

On the web-page for the show, right click on the link to the RSS feed of that show, and copy the URL location.

Screenshot of tvRSS website

(Credit: tvRSS.net)

Step 3: Open up Miro, and go to the Channels menu, and select Add Channel. The RSS address that was copied previously should already be displayed. If it's not, paste it.

Screenshot of Miro media player

(Credit: Miro)

Miro should now automatically download the latest episode of that show, which it will continue to do every time a new episode appears online.

Screenshot of Miro media player

(Credit: Miro)

For ease of use, a user will probably want to rename the channel to something recognizable. This can be done by going to the Channels menu and selecting Rename.

Screenshot of Miro media player

(Credit: Miro)

By following these three steps, its possible for a user to wake up to their favorite TV shows already downloaded to their computer, waiting to be watched and without the restrictions of DRM. Users of Apple's iPods will need to re-encode them into Apple's proprietary Quicktime format, while those users with a Linux based Nokia N800 or one of the many low-cost .avi compatible portable media players should be able to transfer the files with little to no additional work.

As I said before, this is all totally illegal under US copyright laws, and most other western countries that have agreed to adopt similar rules. In addition to the standard risks of file sharing, US based users should take special care not to download any leaked pre-broadcast episodes of TV shows, which occasionally show up online. The Family Entertainment and Copyright Act passed in 2005 makes mere possession of such media a felony. First time offenders can face up to three years in jail. Caveat emptor.

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. I'm a cybersecurity Ph.D. student and take classes in the Indiana University law school, but this in no way makes me a legal expert. CaveatlLector.

Within the last few weeks, there have been a number of reports by Comcast customers claiming that their BitTorrent downloads and uploads have been capped--or worse, blocked. TorrentFreak recently reported that Comcast, a major U.S. cable company, is using an application from Sandvine to throttle such connections.

Comcast LolCat

(Credit: Comcast and LolCat Buildr)

Many ISPs routinely filter the traffic on their networks. Many forbid customers from running e-mail servers or Web servers, and when the ISP detects that a customer's computer has been hacked, they often sever the Internet connection until the machine has been patched. Thus, the fact that a major ISP is now filtering yet another class of Internet traffic should not be major news--except for two factors: BitTorrent traffic accounts for upwards of 25 percent of U.S. Internet traffic, and the techniques used by Comcast are essentially the same as those used by the Great Firewall of China.

Before we get deeply into this issue, let us step back for a brief and high-level lesson in TCP/IP and Internet filtering technologies. Most Internet applications communicate via TCP, a protocol that uses a three-way handshake to establish a connection.

The very first step in a three-way handshake involves the client sending a SYN packet to the receiving party. Modern firewalls block this packet for banned types of traffic--that is, they prevent the recipient from receiving it, and as such, the connection can never be established. Your home firewall does this, as well as those used by Comcast and other ISPs to prevent you from sending millions of e-mail spam messages from their network.

Assuming that the SYN packet goes through, the three-way handshake is allowed to happen, then the two hosts will be able to begin communicating. Your ISP can still kill the connection later, should it wish to, merely by blocking the transmission of future packets.

According to TorrentFreak, Comcast is not doing this. They are instead sending a reset (or RST) packet to the Comcast customer, pretending to be from the host at the end of the BitTorrent connection. This RST packet is the TCP equivalent of stating "I don't want to talk to you anymore, please terminate the connection." It is extremely important to note that when Comcast creates and sends this packet, it does not identify itself as the the source of packet, but instead impersonates one of the parties involved in the BitTorrent connection. This is where things get rather shady.

Last year, researchers from Cambridge University analyzed the Great Firewall of China and found that it used falsified RST packets to terminate connections that matched keyword filters. They were able to determine that users could evade the Chinese government's censorship system by ignoring these reset packets.

Ok, so the Chinese government and Comcast are using the same censorship techniques. Why should we care? The Chinese government doesn't have to pay attention to U.S. law, but Comcast, being a U.S. company, does.

Many states make it illegal for an individual to impersonate another individual. New York, a state notorious for its aggressive pro-consumer office of the Attorney General, makes it a crime for someone to "[impersonate] another and [do] an act in such assumed character with intent to obtain a benefit or to injure or defraud another." (See: NY Sec. 190.25: Criminal impersonation in the second degree). I do not believe that it would be too difficult to prove that Comcast obtains a benefit by impersonating others to eliminate or reduce BitTorrent traffic. Less torrent data flowing over their network will lead to an overall reduction in their bandwidth bill, and thus a huge cost savings.

New York is not the only state with such a law. Several other states including Connecticut and Alabama have similar laws on the books. Should any state AG's office decide to go after Comcast, it is quite possible that Comcast could be looking at a world of regulatory pain.

Comcast is perfectly within its right to filter the Internet traffic that flows over its network. What it is not entitled to do is to impersonate its customers and other users, in order to make that filtering happen. Dropping packets is perfectly OK, while falsifying sender information in packet headers is not.