Meet cGrid, the real-time P2P punisher
Tuesday, March 13th, 2007A new tool has been announced in the piracy arms race. This tool can be deployed by network administrators to monitor network traffic in order to identify people using P2P services, and can automatically boot them off the network. The question is whether or not it can distinguish legitimate uses of those P2P technologies. The price: “$1 million price tag for installation and $250,000 yearly operation costs.”
Red Lambda says that cGrid monitors “a large variety of different P2P clients, in addition to other avenues of file-sharing including Windows file sharing, FTP, IM, and others,” and that cGrid does not perform content inspection but instead focuses on the behavior of the protocols being monitored. But the company does not expand on how it differentiates between legitimate uses of those technologies and illegal ones, raising questions of its effectiveness in an academic setting where students may be using P2P and other services potentially flagged by the system for legitimate, academic reasons.
