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RIAA to DoS Pirates?
_Chainsaw sent an article running at ZD that talks about the RIAAs latest plan to stop pirates: " We'll smother song swappers " is the quote, but it basically amounts to a Denial of Service. Way to go guys! Brilliant strategy!
... does that mean I can respond with a Smurf attack? I mean, they started it...
...hilarity will surly ensue.
___
The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason. --Ben Franklin
How can they be sure that theyre hitting a user that falls under the laws theyre enforcing by themselves? What if the user is in a country not covered by those laws?
Could they themselves could be hunted for performing terrorist actions under terrorism laws?
----- Whats wrong with this picture? http://www.revoh.org:1234/whatswrong
Wouldn't that qualify as a terrorist act now?
"Even when I say nothing it's a beautiful use of negative space."
- Indelible, "Fire In Which You Burn"
"Even when I say nothing it's a beautiful use of negative space." - Indelible, "Fire In Which You Burn"
Apparently it is not legal at this time to use these methods to shut down individual users. They must be getting really scared to stoop to employing potential damaging and/or legally questionable tactics such as these. How far do they think they can go before the backlash gets to them? Or do they think the average college kid swapping songs and burning MP3s can be frightened into spending the proverbial 20 bucks on a disc? I seriously doubt it.
That the RIAA see their own interests as being more important than the civil liberties of their *customers*. Should this vigilante BS be responded to in kind?
I think we need to keep a very close eye on the RIAA right now. We (/. users) have the same capabilities as the US govt because of our large distributed nature. I advocate the foundation of a group to watch the RIAA. Email me if you think it's a good idea.
Oh, and check out the RIAA-watching stuff already on http://www.cryptome.org.
Mattcelt out
"And we would have gotten away with it too, if it wasn't for those lousy k1dd13z!"
This will work about as well as if the 'pirates' decided to circumvent copy protection by singing the desired songs themselves.
Amazing magic tricks
I'm sure this Will just lead to DoS attacks on riaa.com, and big lablessites as well. I wonder if they have thought of this?
Snoozer.
Way to go guys ! - I hope that was irony ..
Have fun you folks at the RIAA, I'm sure you'll enjoy trying to DoS my Linux firewall/router. I wonder what would happen if we all sent e-mails to their ISPs complaining about what was coming from them. Hmmmm......
Those guys were a bunch of terrorists. Maybe the fed can detain them indefinitely. Put Valenti and Rosen in the cell next to Sklyarov...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I'm glad the RIAA is finally taking some pro-active measures to stop music theives. Songwriters deserve compensation, and if AOL using lusers are stopped from trading songs then that's one more dollar in their pockets.
Just stop slow downloads from your computer.. sheees
Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
I'm glad to see internet battles being fought on internet terms. Technological problems need technological solutions (ie, MAPS RBL but NOT spam legislation). Now, it's up to you to decide whether file sharing / piracy is a "problem", but if they do try this, then it's likely that we will see improved technology to deal with it (freenet?).
Bring it on, I say!
Doesn't sound like a typical DoS attack. From the article it looks more like the RIAA would have machines set up to look for copyrighted material and make repeated download requests, then download very very slowly to keep servers with connection limits filled up. How hard would it be to require a minimum transfer rate -- that is, for the servers that do not already offer such a setting -- and then code in a setting to allow banning of IPs that engage in suspect behaviour consistently.
The scarier RIAA attempt IMO is their attempt to make themselves exempt from liability if they damage a system while looking for copyright. The wording alone allowing for immunity to any prosecution provided that the break-in was by a copyright holder (in the article) appears so utterly vague as to be used as a carte blanche for anyone to break into a system (Honestly, your honor, I was trying to make sure that they weren't pirating a Star Trek TNG Fanfic that I wrote nine years ago!). What's scarier is the quotes suggesting that not only have they considered it legal in the past, but they have already been engaging in such activity.
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
Calling this a DOS misunderstands what a denial of serice attack does. A DOS attack blocks you r bandwidth and there's absolutely nothing you can do about that ping flood. If a record company uploads Mambo No 5 from your achine again and again very slowly, it may stop others uploading it at the same time but you can free your connection anytime but shutting down Gnutella, Kazaa or whatever. And since the song wasn't yours to give away in the first place, this hardly seems unreasonable.
1000s Warcraft Gold while you sleep
before users figure out the IP's of the RIAA's smothering servers and firewall connections from those machines to /dev/null?
I'm going to go back in my box and will think within the limits of my box: MS Sucks Linux Good I read too much Slashdot.
Note to those who will say that I'm a dirty rotten no good pirate: I don't pirate music. I simply buy from indie labels. At least then, I'm sure that the artist gets most of my money.
If god had intended you to be naked, you would have been born that way.
And Usenet will immediately be filled with posts of RIAA IP addresses to filter..
Yeah that's a Good Idea(tm). Bring the pirate music industry closer together, then raise prices for the rest of us.
Well duh. It's not a move to combat piracy, it's an excuse to claim 'more pirated works exist than we thought..', and ensure prices stay high, or go up.
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
First they want to be a hacker with no recourse.
Now they want to be a "script kiddie".
What's next, they'll want to be an MSCE?
Is it just me that thinks this has gone straight into the sandbox? I find this mentality, quite frankly, scary. Is this the only thing they can come up with? Why is pissing people off the only way for them to make money? This is, as I've said before, the industrialisation all over again, combined with a "then we will bomb you" mentality.
Why can't they speak with their customer instead of haressing them? I will sit back and smile when the DDoS starts to disrupt large parts of the internet, and a very large bunch of companies will want to sue RIAA;)
and then they'll tell me the sun won't be shining in my city too ! .. blah. yeah right. then again money talks ... bullshit walks.
Let me get this, you're going to request a file
and then download it slowly, using very little
bandwidth. The only way I see this hurting is
if users only allow x number of transfers. As
far as bandwidth, it wouldn't hurt much at all
and by using up a slot and not using much
bandwith it could speed up other transfers.
If this doesn't prove a mentality of being above the laws of "regular people," I have no idea what does.
"Enough of this wretched, whining monkey life." -- Marcus Aurelius, _Meditations_, Book 9, 37
Just when did anyone vote for the RIAA?
I wasn't aware that they had dictatorial powers over the Internet. This seems highly illegal, and should be stopped immediately.
I guess it's time to step up and hurt them where it counts. Boycott the music industry.
This is either a) bogus or b) an example of the fascist thinking going on at the RIAA. Somebody really needs to explain the principles of fair use to those people, or maybe we should just stop buying music altogether.
All Ad hominem replies happily ignored as the sender shall be deemed to lack the faculties to comprehend the equation.
Look for a lot of spoofed IP attacks in which the "attacker" appears to be the RIAA. This will be great cover for malicious crackers.
Amazing magic tricks
From the article:
"We referred to it as the 'license to virus,'" said one congressional staffer.
How exacly does someone go about "virusing" people?
The subject is a quote from the article. And it's quite true.
It's license to committing a criminal act. People who conduct this sort of activity can be prosecuted.
It's like feeding your neighbor's dog antifreeze when it poops on your lawn. Definitely not the right thing to do, and just another way that the RIAA will piss off the public.
Like that Goat Poem I wrote for you?
My system would log their IP address first, then it may scan their open ports (host, traceroute, and maybe nmap) to collect some more information on them, then maybe I'll tell my ISP and the Feds that I am being hacked by Oshitta Bitch Laden and really f*** up their day. Tell them I got their IP and route to host. Maybe find a way to traingulate the exact location of the incomming signal through some ip mapping program. LOL.. hahaha....
Only 'flamers' flame!
Seriously, remember that RIAA uses the DCMA to proactively shut down services on a system that has "their" music/software.
...
What's to keep someone from doing some code with a segment declaration making it free open source except for RIAA or other such entities.
Bury it in an app they're likely to want, and then when it's there go on a destructive search for it.
I used to write free software for various campaigns. All such code had declarations embedded in the final executable and the declaration file (somewhere in the file structure, linked from the main copyright grant) which made it free for all except people or organizations working against feminism.
The same thing applies. Use their techniques against them, use DCMA in a no-holds-barred way to inflict injury to them and simultaneously point out how deeply flawed DCMA is.
That reminds me, need to go on a looksee to see if someone's using my code
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
And what happens when millions of unhappy songswappers DOSes RIAA? RIAA just can't have that amount of bandwith and computrons... Muahaha! RIAA thinks they are strong on anyting, just because they have strong lawyers.
--The knowledge that you are an idiot, is what distinguishes you from one.
OR, they can simply DoS the swappers. Unfortunately for them, they are relying on TCP, so they need to disclose their source addresses for the attack to work. And if they do that, we traders can make a database listing all of their IP addresses (kind of like MAPS/ORBS) and block their asses. We will find ways to thwart this approach and we will continue trading.
So, in a nutshell, I am very pleased with their latest strategy. I haven't been so gleeful since they announced copy-protected CDs (which also have done little to discourage swapping).
-CT
They say that they will connect and attempt to download things very slowly? How is that supposed to hurt me one bit? My limewire setup allows 30 concurrent connections with no more than 4 from any given IP. Even if they do manage to hold all thirty open by using different IPs to download, there is no possible way that they can do the same to any significant number of other users at the same time. Nevermind the fact that their IP ranges would quickly be built into the next release as automatically blocked...
-- Give me ambiguity or give me something else!
If I as an individual decided to write a client for a distributed system such as Gnutella that took an innordinate amount of bandwidth from users it connected to it'd be considered a bad or malicious client, but not illegal.
All the RIAA is asking for here is to play on the same level as us. I have difficulty counting the number of times I've read posts following an RIAA announcement saying "We'll just crack/hack this/that until their systems can't handle it," and yet the assembled masses get all self righteous as soon as the RIAA suggests they be allowed to do the same.
I liken this struggle to the one surrounding the hacked satellite cards. The legality of hacking those cards has been accepted, so the company fights on a technological level. I find this completely acceptable, and perhaps the best/right reaction to a sitation such as this.
I think we should encourage the RIAA to try to slow down file trading systems, and save the real fight for when they try to pollute our laws with amendments that will affect us far more comprehensively than the availability of the latest Spears track.
And got rejected :(
So who do you think can do a better job of DoS? The RIAA or a bunch of 31337 5kr1p7 k1dd135? Not that I condone DoS attacks (*ahem*slashdoteffect*ahem*), but it seems like a terribly stupid battle front for the RIAA to choose.
If you want the best marksmen in the world dead, why would you challenge him to a pistol duel of all things?
-Ted
Oh man!
Already a potentially contentious plan, the recording industry inadvertently sparked a further wave of criticism last week with plans to protect its strategy from being undermined by a pending antiterrorism bill.
Ha! Gee, looks like someone clued up and realized this DoS-type of technique would count as "hacking" and leave them open to prosecution under the Anti-terrorism bill. Ah... that's just too classic!
Hey, wasn't Bush mouthing off about "ridding the world of evil-doers" the other week?
When the US government going to solve all our problems by dropping RIAA executives and lawyers on the Afghans?
[but, then, most of the Afghans don't deserve that much punishment!]
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
The RIAA is now guilty of a conspiracy to commit a criminal act. Please notify your local congress critter, hope they aren't a paid lacky of the RIAA, and maybe something will happen.
Then again...maybe not.
It would be more devious to make a site look like it's swapping music, then let the RIAA do your DoSsing for you.
I think that instead of just writing to my congressmen, I will CC: it to John Ashcroft. This is clearly a criminal act no matter how much the RIAA tries to disguise it. I put faith in the community to stop this from materializing.
The article quotes in reference to the RIAA's last attempt to stop filesharing: "We referred to it as the 'license to virus,'" said one congressional staffer. "It would have given them the incentive to employ lots of hackers trying to figure out how to stop (MusicCity), Morpheus or Audiogalaxy."
So now the RIAA wants a 'license to DoS'. Give me a break.. This is by far more criminal than ripping some MP3s!
I know! I know!
Does this mean the US Army can now spread Anthrax around Afghanistan to stop future terrorists?
Get the source to GNUtella ... and modify it so that it will drop anyone running less than a predetermined bitrate ... so ... at lets say ... 10k/s not a problem ... however drop below that threshold ... and no more connection ... and the slot is opened up to another user ...
Karma? Karma? I don't need no stinkin' karma.
But, hey, I don't see people making that much of an effort to set up an alternative system, either. If there was a realistic alternative, there wouldn't be an issue, because there wouldn't be an RIAA to create one.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Apparently the RIAA has decided that two wrongs now make a right. Shame on them, guess their mothers never taught them.
There's no point in being grown up if you can't be childish sometimes. -- Dr. Who
the RIAA talks on and on about 'fighting piracy', etc, etc. they think the way to fight privacy is to break CD standards with 'security' measures, and issue DOS against users suspected in trafficking their 'property'.
my suggestion is that these two strategies have never worked, and will never work, so maybe, just MAYBE they should try something new, something that has a chance to work.
let me explain.
they should look at the reasons piracy exists and see what they can do about them. (1) CDs are too expensive, (2) CDs are usually one or two good songs mixed with a lot of crap, and (3) downloading a song is SOOO much easier than fighting traffic to and from some shopping mall or waiting 3-5 days for shipping.
(1) CDs are too expensive. LOWER THE PRICE OF CDs. Why does it cost 15 bucks for a burnt piece of plastic, which is debatably more valuable than a 50 cent blank piece of plastic? Bring the price down to 9.99 and a large chunk of piracy goes away.
(2) CDs are usually one or two good songs mixed with a lot of crap. I don't really know what to do about this one. How about stop manufacturing boy bands and nurture the real artists out there?
(3) downloading a song is SOOO much easier than fighting traffic to and from some shopping mall or waiting 3-5 days for shipping. Either build great new perfect highways between everyone's house and the mall, or build a store next to everyone's house, or perhaps (please) provide individual songs for download at a VERY reasonable price in a format i can use (a) on my computer, (b) in my RIO, (c) burned to a CD for my car.
Fix it, or watch your empires crumble. You can't fight piracy with technology.
The REAL sam_at_caveman_dot_org is user ID 13833.
First off, its not a normal denial of service, they're not swamping you with connection attempts and consuming all your bandwidth. What they're doing is downloading your file, repeatedly, very slowly. This is actually fine, and not at all questionable ethically in my mind. Its not going to work however. How long until the various file sharing software products implement blacklists? All you'd need is for somebody to set up a database of IP addresses to block. If they do the denial of service attack from corporate WAN then it'll be easy. If they lease IP addresses from the internet service providers it'll be a bit more tedious but still easily defeatable. Regexps are your friend.
Chris Kuivenhoven is a thief, beware
"Oh great, my router just got fried by a freaking script fogey!"
Oh, I just can't wait for this to begin. I can't imagine it will be even a week until people will create clients to connect to these networks and present false targets to download. At the same time, that stats for the use of Morpheus and such will spike, giving them increased legitamacy and and advertising revenue. Should anyone actually atempt this, it will only be bleasing in descise for the P2P.
"Hey, i just thought of something. I have a great idea on how to stop music piracy, lets fire everyone in our offices!"
"Wow, that's a great idea, ok, lets do it"
And everyone will rejoice.
The article also states: While stopping short of a full denial-of-service attack, the method could substantially clog the target computer's Internet connection.
Could someone please clarify how this stops short of a DoS in any way??
Something we did in football... line the long snapper up all alone... and all the other people further down the line. This caused the team to respect the move and move there line down as well... or else we had an 8 man screen.
... match name, and size... and they do any form of attack to our system, wouldn't they be liable?
Following this idea... if we have songs that seem to be copyrighted
They would have to respect this possibility and react to it... or else they would get some potentialy large lawsuits.
Just an idea....
-I just work here... how am I supposed to know?
...I've become angry enough about the RIAA bullshit that I'm now actively interested in pirating music.
IIRC, Napster is pretty much toast.
What's a good place to start to begin tracking down jazz, blues, world music, and seventies/eighties pop?
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
I don't run gnutella or any other fileswap program. But my dial-up line was almost saturated for about 3 hours last night by attempts from multiple machines to connect to port 6346 - That's gnutella, isn't it?
How are these people going to make sure that the machines that they are trying to DDOS aren't somebody who just happened to be assigned the same dynamic IP address as somebody they actually targeting?
And for that matter, how are they targeting them? The variety of IP addresses the 'attack' came from was high and seemed to be all private users. Are they doing some sort of 'cache poisoning' to the gnutella database so that all requests for certain files are routed to a single slow dialup or something? So that they can effectively turn every gnutella user into a DDoS zombie machine?
It would certainly explain my logs from last night.
Liquor
Sanity is a highly overrated commodity.
I had to double check my browser's url to see if I was reading this article from f**kedcompany.com earlier today.
If that wording had become law, then anyone would be able to legally DoS anyone, for any reason. That's good if you want a Terrorism bill, bad if you want Anti-Terrorism bill.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
It would be so ironic if they started purchasing back copies of 2600.
Couldn't this easily backfire on the RIAA? If I noticed a lot of DoS traffic coming to my site, couldn't I call their ISP and get them to shut down their internet connection since it's the source of a DoS attack? This idea would probably work better if they were DoSing a corporate firewall than the average joes computer. After all, if I was a network admin at a company and I noticed a lot of DoS traffic coming in from a specific ip address, I would try and contact the ISP and get them to turn them off temporarily, but maybe that's just me.
Things you think are in the Constitution, but are not.
Well, they couldn't hack us, so they'll dDoS us. Oh great. Now we'll have to unplug our Ethernet before listening to the mp3. That'll stop 'em! I can see the synergy meeting at the RIAA:
:)
Person A: Let's hack 'em!
Person B: Yeah!
Computer Guy: telnet leet.mp3.trader
Debian GNU/Linux testing/unstable
leet login:
Computer Guy: I r0073d their b0x0r3. I r0x0r!
Person A: Yay! We stopped them!
Person B: Cool!
leet.mp3.trader: PAM_unix: Login timed out. Failure from box.riaa.com logged.
Computer Guy: What does that mean?
~Later that day~
leet.mp3.trader's ISP: Stop hacking our network. The FBI has been notified. Thank you.
Person A: Cool! The FBI's gonna help us do illegal stuff!
Computer Guy: Oh shit.
FBI Agent: All of you are under arrest, please come this way
~Tomorrow~
Person C: Well, our little plan failed! We'll show them! Boys, turn on the dDoS
Oh great. How creative guys
My other car is first.
I've got THE solution for ALL your problems: being above every law, it should be no problem for you to break into every backbone in the world and reroute all taffic trough your own servers, that way you'll be able set fire on the house of every copyright violator! /. readers, because they are likely to hate you...
Ow yeah and while you are at it, do the same for all
GRRR
Fighting for peace is like fucking for virginity
You know, if the MPAA & RIAA put half as much creativity into creating new entertainment as they do trying to stop piracy, we wouldn't all be stuck with Brtney Spears and N'Sync. Perhaps, we would even have had better "blockbusters" than Tomb Raider and Planet of the Apes this summer! What a concept, eh?
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Wouldn't this backfire? They're suggesting that they intend to kill these servers by downloading content very slowly ... in effect clogging the available ports. So serves will simply be configured to dump these slow transfers, and users with slow connections will be more inclined to spend money on broadband connections so that they can access this content, in effect making it easier for them to retrieve larger quantities of content faster. I say go for it RIAA!
If I DoS attack someone I go to Jail? This is a CyberCrime after all, isn't it? But if the RIAA does this its somehow legal? And their, and MY ISP are ok with this? Somehow I think not? Where do they come up with these schemes, they will never work, because of the Physical separation of the networks, and machines, and the dependancy on things inbetween they don't control.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
This should have been under "This is funny, laugh" instead of News. The RIAA bitches and moans about people "violating the law", yet turns around and asks for a waiver to perform illegal activities. I'm glad that congress had enough sense not to provide them the latitude they requested. Quite frankly, I'm surprised they even asked for it. Maybe we should get together and lobby congress for the ability to legally DoS the RIAA?
"Get the facts first. You can distort them later."--Mark Twain
Going by a democratic system, that's two sayings for the Nays, versus one for the Eyes. The Nays have it, by a majority of one vote.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Does the RIAA actually think this plan will work? I mean come on! They are going to constantly d/l the same song at slow speeds to keep others from getting it?! What kind of plan is that? Do they have any idea how much time and money that will take them? I don't know of any record labels that are going to want to front the cash to setup something of that magnitude. But, I guess all we can do is watch and see what they do...it will be funny in the meantime.
Animals have rights!
Surely it wouldn't be impossible to design some software to do this? Then it would be much harder to filter these things out (you would probably need some authentication routines like in ssh).
As long as I have the 2nd Amendment to the US Constitution in my corner, the RIAA's illegal tactics can easily be remedied
Record labels hope to make the point that subscription services such as MusicNet or Pressplay, which will
;-) i'd run it...
launch on Yahoo, America Online, MSN and RealNetworks by year's end, will not be subject to the same
doubtful quality of service.
holy crap! there is only one way to read that statement if you're a non-riaa approved music trading service -- surrender or suffer...
hmmm...i'm guessing that the riaa hasn't even given a second thought to what sort of retaliation might come of this...
i'm seeing an application akin to seti@home, where, when the screensaver comes on, the machine instantly starts bombarding the RIAA/DOS machines...
So when are we going to be let into the next plan, to trick mp3 listeners into getting their penises bit off by a pony? I'm sure Radiohead already thinks they're uncool...
If they can DDOS legal file trading, are we in turn allowed to DDOS their servers? Say for example, if we had an open-source server-client based ddos tool that reads IPs and data from a central server locating these bastards?
My only concern about music swapping is the RIAAs attempt to make their concerns look legitimate. "We're going after people who don't pay us money"; forget whether or not they're actually breaking the law, just shut them down? that's rediculous.
Post any and all knowledge of how to shut these idiots down. I will dedicate all the bandwidth I can.
Eggplants!
Ace
Maybe they'll hire mafiaboy to do a DDoS attack against all the people who share files since he was so effective against Yahoo, Buy.com and others. They'll probably hire a bunch of script kiddies that claim they can hack and the whole idea will kind of fizzle away after they realize the only people smart enough to code this won't sell their souls to the record industry.
Bobuhabu
Sounds like this new "Attack" it is an attack after all could easly be worked around in software. To many hits, or to slow a download, DROP, BLOCK, BAN!
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
Go ahead and try it. Who here wouldn't retaliate against a terrorist/DoS attack?
I sure would.
So I say bring it on suckas, lets c what u got.
We dance to all the wrong songs.
--Refused.
Very cool of the RIAA to set the precedent on this topic! Recently, they backed out of the right to hack amendment of the anti-terrorism bill... so now, could it be interpreted to mean that a DoS isn't a "hack"? Nice work RIAA.
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
RIAA officials will be sending groups of up to 2000 teenagers to any house party, block event, or apartment get-together where so-called "DJs" (i.e., pirates) are illegally performing protected works. By filling the space with RIAA agents, the hackers and pirates can't get in, thus protecting the vital intellectual property from misuse.
Also, the RIAA and MPAA are continuing their plans to merge and become the fourth branch of US government, overseeing the executive, legislative, and judicial branches. Especially the judicial branch. Look for the RIAA seal in a courtroom near you! You PIRATE!
the article states the the RIAA will use a program which will attempt to open multiple, slow speed, downloads to a computer holding a copyrighted file ...
how long until someone adds a "download speedlimit" to their program? ie. a user has to be downloading at atleast some-K a second or they get the boot.
for an group with millions at their disposal, this is a pretty weak solution.
_f
Do they legally have the right to download these files? It would be so sweet to sue the RIAA for copyright infringement.
Something tells me firewalls are going to become all the rage among song swappers...
Gotta block those pesky DoS IPs....
reminds me of that southpark with chef against the recording industry where the balding comb over kept yelling, "I AM ABOVE THE LAW!!!!"
*sigh*, i only buy from jade tree and the like anymore anyways. The last "commercial" cd I bought was Tenacious D, and I had to pay $20 for it...you guys rock, but damn that hurt. BTW, does the RIAA actually set like standards for pricing like you guys acuse them, I dont really understand them to be anything more than reps for labels...*cough* nazis *cough*
________________________________________________
A Script Kiddie WAR! Let's show 'em who's boss, the people who know what's going on, or some MCSEs!
Then sue the fuckers under the anti-terrorism/hacking statutes. I for one would love to see Hilary Rosen in jail with abortion clinic bombers and drug traffickers!
sulli
RTFJ.
Seems like RIAA is going through evolution at a fast pace. First they knew nothing. Then digital happened, and they still knew nothing. Then the net and digital and p2p happened, but this time they were prepared, armed to the teeth with DMCA.
Then they tried out misc. tecnhological speed bumps, which all turned out to be trash, and when that was revealed, they tried to extort dr felten. And when he yelled "foul", they somehow managed to backpedal in a way that got felten's suit thrown out of court. bastards.
And now they've evolved into script kiddies. I guess the goal justifies the means. However, they're still as dumb as brick. In the aftermath of September 11., the hawks have tightened things so that hacking is considered terrorism.
Cool. Finally there is no need to go through expensive lawsuits to stunt these goons. All we have to do is wrap up the evidence, and hand them over to the feds.
Extortion, cyberterrorism, sounds like a mob thing to me. Time for a grand jury to put these people away.
-- Another senseless waste of fine bytes.
All they need is a good headline on /., e. g. "RIAA grants free unlimited access to large music database on http://www.music-pirate.org/w4r3z/".
This is call to the hackers out there to add the ability to automatically kill all downloads in progress that do not maintain a minimum sustained bandwidth!!! Repeated attempts from those computers must be blacklisted as well!
Lets get it done people! Move! Move!
well considering the brains of the riaa...
:)
filter out *.riaa.*
-- botsex is {grep;touch;strip;unzip;head;mount}
How exactly are these people going to identify the song swappers? The article says:
...one method uses software to masquerade as a file-swapper online. Once the software has found a computer offering a certain song, it attempts to block other potential traders from downloading the song.
So, how are they going to define these "certain songs." Think about it: how many bands have played "My Girl" for example? If I have MyGirl.mp3 on my share list, do I get a DoS attack? What if that's an mp3 I actually made using a music production application? How in the world can they accurately say "this person is offering pirated music?" Are we going to be guilty until proven innocent, and at the whims of the RIAA have our sharing shutdown until we justify every song? This will never last, at least I hope it never does.
~ now you know
Surely it wouldn't be all that hard to simply ignore "flood" type requests... either would seem to solve this problem. It's my computer, I can easily set it up to ignore you if I don't like what you send me.
My advice: Ignore it. These people are technical buffoons. Remember that a lot of press-speak from the RIAA is focused upon manipulating public officials to put through the legislation they require. This press-release is trying to legitimise hacking for them alone.
Actually I've got an idea. If they do try this, how about some of our nastier hackers get together, identify the source IP's of the RIAA machines and simply hack them to death. After all, how secure will their machines be? They still don't understand technology, so I suggest we give them an idea of just how nasty the big wide world can be.
So, who will volunteer a boxen to be a honeypot?
.mp3 file that is a recording of someone chanting, "when the log rolls over, we will die, we will die!" and make a copy of it corresponding to every mp3 song name on your 100GB "archive" partition.
/. in a couple of weeks.
Just use an
Then, publish the results on
Don't steal. The government hates competition.
The Ford Motor Company announced today that if they suspeced you would be speeding while driving one of their cars, they would sneak over to your house and pour sugar into your gas tank.
I'll cry you a fucking river
If their legislation had passed, and if in the course of trying to DoS my gnutella connection they had downloaded my own copyrighted files, I would have had the right, NAY the OBLIGATION, to hack into thier servers, retrieve my files, and if I damaged anything along the way, I'm completely free of blame because of their legislation.
And yet, something tells me that it wouldn't have worked out this way.
Too bad.
-Chuck
hey just make your own songs, copyright them
and them share them under popular names
like "purple haze" etc....
when they DL it, then you can sue them for infringement.
The only way to _seriously_ trade music is: MAIL.
Arrange the trade online and then send CD-R's.
Using online mp3 archives is like reading books from the eye-level bookshelves.
http://www.mp3th.net
http://www.sweb.cz/yerbouti
Here in the world of the future, 94% of all bandwidth is taken up by these three sets: machines falsely claiming to have resources, other machines falsely claiming to want same, and those two sets of machines pretending to transfer data very very slowly.
-- Jeff Paulsen
... developing their wacky plans?
This plan was deemed only slighty better than the "PC GPS/Abandoned Star
Wars defense laser" and the "Anti-MP3 MP3" plans, the latter failing because
of the obvious development of an Anti-Anti-MP3 MP3.
This sig is xenon coated, and will glow red when in the presence of aliens
I say that if the RIAA tries a DoS then we should fight back with a DoS of our own. If one of us is attacked/shutdown then we should go after their equipment.
Sounds fair to me.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
I can't imagine that they would be stupid enough to start a war with hackers. They're asking for it.
I guarantee that the large portion of the people that use these systems are people who know their way around networks and systems, at least to some degree.
-X
How would this stop freenet?
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
Fine, I'll just patent this process and sue the RIAA. Let's take this back to the courtroom where it belongs.
Hammer of Truth
so you put a cap on the min download speed from your server... and all their efforts are wasted.. yet again. they cant think that this would seriously work.
"Shut up brain or ill stab you with a Q-tip" Homer Simpson
Yes, we *know* what the guy was originally trying to say; AQM's interpretation was simply a Damn Funny Joke.
Sheesh... ppl these days... no sense of humor...
A packet tsunami from /. readers with broadband should give the RIAA a whole new understading of the concept of "smother."
---
Someone here please offer a solution to the
piracy problem. How can music copyright holders
protect their works from piracy? The RIAA gets
bashed for all their tactics. Okay. Nows your
chance to give them a solution you can live with.
What should they do? How can technology allow
for both protecting copyright and fair use?
Just post the RIAA's IP address. That will teach 'em to try a Denial of Service :)
/. effect here we come.
"The difference betweeen genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." Albert Einstein
Welcome to the Recording Industry Association of America. We provide services for citizens who wish to protect their copyrights with might, instead of right.
Has someone been pirating you're music and putting it on the web? We understand how you feel. Because of that big bad idea called liberty, you can't stop it, can you? Well enter the IP address of the offending site, and we'll blow them to smithereens!
FAQ:
1. Isn't DoS illegal?
Not any more. We're the good guys, so it's ok.
2. Will you DoS any server that's entered on this page?
Discrimination is wrong. Always. You name it, we bomb it.
3. I hate my brother. Can you beat him up?
Watch for version 2.
Free unix account: freeshell.org
I use gnutella and other peer-to-peer systems to distribute many homemade mp3s that I compose, perform, and record myself. I am not a member of the RIAA. On my peer-to-peer systems I don't serve a single mp3 that is under the authority of the RIAA.
If I see any evidence that the RIAA is disrupting my ability to distribute my own songs, they are going to be bitch-slapped with a lawsuit so quickly...
_______
2B1ASK1
It sickens me to see people refer to listening to stolen music or watching pirated movies as their civil liberties.
How about you go live in China for a few months, then start talking about civil liberties.
With Freenet's model, the documents would merely migrate closer to the nodes making the specious requests -- indeed, the extra requests would simply result in *more copies* being available throughout the network!
I sincerely hope that a Freenet-based music search system (such as Espra) becomes consumer-ready soon; we may soon need one.
#!/bin/sh
while true; do wget www.riaa.com; done
Wait for 0.2.. It's threaded.
Calling this a DOS misunderstands what a denial of serice attack does.
No, you "Misunderstands" what a DoS does.
A denial of service is just that: doing something that denies access to a service. Ping flooding/smurfing is one way to do it (the bandwidth is the service that's being denied), but it's hardly the only thing that can be classified as a DoS. Attempting to eat all connection limits also denies service.
If a record company uploads Mambo No 5 from your achine again and again very slowly
Before you spout off about misuse of terminology, you should learn to use it correctly yourself.
Hint: You do not upload FROM. Nobody can "upload something from you". The correct term is download.
upload means to send. download means to receive.
One day, the RIAA is going to set up a few hundred nodes full of files which look like pirated music. Instead they will contain anti-piracy messages. The RIAA will keep up with p2p tools which try to verify checksums and signatures of music. After a while, it will be difficult to find music as 10%, 20%, 50%, 70% of the files available are actually anti-piracy messages instead of the song you think they are.
How are we going to stop this?
there are 2 kinds of people. those who divide people into 2 kinds, and those who don't.
l337 h@X0rZ needed immediately for a position in the entertainment industry. 401K, Benefits, and Bad Karma included in employment package. Must have own h@X0r \/\/areZ. Apply on-line at www.riaa.org.
/*drunk.. fix later*/
If there are N music traders, they may need as many as N^N systems in order to smack them all down. How economical!
Why bother.
Funny why is the song writers' guild suing RIAA if they get so much money twatlicker ?
Next time you pop off how about knowing ANYTHING about what you are talking about pindick.
Minimum average download speed > 3K/sec (sorry 14.4 modem users!)
Maximum connections per IP series (correct me if there is a better term for XXX.XXX.XXX.*)=2
Also, put a sign up at P2P software homepage of choice that says "We Reserve the Right to Refuse Service to Any IP Series Through Our Software".
Doesn't seem to be a problem to me.
I've read through the statute, and I think that the RIAA is attempting an enormous bluff.
... shall be punished as provided in subsection (c) of this section.
It seems to me that for the RIAA to attempt to hack into someone's internet-connected computer and disable it is clearly illegal under current law:
18 USC 1030(a)(5)(C)
(a) Whoever - (5)(C) intentionally accesses a protected computer without authorization, and as a result of such conduct, causes damage;
An internet-connected server would appear to be a "Protected computer" under the definition in 18 USC 1030(e)(2)(B)
(e) As used in this section - (2) the term ''protected computer'' means a computer - (B) which is used in interstate or foreign commerce or communication;"
"Damage" is defined in 18 USC 1030(e)(8)(A):
(e) As used in this section - (8) the term ''damage'' means any impairment to the integrity or availability of data, a program, a system, or information, that - (A) causes loss aggregating at least $5,000 in value during any 1-year period to one or more individuals;
If the RIAA really thinks that it is legal for them to hack into and disable other people's computers, then why aren't they doing it already? Answer, because they know that it's really
illegal -- if they were to do more then $5,000 in cumulative damage, they could be charged with a felony, but they're hoping that they can fool Congress into making it legal for them to attack and destroy other people's computers by claiming that they currently have that right, and that the antiterrorism bill is going to take that right away from them.
The RIAA appears to have adopted the strategy of making a completely false claim, then taking advantage of the runaway-train-antiterrorism bill to attempt to insert a brand new exemption for themselves, allowing them and only them to practice cyberterrorism under the guise of "protecting their copyrights."
Dirty tricks as usual.
From the article:
"Lawsuits filed against Napster, Scour, Aimster, MusicCity, Kazaa and Grokster have shut down some of these file-swapping gathering points, but the practice remains as popular as ever."
I can't imagine what this list is going to look like in a year. Somewhere, sometime, there will be a breaking point, where either the RIAA gives up, or something happens whereby music piracy is stopped completely. This cat-and-mouse game cannot continue forever. How many more networks are we going to shuttle people to before the RIAA wins because music piracy is impossible? Remember, every time the RIAA shuts one service down and there is a mad rush to tell people to just use client XYZ to connect to a new network, more and more people just shrug their shoulders and say, "Well, I guess I'm just going to have to buy that Pink Floyd CD now."
I think the future has to be that the RIAA allows music for download at relatively cheap prices. Enough people have already gotten fed up with downloading the client-of-the-week and finding a server that is a) open and b) has lots of good stuff on it. Right now, the RIAA is slowly strangling "piracy" with their endless lawsuits, but it can never be completely stopped until they offer a competing service. Until then, the lawsuits are going to continue, and that list is going to become ridiculously long.
I don't know how it is in other parts of the country, but in New Jersey, if any entity attempts unathorized access to any computer system, they are in violation of an 1986 hacking law, that is a felony, and punishable with a jail sentence of 5-25 years.
/. readers will do the same. With our numbers, straight up pings can kill them. And if you find them trying to hack into your system, check your state laws. Although there might not be federal provisions, those fuckers are probably breaking local laws.
So, if they try that shit with me, I'm going to my district attorney to file a complaint, and I am going to protect myself in a manner consistent with adequate self-defense - smurf the fuckers.
I hope all
WHY CAN'T THE TALIBAN SEND VALENTI ANTHRAX? DO US A FAVOR!!!!!!!!!!
this is pretty soft corporate vigilanteism; what these punks really deserve is some door crashing, two fisted, Magnum wielding justice, ala Deathwish I, Deathwish II, Deathwish 3, and of course Deathwish 4: The Crackdown.
terms incorrectly. They seem to think that someone downloading a song from me is uploading, and that I download only from others...strange but that is why you see the mis-use so many times.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Sure, you're 31337 & you have already programmed your router to drop their packets, or you've set up an auto-smurfer. Good for you! Back up a second & try this on your Win* box instead:
copy *.exe *.mp3copy *.vxd *.mp3
copy *.dll *.mp3
Just write a short
I think Hillary Rosen will shit live goats the moment her techies tell her that there are suddenly 6.02e23 mp3 files being shared on Morpheus. Didn't Sun Tzu specify a similar strategy centuries ago?
"What is the sound of one belly slapping?"
Just a thought as well, would it be possible to put something in the motd to the affect of: Owners of ANY disruptive automated clients agree to pay the amount of $9999999999999999 to the server owner. ? Just a thought, I'm not a legal expert by any means.
Why not follow our own advice and look for a technological solution? It would be an interesting project to combine something like Advogato's trust metric with cryptographic signatures and connection quotas. In such a system, the hosers that are trying to screw things up would quickly end up locked out of most hosts.
The downside of needing someone on the system to "vouch" for you to start would be relatively minor for the overall gains, methinks.
The bigger downside might be the lessening of anonymity on a transfer; if you have to prove who you are before starting a transfer, then there's the potential for someone to put together a client that logs who you are and what you've downloaded. There would have to be a strict seperation between identity information and digital signature...
RIAA_HAX0R_CLIENT: Request NSync crap song
GNUTELLA_SERVER: Sending...
RIAA_HAX0R_CLIENT: Request NSync crap song
GNUTELLA_SERVER: Sending...
RIAA_HAX0R_CLIENT: Request NSync crap song
GNUTELLA_SERVER: Sorry, too many clients
RIAA_HAX0R_CLIENT: Request NSync crap song
GNUTELLA_SERVER [sending to other GNUTELLA servers]: HAX0R found: RIAA_HAX0R_CLIENT
GNUTELLA_SERVER_A [to RIAA_HAX0R_CLIENT]: Request Nsync another crap song
GNUTELLA_SERVER_A [to RIAA_HAX0R_CLIENT]: Request Nsync another crap song
GNUTELLA_SERVER_B [to RIAA_HAX0R_CLIENT]: Request Nsync another crap song
...
GNUTELLA_SERVER_ZZ [to RIAA_HAX0R_CLIENT]: Request Nsync another crap song
RIAA_HAX0R_CLIENT crashes.
There's simply no way that they could afford to be able to do this. Assume that there are just 250,000 illegal distribution points, and that a single $2000 client machine can tie up, say, 10 of these machines at a time. They would need 25,000 machines running to take down those 250,000 "pirates". Add in their bandwidth costs, which would be sky high, and you've got a solution that costs way more than the problem. Now you could try and do it with fewer bigger machines ( E450's come to mind ), but you still need multiple nic's and a sh!tload of bandwidth, and e450's aren't exactly cheap either. For a task like this it could actually cost more to go with the larger machines, since they're going to need tons of bandwidth.
Hypothesis time:
.5kps...that's 10kps you've eaten up. Gee, I'm not gonna notice that on my screen and kill the requests. If you keep at it, I ban you from downloading anything. Ok, then you spoof IDs or hit me from multiple sources. Fine, I report you to the company for a violation of terms of service. You're now banned from getting on that network.
Ok, assuming the software allows multiple downloads of the same file (why wouldn't it, it's not writing the file, just reading it), how could this have an effect? You start 20 downloads at
Or let's say I'm on Gnutella, which you can't be banned from. I still see your IP you're coming from, and even if you use multiple systems I can still see which net you're on. Spoof an IP? No biggie, I still got a log on you. I'll just keep blocking IPs for each multiple attack that comes in. Eventually, you'll find you can't hit my system.
All legality aside, cause we know this is really walking the dark side, this plan of the RIAA is going to have two neat effects. One, it's gonna make the P2P networks stronger as they adapt to defeat the threat. Two, it makes the RIAA look like the cartel bullies they are. When are they gonna quit fighting the customer and start working with us to find a solution that makes everyone happy?
Electronic Frontier Foundation for online civil rights information
in the United States?
Meaning, if I find a computer attempting to DoS one of my machines, is it legal to DoS them back as a way of protecting my private property?
Under what I understand of the law, it probably is not legal, but I wanted to know if there were any lawyers in the crowd that could answer this.
Since the RIAA thinks they have the right to defend "their property" via these types of tactics, I believe that anyone should have that right.
They should just put in some encryption in file swapping protocols and then when the RIAA trys to get around the encryption they would be breaking the law. Hackers are always going to be a step ahead of the RIAA and they should save their money going to the lawyers for the artist.
...Intellectual Property is a dumb idea.
Look.
Up until now the RIAA's sole method of business has been suing people and trying to get fascist legislation passed, and nothing else. As I'm sure we all know, the massive civil disobedience of file sharing doesn't bat an eye at the law, in fact kind of snickers at it, so that hasn't worked.
What this means is, the RIAA is finally getting with the program. They're finally employing a technological solution to a technological problem. Some might claim they already had with SDMI but that was a joke, plus it wasn't aimed at going after the file sharers. Now, with this plan, even though there are ways around it, it looks like it could be semi-successful, especially if their online music services are attractive enough. Picture: J Random Musiclover, uses WinMX and KaZaA, until they bog down terribly slowly. He doesn't know it's the RIAA attacking, and he should "damn the man" and keep on truckin'. He just thinks they've become lame and it's time to move on. And then he sees one of the RIAA offerings, and if they're smart enough to finally go for some sort of cheap subscription or micropayment, he might very well be sold.
And I'm not so sure that's a bad thing. The RIAA has been an ogre in the past, but if it goes the way of micropayments and accepts the fact of filesharing (and that it will never, never, never go away), then perhaps the RIAA will find itself able to move into the future as, if not a friend, then at least an ally of humanity. I would hope so. Otherwise, let's destroy the fuckers.
But let's give them a little respect, because they're finally starting to get with the program.
-Kasreyn
Kasreyn: Cheerfully playing the part of Devil's Advocate to hairtrigger
I cannot get Michael Buffer out of my mind now.
"Llllllllllet's get ready to rumbulllllllllll!"
If they have the right to DOS a site then so should we. DDOS RIAA and all memeber companies back to the stone age if they try that shit.
if i name some file, like a 3 mb, dictionary file as "Dido - Thank You.mp3" that is not copyright fraud, but they'll have no way of knowing and can just steal my bandwidth when the file name leads them to believe it is a copyrighted song. How can they justify that as legal?
Since we /.ers don't advocate ip theft, and since we at the same time don't like new laws being shoved down our throats that restrict digital freedom, isn't this the course of action we want the RIAA to be taking?
<Flaimbait>
How dare you slashdot morons claim that the RIAA can't download ITS OWN IP!!?!?
</flaimbait>
Slashdot 's editors are dickheads
Hrm. I don't think they mean DoS in terms of swamping trading communities with requests. And I don't think we should talk about this in the future tense; it's happening now. A few weeks ago, I fired up Limewire and spent some time poking around in a couple of communities.
What did I find? Searching for songs from certain artists/labels returned *hundreds* of hits on essentially identical audio files with slight filename changes and incrementally varied byte sizes. Any attempt to download the songs would be successful -- until the server killed the session at precisely 80%.
Then I noticed that *all* of the files were being hosted on three IP's. A quick look showed the IPs in a range belonging to a major commercial hosting operation. Nice. A honeypot of sorts. And of course, they have my home IP (fixed) logged as requesting the same songs over and over until the lightbulb went off over my head.
Oh, well, back to anon-ftp for me...
I think not...(*poof*)
If They can start injecting "legitimate" trader's IPs into the blacklists, the value of the lists would be considerably reduced!
If I have my personal computer set to allow 10 download connections for my personal property that happens to have a name similar enough to something RIAA is DoSing... (not too hard, lots of songs have one/two word names - and there's overlap amongst _published_ songs)...
RIAA says hey, there's one of our songs, and starts up 10 sloooow downloads... I have no access to my own service -> denial of service.
There's a zillion types of DoS attacks, _some_ of which are the bandwidth overloaders - but there's others that are very simple (sending a single SYN caused a thread to wait forever looking for more on some OSes...).
In a democracy, everyone is guaranteed equal rights. There are no double standards. But what the RIAA is proposing, that for some reason, they should be given the right to do legally what is illegal for everyone else. If I were to launch a DoS attack on riaa.org, I would most surely be arrested, fined, called a terrorist, or all of the above. Yet, if things go thier way, they will have special dispensation to deny me (and others) service.
This shows that, with enough money, you can essentially buy and modify our government. Last time I checked, this is called a plutocracy. Let's stand up for democracy, and contact our senators!
--- At my sig, unleash hell.
I don't remember voting to bring the entire world under US law and regulations. What filtering and discrimination are they going to use for international users IP addresses?
So....... they intend to DoS attack every college campus in the united states? riiiiight.
--Nuintari
slashdot : where an opinion can be wrong.
Shhhhhhhh! Don't say anything... we can just sue them under the DMCA for reverse-engineering our p2p software! (How is it encrypted? Well, ah, Morpheus does use multiple, uh, sources to assemble the file, Your Honor...) Then it'll be unrestricted file sharing for all!
*snicker* Your all missing the point. By downloading these files, even to delete them imediately, they are contributing to piracy.
Thats the argument they are using against others, remember? Here they are, downloading HUNDREDS of songs... and they can be countersued to force them to pay punative damages for piracy. What fun.
There are already lots of groups "watching" the RIAA and getting on their case all the time. One of the most prominent ones is boycott-riaa.com, and there's also Die RIAA.
There are also numerous groups which arguably monitor the RIAA and it's actions along the course of their actions. These include The Future Of Music Coalition, The Velvet Rope and Pho.
Not to mention all the news outlets that keep a close eye on them - this article being a prime example, as well as The Register's occasionally inaccurate coverage.
----------
Darryl Ballantyne
http://www.darrylballantyne.com
Hmmm... perhaps it's time to go back to poly sci class. America isn't a democracy and never has been. The founding fathers feared what would happen if power should ever fall into the hands of the common man. On another point, your topic seems to suggest that somehow this one case makes money a more relevant issue than "rights" or "freedom." The fact of the matter is, in terms of the law and politics, money has *always* been able to crush rights and freedom if enough of it is spread around.
Seems mope and more often when I try to get a song instead of ripping my CD to save myself some time I download the mp3. Now I get a quick burst of bandwidth then it just slows to a crawl or even a stop... So when you try to dl a bunch what happens is all your downloads are just sitting there hanging and you have to keep going in and stopping the hung ones...
something is very fishy...
DoS me, I've been upgraded to BSOD'ing since '95, that won't change much in my life :)
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
And I have a few good friends who are, so I have a basic idea about how they think...
I would start banning IP's and entire Class C's at the edge or backbone level that I knew belonged to record companies or the people who worked for them to distribute this kind of attack^H^H^H^H^H^Htechnology. This is the same kind of tactic that sysadmins use against DOS attacks, but in this case there's likely to be no distribution since there is no way to get around that legally, and no ability to spoof ip's since they are planning to act like they're really downloading a track. They have to negotiate a connection and send ack's back and forth, right?
It's a very simple argument if you look at it from a financial or a resource usage point-of-view. It is in an ISP's best interest to keep as much of its network resources free for its customers. If my customers are subject to frequent DOS attacks, then I may ban certain services, such as Ping or Telnet and refuse those packets at my edge router or on my backbone connection if I have a decent backbone provider.
It's the same deal here. It's in an ISP's best interest to keep the RIAA from using up their network resources as well, because the number one reason people leave an ISP (at least when I worked at one) was a perceived 'slow connection'. If a joe sixpack-type customer knows he's going to get online to find music, and if he has heard from his buddies who got him hooked up in the first place that one ISP is worse than another when it comes to having RIAA related problems, then he's not going to sign up for service with that ISP.
This war of words and technology isn't just confined to the elite circles of geekdom, as most of you know. The RIAA has made a big enough a deal out of it that they're starting to build a Microsoft-like reputation for evil and greed. Joe-sixpack *does* know that the industry wants to keep him from trading music online.
By the same token, even a marginally experienced user is going to be picky about his service when he has better luck running his file-sharing apps with one ISP than a another, and we do know that ISP's are starting to refuse to TOS their users more and more often, just so they don't get negative reputations.
In the long run, this is going to be just another class of people who are routinely denied network access for their actions, via organizations similiar to MAPS RBL or the like. I've already seena few posts by people who plan to 'collect' offending IP's. Again, you can't spoof IP's if you have to send Ack's or do any sort of encyrption negotiation for your attack to work.
A humourous side-effect of what I beleive is going to happen will be the fact that the RIAA companies and 'attack dogs' will by able to claim 'success' because they'll perceive a drop in file-trading because of the network blocks that will no doubt be up hours after this sort of thing gets off the ground.
Good try, Hillary, but you're playing with boys who have been doing this sort of thing for a very long time now. Why don't you try again later.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
Does anyone in the RIAA have any sense whatsoever? Don't they understand that by DoSing people they not only lag and bog the person they are trying to get, but the network path it takes to get there as well? Don't they understand that they'd be overloading other innocent companies' routers and switches, etc. too? My God, someone send a Slashdot geek over to the RIAA ASAP.
First they want to 'hack,' and a few days later, they want to DoS! Sounds like the RIAA is a true terrorist group, and we need to erradicate them. They think like criminals. Such evil, evil people.
void women (int money, time_t time);
The most interesting thing about this whole "We'll DoS'em to the stone age!" statement is not so much what they said but what is implied. The RIAA is basically admitting that they can't sue _everyone_ that they need to in order to shut down file sharing services. They can't shut down the services in a litigious manner so they're going to try another route (DoS attacks). The RIAA may have bucket loads of money but their cash reserves are not without end and lawyers don't come cheap. The RIAA must see this and is exploring other avenues.
The only way for the RIAA to benefit from the internet music sharing phenomenon is if they stop trying to be the phone company and monopolize the market. If they just charged everyone a nominal fee for downloading the music that they _don't_ own then they'd be raking in the cash. Instead they spend all of their time, money and resources suing anyone who _dares_ oppose them.
The RIAA is becoming more desperate with their latest actions. It's about time people said no to thugs like the RIAA and the Harry Fox agency who attack our fair use rights at every corner. Now, if we could only come up with a file sharing system to share OLGA tablature then we'd really be on to something!
G. Washington on Government "it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master."
that's accurate. like everything in american politics, it becomes easier with ungodly amounts of money/the forces of satan as your lobbyists.
Let me get this straight. The RIAA just has to think that you are a pirate to try to DOS you? So what if I can make Joe over there look like he's a pirate?
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Wait until some hacker out there does a similar attack on a large commercial entity. Take, say....MSNBC or CNN.com.
If they were continually attacked in just such a way (although I'm sure that a real hacker would be much more ingenious about it) then the government would be finding and prosecuting him for illegal acts aimed at the corporation.
How is this different? Sure it's probably technically legal....but it is riding the line and the line would certainly be "re-interpreted" by the powers-that-be if it were a single hacker doing the deed.
Suppose the RIAA wins the right to actually get into your computer and delete files. There is simply no way for them to know which ones you actually have the copyright to. Right there are grounds for *countless* lawsuits. Secondly, if the RIAA decides to start DoSing a bunch of machines running WinMX or gnutella or whatever, then they're going to be attacking millions of computers at once. That's better than most worms and viruses can claim. How many class action lawsuits, or business lawsuits can the RIAA face? The point made about universities is important. A lot of file trading goes on through their networks, but so does a lot of very *costly* information. Block the important stuff so you can stop a few music pirates, and you're going to piss off a lot of very rich and very influential people and organisations.
ipchains -A input -s -j DENY
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
how come the retarded people get to be in charge?
I really don't get it sometimes. like do they seek them out? are they the only ones applying for these positions?
I imagine the interview process must be interesting - "well, george here does have two legs but can barely walk, drools, and babbles incessantly about bugs 'eating his skull' - sounds like the perfect canidate to lead this deal"
I on the other hand am obviously perfect. and handsome.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
I don't think the RIAA's new on-line music distribution systems are going to fair very well, when all the rogue file swapping DoS-etteers target the Pressplay and MusicNet servers, bringing them to their knees. In an all out DoS war, my money is on the seedy underbelly of the internet versus a collection of music corporations intent on seeing thier profit margins increase.
They RIAA might be able to DoS a few file swappers out there, and knock them off the net for a few days at a time...but they are going to be placing a huge target on themselves for every script kiddie out there with an army of @home windows zombies just waiting for a reason to unleash them.
A script kiddie knocking down the Pressplay or MusicNet servers for even a few hours at a time is going to hurt the RIAA bottom line more than the handful of file-swappers they will be able to DoS off the net.
-jef
But let's give them a little respect, because they're finally starting to get with the program.
Taking down a legitimate file sharing network like KaZaA using a denial-of-service attack is not "getting with the program". It's malicious hacking.
___
The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason. --Ben Franklin
RIAA is trying to terrorize civilians, by first trying to legalize cracking into computers, and now with DoS attacks.
How about putting back a fight?
If they have too much money, and the legal system is too corrupt to handle it, there are plenty of other means available to American citizens, and not all of them are legal, but perhaps it is worth it?
While stopping short of a full denial-of-service attack, the method could substantially clog the target computer's Internet connection.
So they are going to attempt to clog a users' Internet connections... Seems to be that this could be a very dangerous thing to do. Depending on a user's ISP or LAN configuration, blocking one machine may well cause problems for others (Take the example of 'bandwidth hogs' bogging down a neighbourhood on cable...).
Also, say I work at a large multinational company and decide to use file-swapping from there (assumming it is allowed or I want to risk my job). They might not take kindly to a DoS attack and may well kick back.
Finally, I believe that DoS attacks were present in early versions of the Gnutella network - people were forming ping/pong packets with large bogus payloads and sending them out with a high TTL... Some of the simpler clients didn't strip off spurious junk after a valid header on a packet (probably using a strategy similar to wormhole routing...) and thus forwarded it. Guess what? Those clients got fixed and the problem went away...
A good resolve would be to discover the IP's of the computers used to launch the attacks on the P2P networks, and build it into each P2P client to ping these computers, or even better some router in front of them (remembering to spoof source IP address). Might make for a very nice DDoS...
-- Mike
on morpheus, which is at this point windows only I think, but 600,000 users gievs a great shot at finding anything :)
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
All that sounds good, but in the long term there is nothing the music industry can do to solve the problem of piracy without fundamentally changing their business model. Right now it looks like this: 1) Manufacture flashy new act 2) Market the product like it's going out of style 3) Milk it, milk it, milk it 4) When it goes out of style, go to step 1.
The problem is that a model that is so driven by marketing is especially vulnerable to piracy. Why?
The music labels have pretty much stopped telling people to buy their stuff because it's good, but because it's popular, and at some level their customers realize this. People will buy a product because it's the hot thing, but if that is its sole source of appeal, at the end of the day the buyers won't feel obligated to support the people behind it.
If you have an act that's good but undermarketed, MP3-trading will function like free marketing, resulting in increased sales. But if you have an act that's well-marketed but crappy, MP3-trading will function like lost sales, as people say, "Okay, I've been told by Mr. Television that I should have this; well, now I have it."
No one is going to "discover" Limp Bizkit by hearing an MP3. The product is the marketing and vice versa. Similarly, in tend years, that Limp Bizkit CD isn't going to be on the shelves waiting for the next generation of music fans; if you want to make money off it, you have to make money now.
Take a look at the publishing industry. The book world is also driven by marketing, but to a much lesser extent. If you publish a book, you can expect that it will provide revenue independent of the amount of money you spend to hype it. That's because the book industry is actually about selling the content instead of the hype.
Furthermore, the publishing houses have stayed alive by acting as finders and screeners of content. Instead of riding one or two major cash cows, they cast their nets wide, trying to get everything that has some quality. There are tons of great music albums that never get major label release, but there aren't that many great novels out there haven't been published in one form or another. Conversely, I know that anything published by a major house will be better in quality than 90% of what I could get for free.
So why don't the record companies adopt a model like the publishing industry, where they nurture a variety of intrinsically good acts that will provide more modest but longer-lasting and more stable cash flows? Simple: the quality-based model doesn't make nearly as much cash as the marketing-based model.
The fact is that there is no way for the record companies to make a "fair" profit doing what they do now. Nothing less that the survival of their way of doing business is at stake; it's no surprise that they're going down swinging.
I work as a volunteer Sys Admin (BOFH) for my apartment block; 300 users, on a 2mbit leased line, so we are a small time ISP of sorts. /firewall, and our commonly shared bandwith.
Our users are dynamically assigned private IP numbers, so we use NAT on our gateway.
As I see it, any kind of DoS attack on one of our users, will effectively be an attack on our gateway
If such an indiscriminate DoS praxis was instigated by the RIAA against us, we would excersise our legal options to retaliate and defend ourself:
Eg. even though such DoS'ing may become legal in the US, it would still be a criminal activity by my countrys laws (Denmark). Since RIAA has presence in Denmark, it may be possible to persecute them.
Also, perhaps such DoS'ing from the US to other countries, may be illegal even by US law, since it is likely to conflict with international law.
And our humble organisation, might just be politically so well connected, that we could make it an EU case. Certainly we could make it a case in our own parlament, since we occasionally negotiate with high level civil servants, regarding various laws for community(?) based ISPs.
A huge amount of all Danish Internet traffic, goes through the so called DIX. So permanent choke points for RIAA IP numbers there, (and on our backbone providers routers), could also be an option.
We would also bitch and complain to RIAAs backbone provider, suggesting that harbouring DoS script kiddies like RIAA, might be a bad buisness idea, that perhaps could mean trouble for the overseas connectivity for the rest of their costumers (filtering on the DIX, RBL-style, peering agreements, perhaps even lawsuits).
In short, if such a law became a reality in the US, I would strongly advise the RIAA, to individually check the national identity of their DoS-targets IP, before commencing any attack.
I don't think the RIAA suits are that smart. An all out cyberwar might ensue, with the RIAA blown clean out of the internet waters. No ISP will put up with that garbage from the RIAA and any ISP that does will be a pariah to all of the others! If I was an independent ISP, I wouldn't accept traffic from any domain if they are involved in clogging up my T1.
and some spare char's for the lameness filter
All true, but the RIAA is going to have to learn at some point that they can't go to war against their customers. No business can. The RIAA "hackers" are never going to be a match for the true freedom-of-information kind of hackers that are their antithesis. The RIAA can go to war, but even with their great resources, they will never win, and for the same reasons the America is here today. The American Revolution was fought against a larger and better equipped British army. A large part of the reason for the American victory was that the Americans were fighting out of principle...to get what they thought was right...to not be taken advantage of. Imperialist Britain was fighting for money, nothing more (well, little more anyway).
People who want to listen to music are fighting to be able to have the freedom to do just that. Anyone who thinks that Metallica should still get paid for something that they recorded in a studio 20 years ago probably doesn't have the sense to know that they are being taken advantage of anyway.
By the way...Has anyone compared how much the RIAA is spending trying to battle this to how much they are actually losing in record sales because of it (I mean how much they claim they are losing)? I'm willing to wager that their war on file sharing doesn't make financial sense at all.
Will have to use more advanced techniques to negotiate transfers... http://vip.poly.edu/mehdi/papers/summary/The%20Coc aine%20Auction%20Protocol.htm
Music piracy on Freenet is sparse, I should note, and Freenet was created with much higher political causes in mind than pirating music.
For more information on Freenet, see http://www.freenetproject.org/
I promise, next time I sign onto the gnutella network I won't trade any music! I promise, I promise, I promise! Just please, please, please don't take my P2P porn source away.
*Rushes out to buy a copy of the latest Britney Spears and NSync CDs to help appease the RIAA. Holds them up over his head.* See! I'm not hurting your business model! Leave my P2P network alone, please?
Steven
-- I have marked myself unwilling to moderate-- I don't have other accounts to artificially inflate the karma of
If I had mod points you'd get some...
Dear Mr Bin-Laden,
Please could you kill COUGH!, i mean 'take-out' the members of the RIAA, and MPAA. They are responsible for all the bad foreign policies that America has pushed, and the election of G.W.Bush (the ape man). For years they have bribed judges, and politicians to do their bidding, and have recently funded a number of airstrikes on your country which they have dubbed: "Drop CD samples onto Afghanistan" where they are attempting to fix the lack of market penetration in that area.
P.S
They are all high on crack too
-------
Dear Sir,
Thank you for your recent letter requesting Jihad on the RIAA, and MPAA. Here at al-Qaeda, we pride ourselves in devlivering professional terrorist solutions in a competitive world. After reviewing our records, we have chosen to declare Jihad (this will take approximately 24 hours) and will be taking measures to 'take out' the members by use of 38000 trained hampsters. The hampsters will be used to swarm the meeting rooms at the RIAA and MPAA, thus smothering them and relieving them of the oxygen that they didn't pay for. In usual form, we will stagger the events by half an hour to give the press a chance to get their cameras in location. Don't forget, Thursday 18th October @ 8 (10 central). Only on FOX!
Yours, Osama Bin-Laden, al-Qaeda.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
GREED!
It sounds like their plan is to masquerade as a client and request multiple copies of copyrighted songs and then download them really slow.
So to defeat this, you just tell the program to allow only 1 upload per client and set a minimum download speed.
This is just one more challenge that peer-to-peer networks will have to recognize and avoid. Right now, the biggest problem for Gnutella is that a large percentage of network nodes aren't actually sharing any files, they're just downloading everything they can get their hands on. But, clients are already getting smart to the freeloader crisis. In the same way that LimeWire allows you to dump users who aren't actually sharing any files, future clients will have to be on the lookout for RIAA DoS-bots.
suicide hampsters...
I see a solution to their attempt, filter out all connections coming from certain known IPs belonging to RIAA; the list could be automatically updated and I don't think there is much to do for RIAA if I don't want to allow them in my system, after all, it is my computer and my resources and if they connect uninvited, then it is hacking, I'll sue them and some others will join me, I'm sure.
I'd like to see what happens when the RIAA is swamped in complaints and threats of lawsuits from ISPs of their "target" customers.
Imagine this: If the RIAA were to actually make a move on this threat, there could be some serious side-effects. RIAA systems causing major traffic congestion at the offending customer's ISP, possible equipment failures, and overall rise in tech support costs when customers begin to complain about these problems are a few examples.
-- I'll cut you up so bad, you'll wish I'd never cut you up so bad!
As I asked one person in a email, can "ordinary citizens" lobby Congress (the U.S. one) to open congressional hearings? Oh, wait, they already have opened congressional hearings..
I guess you hadn't gotten the memo that M$ took the gloves off after all the complaints about how easy the NT4 track was.
Isn't that like running around selling sugar as cocaine?
Can one charge a drug-dealer selling bunk drugs with fraud?
This is a serious question.. is there a statute that makes the laws against misrepresentation not apply if the intended transaction is illegal?
If they put up lots of 'bogus' files.. can we not sue theM?
Personally, I'm happy to see the RIAA go to war with the common folk.
Oh. You meant people who violate copyrights, not pirates. That's quite different. Carry on, then, with the flame fest.
It's only a crime if you can't buy enough politicians to get out of it.
LaBrea to trap the RIAA
I think this post should receive an extra mod point just for including the phrase "Hillary Rosen will shit live goats."
Record labels hope to make the point that subscription services such as MusicNet or Pressplay, which will launch on Yahoo, America Online, MSN and RealNetworks by year's end, will not be subject to the same doubtful quality of service.
Oh, we'll see about that...
I think someone else said it best on the other thread (about RIAA attempting to make it legal to hack copyright infrigers).
Posted by sphealey:
This technique has been honed to perfection in the last 20 years. Pressure group floats a ridiculous and unbelievable trial balloon. Public outcry ensues. Pressure group "retreats" to a "compromise" position, showing its "reasonableness" to legislators and the courts. The so-called "compromise" position is 120% of what the presssure group wanted in the first place, to give them a little more wiggle room.
I think you can be pretty sure this will be followed by a similar proposal, probably slipped under the radar screen by a pet legislator.
1) Multiple download requests can be beaten with a simple firewall rule (-m iplimit), and if not, will cause at least the application in question to become useless. Its services are therefore unavailable, in other words the user has been denied the service of the application.
2) Multiple upload requests run the risk of filling the partition, which certainly qualifies as at least an attempted denial of service. If a single filename is chosen, with multiple attempts, then a smart client will flip the bird, and a dumb client might tickle some kernel buffer problems.
3) In every permutation this strategy will overload the network infrastructure between the attacker and the alleged pirates, causing
widespread network overloads, and by extension denials of service, like when BGP4 starts shafting its peers.
4) United States law does not apply to denials of service. IANAL, but last time I checked DoS attacks fell under Interpol's jurisdiction, even if the attack was launched against Boston from New York.
On a side note... many people rely on their computers for their livelihood, including me. I would personally choose to interpret such an attack against my systems as an attack against my livelihood, and therefore against my life. I would then invoke a self-defense argument, and take any and all measures necessary to eliminate that threat.
Other possible approach: Stop using those idiotic p2p programs that any asshole with a law firm can figure out, and go back to swapping lists of ftp sites on IRC. Out of sight and out of reach. Better transfer speeds, too.
If I catch any attacks in my packet logs, you can be certain that the offending machine will A) be blacklisted 2) get its IP publicized as widely as possible, and D) get its bits hacked as close to permanent disability as I can manage.
I think that its really cute that the RIAA comes up with a handy little idea like this one, and everyone seems embrace it like the little lemmings that they are!
sure, its a cool idea. a hackers pipe-dream. but the REALITY is that for every idea, there are equal and better ideas just waiting to be found.
i just want people to open their minds, don't get too excited, settle down, and REALIZE that there is a better way. someone just has to use a little more creativity than the previously mentioned kindergarden crusade.
-- Betting on the survival of the media industry is a serious risk. I advise investing elsewhere.
Note to those who will say that I'm a dirty rotten no good pirate: I don't pirate music. I simply buy from indie labels. At least then, I'm sure that the artist gets most of my money.
I grew up on college radio (Rutgers and Princeton). Here is an article about my one of my favorite labels, Touch 'n Go Records. Current or past home of Steve Albini (Big Black, Rapeman, Jesus Lizard, Shellac), Butthole Surfers, Wedding Present and more. Apparently the Butthole Surfers tried to take over the distribution rights to their old albums (mmmm... Locust Abortion Technician) and the Touch n Go said "no way, I own the distro rights forever. that's how I make money." Made me think twice even about indie labels.
For a diatribe by "the greatest songwriter of all time"(tm) Steve Albini, visit Negativland's website.
In classic Big Black style, the liner notes for the Rapeman album "Two Nuns and a Pack Mule" contained descriptions of the songs instead of the lyrics. For "Steak and Black Onions", he wrote "We don't hate vegetarians. We just think they're funny."
Intelligent Life on Earth
I've been thinking of setting up a CD club in my town, basically a bunch of people who put what CDs they own (probably aided by cddb [ironic]/freedb) on the internet, and then do the rest with hand-to-hand swaps. No MP3s, no CDRs. No copies either, except for audio tape. It should be completely legal and protected by AHRA. Unless posing a list of CDs you own on a public forum is illegal (might be stretched out by a court).
That the RIAA see their own interests as being more important than the civil liberties of their *customers*. Should this vigilante BS be responded to in kind?
Bastards. I say we download every friggin' MP3 we can get our hands on, and share with every friggin' person in the world. And then respond in kind by suing them in court under the DMCA for infringing on our rights or being terrorists or whatever...
We must get revenge on the RIAA for their sleazy DoS plans. I propose we link every slashdot story to their website.
If I would be in a Death-Metal band this would be the title of our CD, and from every sold CD we would donate 1 Dollar to an assasin to kill some RIAA Guys. That's called good marketing, because this would increase our credibility as a DEATH(-Metal) band! ;-) If they use our methods to attack some so called haxors (;-)) we would choose their methods to buy some assasins!
- Yasa
:: The anger inside me kills my realistic thinking
I can't help but wonder... who pays for all the bandwidth used by this?
Surely not the ISP...
Someone needs to start something that allows artists to promote themselves online and sell music and make it profitable for the service and the artists but also so it helps consumers. MP3.com was like this at one time, now its to commercialized I think. If you want your music you will have to pay but we need to work out the evil middleman that eats all of our money and doesn't pay the artist.
"You can now flame me, I am full of love,"
If the fight moves to technology, that's a fight that the individual can win.
I see, in the future, most Gnutella clients having a CPS minimum on files, just like most decent IRC file clients do. This is quite easy to route around.
Dishonesty in such a network can temporarily harm it, but just as in the case of spam, we make do and live.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
Couldn`t you prosecute them under the DMCA for reverse engineering the file sharing protocol for purposes of disrupting it`s operation?
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Ok, here are my comments.
#1. The RIAA/MPAA etc are not law enforcement agencies. They have no right to take direct action against any individual without going to a court. The idea that because some copyright holder THINKS someone else is violating his copyright, he can clog an entire network is absurd and dangerous. What if he's wrong? Inevitably, such efforts to identify "copyrighted files" being traded will more often be wrong than right. Even so, what if they're right about the "trading of copyrighted material"? That doesn't give them the right to violate MY computer or MY system, or OUR network of communications. P2P neworks are in effect little different from a LAN at an office(except slower). The office has the right to maintain that LAN without people destroying or hindering it from the outside. Why? Because they paid for it, set it up, and are currently using it as their method of communiation, etc. In the same way, WE have the right to operate on our "LAN" -- which in this case is a P2P network -- without it being hacked.
#2. At least those nut cases in our government had the good sense not to encorporate this into their already grievant anti-terrorism bill. The bill is an assault on almost all of the civil liberties we should hold dear.
#3. Prevention. Of course, just as we are able to trade copyright files whether the law says so or not, and are effectively immune to consequence due to the massivity of the internet; so are copyright holders able to violate our rights, whether or not the law says so. Congress and the Senate may outlaw such attempts at DoS attacks on PUBLIC networks(which is what P2P effectively is), but that will not stop them from acting. On the internet, irrelevant of how hard the govenrment may try, it is difficult if not impossible to delegate responsibility, or to place blame for a particular action. This is not because there is no trail of logs/records to follow, but rather the opposite: there are so many that making sense out of it is impossible, unless they know exactly what they are looking for.
So, government laws cannot stop copyright owners from doing DoS attacks on OUR networks. What can stop them? Obviously, US.
LimeWire, the only program I use to trade files, already has several features that may be able to effectively eliminate such DoS attacks. Here are my suggestions for features to battle DoS attacks(these, of course, would all have to be automated):
1. Blocking greedy users. You may block people from downloading files, if they are not offering more than a certain number of files. Perhaps it would also be good to be able to determine the average size of the files people are offering, and also have other parameters.
2. Blocking repetivie requests. Block a user from downloading from you if he tries to download many things from you at once, or tries to download the same file repetively.
3. Block users from downloading who are downloading at very slow rates. Create a preference for who gets the download priority: people with low pings and large bandwidths, who are downloading quickly, would get the download.
4. Limit the amount of upload bandwidth you will devote to any user downloading files. Also "limit" the number of files one user can simulaneously download from you. That is, allow a user to download as many files from you as he wishes, as long as there are no other requests; when other requests some in, start limiting the number of uploads per user). The idea here is to prevent one person from hogging all of your upload bandwidth. Also, DO NOT limit the number of uploads at any given time: if you limit the number of uploads to say 1, then one user may be downloading a file, and only using up 50% of your upload bandwidth; the other 50% is wasted if anyone else wants to download from you. The idea here is that if say 20 users want to download from you, ALL of your upload bandwidth will be used, and spread between them accordingly, such as to minimize the overall time for ALL of them to get what they want.
5. Going back to setting priorities on which users get the upload. If one user starts downloading a file, and another user comes on who could download that file before the first user, priority is given to the other user. The goal here is overall utility, not "fairness"(i.e., first come not necessarily first serve). Each uploading node "wants" to get one user done uploading as quickly as possible and then offer upload to the next requester.
6. Setting up a system for dynamically identifying users who are clogging the system(DoSers) -- or contributing to clogging the system -- and blocking them. Obviously, anyone can clog the system an inordinant amount, depending on his or her bandwidth and certain conditions. However, users that perhaps over a half an hour display behaviour which indicates they are DoSers(or having that effect) can be blocked.
7. As explanation for #6, let me say that clearly, any user who has been determined to say have a 500Kbps bandwidth and is using say 1500 bytes of bandwidth to download each of say 341 files, that person is clearly intending to clo the system. That user should be dynamically put on a list of users who are intentionally clogging the system, and blocked from downloading, so long as that behavior continues. Obviously, if everyone blocks him/her, (s)he won't be able to continue any behavior; but one should be able to set up a system which will determine what kind of behavior that person is attempting to do, and then keeping the person on the ban list if they attempt to continue the DoSing behavior, but removing them from the list if they don't continue.
8. As another way of establishing #6, here's a simple system. Consider a user who has 2.048kbps of bandwidth. Now, that user should obviously be allowed to download enough files to fill up his/her entire downloading bandwidth.
Obviously, we wouldn't want a person with 4000Mbps of bandwidth "filling up" their bandwidth -- so, depending on the situation, there should be a limi to how much "informaation" any one user can download at any one time. This is very important. As the RIAA and MPAA can afford to get access to high bandwidth "modems" -- i.e., T3 lines, OC12's, etc -- they could use that to download huge amounts of information and prevent anyone else from utlizing it.
The overall idea is that at any given time there must be a "net uploading bandwidth" on the entire P2P network, so to speak. Now, each file-requesting user should have approximately equal access to that "bandwidth", unless of course they're a DoSer. After all, you want to get the maximum number of files(of average size) to people as you can.
9. A general way to increase the speed of a P2P network. At any given time, a person with a very large uploading bandwidth may not be using any of that uploading bandwidth to give his files to the public, while a person with a very small uploading bandwidth may be using all of his bandwidth to give files to the public. Now, wouldn't it make sense if the person with the large uploading bandwidth could automatically download highly-requested files from the person with the small bandwidth, and offer them himself? What this would effectively amount to is users automatically downloading high-traffic files when they log into a P2P network(that is, if they aren't using their downloading bandwidth to download files of their choice), placing those files into a temporary folder whose contents are to be offered to the public. This would increase the redundancy of the system, thus giving each individual downloader more options for places to download from, thus making things faster. Of course, this option would be optional to the individual user -- no one would "have" to download a certain number of files from other people upon logging on, but such would rather be an option they could check or uncheck. Also, perhaps this option would be something which they'd like to modify -- they may want to devote a certain amount of HD space on their computer to this, depending on how much space they have. With that space, they may want to place in there all files of one type, or all large files, or all small ones, etc etc. In short, there could be many parameters for files a person automatically downloads from another and offers for uploading in his temporary upload folder.
10. Back to blocking greedy users. Obviously, a person who devotes less size in MB of files to this "cache upload file set"(that is, downloads less MB in memory for this purpose) is somewhat "greedy", depending on how much less he devotes than the average; also obviously, a person who devotes more is somewhat benevolent, depending on how much more he devotes than the average. Individual users may want to block download requests from users defined as "greedy" by this standard.
The idea here is to eliminate reduce parasitic behavior on the P2P system. Users who do not offer files but download them are somewhat parasitic(after all, it costs little ot offer files, as most people don't need upload space anyways). Users who hog all sorts of download offers(DoSers) are also parasitic and greedy, as they prevent others from utilizing that bandwidth. Users who do not offer "redundant downloads" of high-demand files are also somewhat parasitic.
The idea here is that the P2P system works best when everyone is contributing as much as possible: when everyone is contributign their own files, offering lots of their upload space, and contributing redundant offers of "high-demand files".
11. More on dealing with greedy users. Another functional definition of an easy user is one who gets on a P2P network, downloads stuff, and then immediately gets off. Obviously, users who stay on P2P networks less time are greedier, and those who stay on it more are more benevolent. This because a user staying on a network a long time keeps his "node" open to the public longer. Even after a user has gotten what he desires from a P2P network, what hindrance does it do him to stay on longer? After all, most bandwidth used on internet surfing is downloading not uploading bandwidth. What harm does it do to an individual user to always leave his P2P program open, always having his files available, except in cases where he's gaming? After all, most internet browing is downloading stuff, and other computer activities do not require internet bandwidth(i.e., it doesn't hinder you while using your word processor to also have the P2P program open). A "minimal" version of the P2P program should be set up, so as that the user can go into "inactive mode" in which as little P2P program information is loaded on the RAM as possible: only that relating to uploading information to other users. This would further reduce the "cost" any user pays for leaving his P2P program open continuously.
12. In other words, the P2P system is a "symbiotic" system. Users who are more benevolent should somehow be rewarded in how much they can get. Benevolence in this case does not simply mean offering most of their upload bandwidth, but also offering many files. After all, what good is it if they're offering all of their upload space, but only offering one file, which isn't too popular? Automated protocols should be set up in LimeWire or other P2P programs which reward the most benevolent users, and repriment the most greedy ones. (all of this, of course, would depend on the majority of P2P users selecting these options in their Options boxes).
THE POSITIVE FEEDBACK LOOP:
The system I have described for eliminating greedy users, dealing with DoSers, and overall optimizing the P2P network effectively sets up a positive feedback loop. Benevolent users are rewarded for their benevolence by having more access, and greedy useres are punished by having less. Thus, users are discouraged from being greedy(offering nothing, while taking alot), but encouraged to be benevolent(offering alot). This results in a continual reinforcement of "benevolence" which feeds onto itself: users act more benevolent because it gives them greater access, and this eventually leads to a higher "average benevolence level". Then it starts all over again, users again being encouraged to act more benevolent than the average level. It should be noted that this results in an "increased standard of download speed" for everyone, no just the benevolent users(note, benevolent would be relative, and always an more "difficult" status to obtain). Even greedy users would benefit from this sytem, because the motivation for increased benevolence results in more redundancy, more upload bandwidth, and less cloggers/DoSers. More redundancy means that more users will be offering the exact same file: thus, any particular user who wants to download that file would likely download it faster, as his program could automatically compare the different sources and determine which one would result in the fastest download time for him. As users offering more bandwidth are more benevolent, users would obviously be encouraged to offer more bandwidth.
Finally, it should be noted that this system is a creates MAJOR incentives for individual users to contribute to actively UNDERMINING a creators so called "right" to control information. As this positive-feedback benevolence loop will tend to increase the number of files users will offer, and the amount of bandwidth they devote to offering that information, it will encourage users to OFFER more informaion that "creators" have claimed to have the right to control. That is, users will not only be encouraged to take advantage of others offering "copyrighted" information, but also encouraged to offer copyrighted information themselves.
This system could greatly undermine the attempts of organizations such as the RIAA/MPAA/AAA(Authors Association of America) to control information. After all, people would be encouraged to -- out of an interest for their own interests -- distribute information. Thus, this would turn many people into what the RIAA/MPAA/AAA calls "pirates". I prefer to think of them as Information Liberators, because that's what they're doing -- liberating informaion from the control of the information Nazi's(the RIAA/MPAA/AAA aren't the kind of Nazi's who want to burn books, they're the kind who want to prevent books from being read). Now, furthermore, as this system would turn the vast majority of internet users into Information Liberators, it would also change their feelings about "intellectual property". Note, "intellectual property" is a shortened euphemism for what it really is -- the enslavement of information to be controled by a few information-Nazi's.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
What they are doing is sucking up available download connections with very slow downloads. A lot of new software is starting to support kicking connections that fall below a predetermined limit (a la xDCC scripts of yore) so this won't work for long.
So they want to DoS us eh?
Well we know how to fix that...how come there is no link to the RIAA in the article???
I think I'm going to go to work for RIAA as a developer for anti-piracy. Chrage High dollar to be on a neverending development p[roject, shweet.(plus I could download music from server that I choose to ignore... for a price.MUAHAhahahahah)
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Hey, someone on /. must know - are there any unbiased news sources left online ?
>|<*:=
Won't somebody think of the children!!
Call me paranoid, but I think the riaa is making these ridiculous statements to see what the reaction is from various parts of the net before making their real move. Hey riaatards! Kiss my ass!
BTW: Ramsey Electronics has a kit for you to build that will hook up to your computer and broadcast your MP3's for you! Enjoy!
Then how about giving people what they want? I still haven't seen any RIAA-money-grabbing-member distributer make CDs full of artists' songs in MP3 format available for sale. Not that it's an excuse to pirate songs, but if at least they were available and there was a choice, people would probably actually buy them.
Of course, I'm sure they're too stupid to give it a try
AC comments get piped to
RIAA is quite desperate now... Im waiting on:
"RIAA will send Anthrax letters to all pirates"
"We have a legitimate concern that the measure currently being debated could unintentionally take away a remedy currently available to us under law that helps us combat piracy," said RIAA spokesman Jano Cabrera.
Your concern is noted, but I'm afraid that just now, we're a little busy trying to figure out how to keep crazy people from crashing airplanes into buildings, while not giving the Homeland away to the FBI in the process.
So if you'd kindly put a sock in it, we'd be grateful. Really.
Edith Keeler Must Die
Problem is that the artists should no longer be part of the RIAA in any way. Boycotting RIAA will only result in them spreading more of their propaganda
AC comments get piped to
DoS.mp3.exe...
DoS.mp3.mdb...
DoS.mp3.doc...
Come to think of it, they can't be doing THAT good of a job as far as shielding where they are coming from. How about a target virus that seems to be what they are looking for sitting officially inaccessible on an unsecured server waiting for them to "find" it. I wonder if this would be legal.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
This will never work on the Freenet. Attempting to do so will cause each node along the request path to store a copy. Attempting this on Freenet will cause the targeted files to be spread more widely, making them MORE available, not less.
Edith Keeler Must Die
Why don't we make it so that we use the six degrees of separation that we think exists?
I am willing to share music with any of my friends, even not listen to it while they're listening to it. Why don't we share something like PGP-keys between us and our close ( 20 people) friends, sign each others keys and agree to share?
Then if someone wants music, check your friends lists, and if they don't have it available, ask them to ask for what you're looking for from their friends. The latency might be a day or so. And the chain spreads outwards. If someone eventually connects to someone inside of RIAA, about 6 steps out, the person who shared with them, someone they presumably _knew_ worked for RIAA, that's the only person that's really guilty of anything.
Thanks, just my 2 cents.
--Tom Y
http://66.96.196.244/john/misc/britney_bikini/03.j pg
Look at the CD she's taking out. Look at the case she's taking it out of.
Hopefully, the RIAA will stop people like this pirating music, so that music artists can get the money they deserve.
Pot. Kettle. Black.
Number of napster/gnutella/imesh/audiogalaxy/etc/etc users : well over 10,000,000 (on at one time? easily well over 1,000,000)
... A PRETTY FAT PIPE if they hope to DoS anyone. And with the technology (ideas?) that have been created in order to fight the spreading of virii, there's no way they could possibly hope to do anything.
Assuming a bandwidth of 50kb/s avg per user, they're going to need
They're truly grasping at straws.
But you have to give them merit for one thing:
They are finally going after the source of the problem instead of trying to introduce legislation to hurt everyone. Yes yes yes you do hurt some of the indy artists who are legitimately trading online, but you can't deny that well over 90% of online trading through any sort of mp3 sharing service is going to be pirated.
It's a futile attempt, just like all of their other ones, but finally they've gotten their heads out of their asses long enough to come up for air to see that maybe they're headed down the wrong path. The question is to see how far they put them back up once they're done.
If God gave us curiosity
Since when are DOS attacks legal?
An article about the claim against the RIAA and others is available here.
Maybe it's going to be time to have blacklists with ip's to block Mr. Riaa's attempts to put networks down that way.
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
I can see it now. The RIAA launch a succession of DDoS attacks on unsuspecting MP3 traders, only to recieve a barrage of assorted attacks in retaliation. Now, I'm not doubting the might of the RIAA, but come on.... let's be serious. I doubt even they could survive the pending onslaught from the IMTU (Illegal Music Traders Federation, of which I have appointed CmdrTaco as the President). ;)
slainfu
"I can't be a terrorist if you're sucking my bum."
Don't you think if the RIAA were to set up a service whereby one could purchase high quality MP3 songs for download at a rate of 4 songs for $1, to be used however and whenever the purchaser wanted, they would be swamped with users...and make tons of money.
After all, when you make it easy enough, and inexpensive enough, to download songs legally, the pirate market will effectively dissappear.
All true, but the RIAA is going to have to learn at some point that they can't go to war against their customers. No business can. The RIAA "hackers" are never going to be a match for the true freedom-of-information kind of hackers that are their antithesis. The RIAA can go to war, but even with their great resources, they will never win, and for the same reasons the America is here today. The American Revolution was fought against a larger and better equipped British army. A large part of the reason for the American victory was that the Americans were fighting out of principle...to get what they thought was right...to not be taken advantage of. Imperialist Britain was fighting for money, nothing more (well, little more anyway).
comparing the RIAA keeping pirates from swapping music, and the american revolution is the biggest joke i've heard today. The american revolution was about british control of our every day life. The RIAA is about getting totalcontrol of their business investments. (IE. the artists/music).
People swapping music is kind of like the terrorists that bombed the world trade towers (kind of a bad comparison, im not claiming copyright infringers have anything to do with terrorists) they HATE america, yet lived here for months, enjoying our strip clubs and bars. Need I mention the fact that there are people by the thousands trying to get into the U.S. each day.
People swapping music HATE the RIAA, yet continue to "steal" the music. Why? because it's sounds great! If the music wasn't worth something, why steal it?
It's kinda like a "forced" gnu license for music, except you're not getting the owner's permission.
if you really think the RIAA is raping you, stop buying/sharing their music. If the answer is no, then it must mean the cost is reasonable.
People who want to listen to music are fighting to be able to have the freedom to do just that. Anyone who thinks that Metallica should still get paid for something that they recorded in a studio 20 years ago probably doesn't have the sense to know that they are being taken advantage of anyway.
Really......I guess people who did a job 2 weeks ago shouldn't get paid either. Point being, just because they recorded something 20 years ago doesn't mean EVERYONE has heard it already.
as for the hacking laws..Let me just say that I think that all the laws that the RIAA has or has tried to get passed are wrong, but if they did the equivalent of what file-sharing users are doing, they would D.o.S any copyright infringer they found, without trying to legalize it.
Ok, sorry, how about I say we are a Republic to be more correct. However, the fact remains that we can buy into our government if we had enough money.
--- At my sig, unleash hell.
I hope that they take to sending virii as a method to preventing online trading. It would then be fun to download a song that you have (you actually own the cd, tape, etc) and then when your machine gets infected, boom, instant law suit.
"What are you going to do, release the dogs? Or the bees? Or the dogs with the bees in their mouths and when they bark they shoot bees at you?"
~Homer Simpson
Lets start with the easy stuff!!!
;-)
Peers to support multiple downloads and rate limit the over all bandwidth going out on all the connections, so if they don't want the data someone else can have it! Rate limit the connections to no one connection can Hog all the bandwidth.
A quick IP ban on subnets that look like they are playing the system this could be distributed accross the system. There are only a limited number of subnets they can use. They need a leased line to do this, which would have a static IP, which is easy to find, if they used dsl or modem to get a dynamic one, they could not do enough damage, unless they had lots of lines, which would be a bulk buy from an ISP which could then be banned, customers would then leave that ISP which would lose money, and kick the RIAA from their net.
ban any host that has riaa.org reverse look up
Do not allow the same subnet to download stuff from any one peer to much.
Monitor the network for repeated downloads of the same track from the same subnet communicate this info to others.
Use the "Mojo" system, so if you don't share and get downloads you don't get to do any downloads!
(Now that would be amusing the RIAA would have to provide songs that people wanted to download!)
Use the freenet system, so as data is being requested from one node so much, the data can be buffered on other nodes.
I can just see it... The RIAA are dosing me, clickery click IP banned, day later, they got a new net connection, repeat.... repeat 100 times, they get bored and go away.
The only way they're ever going to truly protect their property and charge us per beat is to wrap the audio signal in an encrypted wireless stream which requires an implant that will contain the key that was used to purchase the song from a device and will be used to decrypt it in real time and play it back to the user through a direct neural overlay/shunt.
People who want to hear music played in public places would probably have to subscribe or the company playing it would have an "event license" which would service only a specific number of listeners within a specific radius...this kind of technology could be used to recieve broadcasts from a local relay. Because each implant also serves to identify the customer, it's easy to determine subscriber counts per performance delivery node, which gives advertisers a very good data stream...right down to the user's ID, which of course is going to be sniffed by about every market-device in the area...blocking "proximity ads" would probably cost you.
This technology will initially be developed to overcome hearing loss, or enable criminals to lead some kind of life/rehabilitiation, and eventually will be sold to the citzenry as an extremely cool way to interface with the environment, computers, and each other.
If a lowly bastard like myself can see this coming, don't think the greedy aren't working towards it right now. They're going to sell it to us, and we're going to assume that "come hither" position we always do...because it's what we're trained to do as good little citizens and we love our toys.
Mommies will love to know exactly where their vandals are, goverment will enjoy being able to track people--anywhere--and the RIAA will happily give you a reason to pay to hear music. Can you imagine a concert where someone with this technology would hear the music without any degredation or at least without their ears ringing, while the "unchipped" would just hear the crowd, and maybe the drums if they were close enough to the stage? That would be some weird shit.
Hey, on the upside, the rebels would just make their own music...too bad they'd have to do it in secret or face licensing issues.
Every new form of media has it's own Requirimento
the method could substantially clog the target computer's Internet connection.
I dont think they understand, no matter how you ubstruct my usage of my computer or the net its a DoS. They can smurf me, they can ping-flood me, or do this - whatever - its all a Denial of Service Attack.
Sheesh, these people want to argue semantics... give me a break.
So - you're one of the very few slashdot zealots who will admit to being braindead?
:-)
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
Hey, maybe they will next try to send those users on the sharing "SITES" as they call them some anthrax thru the mail. Or maybe the will petition the gov to drop bombs on our houses .. COME ON .. this is about the most idiotic thing ive ever heard a company try. They are going to "hack users". I think the RIAA has just run out of ideas and they are paying some idiot off the street to think of stuff. Hey RIAA, pay me, ill give you stupid ideas too, ive got plenty of them!
You're making the assumption that all the hosts are sharing files.
I don't recall the exact figures, but an analysis of napster showed that well under 10% of users provided the bulk of files (75%+)
I knew a guy who used napster a lot to download songs, but was bothered by the idea of someone downloading *his* collection of mp3s. He made sure that napster never pointed to his main collection. Only songs he downloaded were eligible for upload. Bandwidth wasn't an issue as this was at work sitting behind 2 T1's.
Then there's people who through firewalls and/or NATing can't serve files.
The RIAA would still need a honking big pipe, but not as large as your calculations would indicate.
The american revolution was about british control of our every day life. The RIAA is about getting total control of their business investments.
:-)
No, the RIAA is about controlling what, when and how you can use your computer and your media.
The British were about controlling what, when and how you can use your life.
The RIAA are about taxing your media (they already do this in America, and successfully duped our idiot "heritage" minister Sheila Copps into charging Canadians for media. As if protecting Eminem were important to Canadian Heritage).
The British were about taxing your life (boston tea tax anyone?).
I'm very surprised you don't see the exact parallels between the two. I'm not even American and I understand what the basis of the war was about.
>People swapping music is kind of like the terrorists that bombed the world trade towers they HATE america
You really don't have any clue about what the Revolution was about, do you?
It was about your freedom. This freedom includes the freedom to use your computer in any manner that doesn't harm anyone else. They were so clear about this they made sure even the thickest man on the US could understand how important this fact is to America -- they even made sure that you can own guns, the only purpose of which is to kill.
Canada, however, was a little less extereme. Our guaranteed freedoms pale in comparison to yours, yet strangely we have more digital freedoms! I can even hack your satellite TV services without fear of reprisal! Heck, the Canadian government even allows me to walk over to my neighbours house and burn copies of any of their original CDs I like! Really!
Why does America accept having less freedoms than the country they fought against so long ago? Don't you want to be the freest country in the world again? Or do you let the RIAA destroy what your forefathers gave their lives to protect?
>People swapping music HATE the RIAA, yet continue to "steal" the music. Why? because it's sounds great! If the music wasn't worth something, why steal it?
I fail to see how making a copy of someone elses copy takes money out of the RIAAs pocket. That is, unless you come up with a hypothetical situation, which is quite a faux-pas fallacy as far as debating the issue goes. You'll find using hypothetical situations a no-no in any speech making textbook. They guarantee someone in your audience will attempt to out-think you. [INT(J/P) s will exist in your audience]
Just mentioning that since the usual rhetoric is "But you would have bought it if you would have copied it!". Proof again is in the fact Canadians can hack DirecTV yet again can't pay for it. If they can't pay for it then they obviously would have done without if they couldn't hack it. Same thing with MP3, except in that case you can (not will) pay for it.
Besides that, the RIAA doesn't make the music! Find out who our enemy is before you support them with your vitriol. I want to pay the artists more than they have ever made through the pathetic rotting carcass of a business the RIAA is. They won't let me. Whenever an artist tries to let me pay them more than the RIAA would the RIAA shoves a contract up the musician's ass.
That and most have better things to do than seek out every single artist (however, I suppose I don't -- but I get my music for free legally -- read lower). But that seriously cannot cost the majority of my money put down on the CD.
>if you really think the RIAA is raping you, stop buying/sharing their music.
It isn't their friggin music (except in a weak legal sense)! They didn't make it, they didn't encourage it (unless you count shitty fabricated groups like NSync) and their only business is a mob-like racket to get a product from point A to point A.1
They do virtually nothing (apart from hyping up shitty boybands) yet recieve the largest part of your dollar spent on music.
As a volunteer radio DJ I'll even let you in on a secret: As far as I'm concerned, the RIAA does jack-squat for getting artists on the radio. When I want promo CDs on an artist from a company I simply whip off an email to the label (or the musician themselves, if they are independant) and they send me a copy of whatever it is I asked for. I don't even pay postage!
>I guess people who did a job 2 weeks ago shouldn't get paid either.
If you worked like the RIAA does, I'd sue the hell out of you for doing nothing and then overcharging for your non-product. If you work as hard as a good full time musician does I'd pay you very well.
If you ran a cartel on your service just to ensure that I had to pay you (and you only) to get through to your "suppliers" I'd say you work like a drug dealer (or a diamond dealer) and I'd get the government on your ass [Thanks EU! Now can you do something about DeBeers?].
>Let me just say that I think that all the laws that the RIAA has or has tried to get passed are wrong,
Then why do you appear to defend them so wholeheartedly?
Personally I think I'd be cool with them using reverse hacks and/or DOS techniques to shut down people "pirating" their service. Of course they have no experience at it, and are at the same stage (as far as preventing hacking) GE was with the VideoCipher (actually their anti-CD ripping technology is much more pathetic -- its worse than 80's scrambled cable PPVs!), and just look how far anti-hacking Satellite technology has come (In Canada I can just open the classified ads and have no trouble finding a dealer less than 5 minutes away. I can be setup with a full TV hacking solution and have set up working faster than actually paying the money to Dave himself! [if paying for DSS were legal here, which it is not]).
The RIAA is almost two decades behind on ECM technologies and they will never catch up. I, for one, am not afraid, especially since unlike satellite technology I can actually try to hack them back.
>It's kinda like a "forced" gnu license for music, except you're not getting the owner's permission.
The legal owner or the rightful owner? If it were the rightful owner, well, things between me and them would be very different than the currently wretched situation between myself and the RIAA. As a DJ I very much appreciate the efforts that go into making music (even if all I do is flip CDs at a radio station). Also, as a DJ, I'd be angry as hell if I thought I had to make everyone buy RIAA approved radios to listen to my show, which is what digitally encrypted music and "hackpoof" CDs are all about.
If I were a musician I'd be angry that I can't release music myself and expect to "make it". The RIAA has the market so monopolized artists are pawns to their practices.
How many of the artists at Universal are happy about their CDs being degraded? If I were an artist I'd see it as being forced to take the RIAAs license at the cost of your livelyhood.
Sorry for the long post, but there just seems to be a lot of points on which you are uninformed. I'm planning on cleaning this up and posting it to a website at somepoint so I don't have to keep typing it up all the time.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Let's say I attempt to download some music over a peer-to-peer file-sharing system. One of the keen, young whizkids from the RIAA's l33t anti-theft squad spots me and begins hosing me down with ultra-large packets. Who pays for the bandwidth? The RIAA? Or me? IF I start downloading and leave my computer on over the weekend the RIAA terrorist could, in theory, feed me 10-20 gig of meaningless 'data'. At my cable provider's rates that's AU$1700-3400 (US$850-1700). Since that would instantly bankrupt me, causing my bank to foreclose and me to lose my house, would I have some recourse against the RIAA? Bear in mind that I live in Australia and so this would constitute a violation of even the meagre 'jurisdiction' that the RIAA claims in the US these days...
I invite responses
This is a bit off topic, but regarding the RIAA and DoS attacks, and the recent /. article about the RIAA trying indemnify themselves from damages resulting from hacking into computers.. I query whether anyone has been out on Gnutella lately and noticed all the 1k files, the names of which exactly match the query entered. I always assumed that these were viruses, porn site ads, etc. I wonder if the RIAA have gnutella servers out there trying to cripple, create security breaches, etc on the machines of people violating copyright by trading mp3s, movies, etc. Does anyone wanna load up gnut and do some detective work???
"BadTimes will make you fall in love with a penguin" - Laika
How fast do you think they'd find themselves black-holed if they tried this? One minute, or two?
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
An internet-connected server would appear to be a "Protected computer" under the definition in 18 USC 1030(e)(2)(B)
(e) As used in this section - (2) the term ''protected computer'' means a computer - (B) which is used in interstate or foreign commerce or communication;"
Me thinks the key here is communication: foreign commerce or communication. OR communication.
Send a email to a bud in another country. It is now used for foreign communication.
Case closed.
ac
Who VOTED for them?
Better yet...
Which watery tart threw THEM a sword?
Sort of exposes Microsoft's attempt at sophistication, no?
Trouble is they are dinosaurs with lawyers and large bank accounts to feed them
The RIAA represents a bunch of people who'se basic job is being middle men - it used to be that it cost lots of money to get music to people - you had to run an expensive recording studio, have a pressing plant, infrastructure for distribution, payola for marketing, cocaine, etc etc and you got to take a goodly chunk off of the top. The real problem is that now days it costs pennies to make a copy of some music and send it to someone - you don't even need a retail store (there's yet another markup gone) - the whole reason for the existance of these middle men is going away.
We may yet get back to the way things were just 300 years ago when the only way to distribute popular music was free (word of mouth - someone taught you a song and you sang it if you liked it).
However in our world there's still the problem that the artists need (and deserve) paying - we do need to solve that problem in a just and fair way.
Though they may be indirect. Perhaps not a law against it directly, but you are causing me to waste my own time and resources on a lie. Therefore, I can probably sue you for damages.
You really don't have any clue about what the Revolution was about, do you?
It was about your freedom. This freedom includes the freedom to use your computer in any manner that doesn't harm anyone else. They were so clear about this they made sure even the thickest man on the US could understand how important this fact is to America -- they even made sure that you can own guns, the only purpose of which is to kill.
Canada, however, was a little less extereme. Our guaranteed freedoms pale in comparison to yours, yet strangely we have more digital freedoms! I can even hack your satellite TV services without fear of reprisal! Heck, the Canadian government even allows me to walk over to my neighbours house and burn copies of any of their original CDs I like! Really!
Why does America accept having less freedoms than the country they fought against so long ago? Don't you want to be the freest country in the world again? Or do you let the RIAA destroy what your forefathers gave their lives to protect?
The laws the RIAA are trying to get passed, and FILE-SHARING on the internet are two separate issues. I am talking about the latter, rather than the former. I believe that people should be prosecuted for sharing copyrighted materials, BUT the new, strict laws (such as the DMCA,SSCA,etc.) are wrong. The music industry is intitled to protecting their investment. It's equivalent to a software license.
Besides that, the RIAA doesn't make the music! Find out who our enemy is before you support them with your vitriol. I want to pay the artists more than they have ever made through the pathetic rotting carcass of a business the RIAA is. They won't let me. Whenever an artist tries to let me pay them more than the RIAA would the RIAA shoves a contract up the musician's ass.
That and most have better things to do than seek out every single artist (however, I suppose I don't -- but I get my music for free legally -- read lower). But that seriously cannot cost the majority of my money put down on the CD.
>if you really think the RIAA is raping you, stop buying/sharing their music.
It isn't their friggin music (except in a weak legal sense)! They didn't make it, they didn't encourage it (unless you count shitty fabricated groups like NSync) and their only business is a mob-like racket to get a product from point A to point A.1
They do virtually nothing (apart from hyping up shitty boybands) yet recieve the largest part of your dollar spent on music.
I think you have to learn a little something about the business world. Artists go to the RIAA by CHOICE, not FORCE. When they sign a contract, they know FULL well that their music is now mostly owned by another "partner".
a recording company does provide a service: Marketing and studio time for starters. (do you think these things come cheap?)
If I were a musician I'd be angry that I can't release music myself and expect to "make it". The RIAA has the market so monopolized artists are pawns to their practices.
Have you heard of something called the INTERNET?
If you worked like the RIAA does, I'd sue the hell out of you for doing nothing and then overcharging for your non-product. If you work as hard as a good full time musician does I'd pay you very well.
If you ran a cartel on your service just to ensure that I had to pay you (and you only) to get through to your "suppliers" I'd say you work like a drug dealer (or a diamond dealer) and I'd get the government on your ass [Thanks EU! Now can you do something about DeBeers?].
Aside from the fact that the above is a "no-no" in speechmaking (a little rule about life: Practice what you preach), it does seem a little strange that no-one was complaining about this issue until the beginning of napster. People were fine paying $10-15 dollars for a CD, until they were getting it for free, and it was taken away.
What's really screwed up about the entertainment industry is that they freaked out about the potential writer's strike last year and went into high gear producing every script in sight.
End result? A gut wrenchingly bad lineup at the local megaplex that includes movies like Legally Blonde and Corky Romano.
Could somebody please revoke Lorne Michaels license to make a movie please?
Who did what now?
Start supporting and frequenting your local bands and musicians. Let them know (while you have their ear) what you think of the larger labels and their tactics. More importantly, find out what the *musicians* think, since not only do they love the music they play, but eventually might like to [GASP!] make a living playing their music! [[insert thunderous silence]]
If it means you go without the next Backstreet Boys [sic] albumn, then so be it. Why not make your own music, then post it to the web for free. Heck, this might even be the predecesor for turning a large portion of the population into the 'artists' they didn't know they were.
>> An RIAA spokesman said the group was simply trying to protect its existing tools, not expand them...
So by this way of thinking, banks, convenience stores, etc should be able to do drive-by shootings on houses and neighborhoods they think are housing robbers???
Could the police get several hundred people to drive past street corners where they know drug traffickers hang out so folks who are really looking to buy drugs can't stop to buy???
If you're not on somebody's shit list, you're not doing anything worthwhile.....
...
I buy a car from someone. It looks fine, and he assures me that nothing is wrong with it. The next day it blows up because of a problem that the owner knew about.
Assuming I survive the explosion, I think that's grounds for a civil suit right there. Important Note: The act does not have to be illegal in order for him to get sued.
Got Freedom?
Thinking?
Latest Press Release from the RIAA:
"After intense criticism from our customers, e have now come up with a plan to use our resources and make money off of file swapping. We are deciding to take legal action against swapping companies. By doing so we will make them pay liscensing fees to distribute our material. They, in turn, will charge their users a small monthly fee so that they can make a profit. Everyone will then be happy. People will now be able to download our songs and we will legally be able to make money on our (artists) property. Everyone will be happy."
"Just kidding... we aren't that smart."
"Wouldn't it be nice though?"
"Instead we are going to take the law into our own hands and clog your already slow @home connections."
"All your bandwidth are belong to us!"
"Your friends, the RIAA"
I can bet that this is true because no real sane (then again this is the RIAA) group/company/organisation/etc would come to the point or level of Jeff K. unless it was absolutely necessary (with the exception of the government who could use this in espionage).
Again as I state every time I hear something along the lines of this, thank-god I live in Canada. Then again, our government is attempting to bring in something similar to the DCMA.
If they want to start a DoS war then everyone will lose. It's just like who will be the first to launch the nukes...only difference is that we can stop DoS'ing eachother immediately and have everything working shortly after and nukes are a bit more permanent.
There are actually people who go to the riaa website??
CD prices skyrocket to $24.99 and album as RIAA dues increase to allow the organization to buy equipment and hire help to attack pirate systems.
as much money as they spend on these (fun but) ridiculous adventures and their lawyers and court cases, this money has to be coming from somewhere right?
You know what they say, someone is always going to have a bigger pipe then you. Frankly, doesn't self defense come into play if they try this? If I am an ISP, and they are as so brazen to attack my network, why shouldn't I throw everything I have back at them? One good screw deserves another. I hope they rethink this idea - obviously they dont have anyone on staff that was once an EFNet operator. :)
Brielle
Cant see why the authors of this software cant just copywrite their softwares communication protocol, then sue RIAA under the DCMA if they try to reverse engineer the software in order to make their downloading programs. Provided the lisence says something to prevent them from using the released version, RIAA cant touch the system legally no matter what laws they get through, without breaking other ones.
Picture: J Random Musiclover, uses WinMX and KaZaA, until they bog down terribly slowly.
In order for this to work, they're going to need to do denial of service attacks against Gnutella. Sure, our professors have all sold out. Sure, they're just another brick in the wall. However, do you think the former hippies who constitute the nation's CS faculty are going to take it sitting down when "the man" starts doing DoS on *their* (heavily infiltrated by KaZaA, not to mention, good lord, gnutella and freenet) computers? *Especially* when they don't even have to *do* anything, just look the other way while their students do (at my undergrad institution they do this allready, for chrissakes) their very worst?
The RIAA has enough hubris to try it anyway. They could be intelligent and not pick on anyone who might concievably fight back, but I don't think they've gotten that much smarter, and I don't think they understand at all what causes people who aren't empty suits to act or react the way they do.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
Wouldn't spending that much money on bandwidth cost more than to just let the people pirate it? Can you imagine how much bandwidth you'd use, and if you are getting charged per meg... bye bye profits
The RIAA is acting exactly like a cornered animal that knows its time has come. Unfortinately, this cornered animal has enough money to buy more than a few congressmen and senators.
*joy*
-nate
In the mean time, you should investigate your chances of acquiring this gnu world style set of URLs, including a year's free hosting.
Have you seen these face scans, of the REAL .commIEs? know?
fud is dead.
You give them money, study for a few months and you can call youself an Engineer.
In Australia, a telecommunications company found itself in legal trouble when they called the untrained guys that put cable TV boxes in peoples homes engineers.
Anyway, why pay money to become a MSCE when you will get paid money to become a Microsoft Certified Supreme Court Judge!
I really didn't think that it was possible for anyone to be any greedier or more stupid than M$! This sounds like a Darwin award in the making
You are talking about the USA. If you have money, you win the trial. Preiod. If you want to break the law so wildly that you can't win with oyour $$$, just lobby congress and change the law.
Make even shorter URLs - 8LN.org
..At least this will provide us with a great chance to develop anti-DoS (and DDoS) attack tools =)
*snicker*
honestly though, if they actually initiate this ridiculousness, then you can see us doing this
-mateusz-
Linux Violinist
Dear RIAA:
I have recently read a story saying that you were intending to make Denial of Service (DoS) attacks against file-sharing services. In addition to the dubious legality of this, I find that position morally offensive.
In protest, I will never purchase another compact disc. I will never purchase any other form of recorded media. I will buy music only from artists directly, and only in purely downloaded, digital form.
Furthermore, as I run a server that is part of a file-sharing network, I will respond to any DoS attack with legal action.
This letter is governed under the following terms:
Signed,
Alf
In Soviet Russia, sig types you!
In a meeting of top RIAA execs.....
Hilary: Ok everyone, how do we stop these thieves? Well, geek boy?
Geek Boy: Well, there really isn't a technically feasible way...
[Hilary glares, Geek Boy shudders..]
Geek Boy: And......do you have to put your hair in points like that?
Hilary: Alright, that's the last time!
[Hilary pushes button; the floor opens and Geek Boy falls into a burning pit.]
Hilary: Well, that's the last of them....I guess we have the make Congress let us import more of them, eh? [grins evil grin]
Hilary: Any other suggestion? Johnson?
Johnson: Uhh.....well.....I've always learned that a good offense is a good defense! We can attack their computers!
Hilary: Yeah! That's a great idea! [frowns; looks at the smoking spot where Geek Boy was sitting.....] Umm...who do we have that can do that?
Johnson: Well...I have a couple of 13 year old boys......
*snicker*
"You have the option of insanity. I do not. And that makes me crazy!" - Brian to Angela, My So-Called Life
The article seems to imply that their robots will download the files very slowly, presumably under the theory that they will simply fill all the download slots. This would actually reduce the network traffic.
Of course, the filesharing boys won't stand for this. It will be a few weeks before someone lets slip with some software that circumvents the RIAA. Perhaps a server that "registers DoS attackers" and "provides DoS addresses to client dynamically"
This entire battle has been measure vs countermeasure. The problem is that the RIAA cannot move fast enough against all the open source hackers who love their music.
No one can say that the RIAA has "got it" until they finally give this up, and just sponsor "buy this album" links inside the file sharing programs. They need to realize that people who starting listening to music they download online BUY MORE MUSIC.
R7I7AAHaxor from DHCP-stp.loc-5-1.riaa.superhacker.robin.hood.hq.ri aa.org just entered
#mpthreeWaReZLEET
HotBalls: u got any mixed britney spears tracks?
Bsblvr: i want the new Justin Timerlake solo from the BSB new album!
R7I7AAHaxor: trading MP3's is illegal, u know.
Bsblvr: yeah so what????
BigDisks (3,400 GB of MP3) began sharing.
HotBalls: bigdisk, I missed u! I bet u have the new britney spears mix, huh?
BigDisks: Yes, I do. It's on my third Maxtor 100 gig.
R7I7AAHaxor: Bigdisk, you shall die!
BigDisks: Who is Haxor?
HotBalls: Just one of the lame RIAA goons.
R7I7AAHaxor: I am NOT LAME! I can DoS all of u! I will destroy u cable modems!
Bsblvr: ur gay
R7I7AAHaxor: I AM NOT GAY. I HAPPEN TO WORK FOR THE RIAA AND MP3 TRADING IS ILLEGAL! I HAVE U IP ADDRESS!
BigDisks starts file transfer to HotBalls.
R7I7AAHaxor: I HAVE STARTED DOS ON BIGDISK. I WROTE THE SHELL SCRIPT MYSELF; I AM LEET.
BigDisks exited (ping timeout)
HotBalls: u jerk, u cut my dload off at 53%!
R7I7AAHaxor: I AM MIGHTY RIAA HAXOR I WILL PREVENT ALL MP3! I AM ONLY 14 BUT I CAN KICK YOU, I AM LEET.
Bsblvr: u suck
R7I7AAHaxor: I WILL BE BACK. I HAVE TO STUDY FOR A BIOLOGY TEST TOMORROW, BUT I WILL BE BACK TO STOP ALL OF U FROM TRADING UR MP3s'!
R7I7AAHaxor exited.
BigDisks entered.
BigDisks: Who was that?
Bsblvr: One of the RIAA's employees. He's gone now, he has a biology test tomorrow and has to study for it.
"I'll just chip in a bit for RedHat: I actually have that installed on my university machine." - Linus, '95
I write my own music, and upload it as MP3's onto MP3.com. I do this as a hobby, and never felt like paying someone to copyright my music, because, It's a hobby, and I am just doing it for fun. Am I at risk for DoS attacks, from my ISP, because I didn't copywrite my music? (If the RIAA found out about it) Do the RIAA treat all non-copyrighted MP3's as Pirated music? (Even those who where written by Amateur artists on MP3.com?)
Ok, I know that there is a great legislative tradition in this country of attaching riders to Bills. None-the-less, is anyone else as disgusted as I am by the RIAA's attempt to take advantage of our reaction to the senseless killing of ~5000 innocent civilians (not to mention ~5000 of their customers) by attempting to couple their own self-serving interests with Congress's reaction to this atrocity?
Understanding is a three edged sword. - Ambassador Kosh Naranek, Babylon 5
> They're finally employing a technological solution to a technological problem.
But the problem is that this is NOT a technological problem, this is a social problem. People has always wanted and copied music. In the early days one needed to be able to play one self to "copy" the tunes of one other musican. Then came the music technology, and we have useded it since then to copy music.
It the copy is on tape from the radio as was very common a couple of year back or on digital files over the internet dosn't realy matter it's the same. It's a social problem, the main problem is when does the music get worth the pricetag. Actually most people like to give a contribution to the creators if they like the work. Thats why street musicans could survive. But not necessary like to pay the money in the form that currently in use by the music indistry.
I'm not a big fan of conspiracy theory, but I've been reading through all of these articles things just started to form in my head.
The SirCam worm hit the Internet in July and mysteriously did nothing. Someone spent a whole lot of time creating code that propagated very well, but seemed to miss the code that would release the payload, filling up disk space.
Now, the RIAA, in it's most cowardly move ever, is trying to piggy-back on an anti-terrorism bill that would allow them to "hack into computers and delete copyrighted filed" without having repercussions, using the DMCA as it's backing of course.
The RIAA, in their infinite wisdom, now shares their plans with the public:
"We referred to it as the 'license to virus,'"
Personally, I wouldn't put this past the RIAA, but I'd like to hear what others have to say!
you could just change the .ext to zip or something, or even uuencode it and then zip it.
This means I can now put a bunch of free and legal mp3s onto my FTP, watch it get DoS'd then charge RIAA for the bandwidth fees.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Clearly, IANAL, but doesn't this qualify as hacking?
Doesn't this mean that the RIAA are now guilty of attempting to hack, thereby violating the DMCA, and therefore the directors of the company should be put into jail just like Dmitry?
In the land of the capitalist, it will never happen, but it seems that what's good for the goose...
Go, Springboard, Go!
Some days I wonder why I still buy music from them -- oh wait, I don't. Haven't ever purchased a GM automobile or recently purchased any MS software either. Don't plan on purchasing any of the above any time soon unless I see a fundamental change of business.
Note to the RIAA, if you are listening: I don't want to pay $20 for a CD, especially when only a dollar or two at best goes back to the artist. I don't appreciate not being able to purchase certain items from your back catalog, even in a medium that costs you no money. I really don't like this new "War on Pirates" thing you're pursuing. I'm not a pirate, but you just might make me one.
-------------------------------------------------
Viral contamination it's a crime...
If the RIAA hired Slashdotters to use the Slashdot effect, that would really work!
Men believe what they want. - Caesar
... they have a Rage Against the Machine to me. :)
::ducks::
Do you like German cars?
For the record, I am an alternative rock somgwriter/vocalist, and am forming a band at the present time. I was once offered a record deal by Capitol Records, but I refused the offer, deciding that I wasn't at the time wanting to relocate to Nashville to start my singing career. I have released no records or singles at this time. Most people wonder why, for the most part, when there is complaints about music piracy, they originate more often from the RIAA than from the artists themselves. Why is that? Look at what an artist will receive off of an album, and that should explain it. The typical wholesale cost of a CD is between $8-$10. Of this, the artist will receive (normally) somewhere between 50 cents and $1.50. If you have an album go platinum, then it works out (usually). However, those earnings are only from the first release of your album. If the album is re-released, you will rarely see a cent from the sales. In addition to this, you, as the artist, have to pay for your agent, management staff, assistants, music videos, etc., which usually means you end up breaking even off of the sale of an album. "If I knew how much this damn job paid earlier, I'd have taken a job at McDonald's." - Courtney Love I could go into many of the other perils of an RIAA-based record contract (such as being forced to reside in a certain area), but that is beside the point. The main thing is that artists usually don't make their money off of the albums that they sell. Where do they get it? From touring. If your songs are available online, it means you can expose your music to a larger audience, whom, in turn, may later on attend your concerts, buy your merchandise, etc., which are sources of income for the artists. This also explains why many artists will go on the road for as much as two years at a time; they often do it out of necessity. Only the few make exorbitant amounts of money in the industry as artists. "Well then," you might ask, "but how come artists like Metallica, Dr. Dre, and Madonna decried MP3's?" Simple: THEY OWN LABELS. If you're getting up to $5 an album because somebody else sold a record of their music, you'd want them to be selling as many records as possible. There are notable exceptions to this, most of them being in the metal/alternative bend (Korn, for example. Love them or hate them, they own a label, yet support MP3, since they know that, in a non-mainstream genre, you need to find alternate sources of getting your music out to fans). As an artist, I find it appalling that outside sources are trying to dicate how your music can be distributed. Even worse, I find it deplorable that they would sink to the level of attacking people's home, business, and school computers to further their financial well-being. Attacks with a financial benefit are usually considered assault as well as larceny. Shouldn't somebody have the District Attorneys in Nashville, New York, and LA looking into this? Such action, if commensurated, would certainly violate numerous criminal laws. Crime is never justified, even if it is to maintain your financial well-being. If a homeless person steals your wallet, wouldn't you want them put in jail for what they had done? The RIAA is the homeless person in this story, albeit a very rich, arrogant homeless person. In addition, from the technical aspect, I find such an action to be half-baked at best. Such attacks could easily be stopped with a firewall, or by releasing a new version of the P2P client that would filter out DDoS attack traffic or add automated administative control, or by administering your P2P client manually (such as limiting connections per IP or kicking very slow connections). What about other options of this vent? Back Orifice? USE of Back Orifice is generally illegal, and it would probably be so in this case as well. Re-engineering the P2P clients themselves? Not likely, they don't own them, and it would be hard for them to pressure any one of them due to their decentralized nature. Suing all client makers? Well, what about open-sourced clients? Would that mean that, by default, you could have to sue the entire community of that software? You know that would never fly in court. What about other anti-piracy efforts, like copy protection on CDs? Some can be defeated by downloading a "fix" DLL for your system (as is the case with the Macrovision-based solutions), some can be worked around, and all can be recorded to MP3 through an analog recording program such as the one that exists in AudioCatalyst (it slows the process down, sure, but doesn't come close to stopping it). Public service announcements? You've got to be joking. If PSAs worked that well, you'd see a drug-free, violence-free, well-educated society. If you just casually look around, we have about the polar opposite, which is a testament to their effectiveness. Musician spokespeople for the RIAA? Nope, Metallica has been crucified over this, and Dr. Dre has stepped aside a bit in recent months. None of these has seemed to put a dent in music swapping online. Here are some suggestions to the RIAA to try to diminish piracy: 1) Eliminate "copy-proof" CDs. All that's gonna do is convince people to develop ways to copy them, and it adds to the cost of each CD substantially. 2) Abandon tbe "studio system" in the music industry, making artists literal "free agents". With more pressure on labels to appeal to musicians financially, it will take a toll on the level of administration as well. Of course, this would also essentially be the death knell of the RIAA, but that's not that bad, is it? 3) Re-examine retail price points. A CD should, in theory, be able to possess as low of a wholesale cost as $4.50 according to a more balanced distribution of money ($3 to the artist, $1 to the label to cover publicity expenses, which could be handled by the band's manager in the case of a smaller label, and the 50 cent cost of production, recording, and distribution). If this were done, you could theoretically see the retail cost of CDs drop to around $7-$10 each, far more palatable to the consumer. 4) Include a digital version of the album on the CD in a mixed-mode session. There, give people their MP3s for their own use with each copy sold of the album. 5) Stop price fixing. Of course, if point #2 occurs, the labels will really be unable to work together on all that much, but prices cannot just be kept artificially high. Cassetes cost more to produce, the artist gets about the same cut per copy sold (about 80%, normally), but they cost half as much as CDs to buy. Hmm... something's up when I can buy the DVD for Pink Floyd's The Wall ($20) cheaper than I can buy the CD album ($33). Just some random suggestions of mine, feel free to analyze and leave comments.
Hmm... this is definitely strange. The formatting of this document did not take place, making it damn near impossible to read. Man...
After all, if they are allowed to break into people's computers and DoS them, can't we DoS her?
IMHO Locust Abortion Technician is the best Butthole Surfers record. Why shouldn't Touch n Go want to make money off of it? Didn't they provide the sound techs or studio engineers? That record did a lot to promote the Surfers. They shouldn't feel too exploited.
Did you ever go to a Butthole Surfers show? Now that was insane. The second time they came to town, they could have charged $100 a head and still sold out. Without Locust, they wouldn't have had that level of success. Maybe they didn't need to deal with Touch n Go in order to make Locust, but they did and they should live with it.
Even if Touch n Go wants to make money, it's not the same as what the Music Recording Cartel is doing, i.e. using their monopoly of distribution networks to jack up prices and then going after the kids who use MP3's and just don't respect the suits who want to shake them down. And indies like Touch n Go aren't writing legislation to strip us of our liberties. (Granted, they're probably not too upset about shit like the Bono extension. But as long as they stay out of the RIAA, I don't have a problem with them. But hell, if indy X pisses you off, be pissed off.)
So just fuck the RIAA, and fuck the poor jerks who signed with RIAA members. If a "recording artist" wants my money, he's going to have to sign with a decent label. And if a musician wants my money, he's going to have to come to my town and perform.
If you meet the wabbit on the woad...
And I always wondered how the dark worlds in Gibsons novells evoluted. But I think I now beginning to understand.... first it is the illegal song swapping fought with DOS...then...
P.S:Note I am not swapping, but worrying...
Go do some remedial comprehension. The idea is that they max out peoples' upload connections by not actually downloading the tracks, same as if they just logged into an anonymous ftp server fifty times and sent a keepalive every couple of minutes.
It's utterly pointless though; how long will it take developers to put in a "drop upload if under X kbs" tick box? Five minutes? Then "do not accept connection from IPs that have dropped Y connections for the next Z minutes" box? Another five minutes?
Or hell, just change "number of simultaneous uploads" to "bandwidth available for simultaneous uploads".
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Well, sort of. The file itself would indeed be copied around based on the request, but you could prevent a node from being accessed by other nodes (thus keeping it from contributing its storage and bandwidth to the network) by doing that... I think the default incoming connection limit is like 50, and it's not practical to increase it by very much (consumes too much memory/cpu).
So you'd have to attack the entire network, not just one file... I guess it depends on how much bandwidth you need to make a lot of TCP connections sending very little data.
My (and most other peoples) problem with the RIAA is that they charge so much for the music, yet give so little to the artists. If they started charging resonably and/or gave a decent share to the musicians, then why not support them? Of course, that would mean giving less to their shareholders, so I doubt it would happen. but one can hope....
Ok, this will solve the problem of needing a very fat pipe to disconnect one user. To disconnect 1 PC from the network they need 10 connections (most peer to peer software have a default limit of 5 to 10 simultanous connections allowed.
Number of napster/gnutella/imesh/audiogalaxy/etc/etc users : well over 10,000,000
Suppose they need 10 packets to keep a connection alive eache minute. lets say that is possible in 10x40 bytes = 400 bytes per minute. times 10Million =400Mb/min= 6.6Mbyte /sec ~= 50Mbps. Quite a lot if you have to fill it up and use it, but very well possible. (Their ISP will love it)
From another reply to the same root: ...an analysis of napster showed that well under 10% of users provided the bulk of files (75%+)
(/10)=5Mbps to lock out a big percentage of the files.
There are strategies agianst them, called out a lot here: -Block out the IP range of RIAA. --> Very hard for normal users. and they are the big target for this. (HaX0Rs will find the files anyway, i.e. on IRC) -Increase the allowed connections in the P2P software. --> Most users will stick to the defaults. If the RIAA is serious the builds of the software will increase this and build some minor anti-slow-download stuff in. This means the RIAA will need more and more bandwidth. (If you increase the number of allowed connections from 10 to 100 they will need a (1)lot more bandwidth.) -Have more p2p users on your network. This is the most realistic: more users -> more files -> more users -> better armed against a DOS.
-Have a freenet like client they are more resitent agains this kind of attack. -/. required item: Have them DOS my beowulf cluster... gna gna gna. I am a little supprised freenet is not named here more. Freenet is resistent to the kind of attack thay name here. (isn't it?)
The incomming traffic is mainly getting a directory listings and requesting files, this is by nature small stuff. Look at the top of your web browser you send maybe 100 bytes to request most webpage and the server sends back about 100K.
With file sharing Joe Luser is the server, the RIAA-enforcer program sends Luser a couple hundred bytes and he sends back a couple meg. Blocking them at the firewall doesn't stop the couple 100 from slowing down the pipe, but the effect is minimal unless thousands of requests are made a second. Stoping the couple of Meg going back upstream however has a big effect on speed, especialy considering that most pipes are optimised for download not up load.
Since Joe Luser is probably using Windows, and not going to have a real firewall, he's going to get real angry in no time at all. Windows users typicaly expect their 'puter to respond right now, when the computer is servicing a request that he's not aware of and doesn't respond immediatly to his keyboard or mouse, he thinks it's broken. Sooner or later they are going to realise that its the RIAA that "broke" their mmachine and feel attacked.
In order for them to DDoS your 'puter they are going to have to use a whole bunch of IP addresses "attacking". It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that the next-generation file sharing programs are going to include a throtling mechanism to keep them from sucking up to much bandwidth upstream making the RIAA stratagy un-workable.
Also there is nothing to keep people from putting a small garbage file to attract the RIAA that's only 1 K long, and naming it as if it was a copyright protected work just to confuse them.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
The Yahoo article notes that RIAA members will be setting up their own 'sharing' services in the near future.
So (aside from whatever fees they charge,) what's to discourage people from downloading files, or accessing anything on these sites, on the same slowly slowly basis?
Isn't it strange that you can buy the exact same music on a cassette (maybe not anymore, but a couple years ago) and pay about 2/3 of the price you pay for a CD, when cassetes are actually a more expensive medium then CD. Obviously CD's are overpriced and could be sold for considerably less and still make a considerable profit.
Cheap storage VM.
Unfortunately, I never made it to a Surfer show. I was born in '70, and really started getting into this stuff when I was 13. Then, as I learned about more bands like Joy Division, New Order, Big Black and Wedding Present, it was always in the context of "That was so-and-so. Too bad broke up last year." I had to resort to seeing things like the Pixies/Love and Rockets/Cure triple-bill and the Peter Murphy Deep tour. I was lucky enough to catch the PIL/Sugarcubes/New Order (Technique) triple-bill in '89, and for the perfect birthday present, my wife and I saw Bauhaus in Philly in 98.
:)
I'm not really pissed off about Touch 'n Go, the guy absolutely does deserve to make money. I was just throwing it out there that indie labels aren't necessarily angels. I closed with Albini's diatribe since it very clearly outlines how badly the recording industry assrapes listed artists. I don't think I could ever be pissed off at Touch 'n Go
Intelligent Life on Earth
Exactly. If you use your computer to browse web sites in other states, you are using your computer in interstate communication.
Yes. But that sale was illegal; it was fraudulent.
I realize that we're getting into splitting hairs over the definition of 'illegal'. I suppose it's not a 'felony' or whatever y'all call it in the US.
In my mind, if I can have someone in court over it, and the courts will punish them, then whatever it's about was ILLEGAL.
YOU TOO can become a copyright holder, and YOU TOO can have the right to break into ANY COMPUTER YOU LIKE to look for evidence of copyright infringement and then DO WHAT YOU LIKE TO THAT COMPUTER! Don't worry about actually FINDING PROOF of copyright infringement - once you've wiped their hard disk, how are they going to prove they DIDN'T have a copy of your data?
Sounds too good to be true? Just follow these simple steps:
- Write some half-baked nonsense and post it on a well-respected weblog. Be sure to include a copyright statement. Hey presto... you're a copyright holder!
- Pick a target computer. Maybe there's a political viewpoint you want to censor, or a business you want to destroy? Perhaps you want to read the personal mail of the head of a recording industry cartel? Or maybe you just want to find out the medical records of a friend or co-worker. These activities would be called "hacking" if they were done by an ordinary person, but remember: you're no ordinary person, you're a copyright holder!
- There's a pretty good chance that someone uses your target computer to browse the web. And there's a fairly good chance that they read the same well-respected weblog where you posted your copyrighted material. Well then, there's a chance that those bastards are infringing your copyright! Better break in and find out. They've probably got a copy of your data in their browser cache RIGHT NOW! (By the way, don't worry too much about the definition of "a fairly good chance" - you don't have to waste time with any of that pesky legal stuff like probable cause. You're not a policeman, you're a copyright holder! Or maybe you ARE a policeman. Well that's OK - policemen can be copyright holders too!)
- Hack into the target computer and look for evidence of copyright infringement. Criminals are devious people so you should look everywhere for evidence:
/etc/passwd is a good place to start. If you find any evidence, or even if you don't, wipe the hard drive to prevent any future infringement. This would be criminal vandalism, or even terrorism, if it was done by an ordinary hacker. But you're no ordinary hacker. That's right... you're a copyright holder!
The copyright in this comment belongs to Sony Music Corporation. Copying and distribution in any form, electronic or otherwise, is strictly prohibited and will one day be retroactively punishable by death. You have been warned.if it was a minority that was complaining before, it shouldn't have mattered, because it must not have been that big of a problem. Napster was on every new channel/newspaper (time magazine) you can think of. That is why there are so many people complaining about the RIAA now. The ability to "pirate" their material was amplified 10 fold, so that even the average joe blow user could get their hands on free music.
Even so, IRC has been out for YEARS before napster, including FSERVES with a proliferation of "pirated" music/software. The record industry and the BSA have shut these servers down left and right, but still, there was never a real outcry until napster.
It's just human nature. This is going to happen with anything. (It's the same reason people hate LARS from metallica, yet he's not passing laws that impede on our freedom). When you are getting something for free, and someone takes it away, and makes you pay for it, you are going to get pissed off. (even trying to legitimize it)
The record industry's control over their own music is identical to certain software licenses on the internet. I hate to get off topic here, but think about this: Why should things like the GNU software license be followed, if a person who uses another license (copyright) is considered wrong. It would equate to me taking gnu sotware, and using for my own commerical gain in a closed source project. People in the slashdot community would be up-in-arms, even getting the law against me. Sounds JUST like what the RIAA is doing.
I will admit, the RIAA has taken it too far with their DMCA and SSCA, but they do deserve some control over their own property.
as i go onto morpheus the get some more bela fleck live shows it's showing 18.1GB of files shared. this is a network that usually has into the 100's of TB(!) available.
something's going on here...
'Be always mindful, even when ditch-digging.' --D. T. Suzuki
Does this apply merely to criminal cases? civil cases? which? any restrictions?
Curiously enough, some people have published full editions of technical books on-line. Bruce Eckel's well-regarded "Thinking in C++" is available in its entire form at his website. He apparently regards this as a great idea, because people like to have a hard copy of a book like that. Having seen that it's actually pretty good, a lot of people go out and buy it. His sales went up when he put it on-line.
Compare and contrast with the music industry, who keep claiming that their sales are down. Gee, why could that be? :-)
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I was about to post the exact same thing.
I don't quite agree with the reasoning, though. People don't just copy the music because they want to. They copy it because they know they're being outrageously ripped off by the record companies' pricing of CDs, and so they treat those companies with the contempt they deserve.
If the record companies were more reasonable -- making a fair profit, but not an insulting one -- then I believe that most people would be prepared to buy CDs. Look at shareware; for all that many people are on the Open Source and/or Free Software bandwagons, many of us are still prepared to pay the small amounts asked for a good bit of shareware.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I'm just waiting for the next (very amusing) idea the smart brains at RIAA come up with. It appears that it can't go crazy enough with them and so I wouldn't be surprised if they would come up with a new campaign to shut down the internet :P RIAA for President...
l4bs
http://terroristornot.l4bs.com/
:: xl4bs
The lawyers are drooling over this one. A chance at RIAA cash, wow!
The current Slashdot moderation system is made by gay communists!