Digital Piracy on the High Seas
Today’s discovery is worth a little bonus blog, I bet this will move some eyes in our country’s capital. As I tell the story, I will provide illustrations to support my claims and findings. This morning, I grabbed my coffee, and decided to sit down and enjoy a trip around the globe in our DigitalRanger Earthview product, powered by Google Earth, which shows us and our clients digital piracy in real time. I perused many countries and regions until a tiny dot in the middle of the ocean caused me to take a big sip of my hot coffee. After zooming in on the little dot it became bigger and it showed 121 peers last in the last 24 hours, with a total of 511 infringements in the same time frame. I was thinking “Damn, this is a bug I have to fix.” I assumed the coordinate system had to be wrong, and I was about to call the engineer when I looked at the information behind the IP address which read: “Apo United States Navy”. I investigated it and came to the conclusion that the little dot in EarthView was accurate! After further research, I was able to determine that this little dot was a Navy ship, whose soldiers where using the Internet to download content from one of our clients, illegally.
I became excited and got my hands on a database of all known government references, and plotted them into MARC, and what do you know, dots popped up in the middle of oceans around the globe. Not only that, but I had dots appearing where I could swear there is nothing but desert. I turned on adult content filters and even more dots showing up. I figured that I could estimate the amount of people (soldiers) on the dots (vessels) by observing how many peers the system revealed per dot, in a given time frame. One could easy guess with high accuracy what type of vessel or base I was actually staring at, and the digital piracy habits of their soldiers and crew.
DigitalRanger EarthView
Included is a sample of the dots showing one that I keep tracking in the area. I hope you all find my discovery interesting, and one that highlights the true power behind our MARC system. Our technology never ceases to amaze even its creator and the engineers who further its development. At one point during all of this, I was reminded of when I delivered services for the US government in DC some years back. The next thing that came to my mind was, “I should really find some foreign content to track, and keep tabs on their fleets as well.” I am absolutely stunned as to the many uses for our data - most people think this is only piracy data, but think about it, Nexicon reveals facts. We can show not only movies and music, but everything on the Internet in digital form. This information can provide a treasure of intelligence, revealing people’s habits and in turn, a whole new level of marketing research. Does anyone but me realize how powerful this data is for marketing purpose - Business Intelligence anyone?
This concludes this post, I better call it quits before I raise too many paranoid eyebrowns. Stay tuned for the next blog and please comment and share your feedback and thoughts with us.
November 17th, 2008 at 2:55 pm
Tommy,
This is the sort of thing that makes me think the Government would be really interested in what Nexicon has to offer. They could track troop movements simply by watching what the soldiers are doing on the internet during their off hours. Adds a new twist to the old saying “Loose lips sink ships”.
November 18th, 2008 at 8:52 pm
I’d be very interested in knowing how your IP address to geographical location mapping works.
Is it using timings of packets via multiple different routes and plotting a spot where they all converge or are you using a commercial database like MaxMind’s or is it something else entirely ?
Most importantly, can you plot the speed and direction that the ship is travelling in by this method or is this a case of “last known location” ?
November 18th, 2008 at 11:15 pm
Tommy,
I posted a link to an article re: video game piracy, is this an area Nexicon is going to be involved in? Love the blog and look forward to hearing more about the future of the company. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18665162/
November 19th, 2008 at 8:22 am
Very good question! Here is my short answer as I will not reveal to much, but what I can reveal is that we are probably the only company in the world, in commercial space that can do this today!
This is a mix of “maxmind” IP traffic triangulation with algorithms that include delay and hop calculation bundled with “clock skew” computations. So in short very advanced process, and yes if we wanted to we could compute the speed and projected path of the vessels, given off course if we have multiple readings (piracy downloads). Remind you that this is not rocket science and is very easy for us to accomplish, but only due to our world wide infrastructure and computing power that has taken us almost a decade to get in place.
November 19th, 2008 at 8:27 am
Gymmer, Yes you would think that! I have done numerous presentations for government officials and their eyes and shown our capabilities. But it never lead anywhere to business arrangements. Reason I believe was that they did not see any relation with content piracy and government security
But in fact content piracy has everything to do with all aspects of security and every little dark place on the internet.
But again also we have not focused on government sales yet either, but we are in the process of building that part of our organization and we are currently looking for people that is interested in positions for that, no need to say words like cutting edge, next generation solutions and then some
November 19th, 2008 at 8:42 am
gregh
Yes we are tracking gaming piracy, and we have been in discussions with them years back now. Personally I believe they are not ready to make an impact on the business yet. We have seen other giant industries go down the drain now due to piracy, so I am quite surprised the gaming companies are not signing up left and right with us making sure we are working towards a future solution that will benefit them. I can tell you that the meetings I have been in with gaming industry officials, I was surprised how little concern they have about piracy, in fact that in that discussion they where more concerned about Nexicon’s future possible monopoly to the industry, I took that as a big compliment off course, monopoly to me is assosciated with wealth.
I have a blog I am working on for gaming piracy that will come shortly to a browser near you! Stay tuned that should turn some heads.
November 19th, 2008 at 4:46 pm
Hei Tommy
Jeg hopper bukk over hele “English” pratet jeg, kun fordi jeg er dårlig på språk.
Først og fremst vil jeg takke for en fin blog som du har satt igang, jeg forstår i grove trekk hva som foregår nå,, bedre enn for en stund siden ihverfall, men det er kun i grove trekk.
Har nå vært aksjonær i ca 3 år nå utifra tips fra folk i Norge.
No problem, jeg har god tid, og spesielt nå, når du skriver litt om hva som foregår in the Company så ser jeg lettere på fremtiden,
Vanskelig for meg å skrive her fordi jeg har igrunnen mange spørsmål som du antageligvis ikke kan besvare pga “innside”
Men et spørsmål Tommy: Er det mange Norske aksjonærer med her?Du behøver egentlig ikke svare på det heller, men kan du opprette en liten bit i blog som tar for seg de grøvste ting av det du skriver på Norsk innimellom?
Tommy, en liten Norsk bit her hadde gjort seg, jeg har selv opprettet topics på forum i Norge som hadde dratt nytte av dette.
Lykke til Tommy,,
Regards
Longer from North
November 19th, 2008 at 5:33 pm
Heisann Longer
Yes and Yes
I have added a new category called Norwegian, where i will post in Norwegian language as well since I do see many readers from up North.
November 25th, 2008 at 2:26 pm
Come along, just waiting for “a new category called Norwegian” and some other stuff
November 29th, 2008 at 4:18 am
Category already made, waiting to just get some time on my hands to start writing on it!