Sky blocks Newzbin, important legal and technical questions need answering

[Igor Mozolevsky]

On 15 December 2011 23:17, Francis Davey <fjmd1a at gmail.com> wrote:

>> But you can't `know' what IP addresses you need to filter without
>> looking at all address+port pairs (you certainly wouldn't pass non
>
> As I understand it, Cleanfeed work by having a first list of "suspect"
> IP addresses. Only those addresses are passed to the second stage.
> That is a process which is implicit in the order as I understand it -
> i.e. the MPAA will have to pass an IP list with suspect URL's
> associated.

[snip]

> Right, but from a legal perspective, proxying http by looking at GET
> requests is much less invasive than matching on the body of the return
> http result. Sure, *private* information travels in GET etc requests
> (I doubt very much if this is properly understood by the legal
> establishment yet, but I try to get the message out when I'm giving
> talks about it) but I assume that only very simple URL's will be in
> the list supplied to BT by the order.

I think we better take this offline, I was trying to put what was
necessary for BT to do in terms that ECJ put it in Scarlet. You seem
to be saying that because Cleanfeed doesn't look at what is sent and
received as a whole, but only at a proportion of what is sent, is less
invasive?


> I'm sure the IWF is a datafin public authority, but the IWF have
> nothing to do with this order. Cleanfeed is a mechanism that can be
> used to implement an IWF block, but its not mandated.

Indeed, for some reason I was under the impression that IWF was
running Cleanfeed, it appears that they only provide `filtering
pattern'. In a sense then, BT appears to be already prejudiced by the
fact that they had _some_ content filtering and this order was nothing
more than a feature creep into BT's internal system.


> This is an RTFM right? The wording of the order is:
>
> "In respect of its customers to whose internet service the system
> known as Cleanfeed is applied whether optionally or otherwise ...". If
> you read the body of the judgment you'll see that BT apply Cleanfeed
> to some of their traffic but not to all of it. The order requires the
> block to be used exactly where Cleanfeed is.

That's how I read it, just was wondering about customers of customers
of BT, if you see what I mean (ISPs who piggy-back their service off
BT wholesale, for example), and incidental traffic to which BT chooses
to apply Cleanfeed. I have no idea about how Cleanfeed is applied by
BT, btw. Can one freely (not as in beer) find out if their connection
to the Internet is subject to Cleanfeed?


--
Igor