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BBC Worldwide claims VPN users who use a lot of traffic are pirates – forgets something important..

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Oh commercial arm of the BBC, you are such a bunch of lovable silly fools!

*ruffles their hair in playful manner*

Over at TorrentFreak, it’s claimed BBC Worldwide has been advising the Australian government about piracy, and that VPN users that consume a lot of traffic are probably pirates attempting to bypass geographic blocks and other naughty business.

Oh dear.

First of all, let’s define what a VPN actually is.

Virtual Private Network

It is a tunnelled connection between two endpoints deploying encryption designed to keep the flow of traffic secure from being snooped upon.  It’s intended purpose is to protect sensitive and confidential data.

Which is why film and TV production companies use them to secure data in transit over public networks between a remote worker, a post-production facility, or some other third party and the studio.

Yes, it can be used to bypass geographic blocks.  But then again the mouse I’m currently using could be used as a weapon (throwing it at somebody across the room), or a spoon and a lighter can be combined in order to take illegal substances.

Pretty much everything you can think of can be used for nefarious purposes.  Yet we don’t have Mice Monitors patrolling offices or The Royal Society for the Prevention of Abuse to Spoons.

So it seems that BBC Worldwide has forgotten that many production companies and post-productions facilities in the film and TV industry are made to use VPNs and UDP-based “fast transfer” technologies to transfer large volumes of filmed content to studios and clients.  Or vice versa.

This fact should be much more apparent to BBC Worldwide now that the BBC is commissioning many productions using third party independent production companies.

Not all of this traffic goes through specialist media ISPs like Sohonet, indeed,  a lot of it often goes through bog standard business and consumer ISPs.

If my memory serves me correctly, the first and second Harry Potter movies shot at Leavesden Studios used an ordinary ISP (running at around 512Kbs) with VPN end points (with dedicated hardware) to all the major post-production companies working on the film.

Obviously not much could be sent up and down the line because it wasn’t much cop for film data – no, that was a motorcycle courier job, but the point is this was shortly before Leavesden had the infrastructure in place to have dedicated leased lines from the likes of Sohonet put in (which it did for the third HP film, thank goodness because we were using antiquated VPN kit which was bloody awful to use).

We had staff members VPN into the office from homes, the internet connectivity provided by BT business broadband (therefore we could get static IPs which made maintaining the connections nice and easy).

We had people in remote locations sending in data via VPNs.  We gave dedicated VPN boxes and software to our clients to allow them easy access to dailies and approvals without compromising on security.

BBC Worldwide cannot assume that all VPN traffic with large quantities of bandwidth is illegitimate.  It can’t, indeed it mustn’t, even think “probably”.

That the BBC suffered compromised material from Doctor Who was more than likely their own fault.  Were they using deep packet inspection and auditing on their firewalls?  Did they lock down access to physical media on all computers?  It’s things like these that are the problem for the modern film studio or broadcaster.

It makes me very angry that the commercial division of a very technically competent organisation can be dumb enough to propose an unworkable scheme.   I expected better from BBC Worldwide.


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