quote:The Motion Picture of Association of America is urging some of the nation's largest universities to deploy custom software designed to pinpoint students who may be using the schools' networks to illegally download pirated movies. A closer look at the MPAA's software, however, raises some serious privacy and security concerns for both the entertainment industry and the schools that choose to deploy the technology.
quote:The MPAA also claims that using the tool on a university network presents "no privacy issues -- the content of traffic is never examined or displayed." That statement, however, is misleading.
Here's why: The toolkit sets up an Apache Web server on the user's machine. It also automatically configures all of the data and graphs gathered about activity on the local network to be displayed on a Web page, complete with ntop-generated graphics showing not only bandwidth usage generated by each user on the network, but also the Internet address of every Web site each user has visited.
quote:On the surface at least, it was beginning to seem like the MPAA was asking universities to install a black box tool that would allow anyone to wiretap their networks, all the while hiding the tracks of those listening in on the network.
I would love to see one of the colleges this was sent to sue the MPAA.
Posts: 3719 | Registered: Jul 2004
| IP: Logged |
UBBFriend: Email this page to someone!
Printer-friendly view of this topic
