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WiFi Hotspots Elude RIAA Dragnet
mblase writes "A CNET News article discusses a problem the RIAA is having with its copyright enforcement strategy: public wireless hot spots. Normally, the RIAA notifies the ISP when a user is found to be violating their copyrights, but in this case, the ISP is powerless to do anything. Key quote: '...unless the administrator keeps detailed logs of everybody's account use - which is not required by law - she may well not know who was swapping files.' I wonder how long it will be before those detailed logs ARE required by law?"
I'm sure Senator Hollings will pass a bill that bans WiFi access, in order to solve this problem of cataclysmic proportions.
This gives rise to a solution to these and similar lawsuits. Whether or not the ISP's have a choice in turning over the customer information when they have the IP address subpoenaed it does generate a loss because they will have staff or outside lawyers look into it on every case. If this continues and expands then it may be cost prohibitive to the point that the ISP's just stop logging. I think larger ISP's might do this to avoid billable hours and small ISP's will do it as a feature.
Will people be happy to get rid of that static IP for a dynamic one?
proxying port 80 and logging is a good idea for wifi -- why go to prison for your neighbor's kiddie porn habit?
www.pixelectric.com
I always thought that the true anonymous internet would come when unsecured Wi-Fi was rampant. How are they going to carnivore anyone when they aren't tied to the other end of a line? There is no way to really know who is doing what on Wi-Fi.
The free WiFi hotspots I've used don't require accounts at all. They just serve bandwidth and you connect thru DHCP.
Are they going to log MAC addresses? Good luck. I can use ifconfig on my Orinoco card and set the MAC. 00:00:00:00:00:00 and a prepaid debit card in a pseudonym works nicely on the AT&T Wireless hotspot in the Denver airport.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
' I wonder how long it will be before those detailed logs ARE required by law?"
I foresee something much worse, in fact I have been worrying about it for years. As it has been reported there are those ISPs that seem to want to have their nose up your butt and watch everything you do.
Well I foresee soon that *all* suspected criminal activity will have to be reported, oh and all those pesky logs you have around because you wanna be a hyper nosy jerk? Well you, my friend, have just just blown you plausible deniability plea. Because you are keeping all those logs, and you didn't notify the 'authorities' right away you have blown your safe harbor status cause the RIAA came to you. So guess what? You have just become an accessory after the fact. *oops*
When I tell people this they think im overly paranoid. well you decide.
"I wonder how long it will be before those detailed logs ARE required by law?"
:-)
An interesting point occurs to me. One of the great things about the many 'anti-hacking' laws passed around the world is that most (if not all), have little (if any), requirement for systems operators to take reasonable steps to keep their systems secure.
So if I open up a Wi-Fi shop, and keep detailed logs, of all my paying users, but don't bother to secure the setup?????
'Yes officer, you can have the logs of my customers. Unfortunitly it dosen't cover the several thousand p2p users, who have creaked my system, and you want..... Yes thats correct, removing the howto from the MOTD would reduce this, but I'm under no requirement to do that.'
My Paintball Pics
About them WiFi Chalkers,
ain't they fun to see?
Goin' all around,
chalkin' them AP!
Them resourceful Chalkers,
what a useful crowd.
Showin' all the world,
where the net's allowed.
Look at all them WiFi Chalkers,
demon drivin' through.
AirPort, D-Link, and LinkSys,
WEP passphrases too!
How to be a WiFi Chalker,
it's fun if you know how.
Gitcha mobile WiFi kit,
and stumble on them now.
A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
Easy configuration? Now you don't even need to be aware that you wanted to share your files. :)
Q.
Insert Signature Here
The RIAA has brought suit against the descendents of Guglielmo Marconi for his invention, known as radio.
"Using a special radio receiver, a listener, or 'criminal', can listen to copywrited music for free," said Hilary Rosen, of the RIAA. "Some special units even have the ability record. All without one cent going to us, the true owners of the material."
Rosen added that the recent use of public WiFi radio-based internet to evade prosecution for file sharing was the last straw.
"This Marconi guy's got a lot to answer for. This 'radio' thing clearly has only ilicit uses."
Rosen also complained that her wallet wasn't big enough for all her fifties, and her diamond pants were too tight.
Stop copying other people's stuff.
Take the moral highground.
Then, when the RIAA doesn't have a leg to stand on, push the balance of copyright law back to normal.
Until people stop publishing and redistributing material which they have no claim to (or rights to), the people who produce that material will gang up against them. And that gang typically has bigger pocketbooks.
They didn't care about it before now, because it's only with the rise of fast connections to the Internet that people have had enough bandwidth to make it a real problem. The losses were a blip on the radar.
Self regulate, learn the rules, or the fairness police will come down on you. If you think it's fair to copy someone else's material willy-nilly, then I'm willing to bet that you've never produced anything of any worth.
Coming soon - pyrogyra
From what I know, the RIAA is planning to sue sharers, not downloaders (although often they are one and the same). The idea is, kill the supply, and the demand decreases. (Yeah, because it worked so well with illegal drugs.)
/. readers came to the consensus that I can be held accountable for content my neighbors download with my connection. Does this mean that the RIAA can sue coffee shops who setup their own independant hotspots? (Of course, it doesn't apply to the server businesses who have paired with T-Mobile)
Point is, how many people are likely to run persistant shares over a hotspot? I'd think that those who use hotspots have nothing to fear from the RIAA, yet..
There was a previous discussion about an ISP who was encouraging customers to setup an access point and share the connection with others for a reduced rate.
-Ryan
AUWYHSTOT (Acronyms are Useless When You Have to Spell Them Out Too)
If you have the logs, they are business records and can be subject to subpeona. The key is to set up a business policy which purges the logs entirely on a rapid basis, and actually follow it.
If an RIAA lawyer asks you for information about who had what IP address at a particular time last month, and you then delete the logs, you are in a whole lot of trouble.
But, if you only store a week's worth of logs, and regularly delete the logs after they are a week old, you can honestly say "Sorry, that information has been purged in accordance with our document retention policy." There is nothing the RIAA can do about it.
This was what happened at Enron/Arthur Anderson. They had a document retention policy that would have saved their asses, but no one followed it. Only when they realized that they were about to be sued did they shred everything. If they were shredding all along as standard procedure, they would have been fine.
Consider anonymity in the real world. It's almost impossible to do anything really worthwhile completely anonymously. True, you may get along for a while, but sooner or later, you would need a job, a place to live, maybe a phone...the list goes on....and it's pretty much impossible to do any of these without proving your identity. You just cannot get along without remaining completely anonymous, in a fast developing world.
Maybe in lesser developed countries, you would not need an SSN or ID, but you would need alternate means of identification nevertheless, unless ofcourse you prefer to exist illegally under multiple identities.
With the Internet fast becoming part of our lives, and the ever broadening range of stuff that can be done online, it's but natural that some measures to establish identity come into force some time or the other.
People may argue that in the offline world, you are able to perform certain activities anonymously...say relax in a lounge chair in front of the fireplace...but BAM....as soon as you interact with society, anonymity is gone....Poof.
The problem with the Internet, is, that you are *always* interacting with some computer, somewhere, which does not belong to you. This is not true with the real world, if you're sitting lounging on a chair, you're interacting with the chair which belongs to you, thus ensuring anonymity. Anonymity on the Internet, on the other hand, is and will remain to be a very hard thing to achieve.
I guess that's a long enough rant for this time of the night.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
There is nothing they can do except try and shutdown ISPs'. And why is there no parallel analogies to the us postal service ? Should we shut them down if somebody is sending copyrighted stuff ?
The next to be hit is the movie industry. The movie selection should improve when higher speeds come around which should be never with Time Warner controlling everything.
...are people not smart enough to secure their systems. And the more people they bust, the more people will be enticed to secure their systems, thus causing the RIAA's overhead to rise. Frankly, the RIAA is trying to shovel back the ocean with a fork. The only question is how much money they're willing to spend trying. I myself serve almost 500 gigs of stuff (most of it anime, jpop, and the like), and if the RIAA wants to track me they can sure try. I knew the risks when I got into this, and accept them as a cost of doing business. That being said, if the RIAA breaks down the door to get the HDs I keep the stuff on, I have no problems whatsoever with activating the electromagnets sitting on top of 'em and scrambling the whole mess into indecipherable gobbledygook. I got a nice stack of back-up CDs in a safe place ;)
Oh, and for those of you who use Kazaa Lite: The latest ver blocks the IP ranges that the RIAA and their minions/co-conspirators use.
Who says resistance is futile?
Berrik
Current karma: Terrible (due to mods without a sense of humor)
This is just plain over before it started...
The RIAA dragnet is for uploaders because their theory is if they can scare people out of sharing, the non-sharing freeloaders will saturate the remaining uploaders so that the file-sharing network will cease to be useful.
But the coffee shop isn't the idea place to even set up a transient P2P sever. The P2P share would only exist when the laptop user is at the bookstore, which won't be that often to begin with. Any transfer in progress when the laptop user leaves the store will get aborted. Smart coffee shop owners have ADSL behind these shares, because they're expecting browsers not servers, so the upload speed won't be that pretty anyway.
This isn't a technology worth banning, it's not gonna be that useful to file-swappers in the first place!
What you are missing is the level of anonymity.
On the internet, I have the equivalent of a Unique Identifier tatooed on my forehead.
In real life, if someone asks me my name, I can say "Hi, I'm Peter Smith", or perhaps say nothing at all. Online, it's incredibly easy (and regularly done) to automate the process of recording your IP address, and associating it with every action you take online... You can't refuse to give it, you can't shop somewhere else when they ask for it, you don't even get notification that they are doing it...
It's not to say you have true anonymity in public, unless you can change your physical appearance at a whim (to some extent that is possible), but the point is that you DO have some reasonable level of anonymity.
For instance, imagine that the FBI feels like fishing, and decides they want to know the identity of everyone who read about bombs, and politically dissenting material. For digital info, they simply have to ask for those records from each place, and correlate them. In the real world, they would need to track down everyone that was at each place, have them give a description, and then compare the descriptions. That doesn't make you anonymous, but it adds a large barrier to removing your anonymity, which, in reality, is all people really want.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Take this exact same story and substitute "file sharing" with "spamming". Would this story still be posted as a YRO?
(Actually, probably yes, except this time it would be about your right to sue the WiFi operator who allows untraceable spam.)
-a
The IP Log Circle Jerk: .winnuke me"
1) ISP's will be required to keep logs, for legal purposes
2) the common folk, with their (insert firewall here) logs will say "hey, if ISP logs are kept for legal purposes, why not track this sonuvabitch down who tried to
3) The Department of Justice will get involved when they hear of rumors that such and such a ISP has been tampering with their logs, thus costing us more money in them doing their shit.
4) Some random group of people who like to complain will picket the government some more claiming "they are tracking how long i'm on the internet and what i'm doing, invasion of privacy" and that will cost us even more money as they send out the swat teams and the rubber bullets because we all know protesting in any form is pretty much ILLEGAL now.
5) Some Congressman will present a bill to overthrow the IP log law because it's causing conflicts in society (he doesn't want them to catch onto his warez/kiddie porn ring)
6) the law will be discontinued, we'll be right back were we started, a couple billion dollars further in the hole, with nothing more accomplished.
your sins into me, oh my beautiful one.
Try this: Go to your local theatre. Right after the movie starts, ask the owners if there are any empty seats left. If so, ask them if you can go in and watch the movie for free. Tell them your theory that you weren't going to pay to get in anyway, and they aren't losing anything by letting you in. Report the results back here to /.
For even better effect, take a movie camera. Tell them that recording the movie won't cost them a cent.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
This makes me wonder... Wouldn't it be possible to make some sort of data transfer network or "sub-internet" where people communicate using digital channels over internet telephony? It would be pretty hard to trace what people are doing, sharing, etc, because data packets would be coverted to a digital representation of audio being sent out. The digital "soundwaves" could be modulated to any any frequency, so they would in no way look like the digital bits they actually represent. This would probably be fairly slow, but possible.
Any thoughts?
I run a public WiFi hot spot and had my internet access cut off for days. The ISP support people couldn't figure out what was wrong. Finally they discovered someone had removed my business network from their routing tables because of a DMCA threat from EMI.
I explained the WiFi hot spot and they put me back online. Then I was forced to put up sophisticated filters to prevent suspect outgoing connections while allowing most good connections through. I then set up a freenet node. I don't offer a lot of bandwidth to anonymous users, so I think someone that walked by just happened to have some p2p application running on their laptop. But a large part of the reason I offer this service is because I believe in anonymous communication especially for whistle-blowers and for people with unpopular ideas. I know someone that got physical threats and had a friend of his killed for expressing his political opinions. The FBI was absolutely no help, their tech person even threatened him when he didn't want them to take his computer to their lab as evidence after it was hacked by one of the wackos. (The FBI would do more to harm his political speech 'helping' him if they took away his computer, since much of it is via the web. He had also been told by another agent they could just image the hard drive so he didn't really trust this guy.)
If somebody creates a law requiring logging, I'll be lining up to practice my duty as a citizen, civil disobedience of immoral laws. I hope it's not just because someone bought some crap from an RIAA label and put it on their computer. I really have no respect for the people that keep those intellectual "property" leeches in business, but I'll do it for that 13 year old girl sharing the latest boy band tripe too.
I'm one of those indie musicians that offers free downloads of my music so more people can get to know it. Please download and enjoy:
-
Geometric Visions
It's a recording of me playing my piano compositions.Request your free CD of my piano music.
But buying it is what entitles you to own a copy.
Let's see, right here is a digital copy of a song that costs, say, a dollar to legally download from Apple.
Over there is the same digital copy of the same song on Kazaa. Free for the taking.
Let's say I don't want to buy the one from Apple. Does the fact that "I would not have bought it" entitle me to the free one? Using your logic, wanting to buy it means I should pay for it, but NOT wanting it means I can still get it for free.
So, that means I should not express the desire to buy ANY music in any form whatsoever. That would give me the right to take all the music I want for free.
Thinking about it, I really don't want that new car I was looking at...
Ok, I call dibs on 00:00:00:00:00:01
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
If I, or I mean, my close friend, were ever "busted" but the RIAA for sharing/downloading mp3s off p2p networks, my, his best alibi would be that the songs could have been downloaded/uploaded from anyone as I am the only network administrator in the world too stupid to know how to enable WEP on my AP, and the neighbor did it. Of course a simple search of *his HD would prove otherwise.
Oh well, looks like I'm gonna have to build that big red button on my box that will format my mp3 partition over and over and over upon pressing.
Imagines my cat Kerberos brushing up against the button... Then again, maybe not.
Im dreaming ofa big bndwdth, That can resist the
Probably the best known site for downloading MP3s is of course MP3.com. See especially their genre index. Click the link. You will be quite astounded at how many genres there are.
Unfortunately the website usability of MP3.com is atrocious, and their streaming audio seems to be buggy - I can't get it to work in either Explorer or Mozilla. To get an MP3 file to download to your hard drive, you have to register, which I'm sure will result in merciless spamming. May I suggest registering with a throwaway email address from spamgourmet?
The Open Directory Project has Bands and Artists and Styles indices. Not all the artists offer downloads, but the site says they list 48,000 artists and I imagine many of them offer downloads.
Better sites for hosting MP3's than MP3.com are Epitonic.com and insound.
If you prefer the higher quality, patent-free Ogg Vorbis files you can find several download sites here. Ogg Vorbis players are available for many platforms - WinAmp will play them on Windows, and I understand iTunes on Mac OS X supports Ogg now. There are open source Linux ogg players and encoders, even an open source fixed-point decoders for embedded applications where the CPU doesn't have floating point hardware.
There are also peer-to-peer applications for distributing legal music. See Furthur Network and konspire[2b].
I'm sure if more people availed themselves of the wide variety of music available for free download, we will make short work of both the RIAA and ClearChannel. Our lives would also be richer for it.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
I realize there is little I can do to stop someone from cheating, but I expect that as long as I'm providing the downloads, most people will respect my wishes.
I feel it is important to maintain the proprietary copyright and proprietary licensing to my music because it is something that I feel to be a deep expression of who I am. I don't think it's the same as software at all, and in fact I do try to contribute to Free Software when I can, for example by writing about how to create better Free Software as well as by contributing to Free Software projects.
If, say, RedHat were to come out with a copylefted music download service, and lots of people started providing altered versions of my music, I would feel personally violated. It's not simply that I want to keep all the money my music might ever generate.
However, there are people who do as you request, who write, record and distribute Free-as-in-Freedom music. I have read about them online, but I'm afraid I don't know where to find any. Perhaps someone who does can post a link in response.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
However, this has caused friction with the Debian community, because they feel that the fact that the GNU Free Documentation License provides for Invariant Sections and mandatory Cover Texts makes it non-free. They're working on a policy statement to this effect, and getting ready to move all the GFDL'ed documentation from main to non-free. You can find out more about that in Why You Shouldn't Use the GNU FDL.
I observed some of the debate between the Debian developers and RMS on the debian-legal list, and while there are other significant issues, the main sticking point seemed to come down to whether or not political activism had any place in technical documentation. You can imagine Stallman's position on that. I come from way before "Open Source" was ever heard of, so I personally share Stallman's position.
It's an issue for me because I have some articles which use the GFDL, so I discussed the issue at some length in Which License for Free Documentation? The followup discussion has been very helpful.
Now why is this relevant to music?
The issue of whether it is moral (from Stallman's perspective) to forbid alteration of a work I believe comes down to whether the work is primarily functional in nature, or expressive of a personal opinion. The obvious utility of software, and the ability to combine code from different packages into new programs tips the balance heavily towards the side that says one must allow software to be altered. But that's not so clear with writing, which may be either unexpressive technical documentation, or impassioned political expression.
Music is much more like writing than software. Someone who is not a musician might not see it this way, but I feel that my music is an expression of my opinion. I can well see that there is other music that could not possibly be considered that way, and so I would support Stallman's position that not only copying but modification of such music must be permitted.
However, I don't think Stallman has completely thought this through when considering music explicitly. Have a look at his piece Regarding Gnutella.
Request your free CD of my piano music.