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Cyber Sleuths vs. Secret Networks
amnfinch writes "I saw this article on BBC news and frankly, I was blown away. Just another example of the relentless campaign to treat file swappers as criminals when their 'crime' is murky at best." Sir Haxalot provides an article on the flip-side: "CNN has a story on 'exclusive' Peer to Peer networks, that require 'knowing the right people and having a wealth of content on your hard disk to get into the clique.'"
Do the RIAA really think they can do anything to these networks? Or are they just trying to 'act tough'?
I have over 70 freaks, do you?
quote:
"Recently, Republican Senator Sam Brownback offered an amendment to an FTC reauthorization bill that would force "owners of digital media products to file an actual case in a court of law in order to obtain the identifying information of an ISP subscriber" rather than the current standard where the subpoena power is virtually unchecked."
Sounds like Sam Brownback has the right idea, and I want to give him some encouragement...
It seems that money is the only thing these people seem to care about, so I think I will take what I would have spent on a music CD (about 20 bucks) and send a money order to this guys campaign fund instead. I think I will add a nice little note on why I did that. Too bad I can't vote for him directly...
I think I'll send a note to my senator as well, along with a copy of the Brownback note, explaining why I'm not sending HIM any money.
Twenty bucks isn't much.... but what happens if just one percent of the people who read this do the same thing? Hell I might make this an ongoing project, and send twenty bucks a month to whatever congress-critter seems to deserve it the most at the moment.
Thinking of hiding behind nicknames like "hottdudeXXX" or "bluemonkey13" or even installing new software to cloak your identity? Think again, says Mr Ishikawa.
"We got an e-mail last week from someone saying 'How did you find me? I used Peer Guardian' and he thought that would save him from our spiders. There is nowhere to hide."
What about P2P networks that encrypt all traffic? How are they going to determine what media you have (based on the 30s that they apparently download from you) when it's all encrypted?
How about when I trading legal copies of music (like SHN/FLAC/etc Grateful Dead shows?) Will these 30s clips match up?
Of course the article is narrow on details.
This "spider" crap worries me.
Good grief! With comments like "there is nowhere to hide", or, "If you have an active internet address or connection and you are actively sharing files, our spiders will find you", these people are sounding like power-tripped teenagers! It really makes you kind of sick to see the apparent pleasure these people derive from doing this. They are proud of infiltrating your computer and gathering your personal information in order to bully you into submission. *shudder* I guess that's the sort of personality that it takes to accept a job like that in the first place.
Sola Scriptura * Sola Gratia * Sola Fide * Solus Christus * Soli Deo Gloria
From the original post:
'knowing the right people and having a wealth of content on your hard disk to get into the clique.'"
If anyone already on the network can allow someone onto the network, then there is still a possibility of someone charming their way into the trust of others. They need to take it one step further, and give a unique public key/private key to each individual, and have a single person responsible for adding people to the network. Otherwise, if anyone on the network can invite anyone else, then the network will grow exponentially, and then you won't be able to control the network.
yes and besides, his argument loses quite a much point, like, they're saying they are these uberhaxors who can go ANYWHERE, and do go ANYWHERE they like(which is of course, pretty much illegal, and impossible). what they're saying is that if i trade cdr's with my local biker gang(with 'files', he even implies that they are controlling anything that offers files, that means, they're bigger than google!) or if i copy mp3's with my neighbour through direct cable they still will find me! this guy sounds a bit like the phantom ceo at that penny arcade strip.
**"We find between 1.5 million to two million copyright infringements a day and we have a very high effectiveness rate. About 85% of the people we send notices to go away and we never see them again."**
so, but they aren't sending 1.5 million to two million notices per day aren't they? i call that they're ultimately ineffective in handling the problem.
what they're in fact doing is biting into the money veins of riaa, by bullshitting them and by bullshitting everyone in the progress as well, i wonder if i should file a suit because they spy on my private gallery(that shares files, that they have no right to access to, yet they imply that they magically are doing this, i think i could argue that i'm clueless about such things and they made me lose my sleep and i became insane because of that and ran out of tinfoil).
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
As reported on MacSlash, Buymusic.com is violating copyrights. Jody Whitesides, a musician, found an old CD he made for sale on the Buymusic.com site without ever being informed/asked/paid. He checked and also found albums from friends of his. As it turns out, they all had dealings with a brick and mortar distribution company called Orchard in the 90's that supposedly went out of business. They didn't and now it seems that anyone who had dealings with them might be on Buymusic.com without their knowledge, consent or recompense.
As human beings we have the right to anonymity as a basic human privelege. We should not abuse that right to harm others, nor should we be denied the right to not be public if we wish. The RIAA and similar organizations seek to eliminate that right in a certain venue in an attempt to control more resources utterly, i.e., the musical recordings of the artists who they supposedly, fully "represent".
Does anyone remember what happened to anon.penet.fi? And now hotmail.com and the equivalent msn are owned by microsoft and extremely popular years later, after the first popular anonymous e-mail service (Penet) was shut down for allegedly committing a crime through offering anonymous e-mail.
Thinkingman.com New Media
It's not at all clear that sharing a file with a friend is illegal, and it's clearly not immoral.
Copyright exists to provide incentives to push works into the public domain, not to keep them out of it.
--Mike--
What do you do for a living?
I'm serious. I want to know what you do that you expect to profit from to the degree that you can keep comfortably yammering away at this anti-copyright mantra.
Trouble making decisions? Just flip for it.
This is a excellent analogy; the Pinkerton men were almost universally hated assholes who made a habit out of violating people's rights and using strongarm tactics to do their master's bidding. When companies needed somebody to beat up strikers to end a strike, who did they call? Pinkerton.
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
The twist would be that the system would allow relaying of searches and of actual files. In other words, if I request a file that is on my friend's friend's computer, then the file has to come through the computer of our mutual friend. The whole idea is to keep things as encapsulated as possible... kinda like how terrorist cells work.
Now, I know that this increases network traffic... adds a lot of opportunities for a "weaker link" in the chain (imagine if one of the people in the relay chain is using a 56k modem)... decreases the "connectedness" of the whole sharing network, etc. However, I think this is the only real way to keep the RIAA from just being able to download a song and, *pow*, have the IP of someone to sue.
Also, some of these problems mentioned might be assuaged by the fact that people might feel more comfortable leaving their stuff shared. I, for one, have gobs and gobs of stuff that I could share, but I don't... because I have way too much to lose. However, if I knew that the only people who could connect to me would be people that I know... I'd have tons of stuff up and shared... 24/7.
The strange thing is that it seems to me that this was Aimster's plan, but they got shut down for some reason. But I don't know why.
Here is what makes it murky: This guy isn't looking for copyrighted files, he's looking for file swappers, whether the swapper owns the copyright or not. What I do in my own house (hard drive) is my business, and I don't want anyone peeking in my windows (ports) without my permission.
And yes, I swap a lot of files that I own the copyright to. I am a musician and I like to make my music available to everyone. More people trade on Kazaa than visit mp3.com on any given day so it just makes sense to use P2P to distribute indie music.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
This article is the funniest thing I have read in a long time.
"This is just over a few hours and I have almost 14,000 records with a variety of different titles ranging from Daddy Day Care to Anger Management and Charlie's Angels."
What the BBC didn't mention is that she is using the newest ueber-kewl anti-piracy spider PACKETNEWS.COM
For any similar industry stoolie morons lurking here - welcome to the net. You must be new here. "Pirates" switched from BBS to FTP to HTTP to IRC to P2P. The next step will be using crypto to obtain anonynimity that WILL foil IP traces. You will have to do better than chasing down sharers with a glorified webcrawler:
inform your clients that resistance is futile and they have to change their business model to catch up with new distribution technologies that the net enables.
Nice try though, and again: welcome to the digital era.
Then call me Captain Kirk.
At my university there's a Direct Connect hub run by an anonymous student that is accessible only by people in university IP addresses. It's crazy fast, has TONS of good (and quite illegal) media, and the university looks the other way because it helps relieve the MASSIVE (and expensive) bandwidth pressure back when everyone was trying to use Kazaa.
Makes me want to live on campus until Freenet turns into AnonymousKazaa
no thanks
Why on earth would you willingly compare yourself with what amounted to a legally sanctioned group of murderous thugs?
If you want a good start as to who the Pinkertons really were read Howard Zinn's "A People's History of The United States." While Labor certainly had to answer for some of its own murderous thugs, the Pinkertons themselves were responcible for a rather large part of it.
Frankly, I see many parallels between what's going on now with copyright and what happened years ago with labor.
In terms of it's [file-sharing's] legality, just because the government and corporations say that something is illegal doesn't mean that it is. I am quite tired with people on the board dismissing the arguement to freely share files and information under fair use as whiny. I look at each and every file I share and each and every file I download as an act of civil disobediance.
I do not control the Sig, the Sig controls me.
There are people who trade rare, hard to find (read: suppressed by the studios) cartoons. Most are indeed over 50 years old. Let me mention a few names. "Song Of The South." "Coal Black and De Sebben Dwarves." "Tin Pan Alley Cats." "Uncle Tom's Cabana." "Herr vs. Hare." "The Blitz Wolf." "Tokio Jokio." "The Japoteurs." etc. etc. Most have either politically incorrect stereotypes and/or inflammatory anti-German or anti-Japanese content that was part of popular culture during World War II.
From a cartoon historian's standpoint, this is all stuff that should not be suppressed. Maybe it should also not be shown to impressionable children, as well -- at least without an accompanying history lesson as part of the deal. But not everyone who is interested in animation is a kid. Some of us are adults. And it is the adults that are being denied by the embargo on certain politically incorrect cartoons.
And as far as creative people having their food stolen: the screenwriters and songwriters and musicians whose "rights" are supposedly being "protected" by the RIAA/MPAA Sturmabteilung are also systematically being raped up the butt, no Crisco offered, by the same Big Media companies that the RIAA and MPAA actually represent. A recent post I made in my Slashdot blog is all about this.
Moreover, my husband is a musician, who has seen things from both the side of the struggling, unsigned musician and the exploited, swindled musician signed to a contract which in other businesses would be laughed out as being horrifyingly one-sided and biased towards Management. He is now beginning to release all his back catalog of music that he himself owns copyright and publishing on, for free, on the Internet. The only strings attached are that he'd like people to talk to him if they want to either put a song of his on a retail compilation album or use one of his songs in a movie or TV show. If you want a look, here is the link: http://www.richiehass.com/. Why is he doing this? Because his gamble is that once people get acquainted with his back catalog, when he finally gets an indie CD of new stuff done and up on CD Baby people will be sufficiently interested enough to buy it.
The actions of the RIAA and the MPAA are the actions of frightened Luddites fearing the loss of their livelihoods. As history shows, when old industries die, new ones spring up to take their place. The economic models that have supported musicians and other types of artists over the millenia have shifted considerably. They will likely shift again with the flow of technology. Like the song goes, "It's Evolution, baby." Adapt or die.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
From this Sept. 2002 PBS article on BayTSP
One thing BayTSP's spider programs don't do is sit at the Internet peering points sniffing all packets as they go by. "That would be wiretapping, which is illegal," he says. "All we do is go to the same places any user could go, look at the same files anyone else could look at, and we only probe the ports on your computer that you have made public."
The BBC article acts like this is some new big deal, but it's exactly the same thing they've been doing since at least September last year. I think they've spun the article to make it seem a lot worse than it is. Perhaps the only difference is that they have more clients demanding the info now, or that they've decided to prosecute people at a lower level of infringement?
Most people would die sooner than think; in fact, they do.
I agree that downloading songs for free is not always right. But what if the only other option is living forever without listening to that music because you just can't afford it. Don't you think it is logical to do this when the only other option is to live without. Afterall, you ae not hurting the recording companies/artists anymore than you would by not buying it. Ofcourse, all this argument assumes that you can honestly gauge whether you can afford to buy i. But if you CAN honestly do this?