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| Monday, 14 July 2008 | |
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New protection plan unveiled by P2P advocacy group as filesharer lands in hot water…
Peer-to-peer (P2P) pressure group the US-headquartered Distributed Computing Industry Association (DCIA) has announced an industry-wide programme to protect P2P users against the inadvertent sharing of personal or sensitive data. The launch of the DCIA programme culminates a year of work among leading P2P companies and other technology sector participants, along with US federal regulatory authorities. It also follows reports of an incident involving the Wagner Resource Group investment firm of the A document summarising the DCIA programme is posted on the organisation’s website at www.dcia.info/activities/ispg/inadvertentsharingprotection.pdf The summary document begins with a glossary defining terms specifically related to subject matter concerns, such as ‘recursive sharing’, ‘sensitive file type’, and ‘user-originated file’, as well as protective measures, such as ‘affirmative step’. It then outlines seven steps that are required to be in compliance with the programme. These include 1) default settings, 2) file-sharing controls, 3) shared-folder configurations, 4) user-error protections, 5) sensitive-file-type restrictions, 6) file-sharing status communications, and 7) developer principles. The developer principles for P2P file-sharing software applications address feature disablement, uninstallation, new-version upgrades, and file-sharing settings. Finally, the document includes an eighth optional step for added consumer protection that relates to inactive states of the P2P file-sharing application (fully disconnected from the P2P network and running in the background). “We are grateful for the participation of industry-leading companies in a collaborative process with regulatory agency representatives that has resulted in an excellent work product. While adoption is a voluntary decision to be made by each company on an individual basis, we are confident of wide acceptance, and will not only encourage, but also monitor compliance,” comments DCIA ceo Marty Lafferty. And in other P2P news German deep packet inspection (DPI) specialist ipoque has published the results of its ‘Internet Study 2007’. Inter alia this indicates that P2P produced, on average, between 49% and 83% of all Internet traffic, with nighttime peaks of over 95%. ipoque says that at the time of its survey about 20% of P2P traffic was encrypted – a value expected to have increased significantly since. The German company limited its P2P pulse-taking to BitTorrent and eDonkey, but says this is not really a limitation as the two protocols combined account for between 70% and 97% of all P2P traffic, depending on the region. The LimeWire P2P application that was cited in the reports of the breach of confidentiality relating to Wagner Resource clients is a participant in, and supporter of, the new DCIA protection programme. John Williamson |
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