[Cryptography] BBC to deploy detection vans to snoop on internet users

[Ray Dillinger]

On 08/08/2016 09:18 PM, Sampo Syreeni wrote:

> It's being claimed that they take a picture of a neighbourhood and on
> the fly correlate the lighting variation in people's windows with the
> on-going program. That'd work equally for all modes of transmission, and
> FFT based hardware to do that sort of thing efficiently is out there
> already because of the advances in synthetic aperture, active scanning
> radar technology.

Generally speaking though that wouldn't work unless people happened
to be watching the shows at the exact same time they were being
broadcast.

While that was a reasonable assumption in pre-VCR days, and not too
unreasonable in the days when stolen cable was mostly directly plugged
into the TV set, it's becoming VERY unreasonable when people are
watching programs with their computers. First, there's a variable
delay while it's downloaded.  Second, it's downloaded in the default
case directly onto storage media.  For someone to be watching that
stream, and for their playback to be at the exact point of being
caught up to the broadcast, is both unlikely, and from the POV of
the watcher, undesirable.  It would mean, among other things, not
being able to skip commercials and other unwanted content delays.
It would also mean that the watcher hasn't, even once, jumped back
a minute to watch something again after being interrupted by, say,
the telephone.

Seriously, if that's how they're working, I'd expect it to not work
at all.

Surely they've got some better technology than that.

				Bear

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