Slashdot Mirror
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?
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?"
:-)
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.
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
...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
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); }
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.