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NetPD, Metallica's Mysterious Tracker
Akilesh Rajan writes: "An article at Forbes talks about the firm that supplied Metallica with the software it needed to capture 335,000 users. It 'works like 5,000 humans sitting in a room doing Web searches' to identify user names. Demand for their services is enormous, especially since they also plan to expand into the videogame and movie protection businesses."
This NetPD company is unrelated to the shareware program
NetPD,
which, ironically, helps protect user privacy.
Guns have only one purpose--too kill.
This is utterly untrue. Guns can also be used to maim, cripple, terrify, and to destroy property. They are much more versatile than you are leading people to believe.
" How can I mask my IP number when going online (through IRC, web, napster, etc.)? And I mean really anonymous--no logs to be revealed under court order."
Login to laundry.org and then head offshore to crypt.kk and back onto Tombstone, er . . .
I would say NetPD is trying to cash in on all the paranoia of the recording and movie industries, according to the article they are staffing up and sounds like they will be poised to go public. Pretty good plan, I actually wish I would have thought of it first.
Can you say Internet?
Touring can be pretty grueling work, especially for a musician. Later, and even earlier, in life artists can develop illnesses that prevent them from physically holding concerts, yet be able to record in a studio.
I've noticed that for some of the aging rockers their followers may only number in the thousands and it does not make sense (esp. monetarily) to go on costly tours. Many aging musicians are forced to entertain at race tracks (I seen this myself), rodeos, and small night clubs yet to make a cent. And, let's not forget Barbra, she suffers from severe stage fright and can't go back on stage!
As someone recently posted to Cypherpunks when this issue came up, Freed0m has a bunch of problems.
Judging from the FAQ, you can only use ports that they have blessed. (They say that you can use MUDs with it as long as they're on port 23.) I can't believe someone would write something that braindead, but who knows these days.
It's Windows only.
Source isn't available.
It's Windows only.
You can proxy, but all the servers are presumably controlled by the same entity or are in the same jurisdiction. It's trivial to strongarm the company (via warrants and the like) to reveal the identity of a user.
Did I say that it was Windows only and that no source was provided?
Their claim that users' tokens can be connected to their real identities and that "not even Zero-Knowledge" knows who is behind a nym or connection is immediately made extremely suspect by their claim that they will try to track down people who traffic child pornography. If it's untrackable, how can they ever hope to track such a person down?
Oh, and it's Windows only and no source is provided.
Thanks but no thanks.
The above sounds like a great idea. Gnutella is the answer and we might as well fortifying it more to protect against sue crazy lawyers and their rock-star clients.
Hey, come on, you know you've cost him, so why not pay Lars.
The same trick worked for blocking packets headed for Real.com's subnets when their RealAudio player was tracking our listening habits. Also good for blocking out doubleclick.net, microsoft.com, etc.
It was kinda spooky to watch, and I imagine Governments have a proper version, but it looked they were just doing a traceroute/DNS lookup on the IP packets as they made their journey. Trivial really. as soon as Gnutella/freenet can hide IP addresses and encrypt data packets this sad little firm will crash and burn.
When they interviewed the Freenet's creator and 'duh' was told about it he said "it doesnt matter we can still trace them". true now, but he clearly didnt get the BIG PICTURE.
Now that would be fun!
--P
ipchains -A input -s 208.145.34.0/24 -d 0/0 -j REJECT
ipchains -A output -s 0/0 -d 208.145.34.0/24 0/0 -j REJECT
Poof. Packets headed from mp3police.com to your machine or vice versa are brutally slaughtered. You will appear as machines with all ports closed to one another. Access to the rest of the internet is unaffected. Add a -l to log the failed tx/rx attempts.
Hmmm... If people abusing napster = napster responsible for those peoples abuse? Then If people abusing visual basic = Microsoft responsible for all those damn VB viruses? I mean the logic does follow.
"Sir, we've looked all over the state of Calafornia and there just doesn't seem to be anyone named Mike Oxlong around."
NetPD has a net connection and they have found a creative way to use it. Good for them.
They won't have to reveal their search technology in court. Think about this: there are about 5 names on each sheet of paper that Lars Ulrich gave to Napster. That's about the size of a screen shot. I speculate that they just turned over screen shots of each user they found offering Metallica MP3's, and they don't have to discuss what search techniques they used to create those screen shots.
It's downright funny to see pirate apologists yammering about NetPD violating "Terms of Service". Hey, CD's come with "Terms of Service" too, which are found in the Berne Convention. One of the terms is don't make copies for a bunch of other people. That's pretty bsaic.
WWJD? JWRTFM!!!
Your assumption is faulty. I highly doubt that a company in this line of work would have only a paltry T1 has their Inet connection. Far more likely they have a DS3 or even multiple DS3 connections. Or, they may have thier own search servers in CoLo facility with OC-48 level connections peered to mulitple backbones. Or they may have built their own well connected data center. The point is, if bandwidth is that critical to their business, they will have it.
Hmm, are you talking about Napster or NetPD?
toot toot
I suspect the majority of the pieces of paper being presented to the judge(s) are small and green with numbers in the corners.
In the interview, someone asked "What should I do with the Metallica MP3s I have? Delete them?" Metallica replied (para): Enjoy them, we're going after Napster, not users.
I think all current Metallica MP3 posessors have just been grandfathered out of any future action Metallica might take against individuals.
--Threed
The Slashdot Sig Virus was foiled before it could spread.
Isn't the burden of proof for these sorts of things on Metallica?
yeap, it's up to the prosecution to prove that you're guilty, not up to you to prove that you're innocent. Something called the Constitution "guarantees" that. ;-)
Besides, what if you're not in the U.S.? Copyright laws only apply here, but I think other countries honor them, as we agree to honor theirs. But typical, companies and even dumb-ass Congress thinks our laws rule the earth !!
How can I mask my IP number when going online (through IRC, web, napster, etc.)? And I mean really anonymous--no logs to be revealed under court order.
freedom.net
It's an implementation of Chaumian mixes (similar to the cypherpunks remailer network) and it is _really_ anonymous.
Zooko
One of the great things we love about the internet is that it is unmoderated. Unpatrolled. Unenforced.
:-)
As a consequence, you should **EXPECT** companies like this to spring up, in order to track people down. I mean, come on, there are various "people finders" on the Internet already, and I don't see people complaining about those. This new software just speeds up the process.
The fact is, it is still easy to be anonymous on the internet and avoid this software (as it doesn't appear to do any IP tracking as such, just look for usernames). Just don't have a web page. Leave no distinguishing marks. Leave your personality at home.
Also, please don't lose sight of the morals behind this. Metallica's music is copyrighted, and the only licensed way you can get it is to buy the CDs or whatever. You can debate about whether all music should be free as much as you like, but RESPECT THEIR DECISION.
I mean, you lot come down like a ton of bricks the millisecond that a company *DARES* to violate the GPL. As has been shown recently, the companies quickly fix their mistake, normally not realising they had done anything wrong.
So, don't go crying about Metallica wanting to protect *their* licensing, when the Open Source crowd get just as uptight about theirs.
- If the NetPD people connected to Napster with a bunch of fake Metallica MP3s, they could log everyone who downloaded the MP3s from them.
- Or, the NetPD people could instead search Napster for people with Metallica MP3s.
Both of these approaches to privacy violation work in the first place because of Napster's lack of caching. Let's say you, as a user, want to download a particular MP3 on Napster. Your machine must directly connect to the machine the MP3 is hosted on. There goes your privacy.Now, let's do the same thing on Freenet (an up-and-coming distributed network system, like Napster, but more intended for free speech and anonymity than just music downloads). On Freenet, your request for a particular file doesn't go directly to the machine the file is hosted on. Rather, you connect to any local Freenet node, and that node connects to its local nodes, and so on, until the file you're looking for is found.
Then, do you connect to the host with the file and download it directly? No, of course not. If you did, we'd be back in this whole Metallica mess. Instead, the file is returned through the series of nodes, one by one, like popping off the stack when returning from a recursive function. And the beauty of this design is that at each node along the way a copy of the requested file is cached. So not only do you get pretty decent anonymity, you also get free decentralized worldwide file caching. The files naturally and transparently gravitate towards the nodes where they're being requested the most often.
Anyway, check out the Freenet web site if you want to know more about the project. I just thought I'd point out that there are technical solutions to this sort of privacy problem, and they're not too far away at all. Go Freenet.
...that polices nasty villans as the Dark Knight, Batman.
Bruce Ward is some random dork, riding a PR high, unknowing that he's a very small fish swimming in a tank full of sharks. And lawyers, many, many lawyers, who have sharper teeth than the sharks.
-------------
Actually, what we are seeing here is the big record companies getting left behind in the Internet explosion. They are not adapting to the new way of low-cost distribution and replication. Say Joe Blow goes and buys Metallica: Re-Re-Re-ReLoad for $16.99 at the local music store. After the store takes it's cut, the distributor takes his cut, the record company takes their outrageous amount, and the Metallica boys end up with about 20 cents each for the sale. I wouldn't be very happy about that if I was them.
The important thing happening here is not the Napster illegal copying thing, but the fact that manufacturing media, whether tape, CD or Vinyl, has been irrelevant. Now days, the consumer is willing to pick up the tab on the actual creation of the recording (The Internet connection, the computer storage space, etc), the cost of the server and the bandwidth can be fully recouped through onsite advertising and cross-marketing of band-related merchandise. Wow! What a business to be in: The cost of producing the physical media (not the music itself) drops to zero. Nearly infinite return on investment.
Another way of looking at it is: The record companies (Not the bands themselves) now are archaic. They really do not add any value to the equation. Instead, there exists technology to allow bands to sell their music DIRECTLY to the listeners! The middleman is now only a sick sucking noise with no point. Of course, there exists the concept of "OK, if this digital data is so easily duplicated, how do we make a profit off this? How do we keep the fans from freely copying everything we release?" Well, that's the problem to be solved. Perhaps by the bands, perhaps by the recording companies, perhaps by the geeks who have been creating the whole Internet from scratch for the last 30 years. Remember when the movie companies freaked when VCRs came out? They were trying to get VCRs deemed illegal, less everyone copy tapes and put the movie industry out of business. But, looking back, it wasn't that they were going out of business (Not even close, movie companies now make more money off tape rentals than they do off the actual theater showings.), it was that they needed to radically change their business model to keep up with the new reality.
We are now living in a "replicator" (ala Star Trek) economy when it comes to music. No longer is the economic bottleneck the manufacturing of physical music media. Now the economic bottleneck is the pure creation of data - aka good music. Also, the bottleneck is marketing the music, reaching the public. Look at mp3.com: There is a lot of very excellent music out there, released in MP3 format by unsigned/unknown bands. It is simply incredible. Unfortunately, there is also a lot of crap there as well. It's the weeding through the bad stuff until you find a gem that gets you. While the current audience doesn't to be spoon-fed crap from the marketing machine, they also have a lazy streak: It is easier to turn on Z-92 and get an OK-level of music quality. You can also go to MP3.com and listen to the top 40 charts for a particular musical genre. Either way, you will hear a lot of good music, but also will encounter the occasional turd music. How to get the word of truely good music out to the people who want to hear it, and how to avoid hearing "turds". Eventually it will probably turn into an artificially intelligent filtering/rating system that will learn your musical interest over time, and will play music, just for you, that it thinks you will like. Even then, artificial intelligence is far from perfect - you will still get turded from time to time. Music companies that can build a reputation of suggesting the good stuff, and keeping the soundscape relatively turd free will be the ones who will have a value to their service, much like a good Internet search engine can pinpoint the relevant information you are searching for.
We can kill the messenger (Napster), but we sure wont kill the message itself (MP3s, or other open, non-encrypted methods of quickly tranmitting music over the Interner). Napster will probably be destroyed in court, but it will not affect the unauthorized copying of music on the Internet. Already there are alternatives, such as Gnutella (Which is somewhat like Napster, but is designed without a central server, no central choke-point like the Napster servers), like the FreeNet protocol, like good old IRC (Not the best way to do it, but it can and has been done that way for years now). As soon as one avenue is blocked, the next way arises. The genie is out of the bottle and she is not going back in. The only way would be to shut off the Internet, and that just ain't gonna happen.
The golden ring in the new world is to find a business model (like the movie companies had to) to profit off this new technology. It is going to be more similar to direct marketing. A lot of it seems to be related to supply and demand. With "replicator" technology, supply is infinite, demand is finite, therefore, the value of the product will have a trend approaching zero. Value must be created, just like any other business, no longer can the music companies with their monopolistic tendancies continue to exist in the parasitical model, instead, then must adapt to a symbiotic model, or die. Instead of feeding on the host (both the music makers, and music buyers), they instead have to find a way to "give back" in a mutually profitable manner. I expect to see the ability to listen to what you want, when you want, in return for a persons business. Instead of buying a whole album for $17.00 with a bunch of songs you don't want, you will simply buy the songs you do want, individually, for something like $1 per song. If the band does this directly, they get pretty much all of the $1 per song (minus administrative fees). If they sold a million songs, they make a million dollars, instead of the $800,000 they would make off selling a million albums after the lions share going to the big music company. Say you have a good album, with 5 hit songs, each selling 2 million copies, the band ends up with $5 x 2,000,000 (10 million dollars) rather than the sucky $0.80 x 2,000,000 ($1,600,000) that they would get for selling two million copies of the whole album.
It's now up to the record companies to start working, start trying, start actually creating value, rather than sitting around bemoaning the way it used to be. Basically everybody now has a record press in their house. Back in the 1950's, nobody had a record press in their house. It's now like selling air. You can sell lemon-scented air, or you can try to sell farts. Which will you spend your money on?
My thoughts, hope you enjoy them. Take them to heart: for better or for worse, the music world is changing! I certainly don't have all the answers, but I definitely see that things will never be the same again. Being creative and intelligent is now the name of the game: You can embrace the new rules, or you can be enslaved and destroyed by them.
-----Original Message----- From: Program Director guySent: Monday, May 08, 2000 9:40 AM
To: Me
Subject: Re:
So, you're saying if you recorded a number one song, and you made a dollar off every one you sold, and someone came, copied it, and was giving it away, and instead of making a million dollars, you made 250 thousand, you'd be OK with that?
Thanks for writing.
Program Director, KEZO/Z-92 Journal Broadcast Group, Omaha Operations Your Radio Store
>>> 05/05/00 10:36PM
>>>
Stop the playing sucky sold-out Muttalikuh already. Have you not been tuned into the Napster ordeal? The have alienated millions of their fans which does not bode well for your audience or advertisers. Metallica is playing now on Z-92, I am turning the dial to www.knac.com soon as I hit Send on this message.
Haha! No doubt! Good point! Should we restate "Sad But True"? :)
Sell your Metallica stuff! Cheap! Use the market against them!
logan
logan
The NetPD company is based in England, which is part of the European Union.
The European Union, unlike the US, has laws about handing out information on people. In particular, handing over lists of names and information about them to the US without the consent of the listed persons is almost certainly illegal.
I would rate NetPD a "risky investment".
That gives us hard working people some hope for pulling off such a thing at some point as well. ;-)
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
The distinction that exists in law between speech and information and their distribution is somewhat arbitrary.If I read a hex dump of a copyrighted program (or mp3, whatever) out aloud in front of someone and they typed it into their computer, re-constructing the file, would that be illegal copying, or would it be free speech?
Copyright law must provider for a broader meaning of "fair use" in order to avoid conflicts with free speech. A distribution should be considered a copyright violation should only in case of for-profit distribution of the copyrighted works.
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
They delivered 335,000 names on 60,000 pages? That's fewer than six names per page. Seems pretty inefficient to me, that should have fit on a few floppies, certainly on a single zip disk.
True that the phone number will be logged, but that will not help in tracing you. These phones are available in many stores, and if you pay cash then the purchase is anonymous. If you then use the phone once, and never again then it will very hard to trace who made the call. If you use the phone more than once (or make calls to more than one number) then it will make it easier to associate the phone usage with the user.
The victims are the people who would gain from the copyright being maintained.
Admittedly the loss here is extremely small (on a per case basis) and could arguably be negative (the increased sales resulting from the promotional benefits of MP3 distribution outweighing the lost sales from people getting the music for free). But don't say "victimless" - it is wrong.
~cederic
> As a condition to your use of the Napster service and browser,
> you agree that you will not (i) use the Napster browser or
> service, or attempt to penetrate, modify or manipulate the
> Napster browser or service or any of the hardware or software
> thereof, in order to invade the privacy of, obtain the identity
> of, or obtain any personal information about (including but not
> limited to IP addresses of) any Napster account holder or user
Has this clause always been there, or was it added specifically because of this whole controversy? Either way, it looks like an attempt to block similar harvesting programs in the future (legality aside).
I did a little checking and determined that this clause has been added since 2.0 beta 5a, and the whole license has changed in stucture as well.
Of course there are copyright violations happening on Napster, but what does that have to do with the addition of this clause??
Article: 335,435 user names on 60k pages of paper makes about 5 user names per page. Sounds like bullshit to me.
maybe they should turn the operation into a distributed system. Everyone could use their spare cpu cycles to do searches and turn their friends in!
You're completely twisting things around in the wrong way... Metallica's legal argument is not that 300,000+ people have pirated copies of their songs, because that would be too hard to prove. Instead it's 300,000+ people are providing those songs to anyone free for the asking without verifying that they have the right to listen to it. It's a small nuance, but a world of difference. They weren't trying to get them banned from the service for possessing illegal MP3's, because that would be really tedious. Instead they're trying to get them banned on the premise that they're making those recordings available.
By hiring someone who disclaims any right to be able to listen to their music to obtain copies of their music from a percentage of those 300,000 people, Metallica is simply stating that if they can do it, so can any one else in the world and therefore it should be stopped.
I personally trhink that each artist should file suit agianst Napster, one at a time, to keep them in legal quagmire for years and years and years... they'll eventually lose funding from spending their money on defending themselves, and no one's going to want to invest in them because an IPO would be an impossibility.
There's also the mention in the article that this "company" has been around since "last year", and yet they don't even have a freakin' website? What kind of joke is this?
This might be a legitimate company, but IMHO a company that doesn't even have a website up and running, ESPECIALLY a company that performs services such as tracking Napster users over the Internet, suffers from an extreme lack of cluefulness and should be avoided at all costs.
One could possibly interpret the recent my.mp3.com decision as meaning this: You can't send a copy to someone else even if you know that they own the CD.
Slashdot should interview someone with RIAA and ask this question: If I accidently scratch a CD to the point of it being unreadable, is it ok for me to replace it by CDR-duping it from a friend? Make them say Yes or No.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Shut the hell up. Now moderate this up as "insightful."
So they have over a quarter million people who had Metallica songs on their computers shared on any number of the Napster servers. Say that they have a Napster Username, supplied email address, and an IP address:
;-) Does someone want to write a perl script to do this (not that it would be difficult at all).
Those persons with dialup access have virtually no chance of being caught. Unless they have a static IP address, a new address is leased each time they dial in. Even if they used a specific username in an email address, you can't prove that the person who typed in Dork@dork.com really owns that address.
Cablemodem users can be caught if the RIAA can persuede @Home to give out a list of peoples home addresses and phone numbers in relation to their home IP addresses.
University students on resnet with DHCP and set IP addresses can be traced back to specific machines. Ownership of a machine would then prove guilt.
I don't see how it can be financially viable for the RIAA to track all of these people down. Even if they do, it isn't like they got caught with crack on their doorstep. They got caught with the WORD Metallica coming up on a search. Did this NetPD Company go and download each file that was offered to verify what the content was? Maybe I should go through my list of MP3's and rename them all to begin with the word Metallica. Just like our De-CSS utility to remove Cascading Style Sheets from our web pages
Then they'd be screwed. I highly doubt that they have any physical data cross referenced to any of the names on that list. I would assume that each name has been jotted down when their search pulled up metallica.
Just wait until publishers get the hint and close libraries and post armed guards at copy machines.
Sheesh.
-S
Scott Ruttencutter
We Apprentice Developers and Designers
Seriously, does anybody really think that they did anything more than simple query/parse/output hack job? And no, those "5000 people" were not ANN programs trained to recognize that "Genuine Metallica" beat.
If there's one thing one needs to learn before starting business, it is "shamelessly exaggerated self-promotion".
People who want to become reputible freenet publishers can sign their content with a private key. They publish the public key to freent. They use this keypair _only_ on freenet, so they do not compromise their annonimity. The folks at freenet are also working on a protocol that allows authors of signed contenet to update (byut not delete) already published material.
I'm currently reading up on crypto protocols so that hopefully I can contribute before the projects finished. Most of the stuff on the dev list on this subject is currently a little over my head.
Though its a short article, I found it sad that the NetPD representative didn't seem to worry about repercussions of his actions or the company's actions - or repercussions they may face down the road in the form of lawsuits, etc.
Perhaps it was the limits of the article, but that is rather sad. I found his attitude, as portrayed, flippant as well ("expect to be hacked"). He apparently knows he's onto a good thing people will hire him for, but apparently not so concious of what the future may hold.
I suppose we've seen the birth of CyberDetectives bigtime. Perhaps thats one of the next waves/fads in E-business . . .
. . . which I can't get too enthused about.
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
I thought most music acts still make most of _their_ money from live performances - as most of the money from record sales goes to the label, especially for newer acts. Not so anymore?
Not at all. The original post didn't pass judgement on the Christian Coalition, just that violating privacy to give one group information about another group with diametrically opposed views is a Bad Thing.
The example could have been reversed with exactly the same effect. The point is that I needed to provide an example of one group getting information on a second group illegally. Unless I used an example of smurfs and evil wizards, there would be somebody who would place themselves at the sharp end of the stick and call it flamebait.
Now I suppose smurfette will come after me.
As for who makes the 'flamebait' call, it's viewers like you (well, not exactly like you. the ones who register instead of posting anonymously).
Kevin Fox
Kevin Fox
Doesn't matter what their real name is, that's for the DPA to find out. There is an MP3P registered as a limited company with Companies House, but there's a different address given there, so maybe it's not the same people.
If you get on to the DPA about something, they're generally helpful although slow to respond. If you're British and your account gets cancelled as a result of the actions of this company, send the DPA a snail mail. Might do some good. That said, my experience with the DPA (in dealing with a British spammer) is that they're not too clued about the Internet and in general they don't have a lot of teeth. But this experience was before the EU law got incorporated into British law, so things may have changed now.
From the article:
"We fully expect to upset people and our site will probably get hacked," he says. "But what's going on is theft."
Good to see someone tell it like it is and not beat around the bush... I wish these guys tons of luck... I think they are going to have a very good business going here.
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
I suspect that a lot of people will be pissed off once they start hitting too hard.. And will start mirroring their Metallica collections on servers in far-away countries. Or go back to the old-fashioned pre-internet trading on BBSes and schoolyards (CD-R!)..
--
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
Actualy its not a weak argument. I have a p-200 with 32 megs of ram. Someday I'll upgrade to a faster machine, but right now it serves my purpose. The cd-rom is a 16 speed, which is not capable of digital data extraction or whatever it's called to rip a CD. It can play audio and digital CD's put not rip. *shrug* Don't ask me. As for why I would want to have MP3's of my CD'S? Simple. I have the Creative Nomad for when I go jogging. That doesnt skip when I run, and I can create my own set of music I want, and not have songs I don't want to hear.
Even thats not illegal. If someone else is in the same situation as me downloads from my machine, I have not committed a crime. Its not my job to determine if someone else is breaking the law. I may offer the files, but its the other person who's stealing if they do not own the CD.
You're absolutely right and it doesn't matter how you get these copies.
I did not say get copies, I said make copies. Making a copy implies that I own the material. Getting implies that I am taking. There is a legal difference.
An army of 300k+. From a legal standpoint those 300K+ are _guilty_ of copyright violations. If they got organized, it would be very easy for Metallica to counter-sue.
Remember, as someone else in this thread said, it is a legal issue, not a logical one.
The originator of the thread make reference to an old computer. That's where I got that from. If you can afford and 800mhz CPU, 256mb of ram and a large hard drive, you can spring for the $39.95 CD ROM drive. Pretty weak argument.
--
then it comes to be that the soothing light at the end of your tunnel is just a freight train coming your way
then it comes to be that the soothing light at the end of your tunnel is just a freight train coming your way
What I was making reference to was that the person in question had built a top line system and didn't get a CD ROM. That seems pretty flimsy to me.
You can't rip with a 16 speed CD ROM? That is strange. What software have you tried? You should be able to record the wavs directly off the CD and feed those into bladeenc. Maybe it's a hardware thing?
Do you like the Nomad? I would think the 32 meg or 64 meg limit would be too tight.
--
then it comes to be that the soothing light at the end of your tunnel is just a freight train coming your way
then it comes to be that the soothing light at the end of your tunnel is just a freight train coming your way
I may offer the files, but its the other person who's stealing if they do not own the CD.
Making the files (copyrighted works) available is illegal.
--
then it comes to be that the soothing light at the end of your tunnel is just a freight train coming your way
then it comes to be that the soothing light at the end of your tunnel is just a freight train coming your way
So to get the songs I legally have a right to have in mp3 format I have to turn to the net.
Why do you have to turn to the net? You already have the CDs and (I assume) a CD player. Problem solved. If you machine is so old that it can't rip CDs, it most likely can't play MP3s very effectively. Once you have purchased the music, you have the right to make copies for your personal use. You don't have the right to download them from the net.
NetPD gathered the names of the users offering Metallica songs for download, not the people downloading them.
Go ahead and try to take legal action against Metallica. Unless you've got some seriously deep pockets and a great deal of time to waste, I wouldn't bother. If your name is on the list, you were violating their copyright, and would be found guilty pretty darn quickly.
Not too many people seem to remember the one important fact in this case. Metallica asked Napster to remove their songs from the Napster servers. Metallica did not pursue legal action until Napster said "no." If Napster had removed the Metallica stuff, Metallica never would have brought suit.
--
then it comes to be that the soothing light at the end of your tunnel is just a freight train coming your way
then it comes to be that the soothing light at the end of your tunnel is just a freight train coming your way
I think they were trying to make a point. It is much more visual to deliver 60K pages rather than a single floppy. After being ignored by the press all those years, Metallica has really started using the press to the fullest effect.
Napster started playing hardass in this game, and I don't think they realized what they were getting into. I'm pretty sure Metallica could push pretty hard on Napster if the users are not blocked in a timely fashion.
BTW, when did Metallica start tarnishing their glory?
--
then it comes to be that the soothing light at the end of your tunnel is just a freight train coming your way
then it comes to be that the soothing light at the end of your tunnel is just a freight train coming your way
Hooray for the Supreme Court. It's nice that someone other than Scalia is showing occasional common sense. But if there's a billion to one chance that the a child is endangered then all rights go out the door.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Does anyone else here see a connection to the Pinkertons? They are supporting the powers that be (RIAA/MPAA/etc ~= "The Company"), or will be as soon as they are asked to. And who are they against, the masses (Napster clients ~= organized labor). And I'm guessing it is all about selling out to the highest bidder (not that THAT is a bad thing), not even the supposedly "lofty morals" of the original Pinkertons. It's nice to know that the investigative quality remains the same through the ages....get what you need to shut them down by any means neccessary.
BTW, I fully agree with all comments thus posted concerning NetPD (public dicks) and their violation of the Napster liscense agreements. May they rot.
NetPD.....I'd hate to see the Gross.
Papa's got a brand GNU bag. -- Advertisement: year 30 ALC (After Linux Commercialization)
I think this could be a very lucritive time for sites like www.anonymizer.com....
This is another step in the arms race
And the next round of Kill-BOTS will be even worse.(click headline for story)
You might want to check Anonymizer or do a "web search" for any of the keywords in your question..:)
--
+&x
Let's make a quick comparison here. RIAA and the courts are saying that because Napster is being used to transmit illegal material, it is responsible for the actions of it's users. We have to be honest that this is the only intent and purpose of Napster, but that is aside from the point. Napster CAN be used legally, but it is the responsibility of the end user to see to it they obey the law.
For the comparison, let's take gun manufacturers. Guns have only one purpose--too kill. Please note that I AM in favor of the right to bare arms, but this a valid point. Gun manufacturers are NOT held accountable for the actions of their customers. The addage that "guns don't kill people, people kill people" is perfectly valid.
This very point is a contradiction. I'd say that the Napster lawyers should use this as a point of defense, citing past cases against gun manufacturers.
On the otherhand, RIAA could argue about the tabacco manufacturers--but that is not as valid because that concerns blatent lying by tabacco concerns about the addictiveness and hazards of smoking. Irrelevent.
- Install a "honeypot" site. Napster works by providing two endpoints with knowledge of what one has to what the other wants. We know that Napster shares the downloader's handle with the connection establishment. Also, the transfer is over TCP. Keep track of every handle and IP address. This type of download is a clear violation copyright. Of course I don't know if it would be considered entrapment.
- To support the "resume download" feature, Napster clients track MD5 checksums of songs so that you can resume download of the same song from a different site. Write a 'bot that searches for MD5 checksums of songs known to be copyright violations. The RIAA would assert that any of their songs on any computer violates the DMCA because computers don't implement serial copy management and aren't registered with the copyright office.
The bit about serving paper to Napster is clearly to bog them down in administrative overload.I hope Napster has a good sheet feeding OCR scanner!
This is a boring sig
It all really comes down to two possibilties:
Intellectual Property is a Good Thing (tm):
What NetPD is doing is necessary to enforce the copyrights of Metallica and other artists. This is NOT a privacy violation since they only find people who are SERVING (not downloading) copyrighted mp3s. You can't really demand privacy for a public server. Yeah, free music would be nice, but that's up to Metallica.
Intellectual Property is a Bad Thing(tm)
Then this is wrong, since information (including mp3s) should be free, and NetPD is just aiding and abetting a corrupt legal system.
Make up your minds about whether IP is right or wrong, so you don't end up being hypocritical and asking for copyright protection only when it suits you.
I personally haven't yet made up my mind--it's a very complex issue.
Please allow me to enlighten you. The Napster program is a program that connects to a remote server over a network. Therefor, the NetPD people most certainly wrote their own program to connect to the Napster server and do searches automatically. Your comment suggests that their program somehow works with a regular Napster client, which is surely not true. If Napster changed the protocol to require re-authentication occasionally, the only human intervention required would be to modify their program. No one would need to manually type stuff in constantly.
What "reasonable request"? Metallica sent Napster 60,000 pages of paper instead of a few measly floppy disks. I'd be more than happy to slap that request right back in the face of Metallica, I'm not gonna waste my fucking time parsing 60,000 sheets of paper when they can't even write to a lousy disk or two (or even e-mail the damn list to me, shit).
http://208.145.34.97/
Guess they had to find something else to do when the Y2K bug did't
Doubt this page is going to be up much longer, someone want to mirror?
~ppppppppö
See http://www.ne tworksolutions.com/cgi-bin/whois/whois?host+208.14 5.34.1, actually he doesn't own the name, just the coordinator for the NS. This would be before he moved to the UK I guess, bizzare idea that though, people moving here for tech jobs....
Ho Hum
~ppppppppö
Just clicking around, I found thisarticle:
Apparently, They have stopped serving up their program because of the Whole HooHa with Napster/Metallica/NetPD (the stupid company). Interesting, especially in light of the article from yesterday about the For Dummies(tm) bit. Do you think a lawsuit could be filed???
Not that it would change anything, it would serve them right though.
hmmmm?
Thanx... I was under the impression that the client NetPD wrote was one that interacted with the Napster program.
I guess this is a downside of having protocols that are easy to reverse engineer and modify.
Is it progress if a cannibal uses a fork?
The zeroknowledge.com thing would be pretty cool, but they don't anonymize connections to arbitrary ports (e.g. 6699, 6346). For that matter, they don't anonymize ftp connections. Only http, IRC (no DCC), telnet, ssh, nntp (post only, no anonymous reading), pop, and smtp. I imagine the reason for this is to avoid being used for high bandwidth applications like moving copyright infringed software and music anonymously.
:>.
Not to say that some clever people couldn't make a gnutella-like protocol that tunnels over http, with the added benefit that networks find it distasteful to filter all http packets at the routers
* -- NO BOTS ARE ALLOWED ON THIS SERVICE. IF YOU RUN ONE HERE, --
* -- IT WILL BE BLOCKED AND YOUR IP WILL BE PERMANENTLY BANNED. --
*
Heh. Well they will certianlky hold up in court as far as i'm concerned
That's nothing. I've seen "Who's on First?" attributed to Adam Sandler. It seems that if anything's funny it's put as Weird Al or Adam Sandler (maybe more?). I'm guessing that this is because it's funny and the person wants to get it out. No one is really this dumb, are they? Maybe I'm just an optimist.
Hope they used the infinate monkey protocol... would put the link, can't find it though.
c:\music\misc\NotMetallica-TheSmurfSong.mp33
c:\music\misc\NotMetallica-InspectorGadget.mp3
c:\music\misc\Morning_mix_Metallica-Sucks-Me.mp
Anyone?
Anyway, why would the RIAA try to rob me of my precious Menudo bootlegs? I've spent years building up that collection, and now they want to take away my ability to share Menudo with the unwashed masses.
.. so you can turn it off, and voila! No logs, no mess.. although, I'm sure that inetd or something (I, too, am showing ignorance) logs everything.. or wait, is that HTTPD?
.- CitizenC (User Info)
I don't know how (or even IF) you can spoof your IP addy when you are using napster, however, just get a buddy to run a Linux box, throw up a nice port bouncer, and spoof away! =)
CitizenC is AssMonkey@pm3-2-66.winnipeg.escape.ca
Becomes:
CitizenC is citizenc@owns.all.the.couriers.org
I'm sure there are other solutions out there.. but BNC is what I use for irc, plus it lets you use funky hostnames too =)
.- CitizenC (User Info)
.. now that I wasn't aware of.. I see so many companies advertising shells for the sole perpose is to run an irc bouncer.. *shurg*
As for the bouncing/encrypting, Zero-Knowledge Systems wrote a piece of software called Freed0m, which does just that. Of course there is a free trial available.. it's quite cool -- it acts as a proxy.. only with a gazillion (I'm guessing at the exact number) layers of encryption. Check it out, it's definately worth a look.
.- CitizenC (User Info)
Actually, I'm registered too. I just didn't want people to think I was the one who posted the initial response, which did go over the lines of good taste, though I saw his point. So I clicked the "post anonymously" checkbox, lest people moderate me down simply because I can see where the guy was coming from. Anyway, there surely had to be something a little less inflammatory used as an example, given enough thought. Anyway, this is offtopic, I know, just didn't want to appear as though I wasn't participating in the forums like a good netizen. That was my first time posting anonymously. :)
---
http://neomail.sourceforge.net
Copyright has nothing to do with this.
Theft has nothing to with this.
This is a planned series of steps by media companies to establish total control over media distribution and pricing on the internet. If ISP's do become responisble for content, it actually plays further into the hands of big media.
First take out Napster, next go after similar open distribution of files of any kind, in the name of piracy protection. While all this is going on, buy up smaller ISPs, place restrictive TOS agreements, which allow total control of content to and from every consumer point of entry. Buy laws which allow for companies to control or block content in the name of protection from the various media reported evils on the internet.
CmdrTaco and others alluded to this problem with the "What is a server" definition, raised at least once on Geeks in Space. I would like to see a piece if not a whole show dedicated to these issues.
Think it can't happen, it already is.
Can it be prevented, or is it already too late?
So remind me again why after doing this you are now sharing those files via Napster? AFAIK, what this program did was find a list of people who had Napster set up to share Metallica MP3s. If you did that, you were offering people to pirate your (otherwise legitimate) MP3s.. If you didn't, they shouldn't have picked your name up.
I wonder if they actually tried downloading from each individual "offering" Metallica mp3s. I know that I, for instance, will often set "simultaneous uploads" to 0 when I'm behind a firewall. In doing that, I'm only allowing other people to look at my mp3 collection. Showing someone what you have is not the same as copyright infringement....
First of all, Napster is a distributed, peer-to-peer network. Other than the fact that nodes can come up and down pretty rapidly, and change IPs, it resembles the Web of HTTP servers in its distributed peer-to-peer nature. The napster on-the-wire protocol can surely be reverse engineered pretty easily. So what does NetPD have? Same thing altavista has.
NetPD has a "spider/crawler/robot" for napster.
They have 10 employees, so it's probably not very sophisticated. Lets assume they have a flat file entry for every node, keyed by it's IP address, containining a list of all the files on that node. Their next step is to run it against a text filter. cat flatfile | grep "master of puppets" , etc. any hits they get on metallica song names puts that entry into a "hit list".
I'm strongly of the opinion that that is the quality of the data they are presenting. There is no way in hell they have actually downloaded metallica songs from 350,000 people and run any kind of statistical or acoustic wave matching software to in fact make sure that that which is advertised as metallica actually IS. It's theoretically possible that 250,000 of those people are offering the theme to the mickey mouse show and renaming the file Metallica Album.mp3. If this ever actually gets litigated the defendants will have to pick apart this point - but of course this is a scare tactic, and never meant to go that far.
What's the solution?
So what's the next step for napster or open source peer-to-peer distributed networks? Simple. A challenge-response protocol, like the one that msgto.com runs. When you connect to a napster node, you have to pass a simple test that only a human can figure out. Change the test weekly. If you don't think this strategy can work, look at the success of other challenge response protocols such as RADIUS, and check out www.msgto.com. This will stop those damn crawlers dead in their tracks.
Or, just use a PPP pool. I mean all they claim to have is 350k IP's, they say that in their press release. So what if the user at SLIP-POOL-121.SOMESTUPIDISP.DEMON.UK ran napster some night. good luck finding out who that was!
also think about napster behind www.zeroknowledge.com. Good luck netPD! suckers.
--
What happens when you outlaw guns
> Has anyone done a little math? If NetPD actually downloaded 1 song per user they found
They'd only need to download a few 100Kb of each file to recognise that it was indeed an MP3 of Metallica
> Close to a terabyte.
They could easliy discard the downloaded data and just store a flag: Was it really Metallica or not.
> they invented a TIME COMPRESSOR!!! YOU GO!!!
Amazing how far wrong you can go from an incorrect assumption.
Disclamer: I have no idea if NetPD are actually doing this.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
I don't think they logged ips, just user names of people with metallica. However it is still a bot.
I do not understand what the good in Lars Ulrich delivering over 335,000 'usernames' to Napster's office for banning. If the users are banned, they'll re signup. It's not like they can IP ban alot of the users also, for most of them come from ISP's like AOL, or other dialup services where your IP is not static. Metallica should think about things first....and has anyone ever noticed how cheesy they look in all their pictures at Metallica.com?
The Black album is what put Metallica on the 'commercial' music charts and put them in the position to do all this sh*t. IMO, Master of Puppets was their last good album - Ride the Lightning is their best!!!
LRJ
Bands will just stick with what they can do in concert. If you told the Beatles they couldn't make money off of studio albums, would they have made Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart Club Band?
My guess is 'Yes', they would have made Sgt. Peppers anyways. That album was completely an experiment, they did it for the art of making music not making money - something I think Metallica (and probably 99% of all the other 'popular' musicians) have lost touch on =(
LRJ
if a service like napster was a known haven for pedophilia, or other illegal activities (and a previous
tell me if I'm wrong...
Q: What do you think about American Culture?
A: I think it's a good idea.
Q: What do you think about American Culture?
A: I think it's a good idea.
(adapted from Gandhi)
I think its obvious that all this is is free publicity for a band that has been gradually dying for 10 years.
Capt. Ron
crazy dynamite monkey
When I read this article I got the impression they are only searching for keywords????
If that is the case they probably only checked if somebody WAS searching for something from metallica and that means they probably only got your search attemp.
But does that mean that now the SEARCH by itself is "illegal"????? And if so. How can they accuse everybody who searches for a keyword that they actually commited a crime?????
If you want to e-mail me, use my PGP Key.
Actually, all mentioned that very thing in the same "Ask Al" column that the parent quote was taken from.
Not to mention listening to the first 30 seconds of the song isn't enough. How do they know they haven't gotten ahold of a legitimate, fair-use parody that begins with a sample of a Metallica song, but the rest is something else entirely? To prove that copyright infringement has taken place, they have to prove that the defendant actually made an illegal copy available. The only way to do that, it seems to me, is to demonstrate that the majority of the actual song is in fact available for download from the defendant. To do so you would have to download the whole file to determine if it consists of at least half of the copyrighted work.
-Vercingetorix
"Necessitas non habet legem." -St. Augustine
I'm just waiting for all the slashdotters out there to proclaim the loss of all privacy. I agree that in a perfect world everything would be free, but you know what? Human nature isn't perfect and will not allow for everything to be free. How many of you would work for nothing but the sheer enjoyment of knowing you helped the world out? Can we expect musicians and movie and game makers to live up to those work-for-nothing standards? There are lots of musicians such as myself who will release our music for free (here's my example), but as I'm not making money off of it I can't afford to put lots of time into the writing and recording of the music, much less into the touring. If this NetPD is what it takes to keep professional musicians writing, recording, and touring so that people can enjoy their music, then I have no problem with it.
Addlepated - punk & metal
Yes, but being the consumer doesn't give you the right to steal. If you don't want to spend the money on the music, then don't own a copy of it. Look at it this way, cars are overpriced (as I'm sure you'll all agree), but does that mean we should go around stealing them just because we don't want to pay the huge prices? No. We should either buy a used car or a bike or go without.
Addlepated - punk & metal
Ask Al is one of the most wonderful sites I know about. I've liked Al forever anyway (I'm a comedy DJ in california), and Ask Al just makes me respect him even more. He's funny, honest, and answers questions from his fans every month.
Also off topic, but kinda related: has anyone else noticed, both on Napster, it's clones, and the web in general, that people will assign a random comedy song as being by Weird Al? I've seen ALL sorts of songs attributed to him, many very dirty, and they're clearly not him. I just wanted to see if anyone else had noticed this.
Thats all for my Off Topic ranting. Back to your regularly scheduled program.
The Good Reverend
"He insists that to say more would enable Napster and other MP3 programs to block the software."
I'm sure there is already a way to block this. It sounds to me this company is only interested in cashing in on going IPO and then it will fade away...
Sounds like you should try and figure out if your name is on there, and then pay a lawyer $50 to write them a nice (legally)threatening letter. Maybe find out if you can get together with anyone else in a similar situation.
This is a manual virus. Copy it to your sig and help me spread!
How about everyone pulls the favorite Ebay scam, and puts "Not Metallica" at the end of their song titles! Picture "1812 Overture, Not Metallica". Could drive them nuts
Get one who's familiar with English law;
"The 23-year-old is chief technology officer of NetPD, a ten-person consulting firm in Cambridge, England."
Of course if when they put up their web page, and it's hosted one might merely accuse them of libel in a nicely worded letter to theie ISP. Nothing like returning a below the belt punch in kind.
I heard that every search that turns up a result on your machine is like a DoS attack in disguise. I don't use it but those who do tell me that its architecture is not particularly efficient.
So what's the scoop? Does it just not have any central directory servers or what?
Rather than concentrate on the supposedly awful effects this would have on your "lone composer in his basement," think of the huge opportunity that's out there as well - by publishing music independently over the Net, he can avoid the interference that commercial labels burden artists with.
As regards the diversity of music, I can think of no other motivator for the independent artist than to be able to freely distribute their work to millions of listeners just as easily as the Backstreet Boys and any other mainstream act.
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
What I'm waiting to see is the development of a successful "on-line" label company, one that promotes a band that distributes their music for free over the net, gets them mainstream radio/video airplay, and makes the money back by staging a tour. That would be a neat trick, and would certainly give the big labels reason to start quivering in their boots.
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
The whole point is, in the future, where do the record labels provide value to both the artist and the consumer? That is the question that must be answered in order for them to survive.
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
I was surprised to hear Metallica was still together.
I figure they're good for two or three more albums, if you count "best of" and maybe a "live at the...".
After that, it's off to playing at county fairs and summerfests, like all the metal bands of the '80s that didn't break up.
Meow
Yes, that's really my e-mail. Don't change a thing.
It'll just go viral...that is, if we block it, it'll just mutate.
Yes, that's really my e-mail. Don't change a thing.
This means on every page were 5 usernames? They must have used Arial 72 or similar to print that.
This is no better. There is no way that they could prove that what was contained in those files was Metallica's studio recorded music. Who knows if they are live personal recordings or even huge text files renamed to .mp3...
This kind of thing would never stand up in court.
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
Important Note here, Napster can't remove any Metallica songs from their server, because they don't have any on them! You see Napster just acts like a gateway, to link pirate #1 to pirate #2, and so on. That just goes to show you that Metallica (their lawyers, record company, etc) are just plain stupid.
Aaron
My question/concern is how in the heck did Napster deal with 300K+ users in a single weekend? From what I've seen, each server maxes out around a couple thousand users.
2000 Users * 40 Servers = 80,000 users simultaneously
Now if we assume everyone of those users had a Metallica MP3 file, then it might be possible to have 300K+ Metallica fans on in a weekend.
Somehow I doubt it though.
LongTail SSH Brute Force analysis tool is here!
"If your name is on the list, you were violating their copyright, and would be found guilty pretty darn quickly."
YOU don't know that! He is innocent until _proven_ guilty. If that weren't true I'd really like YOU to stand in front of the judge and _prove your innocence_. Just because he's on a list doesn't mean he broke any law at all. Prove to me that those were real MP3 files of Metallica songs.
"Once you have purchased the music, you have the right to make copies for your personal use. You don't have the right to download them from the net."
Agreed, _legal rights_ anyways. What moral rights you have is individual. If I owned a CD I couldn't rip for backup-purposes myself, I would find it reasonable to be allowed to copy the same song off the net. It's not legal though.
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
But "stars" HAVE to go out on tours and generally meet with the public! EVEN if people buy their CDs like madmen. The deals they have to sign with RIAA members give them so little share of the profit of CD-sales they have to turn to MTV, movies, commercials and tours anyways.
Why do you think the girl-group TLC went bankrupt when they were at the peak of their career (a few years ago)? The contract they was in didn't allow them any more money, and it was impossible to get out of it in any decent manner. They were as popular as ever and their employer became stupid-rich from their success. But because their employer refused to increase their income, the cost of producing records/videos/tours became too much (plus a little personal spending from burning down houses illegally, but that was pocket-money really).
Yes, the world is crazy.
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
I think NetPD should sue NetPD for using their name.
When did Metallica start tarnishing their glory? Ummm, let's see.... Oh ya, I'd have to say the black album was a good start. Then Load... then Reload... and so on. What, you didn't notice? Yikes...
Sooner or later, they have to disclose exactly how they got the list of the users, don't they? Otherwise, who is to know that the list they got is not taken out of thin air or whether it is totally accurate - which is a bit more difficult to prove. And they will need to prove it if they want to get these users blocked from Napster.
Or am I just not making sense today?
Interesting, huh? More to the point, because NetPD were violating the rules of Napster, the information was improperly obtained. Doesn't that prevent it being admissable? (Presumably Napster will require some proof of violation. NetPD just handed them proof that NetPD themselves had been violating those rules; what proof do they have that the people on the list were? Possibly not enough...)
I don't understand why such a program would use AI... And if it does, it sounds like this company should be putting their efforts elsewhere. It's unfortunate when people think they have to be complete weiners just to make money.
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
Article IV.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Hard to say what constitutes probabal cause.
The only way for this company to verrify that they contents of each file is infact a mp3 metallica song is to directly scan or download from your harddrive. So their either lying about the authenticy of each "violator" or they're guilty of violating the 4th ammendment?
(.sig free in 5 easy steps)
Well, some aren't buying it, and that's what all the fuss is over isn't it? Flipside is they're still listening to the stuff, and smaller/unknown/consentually free artists are almost completely neglected.
If someone feeds you shit, and you don't like the taste, that's one thing. If you just can't get enough, that's another problem entirely.
Isn't that Robin?
There's a catch... Technically you are allowed one backup copy of any electronic media you own, according to the Supreme court.
***PROBLEM IS*** You have to make the backup copy from your origional!! That is, by downloading an MP3, you commit an illegal act, whether or not you own the CD. Even if the end result is identical, you still aren't allowed to do it.
For the same reason, bleem is legal, but SNES roms aren't.
although i do think someone should do something about the TOS/no bots arguement
~zero
insert clever line here
sig?
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
I have heard several versions of how long this NetPD has been tracking people. At first I thought it was only over one weekend. Now I'm hearing it has been for several months. Does anyone have the actual facts on this?
Project Steve
a temporary economic quirk that was renderred irrelevant by the progress of electronic communications technology.
Hmm... But what happens when the progress of "electronic communications technology" allows bands to perform "live" over the internet?
I expect that in the future we will see a convergence of album releases and live performances, where the two are a single event, your personal collection is assembled from the "concert", or from the "concert" archive, and you'd still pay for each instance of the music you acquire (i.e., you'd pay for the concert, and you'd also pay to download the music later).
One change I see is that by paying to experience the broadcast performance, you'd also be paying for the right to keep a copy of that performance--the "album"--locally. The other change would be that you'd be paying the artist directly, rather than the record-publishing industry.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
How could 5,000 people sitting in a room doing Web searches find even one person who transferred a Metallica file with Napster, let alone more than 330,000.
How do we know this software actually works? Seems to me it would be easy to say the list they provided Metallica was worthless since no one could verify how it was created. And once they tell how they created it, it will be easy to prevent them from doing it again.
Anyway, how long do you really think it will be before someone adds some decent security or obfuscation to Gnutella? This is yet another race the RIAA will lose in the long run.
Lots of people have whois-ed netpd.com, but now let's apply the results.
We've gone from the UK to the US to a Mr. Bruce Ward. What does bruce@provenst.com turn up on google?
Some highly interesting help requests. Least he's using Linux
The request about MySQL, which includes the interesting text-
"I have been trying MYSQL on a project I have been working on for about two months now. Our database is starting to grow now. We have reached 3.5 million records in a table that is about 400Mb with a 600Mb index. The largest part of the table is a 256 varchar field. The server is a AMD Athalon 700 Mhz with 384 Mb Ram and a 27 Gig ATA 66 hard drive running Mandrake 7",
piques my interest.
Could this be the 'project' in question?
This is even better. In order for Metallica to pursue a court battle with the users, they would have to pursue each user individually. Basically, this is the same thing that is happening with the cigarette industry.
Another wonderful example of ignorance. Apparently Metallica believes that trading MP3s and distributing music is the end of the world, but violating the TOS is not. So now the law doesn't apply because it isn't on their side? Is this the old case of "I will uphold and follow the law until it doesn't not suit my needs?" It would have been nice to see Metallica go about this in a legal manner.... maybe they should practice what they preach. And as a note, I'm never listening to metallica again... nor will I erase my mp3s.
And while we're at it, doesn't calling it NetPD violate XemiComputer's intellectual property rights?
We already know he has 5000 mindless slaves, how many more before before we step in?
.......
Mindless droid - a state of being which is a prerequisite for enjoying any of Metallica's stuff from the last five years.
Boy, have they lost it
They might as well pursue Napster, because they are artistically bankrupt. I wonder how many albums they have left ?
Stephen Hawking has written another book. It's about time as well.
It hardly matters how they did it. If this doesn't fly someone will come up with a better method of doing automated checks on Napster. The RIAA and others have too much to lose to let Napster continue to be pirate central. So maybe the next version they can only supply 20,000 users who've been supplying copyrighted material and it takes them 10 days, big deal.
Napster says they will remove users who are shown to be abusing the system. We all know that a huge number of users ARE putting up copyrighted material. Now that the cat is out of the bag, Napster opponents will just keep supplying user IDs to cancel until Napster goes broke trying to remove them all. Even if Napster can automate the removal process, without the copyrighted songs of the big name bands a lot of Napster users would stop using the system.
I know all of us slashdotters are fine upstanding citizens who would never put copyrighted materials online for distribution and we also have such refined tastes that we would continue to use Napster without the big name bands, but Joe Blow on the net will stop coming if he can't get his top 40 hits.
"If they're only supplying dummy files with authentic-looking names, then the people downloading the files aren't breaking the law. "
Not really true: If you buy something that you think is cocaine, but actually turns out to be baking powder you are still guilty of purchasing drugs in the eyes of the law. The same for selling fake drugs.
If you buy a f40 card you get f40.
A f80 card will get you f80.
So you can still keep your phone private.
Then again, it's likelly that in the very least, the mobile phone company stores the cell id's in which you used your mobile ( which in normal use will map to the area where you live and the area where you work ), so if you need to have maximum privacy:
I'm going to start a company called RadioPD and track down every person who tapes songs off the radio. Then I'll start up CDPD and bust anyone buring CDs. That way the RIAA will pay me millions for being anal-retentive.
"These thoughts are my own, but for a small fee, they can be yours as well" - Dave Haney
My karma is in a nose dive
Yes, it is. It's legal for you to give your CD to someone, have them make a backup (or whatever you are legally able but physically unable to do) of it, and give it and the copy back to you.
It is not, however, legal for the other guy to make a copy of his CD, even if it's the same CD, and give you a backup. Yes, the net effect is the same. It's law, don't make the mistake of applying common sense to it.
(Kilometerage may vary outside the US.)
Slashdot's token middle-aged housewife
Gah, the black album bit. I still remember the first time I heard "Enter Sandman." My reaction was, "Oh, that's the ballad? Not bad."
Puppets was the last decent album, but Kill 'Em All was definitely their best.
--
There is no sin except stupidity -- Oscar Wilde
Are these socks anonymous servers like a scaled up NAT server?
NAT is great if your organization is pretty large, but since there are two users for my 20 computers (which share a single IP) it doesn't hide much, but if there was a public NAT that supported thousands of userrs, it would make it much more difficult to track people down.
On a side note, could the "bad" guys who are spying on us use a sniffer pointed at the "anonymous socks server mentions above and see the IP of incoming packets, and consequently defeat the anonymous nature of it?
Sorry for such a public display of ignorance, but I am curious and since we are on the subject . . .
-MS2k
If you don't want people surfing for porn at work, either catch them at their desk or put up a proxy server they can't get through -- don't snoop over the contents of their browser cache or track all of their online movements. Nobody likes a narc.
--
--
fat lenny's gonna lick your brain today.
I know this is a little off topic, but does anyone have a REAL log from that Yahoo chat session with them last Tuesday? All artistdirect.com has is a log of the "moderator approved questions" and the band's not-so-interactive responses.
it is what you type before your password in order to access the napter connnection service
When people are downloading music from you they can tell who you are because your user name is right on the tranfering que list
Napster usernames made easy
Theres one problem with reflecting your reality, sometimes your reality starts to reflect you.
MP3 Police? Are you allowed to use the word "Police" when you are not, in fact, the police? No private investigator is allowed to put the word "police" on his car or his business cards or whatever. That is impersonating a police officer and it is a criminal offence.
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
Has anyone done a little math? If NetPD actually downloaded 1 song per user they found, that would be 330000 songs *about*. Let's assume each song is about 3meg *average* These are NOT hyper accurate by any means, but will do for an example:
;) NetPD not only got the usernames of 300000 users, they invented a TIME COMPRESSOR!!! YOU GO!!! ;)
3megs * 330000 songs = 990000 megs, or 990gigs.
Close to a terabyte. WOW... but why stop there? Let's assume they have a T1 connection, which is
1.5Mbit/sec, or 1500000 bits/sec
1500000 / 8 bits/byte = ~200KB/sec.
990gig / 0.002gig/sec = 495000
495000 seconds to download all those pirated MP3's. Ok, now if you calculate how many hours that is, wouldn't it be close to ~137 hours? And how many hours are in a weekend? Yeah, that's what I thought.
Chris
-- Humans, because the hardware IS the software.
As a former Metallica fan, I think it's time to organize and force the band to reason. They are pawns to the Label's lawyers. I think Metallica's inclusion in this stupid pursuit is exclusively the result of their ignorance of technology and their blind faith in their legal counsel. Metallica as a band used to encourage bootlegging of their live shows. I remember seeing the table they set up for fans to place their recording equipment on the Justice tour. Where is that attitude and graciousness torwards their fans now. They acknowledged the importance of their fans once and that without their fans they wouldn't exist. It's high time to bring their attention back to that fact. We are the ones who make or break Metallica. Show your voice in the face of their arrogance. Boycott Metallica. Raise your voices loud in unison and they will hear.
Listen, man. What they are doing is running a bot that simply does searches on napster for "metalica" and, if you had ever used napster before you would know, it gives you a list of the usernames of people with mp3s that have "metalica" in the file name. Then they log it to a text file and print the usernames out. They have no way of being sure that those are actually illegal copies of metalica songs since they didn't download them, and if nobody has actually downloaded those songs, they can't accuse you of piracy. Their whole "5000 users" thing is probably just a perl napster client that runs ever 5 minutes and logs to a text file.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
get a free internet provider or just use one of the 30 hours free accounts. Used just once and thrown away, from a city you don't live in, and the agency that can trace that deserves to be in world power anyway..
Your phonenumber will still be logged at the ISP through callerID. That is, if you live in the Netherlands. It doesn't matter if you turned it off or not, that's just so other phonecompany clients cant see it.
rue that the phone number will be logged, but that will not help in tracing you.
Oh yes it will. Or are you calling that free ISP using your GSM? If you call that free 'anonymous' ISP from your home, your phonenumber is known. If you dont have an unlisted number, anyone can do a phonenumber search on you using the KPN cdrom phonebook with 'foongrep', a third party program. If you have an unlisted number, the police can still get your home address. (And there are other ways to get this info if you have the money)
I find it hard to believe that a court would allow user names with no hard traceable identities.
Ham on rye, hold the mayo please.
thelocust[dot]org
Many of you have admitted that you've carried Metallica over that ugly weekend. Has anyone been banned yet? And if you were, so what? Start a new userid and get back to the music. What's new? The foggies are complaining about what the world is coming to. New set of foggies that's all.
Given some recent decisions in the courts, I wouldn't put it past anyone...
Don't know about anyone else, but I'm thinking Canada is looking better and better.
Cheers,
Casey
- Sighuh?
My, this strikes me as something akin to the quote Given infinite time, a thousand monkeys could write the entire works of Shakespeare" Would it be forward of me to compare NetPD to a bunch of Monkeys? I personaly doubt it. After all, they certainly have the ego and logic of undeveloped primates. Perhaps they can evolve past their heirarchical system and develop resonable morals. ~Questioning "We are all Monkeys, although some of us are more so than others"
An army of 300k+. From a legal standpoint those 300K+ are _guilty_ of copyright violations.
I'm gonna go out on a limb here and assume that these trials would take place in the U.S.A where you are innocent until proven guilty. As for their counter-suit Metallica would have the burden of proof and I highly doubt that they would have much evidence to go by. They might have fared better if they had taken the time to investigate before simply accusing all of these people of piracy knowing exactly nothing about them other than their user name on napster and maybe their IPA. Not to mention the fact that they have no idea what any of these files contained other than than a name pertaining to Metallica.
If you can afford and 800mhz CPU, 256mb of ram and a large hard drive, you can spring for the $39.95 CD ROM drive. Pretty weak argument.
That was just a hypothetical situation that would explain something similar to what the originator was talking about. There are many other situations that could occur that would be similar to this but I won't go into all of them because there are too many and I'm not trying to start a flame war. I was just trying to say that situations like this can happen that would justify the use of Napster to get Metallica songs without it being piracy.
You already have the CDs and (I assume) a CD player. Problem solved.
This is not always the case. I used to have a cd player and therefore own cd's. Unfortunately it broke leaving me with all these cd's and no way to listen to them.
If you machine is so old that it can't rip CDs, it most likely can't play MP3s very effectively.
What does the fact that you can or can't rip cd's have to do with the age or quality of your computer? What if you like to build your own computers and simply haven't gotten a cd-rom for it yet? That doesn't mean that you can't have an 800mhz Athlon, 256mb sdram, and plenty of hard drive space.
Once you have purchased the music, you have the right to make copies for your personal use.
You're absolutely right and it doesn't matter how you get these copies. It's your right to have them.
Go ahead and try to take legal action against Metallica. Unless you've got some seriously deep pockets and a great deal of time to waste, I wouldn't bother.
Unfortunately you're probably right about this. As a single person you are more than likely completely powerless against Metallica and their team of lawyers. However with a team of 300,000+ more people not to mention the many other organizations that would be more than happy to help out like the EFF or the Cyber Army, I'm sure you could raise enough money to be pretty formidable yourself.
I'm now running a test to see whether or not NetPD actually checkes the validity of the files. Im currently sitting on napster with nine files called Not_Metallica- Fuck Yourself.mp3 containing the five megabytes of Microsoft word slightly modified. the results are simple - if 'my' account gets canceled then they do if not well then, obviously they don't. I will post back the results later.
I wonder how this list could ever hold up in court. What algorithms did they use? Can they prove they work and can they prove they used software with those algorithms to compile the list.
When is evidence obtained via software acceptable? It's generally accepted most software contains bugs.
Probably, since their motivation wasnt money, but the music itself.
Really, I think that if you are into music trying to make a living out of it, you are not into music for the right reason.
However, IF you are good enough that people WANT to go to where you play and WANT to support you with donations in exchange of CD's (or any other medium) with your music, weeell thats another thing.
Jose Alberto Abreu: musician and apprentice geek
No sig for the moment.
Rename all the very large files after music by Metallica, confusing these bastards further. Then, if you are brought to court, the file's opened up, and it turns out do be a database or something. (insert sound of credibility being shred here)
This netPD thing is evil, and unlike most things, I want it shot dead.
When the pack animals stampede, it's time to soak the ground with blood to save the world. We fight, we die, we break our cursed bonds.
Chris 'coldacid' Charabaruk Meldstar Entertainment
Now that would be ironic.
"If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe." - Carl Sagan
Does anybody know who came first? NetPD or NetPD? It seems that if the privacy protecting software was here first, the owners should have some kind of protection from another "NetPD" coming in and taking their name.
Lawsuit anyone?
This is the kind of thing that gives George Orwell a bad name.
wouldn't a napster search like that show even people who have LEGITIMATE metallica MP3s (i.e. mp3s that they made off of their CDs under 'fair use')?
Ok, now rinse and repeat for 330,541 more users.
Kind of like Russian Roulette Hu? I think they would only have to do 10 or 12 of the 330K+ in order to put a good scare in the rest.
This is a sad situation. I cannot stand to even look at my Metallica CD's anymore....Does anyone want to buy them from me???? I have...err...had been a big fan for a long time....(I remember scrawling a big lightning bolt on my gym locker in the Seventh Grade to celebrate their great follow up to kill em all')...However the general suckiness of anything after the ironically titled "And Justice For All"....Has softened the blow a bit....
My 2cents
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
What big balls these guys have. This whole patent/copyright/infringement thing is getting way the hell out of hand. How the hell can Napster be held liable? If I download some pirated software using Netscape, is AOL to be held liable? Metallica is just getting there undies all in a bunch because they are scared. Same thing with the MPAA, they get scared of anything they can't control. Screw em is what I say! They should have thought about that before they started charging 25$ bucks for a freakin CD!
Definately, however, is ANY type of evidence from NetPD even admissable in court? Nobody was notified that they were being watched, and if I remember right, phones can't be tapped, wouldn't this fall under the same law? No warrant, no arrest, no admissable proof, no case. WTF RIAA, get off the people's backs. the RIAA is worse for the music industry than Napster and they know it.
Spring is here. Don't believe me, look outside!
Metallica and anyone else who feels they should be able to profit from released music over the 'Net, should take a look at the former band the Grateful Dead, now in different incarnations but the spirit lives on. The Dead, now bands such as Phish, Widespread Panic, Stringcheese Incident, Leftover Salmon, have all allowed people to tape their shows and disttribute them among fans. This has created a following for each band and illuminates an honesty not found in greedy bands, such as Metallica and the others who want to sue for copyright infringement. Go right on ahead and do that and see what their gross is next tour. To me this reeks of laziness, self righteousness, Metallica released Cliff'em all, a video filled with bootlegged material. A bands lasting reputation is based on the quality of music they perform, and the live concert. Once they released Justice , I was disillusioned, but now I just plain hate'em.
What is NETPD doing? Well, my guess is hot air and causing problems, not only for napster, but also for the RIAA and any sueing aritsts. Let's start like from what we know: -they are using a program that is based on AI(???) -they are vulnerable to changes by Napster -anything else that we know for sure? I don't think so, AFAIK they have collected the user names of the different users. If, as some have said/written, they have also collected the IPs, they must have decoded the protocol, right? I don't think that they had enough time, even if they had traced all users back to the originating servers (though I do not know why they needed to do a visualized traceroute for this, I guess they used some existing SW programs for the demo to make it more TV-like), to get the warrants from the police to extract the real names. This is especially true for international users. So this cannot have been the case. Otherwise a lot of us would have heard about this and would have posted it here. Don't forget we are talking about 300kppl, they would have had to check. Ok, so let's try to figure out how they got the list and what might be on there(even though a short tel call to napster might resolve the issue). So what did the NETPD guys do? My guess is, that all this was !very! easy. One possibility is that they used a modified/patched Napster(would again go against the licence agreement) to do searches for Metallica and then do extract the user names including the IPs . No AI here and no AI anywhere else:) Or they analyzed the protocol and build their own client for querying the Napster Servers. They probably had those programs up and running for a few days and collected user names that showed Metallica files when they searched for them. No magic anywhere. Ways to counter all this: -change the protocols and change the Napster client, encrypt the search results and make their programs more diffficult to crack(I know there is no uncrackable program, once you have it in your hands, but you could make it way more difficult for them to make a user list assembler and if you change the programs often enough, say once a week, they will have problems tracking the current users) -reset all user names every 2nd day or don't use user names at all, just give them a number at log in(you are nr 382793 today) -update their licence agrement, making it illegal for anyone to reverse engineer the program or protocol and putting up fines for using the results of the rev engineering -using shell accounts(usual problems) -using anonymizer variant for napster -using freenet,aol free 50h accounts etc. -Napster switching to anonymizing users, e.g. putting up different servers through which all the packets(download/upload) would be routed with no logs in place. -there sure are more, put those are the ones out of the top of my head(which is tired and still has work to do) So was there magic, no. AI? no. Could most of us have done what netpd has done? yes. Where is the problem for the record industry? Well, I don't know for sure, but I think that they have to proove that the files that were copied were not only named Metallica(this was also pointed out before) but would also be Metallica MP3s. I don't know of any way how they could do this, especially now, 20days after the list was probably compiled. The RPS(=Rights Protection System) which is going to be forced on e.g. all German ISPs, is useless against Napster. They could as well not implement the whole RPS and ground the whole project, as Napster is 10x easier to use then finding webpages/servers with your music on. What are they going to do, if Napster would be moving its servers to another country and register there? Say a country that has no record industry and no close associaton with the US, than they would have BIG problems. I agree with one writer before that wrote that in his view RIAAllica:) does not want to go after the individual users, but wants to shut down Napster. For them it is not about the peanuts that they are loosing now, but about all their revenue streams. If those systems succeed and are easy in use/accessible for everyone, than they are dead. This is what Napster was providing the world with, the axe to slay RIAAllica. RIAAllica will try everything to get them shot to the moon or somewhere where they won't be able to connect to the inet, but as the system and the idea is out, we are going to see many more Napsters/Gnutellas out there and many more tries by the RIAAllica to counter them. So what will happen? Will Napster be bought by Sony to be used for their distribution system? Something like this is already being developed and have a look at mp3exchanger.com they seem to be building something like this. hope this was not too boring:)
beautiful women hate sigs
Software to brainwash people into doing web searches? Nah. He just gives 'em some "coins" on iwin.com, so they have a 1:1,000,000 chance of winning a DVD player. Oh yeah, my first post ever on Slashdot. W00t.
"Settle down, Beavis. We've got an experiment to do."
I think that the anon is right. We, as a community need to defend Gnutella from the millionaire Rockstars, and the sue crazy lawyers. Especially the ones that don't understand the technology. They must be stopped, before the Internet becomes as bad as TV.
It works "like 5,000 people sitting in a room"?
So, do they have like 5,000 guys in a sweatshop somewhere doing Napster searches?
Or are they using some kind of software privatly developed to do the work of 5,000 people? If so, IT should be on the market.
And if the sweatshop thing holds true, this could be bigger than the Kathie Lee Gifford thing.
-------------------------------------------------
oh man, mettalica sucks since the black album. they are really sick, forgive them.
Next album: Mettalica, the pink album feat. hanson
Ha !
Couldn't we just find a set of IPs and Names, post them, and firewall the dickens out of them. Sort of net embargo. I'm going to start now.
IMHO, this is no AI just a simple perl script, probably no more than a 100 lines. The napster protocol is widely available, but the info they have gleaned is almost certainly useless: a lot of usernames and floating IPs. This is an old gag in the net business. old-line companies have enough trouble just getting on the net. what perl can do will more than baffle them. The NetPD crew is probably laughing their asses off to the tune of search_and_destroy.mp3. As for Lars and the boys, its kind of sad. I own every CD, have 'kill em all, 'master' and 'lightning' on vinyl and have seen the band at least 6 times. I'm still a fan, but you guys should have let N Sync or some other cheesy boy band spawn this controversy.
You seem to have cut out and renumbered the clauses, skipping the first (and quite relevant) clause: As a condition to your use of the Napster service and browser you agree that you will not: (i) use the Napster service to infringe the intellectual property rights of others in any way; (ii) use the Napster browser... It's that #1 that people copying Metallica songs are in trouble for...
pfff who is interested in Metallica mp3's these days. Them guyz haven't done anything decent since the black album. Sad but true.
(incidentally, I spelled the name wrong. How do I change it?)
Music is more than data; but it's not more more-than-data than sofware, cinema or literature. All of which benefit from being as widely distributed as possible; culture flourishes as culture producers (which is just a sugared term for "content provider," but nevertheless) gain readier access to one another's work. I won't bother to repeat the rosy technofantasies of the anarchists who infest this server like so many sarcastic body pierced rats, but there's a possibility of real enrichment of the human condition with this technology, and the "shortsighted" people are the people trying to get in the way of that.
The real problem is: how can a musician, or anyone else producing a cultural product, once the distribution of culture is itself free, make a dime? Musicians like Metallica shouldn't have a problem. Aside from live touring, there are all sorts of things they can do - merchandising, for example. Really famous musicians, for that matter anyone selling about half a million records like the relatively popular underground bands which demographics indicate my fellow slashdotters like, can make a perfectly respectable living for themselves and their lawyers, without the revenue from actual album sales. Another poster was reiterating the argument everyone always makes about that guy who wrote Catcher in the Rye... he was a real recluce... anyway, he wouldn't want to go on speaking tours. Someone that popular could make a fortune just by sending a request that money be sent to him at a P.O.Box.
The problem, and it is a problem, is that the new system of music distribution is growing up organically, and it isn't doing what it should be doing, which is to provide a system of economic support (with dignity) for those really marginalised musicians who the RIAA isn't even interested in.
In the hayday european classical music, musicians and composers made a living through what amounted to various forms of patronage (which is also what album sales represent, incidentally.) Now, I don't believe that culture should be dicatated by rich people, which is the case under the CURRENT system, but I digress, patronage is the real promise of online music distribution. We need to build a logistical system so that an artist, with perhaps only 5,000 patrons/viewers/listerners/fans scattered around the world, can make a living from their work.
Aside from the solution that seems obvious to me (it involves the government paying people after counting hits...) how do people think you would do this, from a nuts and bolts perspective? Keep in mind that fraud is still a real problem, and you have to take steps to protect people's reputations (or maybe you don't?) Much more interesting question than "should music distribution go on-line" which is, of course, a moot point.
shandelm@chemistry.ucsc.edu
I find the most humorous aspect of all of this to be Lars' comment that 'it's sad that our music is being traded as a commodity instead of the art that it is.'
On the surface, this seems to make sense. Yet in what avenue is Metallica's art being traded as a commodity? In record stores? On MTV? What does he think his music is to his label, to the radio stations that play it, to the entertainment market at large? A potential source of revenue.
And for what other reason are the powers that be going after Napster? Because they are afraid of a drain on revenue.
Artists who are interested in their art reaching the widest human audience should love Napster. Those who believe that art, once created, does not belong to its creator but to everyone, should love Napster.
I love Napster, but of course I still buy discs and will never stop. I want the source recording. I want the cover art and the CD booklet. But Napster has gotten me interested in artists I never would have listened to otherwise.
In short, real artists should be in favor of Napster, not against it.
d0lemiteAnd NO IP addresses. Just Napster account names that are listed by the software. This from a friend who works at Napster.
I wonder if Mr Ward has taken into consideration that data collected in the UK would be subject to the Data Protection Act 1998 - ie. based on various data protection directives which have come out of the EU. His company has possibly commited a criminal act by passing data relating to individuals to the US.
There are various privacy acts and such prohibiting unauthorized wiretaps by private parties and such (just ask Linda Tripp :-), but it is unlikely that any such laws apply here. In any event, it's not a Constitutional issue, since the Bill of Rights restricts what government can do, not what businesses can do. The only restriction upon businesses are the laws passed by Congress and the individual states -- bodies which increasingly are owned by big businesses and which rarely today serve the people.
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
Not one bit... so they can cobble together a C program that aggregrates the data returned by a search query made using a protocol that has been reverse-engineered and publicly documented. "Artificial intelligence" is a total fucking lie, and Forbes went for it hook, line, and sinker. I can all but guarantee you that whatever they used was no more than an amalgam is socket calls, pattern matching, and logging. WOW! Given the proper motivation and bandwidth, I could have written this. Most everyone here probably could. And now they have the balls to call themselves the "MP3 Police"? Uhh, not quite.
I have a feeling their capabilities for detection of illegal MP3s is massively overblown. First, they did not check to see that people were actually offering files for download. They only checked to see if people came up as search hits. How do I know this? Because my computer was running Napster for the last two weekends and has been for over a month. During the time period that they claim they did their probing, not a single Metallica track was downloaded from my computer. None were even "poked" and then cancelled to see if I was offering them.
It's possible to enter a max upload rate of zero and not upload anything to anyone. Merely having copies of Metallica songs on my computer that I am not distributing is perfectly legal and covered under fair use. We went over this last year with the Diamond Rio.
So, NetPD has produced a fairly hokey list of 300,000 names of people who have Metallica tracks residing on their computer. So what. This is not illegal. It's also not illegal to name my MP3s after Metallica songs. So if I want to my Beethoven's 5th Symphony public domain MP3 "Enter Sandman", that's not a copyright violation. AFAIK the only way to prove that all 300,000 users violated some sort of copyright is to download the tracks and listen to them. Unless they really have written some sort of AI software that can do this (highly unlikely), all they have proven is that I have files on my computer vaguley matching "*Metallica*.mp3" I am free to name my files whatever they want, and I'll be damned if NetPD or mp3police.com or whoever is going to tell me otherwise.
--
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
Bizarre. You think that companies can make their own law? A "fine" clause would not be valid just because someone writes one into a shrink-wrap contract.
NetPD would only be bound to obey Napster's terms of service if they have a legally binding agreement with Napster. In some places, clicking on the "I agree" button creates such a contract. But lots of folks have reverse-engineered the Napster protocols. This reverse engineering can be used to track users. Anyone running Napster from a box with a static IP address, and serving up MP3s belonging to bands/record companies that don't like Napster, is a moron. You will be traced. Even if you have a dynamic IP address, your ISP could help to nail you.
though you're probably kidding, I thought I'd point out something that people like the RIAA would really like to get rid of: the principle of first sale. basically it says that they can't do anything about (who/what/whether) you sell it. Now, with DMCA, it is possible to technologically block this, though it is yet another principle enshrined in copyright/fair use law.
so, though you're not allowed to make copies and distribute/sell them, you can take your original copy and pass it on/sell it/microwave it, and there isn't anything they can do about it.
Lea
>If you are unable to make a copy of music you own personally, I seriously doubt it legal for you to obtain a copy from someone else's copy.
Why not? Libraries do this frequently to replace missing or damaged pages in books or periodicals.
Or, for example, you ask a friend to make a copy of a CD you own to tape, but you & your friend find it hard to meet to hand your copy over for copying. ``No problem," says the friend, ``I'll just make a copy of my CD & give it to you next time I see you."
I'd say that there are enough plausible reasons for sharing MP3s over Napster that do not violate copyright -- & indeed require the bottom fish^W^Wsuits at RIAA to provide proof that their rights are being infringed upon -- & to convince a jury or impartial judge.
Geoff
I think I see a trend here. Maybe for them it really would be easier to muzzle the entire internet than to produce p
"If you buy something that you think is cocaine, but actually turns out to be baking powder you are still guilty of purchasing drugs in the eyes of the law. The same for selling fake drugs."
This is going to vary, but usually this actually results in a charge of Attempt to Posses Nacotics. If a man lies dead and you feel he is sleeping and you shoot a bullet through his heart, you are guilty of attempted murder.
Or that's how it's supposed to go.
Bad Mojo
Bad Mojo
"If you can't win by reason, go for volume." -- Calvin
But, let's say I went to a Metallica show.. and had tapers-section seats, and I recorded the show. That's MY recording, I own it, and the copyright on it. I can share "Metallica-Enter Sandman.mp3" if it is from the Albany, NY show I taped it at.
Now, what differentiates my "metallica-enter-sandman.mp3" file from some bozo's "metallica-enter-sandman.mp3" CD-Rip? It's the CONTENTS... and I can bet you they didn't sit down and listen to the contents.
Napster can summarily reject the data as bogus on that principle right there.
D
Should that be www.befound.co.uk. There's a big difference.
"Cause there's 40 different shades of black, so many fortresses and ways to attack, so why you complainin'?"
They dont' have to. THey aren't taking you to court.
Odds are if you are using napster, and sharing a file called 'metallica-black.mp3' that it is in fact, Black, by Metallica, and music. They are asking napster to ban the users, as napster said they would.
It is legal for you to COPY the CDs you have.
Presumably, nobody would try to sue you for copying them from somewhere else, if you have the originals already.
What is at issue is the fact that the other person does NOT have the right to GIVE those copies to you in the first place, and as you are receiving information they are giving you illegally, the information itself is illegal.
hey don't have to prove it in court.
Napster said that if Metallic provided them with names of infringing people, that napster would ban them (as per the napster usage agreement and other things on the site, as well as a letter right from naspter's lawyers to metallica's lawyers). Metallica did just that. They are not suing users, they are not planning on suing users.. they are simply making napster do what it said it would do. Whether it is admissible in court is irrelevant. Napster said 'give us names, we will act accordingly'.
Did NetPD go through the trouble of ensuring that these files were what they claimed to be? What's to say that the file 'Metallica-Black.mp3' isn't my biology assignment? Or maybe it's just a tape of me singing in the shower?
...off to see if www.NetPDSucks.com is registered yet.
Is it illegal to have a file that has a title that sounds like a song? Shouldn't they have to make sure that this file is what it appears to be? That would take a long time given the number of Metallica songs that are out there and the thousands of file sizes that are available for these songs (based on combinations of frequency, bitrate and ripping software).
Just some thoughts
------
IanO
------
Objects in Mirror are Losing!
I'm in the mood to......spoof.....
linux/beos bands/songs
here and here
when Push Comes to Shove
Anonymous attacks are becoming more and more effective in the U.S., you can anonymously rat out your neighbor to Child Protective Services and they have to prove to the authorities that you aren't beating your kids, and if you refuse to cooperate you are (to them) admitting your guilt and you will always be suspected.
Once NetPD fingers you as a copyright violator (even if they make up the information out of whole cloth, who can prove otherwise?), people like Metallica and the RIAA will assume you are scum of the earth, and but for the fact that most people don't have much money and wouldn't be worth the trouble, would probably sue you into the Stone Age.
And if they do pursaue it, as with any unfounded litigation, it will probably be easier and cheaper to settle.
IANAL, nor do I pretend to have any idea what I am talking about.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Assume I've never used Napster (I have for awhile now). What username are they referring to? Did they just capture IP addresses of people who have Metallica MP3's up for grabs, or people who are downloading Metallica MP3's?
I'm a little foggy on "what" they actually captured.
It doesn't have to stand in court. It's Napster's own policy that's biting them back. Since Napster promised to remove any specified user's account per the artist's request, if Metallica comes back after a couple of weeks, looks up any of 300,000 users and finds out that metallica mp3s are still being offered, Napster is going to face more trouble in court.
Go get your free Palm V (25 referrals needed only!)
fom your bash command line ;)
/home/pirate/netpd-bait /home/pirate/mp3` /home/pirate/mp3/$i /home/pirate/netpd-bait/Metallica-$i
/home/pirate/netpd-bait
mkdir
for i in `ls
do cp
done
login with favorite client and redirect your db to
What? have they linked in mp3 id tags? same search, insert command to change id tag.
-- Who is the bigger fool? The fool or the fool who follows him? --
Offtopic but interesting The data protection registrars response to the RIP bill (Word Doc)
http://www.dataprotection.gov.uk/
~ppppppppö
Can't find Netpd/mp3police or Bruce Ward registed as data collectors on the Data Protection website either.
Section 8 is interesting, u r not allowed to transmit data outside of the European area unless you can prove that there is sufficient protection for it....
And hey if you think you are on their list you can send a couple of quid to their registered address and they have to send you a copy of all the info they have on you.
~ppppppppö
You've hit on a really good point...
He insists that to say more would enable Napster and other MP3 programs to block the software.
The proceadure/progarm/AI is defeatable by their own words. It will only take a little time and effort and NetPD will be made impotent!
If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you.
All the probes are coming out of a cable system in the UK. Look on whois.ripe.net for the real source
:-)
inetnum: 62.254.209.128 - 62.254.209.159
netname: MP3PLTD
descr: Internet applications for the music industry.
admin-c: BW2097-RIPE
tech-c: COH1-RIPE
person: Bruse Ward
address: 1st Floor,Godolphin House
address: 2 The Avenue
address: Newmarket Suffolk. CB8 9AA
phone: +44 1633 670000
e-mail: Bruce@mp3police.co.uk
nic-hdl: BW2097-RIPE
changed: hostmaster@ntli.net 19991221
source: RIPE
but can't find the registry contact for mp3police.co.uk, it seems to be hosted at Xara.net.
According to logs, mp3police.co.uk were actively scanning http, ftp, and napster style connections starting in mid-april. Machines were under occasional cyber-attack by groups of 5 machines, each taking turns probing different services and trying to walk ftp trees on a few anonymous-login servers, and ignored robots.txt on the web servers. Couldn't tell from the logs what they were looking for, but since they didn't try to rattle any exploits, the rogue bots were ignored for more immediate threats.
It should be noted that for a while they were attempting napster type connections on whole banks of IP addresses, whether or not the nodes were running napster. It shows up kind of funny in the security logs when routers are probed by a rogue napster client.
So their scanning pre-dates the lawsuit, or else there were preparations for the suit going on for a long time.
I think mp3police or netpd have been getting ready to sell their services to the first lawsuit to come along. They've collected tons of logs over a period of months, and then when metallica hit the news their marketing guy contacted the lawyers. I wonder what their business plan looks like
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
The article hints that this software would be easy to block. It relies on Napster, etc. not knowing what to look for. I wonder if Napster could look at logs of the Black Weekend (bad Metallica pun--sorry) and figure out how to block NetPD.
If you can read this, then I forgot to check "Post Anonymously".
Let's try to be just a little consistent here. Under any other circumstances, slashdot posters would deride those TOS as completely ludicrous -- of course you should be allowed to use bots and reverse engineer the system.
But now you want to enforce such restricive terms!? With a fine !?. That must be the most stupid thing I've heard all day.
*shakes head, sighs, and turns away*
Someone thought I was joking!
No. The TOS should have those terms, and the fine clause, and here's an analogy:
I write a bit of software. The license I used granted some of my rights to my users. My users can do all sorts of wonderful things with my software. But so can BigEvilCorp. They decide to rip me off and exploit my license. I can't change BigEvilCorps license. They can screw me.
I write another bit of software. The license I use not only preserves all of my rights, it actually removes some of those normally granted my users. My users want to do wonderful things with my software, and I can let them, either by changing the license on a case-by-case basis or by choosing to not enforce some of it. But BiggEvilCorp can't screw me.
It's not the TOS or the license; It's the person enforcing it.
.sig: Now legally binding!
Read the rest of the thread, especially my reply to myself. They're not hypocrites, exactly..
.sig: Now legally binding!
I'm not quite sure that the progress of electronic communications will help our situation. Every day a budding musician has to travel farther in the scene in order to eat, since the big names keep becoming bigger and bigger. I'd prefer to concentrate on everything that's going on nearby, but too many people concentrate on high profile talent, and local music fizzles unless it's distinctive. I'm sure some people will say that the added competition makes the remaining few stronger, and they're probably right. But it does make it a pain in the butt to find fun shows and cool records if you're not into pop pap.
--
The other side is crowded. The dead have nowhere to go.
yep, we're talking about GSM here. Prepaid phones, and use them only for the one phone call where you do your misschief, that way they can't find you buy tracing all the calls you do with that phone. Oh, and for bonus points, assume that when you use the phone they are ably to track your location by finding out what GSM base station you're connected to - so do this from a moving train during rush hour.
-John
Remember Usenet? Store and forward becomes effectively completely untracable with just a tiny bit of effort. Perhaps we'll see a resurgance in the alt.* hiearchies...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
They're obviously aiming for a hallowed spot up there next to Oasis...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Good point, but when does a bot get a chance to read or agree to Napster's TOS?
There is nothing in their protocol that sends the bot Napster's TOS, nor is their any request in the protocol that asks whether or not the user actually agrees to the TOS. Without these things in their protocol, NetPD could argue that they never saw nor agreed to Napster's TOS.
Sig goes here
Anyway, is this provable evidence in court? Did this program DOWNLOAD and LISTEN to the songs? What if someone gets kicked off because they have a Chuck D song that is renamed to Metallica-One.mp3 ?? What if its a lower quality, or is just a clip, and not an entire song?
Has this stupid program (written by a stupid company (hired by a stupid band))) proven anything here?
Mike Roberto (roberto@soul.apk.net) -GAIM: MicroBerto
Berto
The rise of the fixed-medium (vinyl, CD, etc.) music industry as a gigantic financial engine is a fairly recent one. In another decade or two, it will (hopefully) be remembered as a temporary economic quirk that was renderred irrelevant by the progress of electronic communications technology.
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
This gets back to the point made by another poster: what if you just called all of your Napster files metallica_000001.mp3, up to metallica_300000.mp3, but having absolutely NO Metallica content within them? Or, make the template m3tall1ca_######.mp3 so they can't claim any trademark issues.
Seems to me the best way to thrwart what being done is to make it VERY difficult to make the case that the alleged violations are genuine. Consider:
Metallica's Lawyers: we found all these copies of our music on this site.
Judge: How do you know?
Metallica: It's has the word metallica on the file name.
Defense: Please play one.
Judge: Is this your music?
Metallica: Uh..... No.
Judge: Did you check the files to see if the content is actually your music?
Metallica: Uh..... No.
Judge: Case dismissed, precedence set.
They might have more trouble in court, but it doesn't have to be a difficult experience. Personally, I like the idea of sending money to bands to wean them off of their record label. Look at Aimee Mann who is label-free and having a very successful year (Magnolia soundtrack nomination).
He has not provided details beyond the fact that NetPD's software "works like 5,000 humans sitting in a room doing Web searches" to identify thousands of user names very quickly. He insists that to say more would enable Napster and other MP3 programs to block the software.
So what will happen when this program results are submitted as evidence in court? How can it be without saying how it works (at least in general terms)? NetPD will have to, and then Napster, etc. will be able to block it.
Gonzo
This means that the 300-odd thousand names of copyright infringers still need to be individually verified by humans before they can be pursued in court. To do otherwise would be like typing "child porn" into a search engine and pursuing the owner of every page returned without checking to see what is actually there. Using a firm like this should increase the cost of litigating copyright offenses with little benifit to the plaintiffs. Let's hope they all contract with these guys!
.sig: file not found
(iii) reverse engineer any portion of the Napster service or browser
Yet on their home page, they recommend Macster for users on Macintosh boxen. And the official FAQ lists (unsupported) clients for other platforms.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Take an infinite number of monkeys, typing on an infinite number of typewriters for an infinite amount of time and you'll get yourself an Encyclopedia Britanica.
Take 5000 NetPD employees typing on 5000 computers for a day and you get yourself 335,000 Napster users downloading Metallica. It's all about the time constraint and the theory of probability.
You can't handle the truth.
you also forgot slander! Nothing says loving like getting gang raped in prison for being a loyal fan and supporting a band!
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -THHGTTG
Yea sourceforge is part of VA linux, but freenet is an open source (GPL IIRC) program that is not affilated with VA Linux (that I know of), VA Linux is cool enough to host open source projects on their servers (ie. sourceforge.org). sourceforge.net gives up server space/bandwidth/maintaince to open source developers, which IMHO is really cool of them (no I don't work for them).
Sorry I posted the wrong URL last time, the correct address is:
http://freenet.sourceforge.net/
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -THHGTTG
they got your username (and ip?) and that is it. Say they don't have your ip address and force napaster to give up there logs on that date (assuming they don't rotate logs every week or so) and they manage to get your IP. Ok, so they got your ip and roughly the time you where trading metallica mp3.
With that IP, they would find how it was registored to (more than likely your isp), then they would go to the registors of that ip (more than likely your isp) and court order them to give up the logs files on that date for dial-in connection (assuming your on a dial up), or what ip is staticly assigned that.
If your ip is staticly assigned by your isp, your pretty screwed, but if it is dynamically assigned like for a dial up connection (cable modem??, dsl??) they would need the log files. Most smaller isp rotate their auth-log/radius log files alot (every week for some) because 1) they are small and can't afford disk space 2) they really don't give a crap what their users do
Or, say they magically get past all this crap and do get your ip and that leads back to the username on the isp, with that username the isp (under court order) finds your billing information and it traces back to your name, simple huh?
Ok, so they know have to get a search warrant for your house/apartment, plan a raid, then arrest you/ or take your computer equipment to look over.
Now lets think about this, how long is this going to take? It has been 1-2 weeks since they go this user names, it will probably take a couple weeks PER USER to get a warrant for the isp, then it might take 1-3 days for the isp to produce the log files (assuming they wheren't flushed at this point) and then it will take 1-14 days to get a search warrant for your house. Ok, now rinse and repeat for 330,541 more users. If you are at the VERY bottom of this list, it might take YEARS to get you arrested (assuming the isp still has the logs, and you still have the mp3's on hard disk)
Metallica isn't going to arrest 300, 000 + of it's users. This is being used as "Look Mr. Court, they ARE trading meticall mp3s on Napster, look big piles of paper, it is proof"
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -THHGTTG
Instead of finding more creative ways to break copyright laws, how about going about changing them? You know I don't like these murder laws, in protest I'll go kill some people. See my point?
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
www.badassmofo.com
lets pull an 'echelon' on them; create so many false triggers, they won't be able to find out which advertised entries are real Met. songs and which ones are just renamed versions of the latest uuencoded linux kernels.
so please do the following before running napster:
% cp /boot/bzImage /mp3/junk
% cd /mp3
% uuencode junk junk > metallica_song1.mp3
repeat until satisfied.
--
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Yep, and you just know that their methods are likely bogus, or at least severely flawed. Which is probably why they won't reveal them.
The "works like 5,000 humans sitting in a room doing Web searches' to identify user names" crap sounds strangly reminiscent of the pathetic "we have humans checking every single website we block" crap that products like CyberGestapo^H^H^H^H^H^H^HPatrol spew forth for advertisements.
I don't know about anyone else, but I'm rather suspicious of their oh-so-intelligent Artificial Stupidity algorithms.
Registrant:
MP3 Police (MP3POLICE4-DOM)
PO Box 3242
Hot Springs, AR 71914
US
Domain Name: MP3POLICE.COM
Administrative Contact, Technical Contact, Zone Contact, Billing Contact:
Ward, Bruce (BW11725) bruce@PROVENST.COM
MP3 Police
PO Box 3242
Hot Springs , AR 71914
501 466 4883
Record last updated on 03-Sep-1999.
Record expires on 03-Sep-2001.
Record created on 03-Sep-1999.
Database last updated on 7-May-2000 20:36:49 EDT.
Domain servers in listed order:
NS1.BEFOUND.COM 208.145.34.1
NS2.BEFOUND.COM 208.145.34.2
On a clear disk you can seek forever
Anyone consider the ussage violation that Napster has set up, specifically it says that no bots are allowed on napster...this I'm sure would be some type of bot, it's automated and all that...so Napster has authority to ban them, am I correct? (BTW this is my first slashdot post...but have been reading this page forever) -Balt_53
Things like this will just force more expansion on the FreeNET front.
This is a losing battle - the only thing that RIAA can even remotely *hope* to gain is a public perception that they'll beat you if you try to usurp their members positions as owners and dominators of the media industry.
FreeNET will come along and fuck this up for them, big time. It'll also be a major headache for *legitimate* law enforcement, but I suspect the Discordians behind the various free net movements find that perfectly reasonable.
I just hope that *real* musicians, who *want* to share their works with others keep in mind that they *STILL CAN DO IT, IN SPITE OF WHAT THE RIAA/MPAA SAY ABOUT IT*.
Folks, there's an awful lot of good music out there, for free, available to download any time of day. You don't *have* to buy the force-fed 'product' that's being pushed in the frontlines - you can always have a more direct, personal relationship with other musicians whose art you prefer.
When was the last time you sent an email to Christina Aguilera or Metallica and got a *real* response, eh? That's the new rules of the game, and the majors know they can't play that.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Why not let the musicians decide how they'll make a living? Granted, a large number of them do take to the road, choose to be away from their families for weeks or months at a time. But to decide that those who choose not to should not make money by making music I thing is pretty presumtive.
I suspect this will also lead to less, not greater diversity in music. For one thing, the only people who will make money in the music biz are those acts that *can* travel. A lone composer in his basement whipping up symphonies on his bank of synthesizers is out of luck under your plan. "Sorry mate, not paying for your music, since you can't manage to play 5 keyboards at once. But hey, thanks for the tunes."
Also consider that the limited number of venues will act as a force to restict who will be able to make money. This is a limiting factor now to bands that are starting out, but if *every* band out there needs to play live gigs to make their money, things will just get that much more crowded.
Also, the focus on live performance will likely change music itself. Why spend all of the money to cut a studio album when you'll just be giving it away? Bands will just stick with what they can do in concert. If you told the Beatles they couldn't make money off of studio albums, would they have made Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart Club Band?
Perhaps some will say that this is a good thing. Well, that's your musical taste. Why enforce your taste on others?
You know, most geeks would throw a hissy fit if management dictated they had to work 9-5, had to wear ties, and the whole works. Why, then, this attitude regarding how others make their money?
I've been wondering about this for a while. Say say my name is on Metallica's list. I own every Metallica CD they have came out with (except re-load but thats another issue). I have the right to have copies of the songs in mp3 format, this has been proven in several court cases. Now, I have an older machine with a CD-ROM that cannot rip. So to get the songs I legally have a right to have in mp3 format I have to turn to the net. Fine, thats still not illegal. Metallica accuses me of being a pirate because some research agency pulled my name off the napster lists. They have no proof that I have done anything illegal, just that I have downloaded their songs. Isn't the burden of proof for these sorts of things on Metallica? If Metallica has me banned from Napster, could I take legal action against them for harrasment, defermation of character or other nasty things?
It's very likely you're overestimating the technology behind NetPD.
My guess is that they simply queried for the names "Metallica", parsed the search results, and queried each request to get the username holding the song. Rinse and repeat for each Napster server. It's not like you don't already know the username when you download an mp3.
There wouldn't be anything illegal about that, and they don't really have to resort to methods like packet-sniffing and eavesdropping, which would probably be pretty controversial.
Go get your free Palm V (25 referrals needed only!)
Does anyone want to bet that this firm get's hired to go start looking for DeCSS on the internet should the court battle go the way of the DVDCAA/MPAA?
From the Article,
"We've set up with the intention of offering copyright protection services to not just the music industry, but the videogame and movie businesses," says Ward, who worked at "a few unknown software companies" before starting NetPD last year."
This sounds pretty much an offer to help the MPAA/DVDCAA to me - even though I wonder how the actual program would identify and make sure that the so labeled software actually is CSS code.
Which brings me to my next point. If I was trading non-copyrighted music through Napster (after having renamed it to Metallica music) and may have got my name on the list - does that mean that I can be prosecuted for violating the law?
At the moment, I dunno. Still I do not think programs like this will ever be effective. Hotline (ftp client program like Wrapster) has an infamous bot - known as the Sadwyw Spider - that searches HL servers for warez. It was news when it came out, but people quickly figured that by simply requiring an l/p to view items on the server the bot would be defeated - or by renaming the items and listing the actual name as part of the info tag.
Couldn't Napster do - something of the like, to defeat bot searches? For Instance - require that a specific always changing login that is displayed at several different locations on the screen be entered for the Bot to search - that would at the very least require a human there to punch in the login, which should make the popularity of programs like this go down alot.
Overall, I don't think this is something to worry about - more scary would be if Metallica put a bot user on Napster with thier songs and displayed the IP's of anyone that dl'ed their songs (Like the webpage that does Gnutella porn) Anyhow - what if I download a song that I legally own, the bot cannot check that either so I'm not that worried...
Is it progress if a cannibal uses a fork?
So I'm wondering if anyone has any idea of where they could have gotten such a high number. Perhaps there were 335,000 songs, but I just can't believe that there were 335,000 individual users.
My guess is that they used the song count, rather than the user count so that it would have more press impact, and that we'll find out later that it really was something more like 20,000 users (even that is high). Come to think of it, 335,000 songs is too high. They must be double counting.
Like if NetPD person A and NetPD person B were logged on to the same Napster server, they probably counted the songs they saw twice. And with "5000" NetPD people banging on it... Hmm, that would require only 67 Metallica (TM, Reg. US Pat. Off., Reg. Penna Dept. Agr) songs to be on Napster to get a count of 335,000, which is about how many I'd estimate are available on a server at any given time.
Here in Europe, I'd buy a pre-paid GSM mobile phone anonymously (from a store that has no surveillance cameras running) on a busy saturday afternoon, get a free internet provider or just use one of the 30 hours free accounts. Used just once and thrown away, from a city you don't live in, and the agency that can trace that deserves to be in world power anyway..
I agree that it seems hard to prove who is who on napster and if they could even block all the people on that list (possibly the people with static ips, but then they'll just get another).
My question, and I feel it's something that should certainly be investigated before napster instigates any actions, is just HOW were they collecting information? Sure, they say they've got some "AI Program" doing the search of 5,000 individuals, but that doesn't mean their searches were successful. Are they looking for every mp3 that has metallica in the title? Or has some reference to a Metallica song title? How are they even sure that these mp3s are even Metallica mp3s without downloading and listening to them (Can't you see it, NetPD sued as largest pirate of illegal mp3s *grin*)? Then, the question is, is it illegal to have an mp3 with Metallica in the title, but the actual music isn't Metallica?
I think NetPD needs to be saying a lot more about it's "AI Program" before anybody (slashdotters, lawyers, napster, etc) take their results seriously. In the meantime, I vote we (as in slashdotters), make a rather annoying song about how Metallica sucks and flood napster with tons of these with Metallica titles. How about it? Of course, we'll want to change spellings, titles, file size, etc to throw their "AI Program" off.
Note: I have heard of a company that is developing software that can identify/pattern match music based on properties within the file. So maybe NetPD is using something like this, but they should certainly be able to prove their results are accurate.
He has not provided details beyond the fact that NetPD's software "works like 5,000 humans sitting in a room doing Web searches" to identify thousands of user names very quickly. He insists that to say more would enable Napster and other MP3 programs to block the software.
Oh my God he is using software to brain wash people into doing web searches, any army of mindless droids, he must be stopped. We already know he has 5000 mindless slaves, how many more before before we step in? He must be stoped know.
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -THHGTTG
Since you were technically a juvenile in 7th grade, you might get off with a warning unless Metallica chooses to prosecute you as an adult, in which case you'll probably go down for "intent to redistribute illegally" and "racketeering" in addition to the usual "habitual violator" stuff... tough break.
"The Internet is made of cats."
wouldnt this program violate napster's 'no bots clause' that you get when you log on? wouldnt this be considerd a bot and hence the ip should be banned??? oh well... just a thought.
Someone will need to add on the fly encryption keys to Gnutella.
What if the hokey pokey is really what it's all about? -- Anonymous
I suppose there was probably more than just the name, possibly a listing of songs downloaded or other info (IP Address, etc), but it still seems pretty wasteful use of paper.
Isn't there some kind of law against wanton waste of natural resources? (Nah, guess not or all the junksnalmailers and those postcards that fall out of magazines would be illegal too...) Maybe there should be! :)
"We've got 5000 users, each with a computer, locked in a room. They want to talk to you about this script to Hamlet they've worked out."
--
--
Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
Here's what I don't get. So they have user ID's or whatever of 330,000 people who are trading Metallica mp3's.
OR, is it people who have a file with the name Metallica in it, or one of their song title's. How about I put out a copy of the dictionary, out there titled "Metallica - Holier than Thou.mp3"?
Did they download 330,000 mp3's and play them to see that the are copyrighted material.
I have a file called "Metallica Sucks My Dick.mp3", on Napster. Am I on their list?
- I like pudding.
How can I mask my IP number when going online (through IRC, web, napster, etc.)? And I mean really anonymous--no logs to be revealed under court order.
I sometimes use a socks{4|5} anonymous server. They are really hard to find, but they do mask your IP under anything you can find a client for (irc,telnet,ftp,etc.), a lot of the anonymous socks servers get abused alot so they don't stay around for an extended period of time, ussually have to find a new one every week or so.
They do mask your IP well (it appears to be coming from the socks server), but under a court order they might be able to get your IP from the "anonymous" socks server. It isn't full proof, but it can help you in some sisuations.
there is huge listing out there of anonymous and free socks avaiable on the Internet, also there is free shell accounts. These both appear to "mask" your IP, but the server that you are bouncing from can grab your IP if they really wanted to (some have a no-log-ip policy, some don't), also make sure the shell/socks proxy you are "bouncing" off allows this, some sites "forget" to secure them probably and they get posted on this list, then 100 script kiddies start trading p0rn though them and it ends up in a big mess...
The only other thing I know of would be FreeNet
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -THHGTTG
This is another step in the arms race between those who wish to remain anonymous and those who want to know who is doing what.
It's just a matter of time before the RIAA goes after those operating servers on IRC. NetPD is a company that will likely help in this. (In most cases, they could probably get those running servers booted from their ISPs--very painful when high-speed options are limited.)
So what are the next step for those who want to be anonymous? How can I mask my IP number when going online (through IRC, web, napster, etc.)? And I mean really anonymous--no logs to be revealed under court order.
NetPD hails itself as a "force for good", but where's the accountability? If the Christian Coalition approached NetPC asking for the names of everyone emailing to abortion clinics, how do we know they won't turn their 10 employees (5000 monkeys) on that job to make their next dime?
Also, without revealing their methods, it seems like there is a real possibility that they're doing packet sniffing, which would be a violation of the law, constituting illegal search, or they're posing as napster clients, letting people download which, while not entrapment, as they're not a law enforcement agency (among other reasons) is just as illegal as the person downloading them.
If they're only supplying dummy files with authentic-looking names, then the people downloading the files aren't breaking the law.
Of course, there are other major problems, such as the fact that they're using Napster-registered names, which are often fake to begin with, and that they have no way of showing that someone doesn't own the CD in the first place, and thus a license to make or obtain a copy.
None of this will have an effect in the long term, as NetPC admits they can't discuss their information gathering methods, because if they were public Napster would be able to block it. Sorry, but such evidence won't hold up in court without demonstrating exactly how it was obtained (for resons of determining authenticity, accuracy, and legality). Once this is done, Napster can block it.
Kevin Fox
Kevin Fox
Anonymous attacks are becoming more and more effective in the U.S.,
:) In the case Florida v. JL, handed down 28 March 2000, the Supreme Court ruled *unanimously* that "an anonymous tip that a person is carrying a gun is not, without more, sufficient to justify a police officer's stop and frisk of that person." The argument is that anonymous tips which are *predictive of behavior* can be trusted *when the predicted behavior manifests*, but tips which are merely *descriptive* cannot be --- otherwise you could call the police and accuse the otherwise innocent-looking black man standing at the bus stop of carrying a gun, and the police would be justified in searching him.
S .html
Yes and no.
For more information, including the text of the decision, see http://supct.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/98-1993.Z
Their methodology will have to come out, eventually.
Imagine (this isn't going to happen now, but something similar will someday) that Napster refuses to block the names on the list. Metallica sues, and the conversation in court looks like:
Metallica: "Napster won't block these known copyright violaters."
Napster: "This is a random list of names; there is no proof they are copyright violators."
Metallica: "Sure there is; NetPD told us they are."
Napster: "How did they get the list?" What proof do we have they aren't just random names?"
NetPD: "Trade secret, we can't tell you that."
Either NetPD's comment holds up in court, and *anonymous attacks* become acceptable legal practice (in which case we all ought to run to the nearest country with reasonable laws, as ours will cease to mean anything), or NetPD is forced to disclose their methodology to the court, or the list is thrown out as being invalid evidence in a court hearing.
Start by attacking any ISP in the UK who offers internet service to this company. At this point, all it takes is threatening to file a law suit, and the ISP will yank their access. It is legitimate to use words such as 'libel', since they may in the near future try to claim someone a criminal, which could then be proven in court to be libelous. Words such as 'cracking attempts' and 'illegal probing' can also be tossed out truthfully. When netPD have exhausted all potential connections in the UK, they will be forced to move their entire operation to another country, and start over again. It will take some perseverence to take them down, but the community is large, and the number of ISPs willing to take a stand against baseless litigation is rapidly diminishing.
:-) Any takers?
Complain to their upstream provider, about the excessive use of bandwidth caused by netPD. It might not get them blocked, but they could get bumped to a higher cost guaranteed bandwidth service, taking another chunk out of their revenue.
Track the methods they use to search napster, gnutella, and web sites. They are using some kind of spyder to crawl around and log hits based on their customer's heuristics. These bots/spyders could then be blocked at various points, freeing small sections of the internet from their insidious probing.
Enlist university administrators to help block netPD. Students who are running distributed file systems and fear being libeled or falsely accused by netPD should send a written request to the university network administrators to block outside access to netPD. Again, use carefully selected panic words 'illegal probing attempts', 'crack attack', and 'allowing netPD access could open the university to a lawsuit'. Tell them cracking/scanning attempts are coming from the subnet 62.254.209.128/25, and ask them to block it.
Create a standard template to exclude netPD from networks you control. Someone should write a one paragraph disclaimer which could be customised for each locale telling netPD to stay away, and promising to follow up any violations with a vigorous prosecution.
Bruce Ward, 23-year-old chief technology officer of NetPD sounds like this is a small failed Y2K pre-IPO company jumping onto a wave of free publicity. Not to put down 23-year-olds, but a company with an abrasive CTO like Bruse may not survive riding a big and dangerous tsunami very long, no matter how good surfers they think they are. He already rode another company into bankruptcy and several lawsuits.
He's been so bold as to register the address www.mp3police.com.
"We fully expect to upset people and our site will probably get hacked," he says.
This sounds likes a challenge to leave to the script kiddies. That server is physically located in a webhosting service in Dallas, Tx, USA, running a static page of Bruse's failed Y2K fixit company. Bruse has also registered mp3police.co.uk, which has been recorded scanning many legitimate sites, none of which are running napster or warez boards. Complaints have been circulating for a while, go scan deja for some more info. NetPD has even hit some totally innoculous honeypots and scanned them completely.
At this moment, netpd.com and netpd.net are still available from futuresite.register.com for a price
The challenge for those who want to see a free net is to attack netPD where it counts, their access, their financial well being, their status as vigilantes, and their reputation with any potential customers.
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
I was under the impression that Metallica had hired some magical internet dectective firm to find the real names of those who had been trading mp3s illegally...am I mistaken? This article makes it sound like all that have is Napster user IDs. Yes? No?
If that's all they have, then why is there a problem? Anyone can use any name to sign up and use the service, it's not as if the 335,000 named folks can't use it anymore. Also, I don't remember giving any personal information when I signed up for Napster, so unless they're working with ISPs, they won't have any real names. If I'm wrong about this, please, someone enlighten me. But it just sounds to me like NetPD logged on, got user names, and killed some trees to make a show of the whole thing.
The Good Reverend
Asked of Weird Al: Hey Al!!!!! What do u think about Napster? I just want to know if you approve.
Al Answers: I have very mixed feelings about it. On one hand, I'm concerned that the rampant downloading of my copyright-protected material over the Internet is severely eating into my album sales and having a decidedly adverse effect on my career. On the other hand, I can get all the Metallica songs I want for FREE! WOW!!!!!
Taken from Ask Al
BlackNova Traders