OverPlay

Many broadcasting companies now provide TV shows over the Internet but you’re unable to watch most of them unless you live in their country of origin.  For example, you can’t watch Hulu unless you live in the United States, you can’t watch BBC iPlayer unless you live in the United Kingdom and you can’t use the RTE Player unless you live in Ireland.

Fortunately that’s no longer a problem thanks to a solution from OverPlay.  Using OverPlay you can have access to TV shows from the UK, US, Ireland, Canada, Switzerland, and Sweden and that list keeps getting bigger.  OverPlay provide a VPN service with one or more servers in several countries.  The current price at the time of writing is $9.95 (USD) a month and that single price gives you access to ALL of those servers.

Not only that but there are no bandwidth limitations so you can watch as much as you like.  They also provide their own software so it’s easy to set up and use, however you can use your own PPTP and OpenVPN diallers if you want that flexibility.

The other advantage to using a good VPN service is that they provide a good level of anonymity.  With governments taking an increasing interest in their citizens’ Internet activities and in some cases filtering content that they don’t like, they can be a good way of accessing the true, uncensored Internet.

We reported last week on plans to enforce copyright law by forcing internet service providers to spy on consumers to detect and report every piece of copied music, movies, e-books, games and software.

Now one UK ISP, Virgin Media, is trialling some of the technology needed to do that on about 1.6 million of its customers.

Provided by Detica, a subsidiary of defence firm BAE Systems, the system is being used to try and gauge the size of the alleged piracy problem. CView, as the system is known, will take a snapshot of the scale of peer-to-peer music transfers over a few months.

It will do so by copying every packet of data that passes by, and looking for the digital signatures of data transferred using the popular bittorrent, gnutella, and edonkey file sharing protocols.

Whenever it finds a data packet that matches, it will extract the code these protocols use to identify the contents of the packet.

CView will then compare that code with a database of “musical fingerprints” to identify any music being shared, allowing it to work out if the data packet infringes copyright.

As a result, Virgin will find out how much file-sharing traffic is infringing copyright, and what the most-pirated tracks and albums are, the Register reports.

CView won’t be able to finger individual users, because the IP addresses that identify each computer’s connection will be stripped from every packet. But some Virgin customers are worried about the potential for it to be used for snooping at a later date.

CView’s technology could conceivably be used to identify people accessing certain data, for example.

Or it could block certain content, in much the same way as China’s “great firewall”.

More at New Scientist

Originally posted on Friday, 16 May, 2003, 16:51 GMT 17:51 UK at BBC News.

Officials in the UK are routinely demanding huge quantities of information about what people do online and who they call, say privacy experts.

Police and other officials are making around a million requests for access to data held by net and telephone companies each year, according to figures compiled from the government, legal experts and the internet industry.

The findings were announced at a public debate into government proposals to widen powers for internet snooping held in London this week.

But a Home Office spokesman disputed the figures, telling BBC News Online it estimated that the number of requests were half that suggested.

The requests include telephone billing data, e-mail logs and customer details, which privacy experts estimate could amount to a billion individual items of data, ranging from credit card numbers to numbers dialled.

Read more here.

From August net service providers in the UK will be obliged to carry out surveillance of some customers’ web habits on behalf of the police.

Controversial laws passed in 2000 oblige large communications companies to install technology that allows one in 10,000 of their customers to be watched.

The information gathered about what people look at on the web, the content of e-mail messages and their phone conversations will be passed to the police or a government monitoring station.

The demands have been criticised by experts who say the law conflicts with basic guarantees of privacy and that the government is not doing enough to help pay for the installation of the surveillance systems.

Read more here.