How About An Anonymous Olympics Video Mirror?

tickback asks: "As I was reading about how the International Olympics Committee has bandied the television companies together for something along the lines of several BILLION dollars worldwide (Over $700 Million to NBC alone for this year) and how they're citing copyright laws as a way to police ANY Internet traffic relating to video of the Olympics, a thought-sequence started to form on how simple it would be to get video into the hands of the Internet users at large, regardless of how deeply entrenched the IOC has their hooks in the television and data carriers in Australia. Of course, as with any self-respecting geeky thought-process that these days seem to end up with some sort of a lawsuit because you happen to ask how a law should be interpreted (See the wonderful discussion at Dr. Touretzky's page Gallery of DeCSS Descramblers), I'd like to explicitly state that this is simply a plausible hypothesis meant to encourage thoughtful discussion on the pro's and con's of current copyright law and enforcement of such and how effective it is or isn't."

"Normally with video, the problems are that it has to be really well handled in terms of latency, is delivered using UDP (ie, lossy) transfer, and can be traced easily through the ports used to deliver it. What if the live or close to live video was encoded by a party in Australia or any area served by satellite or whatnot, automagically broken into 5 minute pieces (to pick a reasonable small chunk) of realvideo (to pick a random but popular video codec), encrypted, dispersed to any number of mirror sites over any normal TCP form (SMTP/FTP/HTTP/POP whatever), re-assembled, and then broadcast in its normal form with the resulting say 15 minute delay meaning the video would still be over 12 hours ahead of whatever the IOC is allowing to be broadcast?

Now, there are some technical issues that whoever pursuing this path would have to overcome: how to distribute the material from the mirrors, how to anonymize any connections, how to handle similar streams from mutiple sources, and after the recent rashes of gnutella 'spamming' and such, how to distinguish 'legitimate' incoming data from 'trojan' data meant to disrupt any system.

Now, I'm not a programmer by any means, so I certainly have no way of testing this theory even in a closed network (although it doesn't seem like the technical hurdles are insurmountable, or even serious hurdles at all) and I honestly don't care much about the Olympics (I'd be happy getting the data the next day, since I don't watch much video on my computer; I happen to think TV belongs on a 32" screen, and I can't afford a monitor that large). I *do* wonder about just how often laws are being used to enforce practices that the internet has made a bit archaic, and think that a few more discussions into the matter are needed. Hopefully, this will promote just such a discussion, especially considering how quickly new laws are being discussed concerning digital copyright."

Well...

[Jordan Block]

We're gonna need some damn good bandwidth, and a pretty decent sized server farm to handle the encoding / encrypting. Very interesting idea though...

wow

[Jordan Block]

wow, the trolls are really slacking off this weekend......

Ideal use of freenet

[griffjon]

This would be the PERFECT application of the Freenet project (freenet.sourceforge.net)--it offers anonymity to its nodes, and--even better for this--will cache oft-requested data near the requesting parties--no slashdot effects, because if it's retrieved once, it's already one hop away next time it's requested.

By the time the Olympics are active, so should freenet be--this would be a wonderful PR stunt for the project (hear that Ian??), not to mention a demonstration of its applicability.

Re:Well... How much CPU does it take to encode vid

[backtick]

Really? I've seen a decent PC handle real audio, but I'm not sure how much more intensive video is, never hacing encoded any. Anyone have experience?

Email gateway/Carrier Liability/Anonymizers?

[backtick]

I just looked at the freenet page on sourceforge.net, and I wonder about the scalability. However, I'm not an expert on this kind of math, so I'll leave that alone.

Is there currently some kind of email -> freenet gateway? It seems that one way to let data enter freenet could be in email that had been sent through an anonymizer.

I am not a lwayer, but I think in the US at least, certain carriers are declared not liable for the content delivered over them (ISP's not liable for delivering a harassing email to their user from another ISP, since the ISP only acted as a carrier; the Phone company not being liable for harassing calls, etc). So if a video server was just a 'carrier' for whatever data entered it, what if they accepted data in email form, regardless of if it came from a verifiable address?

Seems to me this sort of setup would let people in countries/careers concerned about particular issues make sure their video got out into the wild, while still being as assured of privacy as you can get (the example that springs to mind might be video from the riots in Seattle, where so many people thought the video was being supressed or doctored on the normal news media).

Civil Disobedience, or just plain cheating?

[ptbrown]

And we get flustered when the MPAA says open source is thievery.

Did this thought process at any time consider whether doing this would be legal? I assume this would come under the jurisdiction of Australian law. I know that the US forbids retransmission of television, and iCrave took advantage of Canada's less restrictive laws. But what would the situation be down there?

I don't mean to argue against breaking the law when the law is unjust. I understand hosting a mirror of DeCSS, and before that PGP, and before that the E911 document, etc. And yes, the IOC is way out of control and needs a serious bitch-slapping. But what you're saying sounds not so much like a righteous stand, as it does a greedy child lusting after the cookie jar.

Unless, of course, you intend to do this without using any "official" broadcast material. In which case, I wish you all the luck in the world. Unfortunately, I doubt that would be enough. But hey, you can't expect to accomplish anything if you're afraid of the impossible.

Usenet

[Vassily Overveight]

Consider packaging the video of a particular event into a single file and making it available on usenet (larger files have to be broken up across multiple messages, of course). The distribution and mirroring will be taken care of for you, and there already exist a number of anonymizing methods.

Re:Well... How much CPU does it take to encode vid

[backtick]

So what level of quality would be considered acceptable to most people (geeks, mostly, because I still don't think too many normal people find out about freenet and gnutella and such easily)?

Re:Civil Disobedience, or just plain cheating?

[backtick]

One of the basic tenants of this is not HOW to do it. I'm mostly just wondering what it means *if* the technology is there to allow it?

See, from what I can tell, people are now expecting their news and reports to be live online. During the Concorde crash, a lot of good information about it was available online before the television media really had a chance to get their hands into it. When there are conflicts and wars, online video and media is often the only way for some information to get out of an affected area.

The main followup isn't really "Why does the IOC have complete control over the media at an internation event that is supposed to celebrate the athletic ability of as many nations as possible in a community atmosphere?", but rather is "How plausible is it to think that any entity can allow information to be broadcast locally, but expect that info to be withheld from the public at large, with legalities being the sole prevention, even though people are now accustomed to getting all their information live and from the source?"

Re:Civil Disobedience, or just plain cheating?

[ptbrown]

Well then that's pretty clear. And you're right that the internet defies control of information. It is the situation that the American colonies were in with the printing press. Sure, presses had been around for ages, but by the early 18th century America was prosperous (filthy-stinkin-rich, really) enough that the ability for almost anyone to have a few broadshits printed up and posted around was trivial. Much like the ability to create a web site today. And with a meager (considering the current rate of growth) increase in bandwidth, any kind of media becomes fair game. But that doesn't mean a revolution will occur right away. Being imprisoned for printing seditious material was incredibly common for decades before a number of particularly intelligent and devious men started talking about rebelling. And a lot of people are going to have their asses sued off for sending stuff over the internet for years to come. Whether it will eventually turn into a political movement I can't say. But for anyone attempting to use the internet for technically illegal acts, the trick is to do so in a way that when you are brought to face the wrath of the law, it should be perfectly clear to anyone who the good guys and the bad guys are.