UK ISP Sky Broadband Feeds Realtime Customer Bandwidth Data To Litigious Anti-Piracy Firm (torrentfreak.com) 30
UK ISP Sky Broadband is monitoring the IP addresses of servers suspected of streaming pirated content to subscribers and supplying that data to an anti-piracy company working with the Premier League. That inside knowledge is then processed and used to create blocklists used by the country's leading ISPs, to prevent subscribers from watching pirated events. An anonymous reader shares the report from Torrent Freak: In recent weeks, an anonymous source shared a small trove of information relating to the systems used to find, positively identity, and then ultimately block pirate streams at ISPs. According to the documents, the module related to the Premier League work is codenamed 'RedBeard.' The activity appears to start during the week football matches or PPV events take place. A set of scripts at anti-piracy company Friend MTS are tasked with producing lists of IP addresses that are suspected of being connected to copyright infringement. These addresses are subsequently dumped to Amazon S3 buckets and the data is used by ISPs to block access to infringing video streams, the documents indicate. During actual event scanning, content is either manually or fingerprint matched, with IP addresses extracted from DNS information related to hostnames in media URLs, load balancers, and servers hosting Electronic Program Guides (EPG), all of which are used by unlicensed IPTV services.
The big question then is how the Premier League's anti-piracy partner discovers the initial server IP addresses that it subsequently puts forward for ISP blocking. According to documents reviewed by TF, information comes from three sources -- the anti-piracy company's regular monitoring (which identifies IP addresses and their /24 range), manually entered IP addresses (IP addresses and ports), and a third, potentially more intriguing source -- ISPs themselves. The document revealing this information is not dated but other documents in the batch reference dates in 2021. At the time of publishing date, the document indicates that ISP cooperation is currently limited to Sky Broadband only. TorrentFreak asked Friend MTS if that remains the case or whether additional ISPs are now involved. It appears that instead of monitoring customer IP addresses, Sky is compiling data on which IP addresses subscribers are pulling most data from during (and potentially before) match or event times. Sky then uploads the highest-trafficked IP addresses along with the port the traffic is streamed on to the S3 bucket mentioned above, every five minutes. It is then accessed by the anti-piracy company which, every five minutes, extracts the IP, bandwidth rate, and the port number that bandwidth is on. At the time of the document's publication, the Sky 'Top Talker' threshold for the Premier League's 'RedBeard' module was 100mbps. The IP address information provided by the ISP that exceeds this limit then appears to be cross-referenced by IP address and port number with data obtained during game week scanning at Friend MTS. It is then processed accordingly. Torrent Freak goes on to note that the Premier League is "seeking cooperation from additional ISPs too."
"In summary, it appears that Sky subscribers aren't being directly monitored per se, but the servers they draw most bandwidth from are being noted by Sky and that data is being forwarded for anti-piracy enforcement," the report adds. "This means that Sky subscribers' piracy habits are directly providing information to support Premier League, Matchroom Boxing, and Queensbury Promotions blocking efforts."
The big question then is how the Premier League's anti-piracy partner discovers the initial server IP addresses that it subsequently puts forward for ISP blocking. According to documents reviewed by TF, information comes from three sources -- the anti-piracy company's regular monitoring (which identifies IP addresses and their /24 range), manually entered IP addresses (IP addresses and ports), and a third, potentially more intriguing source -- ISPs themselves. The document revealing this information is not dated but other documents in the batch reference dates in 2021. At the time of publishing date, the document indicates that ISP cooperation is currently limited to Sky Broadband only. TorrentFreak asked Friend MTS if that remains the case or whether additional ISPs are now involved. It appears that instead of monitoring customer IP addresses, Sky is compiling data on which IP addresses subscribers are pulling most data from during (and potentially before) match or event times. Sky then uploads the highest-trafficked IP addresses along with the port the traffic is streamed on to the S3 bucket mentioned above, every five minutes. It is then accessed by the anti-piracy company which, every five minutes, extracts the IP, bandwidth rate, and the port number that bandwidth is on. At the time of the document's publication, the Sky 'Top Talker' threshold for the Premier League's 'RedBeard' module was 100mbps. The IP address information provided by the ISP that exceeds this limit then appears to be cross-referenced by IP address and port number with data obtained during game week scanning at Friend MTS. It is then processed accordingly. Torrent Freak goes on to note that the Premier League is "seeking cooperation from additional ISPs too."
"In summary, it appears that Sky subscribers aren't being directly monitored per se, but the servers they draw most bandwidth from are being noted by Sky and that data is being forwarded for anti-piracy enforcement," the report adds. "This means that Sky subscribers' piracy habits are directly providing information to support Premier League, Matchroom Boxing, and Queensbury Promotions blocking efforts."
Beat them at their own game... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Or better yet, a large amount of open http requests from many users downloading .m3u and .ts files from servers all over the globe (even if they are just Big Buck Bunny in a loop "live streamed" to look like a live event), perfectly timed with the beginning and end of the PPV events.
Have you heard of the Internet Archive?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1, Troll)
"investigators"
From TFA:
data is being forwarded for anti-piracy enforcement
Right. A private organization is not "enforcement", or an "investigator". Hence, one more I say: Fuck the surveillance state that floats in the North Sea.
Re: (Score:2)
Pretty sure the Premier League are paying Sky for this information.
Never give away what you can sell.
Re: (Score:2)
SKY more than an ISP (Score:5, Informative)
It is not obvious from the summary, but would be known to it’s UK users that SKY is a major subscription TV provider (satellite, cable and IP) as well as an having become an ISP. So they have a major vested interest in preventing unlicensed streaming.
Re: (Score:1)
Re:SKY more than an ISP (Score:4, Insightful)
It is not obvious from the summary, but would be known to it’s UK users that SKY is a major subscription TV provider (satellite, cable and IP) as well as an having become an ISP. So they have a major vested interest in preventing unlicensed streaming.
Yes, they have the same problem as Bell in Canada. A content provider actively working against the freedom of their ISP customers because the content part gets corporate priority over the delivery part. If regulators are looking for a reason to break things up, the obvious conflict of interest here should be a good start.
Re: (Score:3)
If regulators are looking for a reason to break things up, the obvious conflict of interest here should be a good start.
It isn't clear that preventing companies from taking steps to combat piracy would be a convincing reason for regulators to break things up.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
So what, they get sold by one scumbag company to another scumbag company? How does that make a difference? :)
Re: (Score:2)
In case you wondered if it was possible to get scummier than Fox...
Let it also be known (Score:2)
Their parental controls are purely DNS-based though, so have at it on 8.8.8,8 and al
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Surely you just hook your router to one of their ethernet ports and turn off their wifi?
Virgin's 'must use' cable modems include a specific setting intended precisely for you to do this.
Re: (Score:2)
Another reason to use a VPN service. Many ISPs have conflicts of interest and don't think twice before spying on users.
No Man's Sky (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
False Positives (Score:1)
This is such a dodgy way to capture this information, I wonder if there are whitelists for services such as XBOX Live? Surely quite a number of people are downloading games at way more than 100Mbps. Will this be falsely flagged?
Surely not a coincidence? (Score:3)
Sky are of course the largest seller of licensed Premier League match streams in the UK, both via their Satellite TV service, and their NowTV streaming service.
Sigh. (Score:2)
IP addresses and traffic data would be considered personal information, according to most case law.
Sky are probably going to have to answer to the ICO / GDPR authorities if they have failed to obtain explicit consent for this.
Especially if, by working only on the amount of data and/or the target IP (which if it's Amazon EC, could really be anything), they are then informing a third party who is using it as "proof" for harassment of people in the hope they were actually infringing copyright.
Someone's gonna g
Re: (Score:2)
IIUC, Britain is getting out of GDPR, so that may not be a problem. I'm not sure which TLA ICO represents.