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!

Comments

And just how long

[Xibby]

before users figure out the IP's of the RIAA's smothering servers and firewall connections from those machines to /dev/null?

Re:This is not a DOS

[batkiwi]

A DOS attack does not HAVE to be a ping flood.

It's anything that keeps you from being able to offer your service to the net, hence a "Denial of Service" attack.

Exploiting all the bandwidth of an ftp is certainly a DoS attack if it keeps others from being able to download those files, same as having thousands repeatedly hit a web site to take it down is a DoS.

Typcially DoS's are accomplished through pingfloods and the like, but that's not the only definition.

audio honeypots

[xeno]

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...

Re:Arrest them

[psych031337]

From the link... they have already identified this as a problem and adress it properly (mainly by lobbbying and lieing - but read for yourself:

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.

RIAA lobbyists sought a provision to the bill that would shield copyright holders for any damage done to computers in the pursuit of copyright protection--a goal that critics charged was too broad and might even give the group the ability to spread viruses in the pursuit of pirates.

"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."

An RIAA spokesman said the group was simply trying to protect its existing tools, not expand them.

"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.

Pretty much says it all.

RIAA and ISPs

[wysoft]

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.

Re:Just goes to show

[Anonymous Coward]

1) Retail music outlets (Sam Goody, WalMart) who take in 50% of the cost of a CD.
2) Radio stations

Good call, BTW, don't expect it to sink in.