Actually, I kinda figured that, because you’re actually one of the mellowest folks here.

@Leon:
“When will people learn that there is a difference between the application of technology and the technology itself.
“Deep Packet inspection” has existed for as long as packets have. Sniffers have been used to debug, watch for, and understand network communications for… well ever.”

Some of us know that. (Of course, some of us also know that the CIA armed and trained a great many of the people we’re now supposed to call “the Iraqi Insurgency” — not to mention Bin Laden himself.

The ironic thing is, in the Net Neutrality/DPI squabble, BOTH of the main “sides” have good points:
It IS problematic for providers to engage in censorship, or block apps entirely, or suchlike.
(Ignoring, of course, that there’s a big difference between “they blocked bit-torrent! I can’t use it!” and “They prioritize bit-torrent traffic lower during peak usage hours.” That’s really all “throttling” amounts too: If you’ve ever used Utorrent, you have the capacity to impose “bandwidth-caps” on other users just as much as the ISP does on YOU, but most people don’t bother to think about that. We all love a nice, juicy doomsday-scenario, complete with an obvious “devil”.

I’ll admit that I’m not immune to this — else I wouldn’t have gotten so damnably intense about it.
I take stuff just as seriously as everybody else here — sometimes, too seriously.

Cheers!

Remember all the bad press against debuggers as tools to violate DRM & IP? Lets not link another *vital* internet technology to another political fight, regardless of it’s intentions.

Hmm….I “brought” that new guy by referencing his blog-post.
(And I DId prompt a rather more substantive explanation of what DPI is.)
But hey, cool.

That wasn’t me, Henry: It was a troll signing itself in as ‘Jon’.

This was posted by a troll signing itself ‘Jon’ and has been edited: I left the link (to the Privacy Commissioner’s anti-DPI page and already cited in several p2pnet posts) in – Jon

Cheers!

My only major quibble is with this:

“In attending to surveillance at a broad level of social analysis, David Lyon notes that surveillance is “the focused, systematic and routine attention to personal details for purposes of influence, management, protection or detection” that it is “deliberate and depends on certain protocols and techniques” (Lyon 2007: 14). Lyon’s definition corresponds with potential uses of DPI technologies to influence action though the alteration of data packets, and management of action by potentially limiting websites that can be visited and online actions that can be performed.”

Oooh, that sounds uber-scary! “They” might “potentially” limit — or merely “influence” — your online activities.
Except, Y’know what? DPI is merely a fine-grained version of what’s already happening.
Shallow packet-inspection (like what your firewall is probably already doing) can prevent connectivity entirely. Any technology using it “knows” where you’re connecting to, as far as IP address and suchlike. (So I gotta ask: is that “your private data”? If so, firewalls should be banned.) Not sarcasm — just real skepticism in regard to how government wonks do stuff.

As for MPI, it’s even more super-evil than SPI, because:
“When a packet enters the proxy, it is analyzed against a parse-list that systems administrators can easily update. A parse-list is somewhat more subtle than a blacklist. Whereas the latter establishes that something is either permissible or impermissible, a parse-list allows specific packet-types to be allowed or disallowed based on their data format types and associated location on the Internet, rather than on their IP address alone. Using MPI devices, administrators could prevent client computers from receiving flash files from YouTube, or image files from social networking sites.”

I can hear it now — “Ooh! The big evil providers could block Youtube and force me to use MSN video instead!”
(Oh but wait, they could do that really simply on their side NOW, simply by changing their local DNS so that “www.youtube.com” forcibly resolves to the destination they *want* it to. Hell, they don’t even need to do anything on *their* side — before I was running the firewall I have now, I had to reinstall Xp three times simply because I kept getting infested with a forced-redirect thing where the only thing my web-browser was capable of displaying was a freaky gay-sex porn site. (Look it up — it’s very real.)

“It is important to distinguish between surveillance, which is evidenced when ISPs use DPI devices to inspect each packet that passes along their network,and search, which entails looking for a particular element of network traffic. Surveillance extends beyond search because “[r]ather than targeting specific information, surveillance can ensnare a significant amount of data beyond any originally sought” (Solove 2008: 109). In making this distinction, Solove is calling attention to potential breadth of digital surveillance, while also implicitly identifying that there is a qualitative difference between broad-based social surveillance, and individual surveillance or particular searches for information.

While broad surveillance may accidentally capture information beyond that sought, ’search’ surveillance – the specific targeting of an information-type – may provide the surveying party with a deep field of data that is relatively limited in its scope. Whereas broad surveillance may identify how popular VoIP applications are on an ISP’s network, a targeted search of a customer’s Internet habits may reveal precisely how much that individual uses such applications. The distinction between broad and narrow surveillance processes raises questions of the felt and realized impacts of surveillance, and whether multifaceted responses to different calibers of surveillance are needed when addressing ISP uses of DPI equipment. In both broad and narrow surveillance procedures, questions of who is, or may be, discriminated against must also be raised, as must the possibilities of ’social sorting’ that may arise following the deployment of DPI technologies.”

All I’m going to say about the above is: if it’s “It is important to distinguish between surveillance, which is evidenced when ISPs use DPI devices to inspect each packet that passes along their network,and search, which entails looking for a particular element of network traffic”, then why does he fail to do so later in the article? Or are you classifying things into “surveillance”, and broad vs. narrow search?

More importantly, just what exactly is it that DPI opponents want to have the government ban?
Is it the ability to potentially *block* packets from reaching their destination? Goodbye to even the simplest and most basic firewalls.
Or maybe it’s the ability to slow down traffic (derisively — and innacurately — described as “throttling”). So much for time-sensitive applications. So much for all that Buck Rogers bullshit about how doctors will be able to do surgery remotely. After all, we wouldn’t want somebody’s WoW gaming-session to suffer from extra lag (Strawman? I don’t think so.)

Or maybe what DPI opponents are against is the forensic analysis aspect (they can’t “hear” what you say on Skype, but they can merely tell that you’re using it.) How this is a violation, I have no idea. So they know I’m using Skype?

Hint: SO CAN THE GOVERNMENT — ESPECIALLY after you empower them to enforce something like Net-Neutrality. I mean, we *know* that the NSA likes to have the backdoor to things. We already *know* their extreme ambivalence toward end-user encryption.

So just what exactly is it that is so uniquely evil about DPI, that isn’t already equally “threatening” in other forms?
And more importantly (which brings me back to my original point, which everybody just dismissed as me being too intense) — how do you possibly draft legislation which prevents the “bad” uses, without essentially destroying the Internet in the process.

Personally, I think collusion between governments and businessfolk (much less, legislation FORCED by corporate lobbyists under cover of “protecting consumers”.

Thus, I’m pretty sure BOTH sides of this “debate” are bullshit:
But, glad to see the clarification here. It was informative in the extreme