Culver City, CA has installed a program to filter illegal content from their free wi-fi network. It’s not that big a network (10 square blocks). Apparently they were surprised when they found that some people were using their network for downloading copyrighted content.
What gets me is the analysis was done by Audible Magic using their CopySense Network Appliance program (which was what they sold Culver City).
According to reports, the program will not filter legal P2P activity (I’ve used P2P to download Linux distros, for example), but will use a database to only filter illegal downloads. Interestingly, according to Broadband Reports,
The only problem is, last we checked, the hardware is easily bested by encryption and some flavors of basic compression. The latest Bit Torrent clients, such as Azureus, have incorporated encryption to help get around the traffic shaping being done my (sic) a number of cable ISPs.
More worrisome is this just goes to show that any activity you may do on a free wi-fi network, especially one provided by the city, is subject to monitoring. Precisely why I have said you need to be careful when using open wi-fi at a coffee shop. The best thing you could do would be to use a VPN if possible.
