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UK ISP Sky feeds realtime customer bandwidth data to litigous anti-piracy firm

351 points by azalemeth 5y ago

srmarm 5y ago
I'm surprised it's not made more clear in the article, but it's important to note that as well as being an ISP, Sky are a more traditional subscription TV provider. They have the exclusive rights for most of the Premier League TV on their channels (paying ~ $1.65bn a year for the these rights[0]) - it's probably the main pull to their , so it's very much in their interest to fight off piracy of it. [0] https://www.sky.com/help/articles/sky-channel-changes https://www.sky.com/help/articles/sky-channel-changes
- MereInterest 5y ago
  Something being in their best interest doesn't mean that it's ethical. This is still a gross invasion of privacy. I agree that it is in their best interest, but would argue that their TV and internet services should be split into separate companies so that the company interest and the user interest align.
  - Mindwipe 5y ago
    Gross invasion of privacy? They aren't doing blockings of individuals here, they are looking at aggregate traffic to certain sites, and literally every ISP on the world does that because they need to optimise their peering arrangements for high traffic, high QoS sites (such as installing OpenCache for Netflix).
    - paranoidrobot 5y ago
      The difference between aggregating traffic for the purposes of internal network management, and sending traffic data to a third party is not hard to see. It's also a vastly different type of aggregation.
      - Mindwipe 5y ago
        > The difference between aggregating traffic for the purposes of internal network management, and sending traffic data to a third party is not hard to see. Is it? If they send it to a third party technical subcontractor for internal network management is that bad? If they publish a chart publicly of the top ten websites our users visit is that bad? (That's very common). If they pass the data to geofiltering vendors to use for threat intelligence to reduce DDOS attacks is that bad? Fraud? What exactly is the obvious line here that you think exists, other than "I don't like copyright."
        jollybean 5y ago
        They are sending it to a third party so that party can use indirect behavioural information to enforce commercial contracts. Imagine McDonald's selling data to your insurance provider so they can help determine your rates etc.. It's definitely out of bounds and worth putting up a fuss over.
        crtasm 5y ago
        But they're not sending any customer data in this case. It's a list of IPs of servers that are seeing traffic spikes on their network, not IPs of customers connecting to them.
    - White_Wolf 5y ago
      By your logic you'd by fine with your phone provider handing over all call logs and recordings to the govt too along with full browsing history, location data... you know... since they already have the data.
      - Mindwipe 5y ago
        > By your logic you'd by fine with your phone provider handing over all call logs and recordings to the govt too along with full browsing history, location data... you know... since they already have the data. In the UK all phone providers are required to keep all call logs, location data etc for six months to hand over to the government in a variety of circumstances, so that ship sailed a long time ago. However, that is the most broken comparison I could possibly imagine, so no.
      - denton-scratch 5y ago
        We're not talking about "call logs". Sky is collecting information about where their heavy traffic is going, which as Mindwipe says, is just sensible network management. Then they share some of that data with 3rd-parties. That's not information about their customers; it's the IP addresses of IPTV servers they've been streaming from. They could be sharing information about which customers have been streaming from those addresses; but that's not what the article is claiming. I subscribe to Sky satellite for TV. I get my broadband elsewhere. The Sky box is not susceptible to inspection, and since it integrates online "catchup" services, it might well be using my broadband connection to send home information about my viewing habits. The Sky box also creates a shadow wifi network, by default. The shadow network uses at least two wifi channels. On the face of it, this is to allow multiple Sky boxes on the same household account to communicate with one-another, share recordings and so on. I'm not keen to have wifi networks I don't control piggy-backing on my ISP connection; and since I only have a single Sky box, I disable toe wifi. I trust Sky as far as I could throw them, so I have plans to find out what my Sky box is talking to, and firewall it.
        88 5y ago
        If you are using one of the newer Sky Q boxes, my anecdotal understanding is that they phone home a fairly terrifying amount of telemetry data. Would certainly be a fascinating project to MITM and figure out exactly what is being sent.
  - enkid 5y ago
    I think the parent comment was highlighting the conflict of interest and moral hazard here, not excusing the behavior.
  - tablespoon 5y ago
    > Something being in their best interest doesn't mean that it's ethical. They don't care about ethics if it gets in the way of making money. That's the beast that is capitalism.
- Lio 5y ago
  Yep that makes sense. I would also expect BT and their subsidiaries (plus.net, giffgaff, ee, etc) to be involved as BT also off a subscription based BT Sports service. Got to wonder if simply using a VPN would sort the problem out or if they could make the case in court that the volume of traffic and the time it was downloaded matches the pirate stream. Seems dubious.
  - petepete 5y ago
    I bet Virgin Media will be under pressure to follow suit too, seeing how lots (probably most) of their TV offering is from Sky.
  - mprev 5y ago
    Not that it really matters but GiffGaff is owned by the newly combined Virgin Media O2.
    - signal11 5y ago
      Yes, IIRC Giffgaff was originally owned by Telefonica, O2’s parent. Never by BT.
      - Lio 5y ago
        Ok right you are. What's weird though is that O2 were once BT's mobile arm (BT Cellnet) so it's all still a bit incestuous. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O2_(UK) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O2_(UK)
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - bentcorner 5y ago
    While a VPN might technically work it doesn't excuse the overstep from Sky. IMO this shouldn't have happened in the first place. Makes me wonder if we (technically proficient users) are coming at this from the wrong angle. Ads? No problem, adblock. Bittorrent scare letters? No problem, VPN. Tracking? No problem, pihole/firefox/linux/lineageos/whatever. We are solving these problems at the wrong end and are leaving less-capable users behind.
- HighChaparral 5y ago
  Precisely. I would have been shocked if they weren’t doing this. Despite their attempts to diversify their offerings ober the years, their Premier League coverage is the lynchpin of their entire business.
- toyg 5y ago
  That's sadly the case for most large-scale UK providers, they all have an interest in content. The "convergence" mantra in business circles made that an inevitability ever since the times of AOL-TimeWarner. You can look at Netflix today to see very clearly why nobody wants to remain a "dumb pipe" in the long run, once they get big enough.
- koyote 5y ago
  Also worth mentioning that they were recently (2018, I guess not that recently anymore...) bought by Comcast.
thinkingemote 5y ago
Sky is a subsidiary of Comcast the largest ISP in the USA, some readers might be interested to learn. It is also a now a broadcaster, creating and producing movies, TV shows etc... so there's another interest in anti-piracy from within.
- fy20 5y ago
  It's more the other way around... Sky has been a broadcaster and producer in Europe for a long time, and in the mid 2000s got into the ISP game thanks to local loop unbundling (allowing third parties to use shared telephone infrastructure) in the UK.
antihero 5y ago
Could this mean they "accidentally" block VPN provider servers if enough Sky subscribers stream games over VPN? Also, streaming live sports in the UK is an absolute garbage fire of different providers each with exclusivity so you'd have to have elevel billion subscriptions to various shitty companies (who still bombard you with ads) to reliably watch sports here.
- Mindwipe 5y ago
  By "evelel billion" you mean four. With no sport on more than three (which goes down to two if you exclude the one weekend Amazon have Premier League rights on Amazon Prime).
hughrr 5y ago
Move to Zen or Andrews and Arnold if you are in the UK. Larger ISPs are cancer here.
- azalemeth 5y ago
  "My mother" is an A&A customer as she lives somewhere where FFTC is the best form of broadband you can get (and I pay the bill -- A&A are amazing and deserve all the praise they get). Where I live, my partner subscribes to Virgin Media as they're irritatingly the only ones who can provide a ~1 GBit pipe where we live. I just had a look at both of them again, and whilst Virgin offers 1.1 GBit, Zen and A&A offer ~40 MBit. I don't live in London, and as far as I know, there are no other high bandwidth fibre or cable providers in the area. Do you know why? I know Virgin has its own infrastructure, but it irritates me that BT have been forced to unbundle their services, yet the cable cartel have not.
  - Angostura 5y ago
    Might be worth looking into https://communityfibre.co.uk https://communityfibre.co.uk in London - they are digging up the streets outside my house in East London at the moment. I intend to move from Virgin when they go live here. They already cover other London areas
    - oarsinsync 5y ago
      +1 for communityfibre, and another +1 for hyperoptic. They're both super reliable once installed and running. I've got Hyperoptic 150Mbps in one place, and CF 1Gbps in another, both are rock solid (and symmetric upload and download).
      - kmlx 5y ago
        hyperoptic 1gbps here. been with them for 4 years now. very happy. no issues, everything is up all the time.
    - zimpenfish 5y ago
londons_explore 5y ago
A VPN would trivially get around this protection, my making the users traffic not visible to the ISP, and therefore the per-IP block ineffective. And a large proportion of users who watch TV online already have a VPN for netflix etc.
- cutler 5y ago
  Are you saying a Netflix sub comes with a VPN setup or something? Please elaborate.
  - pirocks 5y ago
    No they mean people have a VPN for watching netflix content not available in their country.
- gambiting 5y ago
  >>And a large proportion of users I'd love to have a source for that. I'd be honestly shocked, surprised even, if it was even as many as 1% total.
ZiiS 5y ago
Sky _are_ a litigious anti-piracy firm
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
rcarmo 5y ago
Not really surprised. Back in 2015 (when I was still at a telco) we were contacted to sell our DNS resolver logs for "analytics" purposes. They were inordinately interested in getting hold of anything that resembled PII or where they could have a close enough match to advertisement trackers.
daniam 5y ago
Some clearly haven't read the article properly. It's not individual customer bandwidth data that's being monitoed and transferred to a 3rd party as inferred, but data on which endpoints are the source of most of that bandwidth usage on the basis they may be pirate IPTV sources, partliularly when they spring up at a similar time to a big event starting. And it's no big secret, Sky announced to the world they were doing it back in 2018: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDNw3t-2euU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDNw3t-2euU, video described as "A fascinating look at how Sky Broadcasting in the U.K. is using Google Cloud to combat piracy of licensed sports content to defend the rights of copyrighted content owners everywhere and reclaim lost revenue in the process."
- tyingq 5y ago
  So it is individual customer bandwidth, just not ALL individual customer bandwidth. That's only slightly less objectionable. It's also pretty clearly just a correlation, and not proof.
  - daniam 5y ago
    Erm, no. Read it again.
    - daniam 5y ago
      Better still, watch the video I linked to.
      - daniam 5y ago
        It's a legal requirement for UK ISPs to block these pirate sites for their customers. The IPs identified are further verified as licensed content abusers before any further action is taken.
    - tyingq 5y ago
      I was reading your comment, this part: "but data on which endpoints are the source of most of that bandwidth usage on the basis they may be pirate IPTV sources, partliularly when they spring up at a similar time to a big event starting" Which sounds like a correlation to me. "Source of most that bandwidth...when they spring up at a similar time"
mikeiz404 5y ago
I’m not sure how I would update the title but to clarify it’s not all bandwidth data that is shared but rather a list of non customer IPs (along with ports, and bandwidth usage) which are sending data to customers over a given rate. Note: Not trying to nitpick but I think it’s important to be precise when making these claims. It appears that instead of monitoring customer IP addresses, Sky is compiling data on which IP addresses subscribers are pulling most data from during (and potentially before) match or event times. Sky then uploads the highest-trafficked IP addresses along with the port the traffic is streamed on to the S3 bucket mentioned above, every five minutes. It is then accessed by the anti-piracy company which, every five minutes, extracts the IP, bandwidth rate, and the port number that bandwidth is on. At the time of the document’s publication, the Sky ‘Top Talker’ threshold for the Premier League’s ‘RedBeard’ module was 100mbps. The IP address information provided by the ISP that exceeds this limit then appears to be cross-referenced by IP address and port number with data obtained during game week scanning at Friend MTS. It is then processed accordingly.
bob229 5y ago
Who needs a pirate stream. I’ve got 6 people on skygo, split 6 ways it’s basically free

351 points by azalemeth 5y ago

I'm surprised it's not made more clear in the article, but it's important to note that as well as being an ISP, Sky are a more traditional subscription TV provider. They have the exclusive rights for most of the Premier League TV on their channels (paying ~ $1.65bn a year for the these rights[0]) - it's probably the main pull to their , so it's very much in their interest to fight off piracy of it. [0] https://www.sky.com/help/articles/sky-channel-changes https://www.sky.com/help/articles/sky-channel-changes

MereInterest 5y ago
Something being in their best interest doesn't mean that it's ethical. This is still a gross invasion of privacy. I agree that it is in their best interest, but would argue that their TV and internet services should be split into separate companies so that the company interest and the user interest align.
- Mindwipe 5y ago
  Gross invasion of privacy? They aren't doing blockings of individuals here, they are looking at aggregate traffic to certain sites, and literally every ISP on the world does that because they need to optimise their peering arrangements for high traffic, high QoS sites (such as installing OpenCache for Netflix).
  - paranoidrobot 5y ago
    The difference between aggregating traffic for the purposes of internal network management, and sending traffic data to a third party is not hard to see. It's also a vastly different type of aggregation.
    - Mindwipe 5y ago
      > The difference between aggregating traffic for the purposes of internal network management, and sending traffic data to a third party is not hard to see. Is it? If they send it to a third party technical subcontractor for internal network management is that bad? If they publish a chart publicly of the top ten websites our users visit is that bad? (That's very common). If they pass the data to geofiltering vendors to use for threat intelligence to reduce DDOS attacks is that bad? Fraud? What exactly is the obvious line here that you think exists, other than "I don't like copyright."
      - jollybean 5y ago
        They are sending it to a third party so that party can use indirect behavioural information to enforce commercial contracts. Imagine McDonald's selling data to your insurance provider so they can help determine your rates etc.. It's definitely out of bounds and worth putting up a fuss over.
        crtasm 5y ago
        But they're not sending any customer data in this case. It's a list of IPs of servers that are seeing traffic spikes on their network, not IPs of customers connecting to them.
  - White_Wolf 5y ago
    By your logic you'd by fine with your phone provider handing over all call logs and recordings to the govt too along with full browsing history, location data... you know... since they already have the data.
    - Mindwipe 5y ago
      > By your logic you'd by fine with your phone provider handing over all call logs and recordings to the govt too along with full browsing history, location data... you know... since they already have the data. In the UK all phone providers are required to keep all call logs, location data etc for six months to hand over to the government in a variety of circumstances, so that ship sailed a long time ago. However, that is the most broken comparison I could possibly imagine, so no.
    - denton-scratch 5y ago
      We're not talking about "call logs". Sky is collecting information about where their heavy traffic is going, which as Mindwipe says, is just sensible network management. Then they share some of that data with 3rd-parties. That's not information about their customers; it's the IP addresses of IPTV servers they've been streaming from. They could be sharing information about which customers have been streaming from those addresses; but that's not what the article is claiming. I subscribe to Sky satellite for TV. I get my broadband elsewhere. The Sky box is not susceptible to inspection, and since it integrates online "catchup" services, it might well be using my broadband connection to send home information about my viewing habits. The Sky box also creates a shadow wifi network, by default. The shadow network uses at least two wifi channels. On the face of it, this is to allow multiple Sky boxes on the same household account to communicate with one-another, share recordings and so on. I'm not keen to have wifi networks I don't control piggy-backing on my ISP connection; and since I only have a single Sky box, I disable toe wifi. I trust Sky as far as I could throw them, so I have plans to find out what my Sky box is talking to, and firewall it.
      - 88 5y ago
        If you are using one of the newer Sky Q boxes, my anecdotal understanding is that they phone home a fairly terrifying amount of telemetry data. Would certainly be a fascinating project to MITM and figure out exactly what is being sent.
- enkid 5y ago
  I think the parent comment was highlighting the conflict of interest and moral hazard here, not excusing the behavior.
- tablespoon 5y ago
  > Something being in their best interest doesn't mean that it's ethical. They don't care about ethics if it gets in the way of making money. That's the beast that is capitalism.
Lio 5y ago
Yep that makes sense. I would also expect BT and their subsidiaries (plus.net, giffgaff, ee, etc) to be involved as BT also off a subscription based BT Sports service. Got to wonder if simply using a VPN would sort the problem out or if they could make the case in court that the volume of traffic and the time it was downloaded matches the pirate stream. Seems dubious.
- petepete 5y ago
  I bet Virgin Media will be under pressure to follow suit too, seeing how lots (probably most) of their TV offering is from Sky.
- mprev 5y ago
  Not that it really matters but GiffGaff is owned by the newly combined Virgin Media O2.
  - signal11 5y ago
    Yes, IIRC Giffgaff was originally owned by Telefonica, O2’s parent. Never by BT.
    - Lio 5y ago
      Ok right you are. What's weird though is that O2 were once BT's mobile arm (BT Cellnet) so it's all still a bit incestuous. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O2_(UK) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O2_(UK)
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- bentcorner 5y ago
  While a VPN might technically work it doesn't excuse the overstep from Sky. IMO this shouldn't have happened in the first place. Makes me wonder if we (technically proficient users) are coming at this from the wrong angle. Ads? No problem, adblock. Bittorrent scare letters? No problem, VPN. Tracking? No problem, pihole/firefox/linux/lineageos/whatever. We are solving these problems at the wrong end and are leaving less-capable users behind.
HighChaparral 5y ago
Precisely. I would have been shocked if they weren’t doing this. Despite their attempts to diversify their offerings ober the years, their Premier League coverage is the lynchpin of their entire business.
toyg 5y ago
That's sadly the case for most large-scale UK providers, they all have an interest in content. The "convergence" mantra in business circles made that an inevitability ever since the times of AOL-TimeWarner. You can look at Netflix today to see very clearly why nobody wants to remain a "dumb pipe" in the long run, once they get big enough.
koyote 5y ago
Also worth mentioning that they were recently (2018, I guess not that recently anymore...) bought by Comcast.

thinkingemote 5y ago

Sky is a subsidiary of Comcast the largest ISP in the USA, some readers might be interested to learn. It is also a now a broadcaster, creating and producing movies, TV shows etc... so there's another interest in anti-piracy from within.

fy20 5y ago
It's more the other way around... Sky has been a broadcaster and producer in Europe for a long time, and in the mid 2000s got into the ISP game thanks to local loop unbundling (allowing third parties to use shared telephone infrastructure) in the UK.

antihero 5y ago

Could this mean they "accidentally" block VPN provider servers if enough Sky subscribers stream games over VPN? Also, streaming live sports in the UK is an absolute garbage fire of different providers each with exclusivity so you'd have to have elevel billion subscriptions to various shitty companies (who still bombard you with ads) to reliably watch sports here.

Mindwipe 5y ago
By "evelel billion" you mean four. With no sport on more than three (which goes down to two if you exclude the one weekend Amazon have Premier League rights on Amazon Prime).

hughrr 5y ago

Move to Zen or Andrews and Arnold if you are in the UK. Larger ISPs are cancer here.

azalemeth 5y ago
"My mother" is an A&A customer as she lives somewhere where FFTC is the best form of broadband you can get (and I pay the bill -- A&A are amazing and deserve all the praise they get). Where I live, my partner subscribes to Virgin Media as they're irritatingly the only ones who can provide a ~1 GBit pipe where we live. I just had a look at both of them again, and whilst Virgin offers 1.1 GBit, Zen and A&A offer ~40 MBit. I don't live in London, and as far as I know, there are no other high bandwidth fibre or cable providers in the area. Do you know why? I know Virgin has its own infrastructure, but it irritates me that BT have been forced to unbundle their services, yet the cable cartel have not.
- Angostura 5y ago
  Might be worth looking into https://communityfibre.co.uk https://communityfibre.co.uk in London - they are digging up the streets outside my house in East London at the moment. I intend to move from Virgin when they go live here. They already cover other London areas
  - oarsinsync 5y ago
    +1 for communityfibre, and another +1 for hyperoptic. They're both super reliable once installed and running. I've got Hyperoptic 150Mbps in one place, and CF 1Gbps in another, both are rock solid (and symmetric upload and download).
    - kmlx 5y ago
      hyperoptic 1gbps here. been with them for 4 years now. very happy. no issues, everything is up all the time.
  - zimpenfish 5y ago

londons_explore 5y ago

A VPN would trivially get around this protection, my making the users traffic not visible to the ISP, and therefore the per-IP block ineffective. And a large proportion of users who watch TV online already have a VPN for netflix etc.

cutler 5y ago
Are you saying a Netflix sub comes with a VPN setup or something? Please elaborate.
- pirocks 5y ago
  No they mean people have a VPN for watching netflix content not available in their country.
gambiting 5y ago
>>And a large proportion of users I'd love to have a source for that. I'd be honestly shocked, surprised even, if it was even as many as 1% total.

ZiiS 5y ago

Sky _are_ a litigious anti-piracy firm

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

rcarmo 5y ago

Not really surprised. Back in 2015 (when I was still at a telco) we were contacted to sell our DNS resolver logs for "analytics" purposes. They were inordinately interested in getting hold of anything that resembled PII or where they could have a close enough match to advertisement trackers.

daniam 5y ago

Some clearly haven't read the article properly. It's not individual customer bandwidth data that's being monitoed and transferred to a 3rd party as inferred, but data on which endpoints are the source of most of that bandwidth usage on the basis they may be pirate IPTV sources, partliularly when they spring up at a similar time to a big event starting. And it's no big secret, Sky announced to the world they were doing it back in 2018: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDNw3t-2euU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDNw3t-2euU, video described as "A fascinating look at how Sky Broadcasting in the U.K. is using Google Cloud to combat piracy of licensed sports content to defend the rights of copyrighted content owners everywhere and reclaim lost revenue in the process."

tyingq 5y ago
So it is individual customer bandwidth, just not ALL individual customer bandwidth. That's only slightly less objectionable. It's also pretty clearly just a correlation, and not proof.
- daniam 5y ago
  Erm, no. Read it again.
  - daniam 5y ago
    Better still, watch the video I linked to.
    - daniam 5y ago
      It's a legal requirement for UK ISPs to block these pirate sites for their customers. The IPs identified are further verified as licensed content abusers before any further action is taken.
  - tyingq 5y ago
    I was reading your comment, this part: "but data on which endpoints are the source of most of that bandwidth usage on the basis they may be pirate IPTV sources, partliularly when they spring up at a similar time to a big event starting" Which sounds like a correlation to me. "Source of most that bandwidth...when they spring up at a similar time"

mikeiz404 5y ago

I’m not sure how I would update the title but to clarify it’s not all bandwidth data that is shared but rather a list of non customer IPs (along with ports, and bandwidth usage) which are sending data to customers over a given rate. Note: Not trying to nitpick but I think it’s important to be precise when making these claims. It appears that instead of monitoring customer IP addresses, Sky is compiling data on which IP addresses subscribers are pulling most data from during (and potentially before) match or event times. Sky then uploads the highest-trafficked IP addresses along with the port the traffic is streamed on to the S3 bucket mentioned above, every five minutes. It is then accessed by the anti-piracy company which, every five minutes, extracts the IP, bandwidth rate, and the port number that bandwidth is on. At the time of the document’s publication, the Sky ‘Top Talker’ threshold for the Premier League’s ‘RedBeard’ module was 100mbps. The IP address information provided by the ISP that exceeds this limit then appears to be cross-referenced by IP address and port number with data obtained during game week scanning at Friend MTS. It is then processed accordingly.

bob229 5y ago

Who needs a pirate stream. I’ve got 6 people on skygo, split 6 ways it’s basically free