Sky, Kontiki: ‘baaaad medicine’
p2p news / p2pnet: "Sky Chooses Kontiki’s Legitimate Peer-to-Peer Delivery Management System to Deliver Sky Movies and Sky Sports highlights via broadband to Sky digital customers," the latter boasts on its web page.
But, "I don’t like Sky by Broadband," says PC Doctor Adrian Kingsley-Hughes because, "it’s baaaad medicine and it’s gone off my system".
He says he had great expectations and was, "eager to give it a go". But he was quickly disillusioned. There was nothing new and moreover, "it’s slow and sluggish to download movies (nothing close to the 1 hour per movie that Sky claim) and certainly not something you can do when you want something because you are bored – you have to plan your viewing well in advance," he says.
But there’s an even darker side to the Sky by Broadband, Kingsley-Hughes goes on: it installs Kontiki, "to allow others to access the movie data that lives on your PC. This means that they entire Sky by Broadband system is a big P2P experiment and everyone wanting in on Sky by Broadband has to take part.
"I would imagine that this is to take the load off of the servers at Sky – they dish out the movie a few times and then it’s served from other viewer’s PCs. Sky mention this in their terms and conditions External Link, but nowhere else, and they certainly don’t make this clear during installation (Sky do mention it on their website FAQ External Link – but how many people are going to read that)."
Further on, "If you are on a limited bandwidth broadband service where you have a capped transfer limit or you get charged by the GB then Sky By Broadband is not for you, as you have no control over how much of your bandwidth is consumes," says Kingsley-Hughes. "Theoretically, if you download a popular movie then you could be streaming a lot of data to other users.
"This could cost some people a LOT of cash!"
Kontiki crawls into users’ systems as a "service" and uninstalling Sky by Broadband doesn’t do much good – "it has to be removed manually after uninstalling Sky by Broadband (I’m not sure if this is a mistake or by design). Sky’s own website gives very little information External Link on how to uninstall Kontiki."
Does this make you think of another entirely self-serving p2p application beginning with K?
Apparently, Kontiki also sends data about your PC to Sky, and there’s no mention as to how it’s protected from unauthorized access, although, "initial examination with Ethereal seems to show that all data is at least encrypted during transmission" and to make matters worse, "conveniently, all the uninstall information is currently unavailable on the Kontiki website External Link (typical).
However, on his site, Kingsley-Hughes details a Kill Kontiki script. So if your system is infested, head over to the PC Doctor for the cure.
Also See:
PC Doctor – Serious issues with Sky by Broadband service, February 26, 2006
Kontiki – Open Media Network, with DRM, April 26, 2005
