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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!
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"
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!!!
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.
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.
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.
HELLO! Who are their customers?? Nope, not the listners, nope not the performers. Keep guessing!
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.
How do you figure?
If the RIAA tries to DOS me, they'll be DOS-ing my ISP (a baby bell.)
If the RIAA tries to DOS some college student, they'll be DOS-ing that college.
Likewise, the RIAA is connected to the internet via some ISP, and I don't know of a single ISP that doesn't have a rule/contract clause/etc. against launching DOS attacks (or other forms of network abuse.)
Even if directed at a single IP#, the attack is still interfering with the normal operation of that network to which that IP# belongs.
Apparentally no one told the RIAA that two wrongs do not make a right.
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!
..or even create RIAA Honeypots. Machines that will act like they have all of the hotest songs, and unlimited connections. Bog the RIAA machines down by trying to download 1000's of songs off a Honeypot server, and let the server throttle down the RIAA machine even slower then it's trying to get the songs.
A couple of these could probably eat up the RIAA machine resources. A RIAA tarpit.
--knick
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.
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
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.
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...
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.
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
So....... they intend to DoS attack every college campus in the united states? riiiiight.
--Nuintari
slashdot : where an opinion can be wrong.
The answer is that technology cannot solve the problem, because copyright is a social contract, not a set of absolute rights of control.
There are NO technological methods to distinguish piracy from fair use. In the end, that is a legal distinction, and is based on a number of factors. In fact, quite often, the same, identical act can be either infringement or fair use, based on nothing more then the intent of the person committing the act.
If I record a television show off the air so I can watch it later, when I'm home, that's fair use. If I record the same television show off the air so I can sell the videotape on ebay, that's piracy. There is absolutely no technology that can determine what I'm going to do with that videotape. The idea that technology offers a "solution" to the problem is a fallacy.
The real "problem" is that copyright law is completely out of sync with the reality of how people use, and want to use, copyrighted works. The problem is that copyright holders have grown far too powerful, and have convinced Congress that they, and they alone, are the only "interested party" in matters of copyright, when in fact, the real purpose of copyright is not to protect them, but to serve the public by increasing access to and the availability of creative and useful works.
The copyright industry is struggling to reduce and control access to and to limit the availability of copyrighted works -- the exact opposite of the constitutional purpose of copyright.
The "solution" is for Congress to change the laws to maximize the availability and access to copyrighted works, through such methods as statutory royalties, and eliminating the "right" of copyright holders to control who may use and distribute their work.
The problem is that unlike the recording and motion picture industries, which pay individual Congressmen directly through campaign contributions, the rest of the country -- the citizens at large, pay Congress indirectly through taxes. We've created a system where no one can get elected without selling out to the media corporations, then we wonder why Congress keeps repealing our freedoms, but leaving exemptions open for the recording and motion picture industries.
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
It sickens me to see people refer to listening to stolen music or watching pirated movies as their civil liberties.
Being terrorized and attacked due to their determination of me holding "copyrighted meterial" is violating my civil liberties.
A) They cannot determine with certainty that I actually performed any illegal action, due to the uncertainty that the song/whatever is actually copyrighted, and also due to the fact it is not necessarily illegal to export copyrighted meterial, by accident/etc.
B) If whenever you illegally throw a piece of paper in the street, or whatever, I break into your house and mess it up, I'm breaking your civil liberties. The broken civil liberties are NOT of throwing papers in the street.
If the RIAA take the law into their own hands, and cannot be stopped legally, maybe citizens should take the law into their own hands, and fight back too.
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.
LaBrea to trap the RIAA
Oh, I figure it will happen around the same time as Joe Sixpack learns to check and see if he has IIS running on his pre-loaded system from Best Buy and applies the proper patches to keep it secure.
Face it, technophiles are fine with this measure of the RIAA's. It simply won't affect us, but the RIAA, for all their mouthing, doesn't give a damn about us. We're such a small number of people we simply don't matter. It's the Joe Sixpacks they're worried about. If they can make Joe's experience with P2P miserable(and tying up your phone line all night to download a couple of songs will certainly be miserable) then they've done their job. Any action on the part of P2P servant providers to filter these type of connections through a central MAPS-type database would be attacked like all other companies who have had any central architecture to attack have been.
I'm afraid this has a possibility of working in the short term at least. Anyway, everyone knows real pirates use Usenet or IRC.
Steven
-- I have marked myself unwilling to moderate-- I don't have other accounts to artificially inflate the karma of
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.
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,"
Hey, someone on /. must know - are there any unbiased news sources left online ?
>|<*:=
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
- From a mathematical point of view, if Congress is free to extend the term of copyright at will, then by definition that copyright term is not "limited".
- From an operational point of view, a copyright term that has been extended so that
during my adult entire lifetime, past, present, and future, no work has had nor will have its copyright expire is operationally indistinguishable from an unlimited one (for no experiment I can perform can make the distinction).
- From a human point of view, a copyright term that lasts for multiple human lifetimes is not limited in any meaningful sense.
In the United States, the Constitution is the supreme law of the land. I say that the fundamental lawbreakers are the RIAA and their cronies in Congress, the Executive Branch, and the Courts."My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
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
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.....
"Doesn't this mean that the RIAA are now guilty of attempting to hack,"
The RIAA wouldn't know how to hack. Crack, maybe, anyone can be a skr1pt k1dd1e these days...
However, the implications of someone wantonly DoS-ing a company's connection because of an employee's (or, better, a wandering consultant's) illegally downloaded file, is phenomenal: you piss off a whole company, you get sued, very quickly, for DoS-ing them without good reason. IOW, it's very easy to miss the target...
~Tim
--
Rushing on down to the circle of the turn