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RIAA/MPAA vs. xMule Author, EarthStation 5
Two bits of news in the ongoing battle between the RIAA/MPAA and the rest of the internet: One P2P company, apparently based in Palestine, has thrown down the gauntlet to the movie industry. Meanwhile, a developer of another P2P tool who unwisely chose to live in the USA has been shut down (mirror) by the RIAA.
this is getting fucking ridiculous.
It saddens me as a developer that you can't even deign to write a P2P add without the assumption that it will be used for sharing copyrighted materials and thus shut down by the RIAA/MPAA. It's really amazing to see what lengths these bastards will go to to protect their industry after a major, earth-shattering shift in their profit model.
I urge everyone reading this to be very diligent in your boycott of buying new music or going to see movies. I haven't bought a CD in 22 months and haven't seen a movie since (believe it or not) 1999. You can't cheat and plead, just one movie! It's the Matrix! I have to see it. Nothing but the bottom line is going to get through to these people. If these folks don't get the message and soon, you may find yourself asking for permission to write anything on your machine that moves bits around.
Karma: Excellent Birds (mostly as a result of listening to Laurie Anderson)
Here's the full text of the article, to hopefully stem some of that tide.
0x0D 0x0A
(...) Earthstation 5 is at war with the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the Record Association of America (RIAA), and to make our point very clear that their governing laws and policys have absolutely no meaning to us here in Palestine, we will continue to add even more movies for FREE. .com) does not require any signups, registration,
credit cards and/or any other personal information to watch the first rate
streamed movies like TERMINATOR 3, BRUCE ALMIGHTY, MATRIX RELOADED, etc.
Our secure software protect our users who use our P2P application and
there is nothing that you can do to stop us, says Ras Kabir, president of
Earthstation 5 (http:/www.earthstation5 .com).
(...)
ES5 (http://www.es5
(...)
Ras Kabir's warning to the RIAA and the MPAA, "The next revolution in P2P file sharing is upon you. Resistance is futile and we are now in control".
OMG! It's what I call a man who has BALLS!!
That's all we need. The MPAA and RIAA getting involved in the Middle East. I wonder if Big Oil will like the competition.
R: That voice. Where have I heard that voice before? B: In about 365 other episodes. But I don't know who it is either.
HTTP error 506:
Server has been ran over by an Israeli tank.
Hate me!
Most countries are signatories to one or more copyright treaties that commit them to recognizing and protecting international copyrights. They are therefore more or less prohibited from allowing the explicit breach of copyright declared in this PR release.
But who is responsible for enforcing copyright in an occupied country? Palestine has been recognized by the UN as an occupied territory, with Israel as the occupying power. With little real power, is the Palestinian Authority still supposed to enforce copyright restrictions? Or is that for Israel to do?
The same situation would apply, I assume, in Iraq. America is the occupying power, so I would think the same criteria should apply as in the Israel/Palestine situation. There is no true Iraqi government to enforce copyright, but on the other hand it seems a bit absurd to think that American laws should govern Iraq.
Interesting situation....
I am concerned about any program, any piece of hardware, any treaty, any law that treats me as a consumer, not a citizen
Their company page (http://www.es5.com/company.html) says:
"Our group is made up of many people, Jordanians, Palestinians, Indians, Americans, Russians and Israelis. Some of us are Jewish, some Christians, some Hindus and other of us are Muslim.
Believe it or not, we all love and respect each other.
We all work and play together. Our families on many occasions eat at the same dinner table. We trust each other and are very close friends with each other. As a group, the most important thing in our life is our children, our families and love ones and of course our friends. "
Hey! 1997 called! They want their web developer back!
Palestinians, being semites themselves, can hardly be anti-semitics...
;)
Sure they could...they could be filled with self loathing.
I'm not a speaker, but AFAIK "Ras Kabir" is arabic for "large head"
definately a pseudonym.
What's more, with the fighting in the west-bank over the last two years,
I doubt that people there had time to run any OS project, let alone one with "15 million active online users" cocurently. Especially entertainment-oriented.
This "declaration of war" is probably a hoax, and I wouldn't be surprized if kooky conspiracy-theories actually turn-out true in this case
(BTW, I'm not much of a speaker, but AFAIK "Ras Kabir" is arabic for "large head" definately a bad pseudonym )
Working for necessity's mother.
You have the right to do anything you want until the state takes that right away. The ES5 live in a country where american copyright is not recognized. You may argue that what they are doing is unethical. You might have a point, law does not dictate morality.
Now users of this software may be be breaking the law, but I would argue that they are doing nothing unethical. After all law does not dictate morality.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
From the website, it seems they do have their privacy ducks in a fairly neat row:
;)
ES5 #1 goal is to protect its users from intrusions to their privacy by providing encrypted traffic, random ports and IP anonymity:
ONE CLICK PROXY SERVER - Users can send connection requests through intermediary proxy servers located throughout the world so that the download destination of a file cannot be traced by any entity whatsoever. There is nothing for the user to set-up, just right click to enable the proxy server.
SSL - SECURE SOCKETS - Prevents monitoring of a user's uploading or downloading activity. Users can automatically deploy SSL by right clicking.
UDP -USER DATAGRAM PROTOCOL Using UDP makes it impossible to reliably scan a useras computer to determine if ES5 is running. Also, unlike TCP connections, UDP traffic can not be easily blocked by ISPs.
ES5 SECURITY KEY - ES5 utilizes a standard HTTP server to transmit files, but deploys a special "security key" so than only ES5 users can access your shared files.
IP ADDRESSES - ES5 does not display user IP Address information.
DYNAMIC PORTS- Each ES5 node uses a randomly chosen port (unless the user chooses a specific port themselves). Therefore, ISPs will be unable to identify file-sharing traffic based upon port numbers and unable to throttle back the users bandwidth.
USER DEFINED PORT SETTINGS- ES5 provides users with "one-click" port setting options for ES5 to use port 53 (the port used by DNS) or port 37 (the port used by time service) therefore rendering all blocking attempts hopeless.
MULTIPLE POINTS OF ENTRY - ES5 uses multiple methods for connecting to the ES5 network including IP Multicast, Usenet Articles, Web Sites, Node List Files and a several other undisclosed methods.
PENETRATING FIREWALLS - UDP allows seamless penetration of firewalls without inconvenient setting of firewall parameters. For users behind firewalls, ES5 uses UDP to request a PUSH, where the behind-the-firewall computer initiates the connection back to the requested user's computer. PGPDisk - As an additional security feature, to all P2P programs, is that ES5 integrates seamlessly with PGPDisk (which is a free program and will be provided by ES5 to its users) that lets you encrypt your disk drives to store your P2P content. No one except you will ever be able to see your files, not your kids, your spouse, your mother, your boss, the FBI, the KGB or anyone else!
So, the plot thickens. Whatever will the *AA do?
everything in moderation
Not that I'd de-advocating this sort of stance. I'd really prefer that my money not go to these money-grubbing [NAUGHTYS].
But think on this for a second. These idiots don't even have a NODDING acquaintence with common sense, or even REALITY. All they'll see, and yammer about, when sales plummet is "It's filesharing!" "It's texting!" "It's freedom of speech!"
No matter what, they're utterly incapable of believing tha that their sales dropoffs are actually due to:
Need I go on?
In short, no matter what people do, or do not, buy, the likes of the MPAA and the RIAA will merely blame-shift so they don't have to accept responsibility for their own [NAUGHTY]-ups.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
1. Wonderful press release, kick the MPAA/RIAA where it hurts.
2. Web site not slashdotted.
3. 40kb/sec download of the software. Exactly what kind of net pipes do they have running into Jenin? Maybe download.es5.com is located somewhere else...
4. None of this "we're just technology providers" bullshit. No, this is theftware at its best. Hey, the US has paid billions to help the Israeli state bomb the Palestinians into the stone age, it's not surprising there is not huge local support for US "intellectual property".
The software was apparently developed in Russia, financed by Arab and Israeli businessmen. It appears to use UDP rather than TCP/IP, which is a neat idea when you are sending redundant chunks of information around, and SSL for security, which may or may not be really secure.
The whole thing may be a hoax, I am downloading it to a test machine to try right now.
At last, someone with the guts to sock it to those bums at the MPAA and RIAA. Yeah!!
Ceci n'est pas une signature
Sure, we should make guns illegal to ensure that only criminals have them.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
...Yes, Hollywood DOES have the right to make money. ...
No they don't. They have the right to TRY to make money by making movies that people want to see. They have no right to expect a profit if they make crap, no matter how much they spend making the crap.
Used CDs:
a) Are cheaper
b) Don't send money to the RIAA
I haven't bought a new CD in many years. I have bought used though.
half.com rocks.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
They are anti-establishment. Their software is the epitome of ideals held by hackers everywhere.
From the article:Earthstation 5 also has a FREE multi-user Voice and Video chat system,
FREE Dating system, provides FREE video streaming of first run movies, FREE
ten SEX channels, FREE live Sporting events, and will be releasing soon a
Voice over IP application providing FREE local and international telephone
calls to its users to communicate with each other.
They are attacking the old bricks-and-mortar businesses, in an attempt to force them to change their ancient business practices. And good for them! Information wants to be free, but content doesn't have to be. These companies had better start releasing their music/movies/services to the unwashed masses in a proper and timely manner or people are going to do it for them.
I don't agree with the Palestinian suicide bombings, but all the evidence that I've seen suggests that Israel poses a far more immediate threat to most Palestinians than Iraq ever posed to the US; so if we're going to complain about killing civilians, let's start at home.
I'm pretty sure that Israelis wouldn't fuck with anybody if people stopped blowing them up. I've never lived there, but talked to quite a few people who have, and have family members and that seems to be a general consensus amongst them.
That should be their new slogan, "Stop blowing us up and we'll stop taking your land."
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
As loudly as they proclaim, "Get your Illegal Warez here, we will protect you, we got nothing but illegal sutff," I don't trust them to not be a trap for users. Think about it, RIAA/MPAA set this up, make it super duper abundantly clear that the only purpose here is to be illegal, they score a two fold victory: first their case is strengthened against P2P in general, and second, they eventually sue said company and in an "out of court agreement" come away with complete logs of who did what on the network. Now they get to really sue those people, and their case is all the stronger, "More people watched Terminator 3 on the net than went to see it in theatres!"
Slay a dragon... over lunch!
Below is a copy of my letter to my senator, McCain, of Arizona. Feel free, indeed encouraged, to email your own senator (or even others!) and representatives. You can find their addresses at http://www.senate.gov/ and http://www.house.gov/
With respect,
Un-Thesis
=====================
Dear Senators,
Some of you have . It affected me personally on 17-Aug 03. I am the main developer of one of the few person-to-person filetrading programs for UNIX (Linux, FreeBSD, etc) machines and MacOS X.
Apparently I was struck without warning by some DMCA clause for downloading 'copyrighted material.' In other parts of the law, you need habeus corpus, search warrants, judicial review, warning, etc. With the DMCA they merely terminate you, with no warning, with no appeal, with no representation, with no pretense of jurisdiction, based upon evidence that was 100% obtained outside the framework of any noticeable governmental or 3rd-party oversight.
In short, it is an apparently open fascist policy prone to rampant abuse, supporting the rights of the Establishment over the People.
My life revolves around the marvelous information transport technologies collectively referred to as the Internet. I attend a part-time university online (www.accis.edu), near 95% of my contact with my friends and family is online, 100% of my employment is online (via rentacoder.com), and my personal hobbies (www.xmule.org) and political activities (www.fearlesszippy.com, wakeup-people.com, etc) are online.
In short, terminating my internet without warning has seriously halted my life. It is time we make the right to chat online a fundamental human right. The government should be allowed to restrict a person's movements (prohibit uploads, downloads, etc) by placing restrictions on the amount of data a 'criminal' should be able to send online in a given day or so (500KB should be sufficient for email, chat, etc). Such bandwidth caps are already implemented by teh vast majority of broadband suppliers throughout the nation adn would be just about as easy to implement and enforce as the current DMCA suspension of accounts.
I just wish there would be *some* judicial process involved in the DMCA. I should have my constitutional right to a fair trial. This is above and beyond the reasons why most people download movies. People overseas download movies and music because of artificial monopoly regulations that delay the international exportation of American media by weeks and even months.
People in America download media because they are either too poor to purchase the overpriced media, and also primarily to see if a given media is of good enough intellecutal quality to warrant purchasing, due to the unequal consumer rights 'laws' which prohibit the returning of open media.
Generally, people download not out of nefarious intent, but because they lack real alternatives to verify the intellectual quality of any given electronic Media before purchasing.
Thus, more consumer rights laws, less 'illicit' copyright infringement.
Sincerely,
Theodore R. Smith
Promote freedom; fight fascism.
Israel has never once started one of the wars that it has participated in
Sorry, I think you must have forgotten about the six day war in 1967 (OK so it was a "preemptive strike". Name a war where the first person to attack hasn't claimed that). You also seem to have overlooked the 1978 and 1982 invasions of Lebanon -- the last one being condemned even by the US. So by my counting Israel was invaded twice in the last 55 years: the 1947 independence war and the 1973 Yom Kippur war. Perhaps you were confusing Israel with Lebanon, which has never started a war but has been invaded three times in the last 30 years (by Syria in 1976, Israel in 1978 and 1982).
However, it should be noted that there has never been a strike against an unimportant figure.
I suppose that depends how you defined important figures. Even if you count any suspicious looking palestinian as "important", I don't see how you can include people like James Miller, a british reporter, or Iain Hook, a UN aid worker. Of course the Israeli army admits these were "mistakes", but does that exonerate them?
Never do you see in the news: Israel kills busload of Palestinian schoolchildren. Why?
Because the Palestinians don't have the option of sending in helicopter gunships to assassinate Israeli politicians. I'm not condoning suicide bombings, but your comparison is laughable. In a conflict, each side will naturally make use of the means at its disposal. Moreover israel's "targeted assassinations" invariably kill many more people than just those being targeted -- but obviously a 6-year-old girl who happens to live next door to a Hamas leader doesn't matter as much as a 6-year-old killed in a suicide bombing.
The author of this post asserts his moral rights.
I'm sorry to break it to you, but your sarcasm detector seems to be malfunctioning.
I take drugs seriously.
That's not really funny.
Why not? It made me laugh.
You can share with your friends (instead of 60M people) so it's less guilt factor. Plus it is over an RSA encrypted link. The best of all P2P worlds.
http://waste.sourceforge.net/
"There are laws that enslave men, and laws that set them free. " - Sean Connery as King Arthur
Is this the cyberterrorism the talking heads on the idiot box have gone on and on about?
The Uncoveror: It's the real news.
For the "sake of curiousity" I decided that I wanted to check this site out. Particularly the claim of providing first-run movies (I'm not interested in wasting my money on The Hulk...hey I got the text page telling me it sucks, remember?). I don't know if it's the bandwidth constraints of refugee camps or the serious slashdotting but the movie stop for two minutes of buffering just about every 20 seconds.
u lk-384.wmv" , Target = "")
Frustrated, I whipped out my trusty copy of ASFRecorder. Imagine my surprise when it failed to connect! First time that has ever happened to me. So I whipped out my trusty backup copy of ASFRecorder that was recompiled with a Windows Media Player User-Agent string. That didn't work either! This was bizarre. I'm watching the video play right now (albeit poorly) in WMP but ASFRecorder with the exact same user agent is getting connection closed. I try HiDownload, again, failed, even with the same agent string! What is going on here?
The entire thing is SWF based so I download an evaluation copy of SWF Scanner and decide to see what URL I'm actually going to. Low and behold, what is this?
on (unLoad) {Get URL("mms://stream.es5.com:1755/es5/movies/The%20H
What the hell is with that blank "target" paramenter? Can anyone explain that? I have a feeling that is the problem. ASFRecorder only takes a URL, there is no place to specify a target. Ditto for HiDownloader and Windows Media Player. I confirmed that if I type the stream location into Media Player, it fails to connect. But, if I make an ASX file that links to the stream and includes the blank "target" parameter, it works!
Okay, now it's gone beyond trying to see if The Hulk is really as crappy as everyone says. This is a mystery, and I'm hoping someone here can figure it out.
In short, streaming file plays in Windows Media Player but it seems impossible to capture this stream using any of the tools available. Is there a solution? And why would these boneheads at war with the RIAA/MPAA bother to sabatoge downloads to begin with?
- JoeShmoe
.
-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
Isn't it amazing how something so unimportant as a few studios that produce screen plays and music can drastically change the laws in a huge country full of freedom loving (wanting) people?
The RIAA and MPAA members wealthy off our dollar. Please don't spend more money with these people unless you don't mind kissing more freedoms goodbye.
Also, you do realise that violent crime in your country has dropped year on year in the last 10 years? So why exactly do you need all this weaponry?
I could care less about having a gun for my personal civil protection. The chances of me getting to a firearm before a criminal shot me are next to nothing. But the fact of the matter is, we don't trust our Government. That's why America was founded with so many checks and balances; one of which being the people shrugging off a tyrannical government. I believe it was either Jefferson or Washington who said that it was essential for a people to revolt every so often so as to keep the government clean and honest. I don't know that I necessarily agree with that, but the truth is, we want to have the ability to protect our rights (if it ever came down to it.)
That is why I believe in the 2nd amendment. I don't care that it's a sport, I don't care that it "protects" people from criminals (which I don't believe justifies the many more deaths as a result of illegal gun violence each year). I just want to make sure that, if it ever came down to it, I, or my children, or my children's children would have the means to do what they need to do if the situation were to call for it. I don't mind gun control. I'll lock my guns up in 3 safes and bury them if I have to. But I want to have access to a firearm if it were needed.
Paranoid? Probably. But I'd rather be safe than sorry. Like someone else stated: I value my liberty over security. The Patriot Act, gun banning, etc, etc, while potentially keeping me safer draw perilously close to trading my freedoms for a little more "safety".
I'd rather be free and fighting (or dead) than safe and a slave.
See, in 1983, before CD's came out, LP albums cost about $6.98, and tapes about the same. Then CD's came out, costing TEN DOLLARS MORE! The industry's excuse was that CD's cost more to make, "better sound forever", and other rubbish. Now we know these all were lies. CD's now cost about 1/10th as much to press as records cost at their cheapest (and I'm speaking 2003 dollars here which are worth about half of 1983 ones). CD's STILL cost almost 20 bucks apiece. The record companies' excuse is that inflation has finally caught up, which is more bullshit. In essence, they TRIPLED the price of CD's over LP's, got rid of LP's (to remove choice), got rid of singles (to make sure that you HAD to pay $17.98 to get the ONE song you liked), raped the consumer for over 20 years, formed cartels (which would have been illegal in 1983!) and now when the consumer finally has the ability to fight back they respond by bribing our lawmakers to maintain the status quo by passing the DMCA, throwing the Constitution out the window in the process. Yep..sure sounds like an upstanding business model and a fair deal for the consumer, huh?
Oh great, we'll just let special interest groups manipulate language to further their own twisted ends, won't we?
I'm sick of all of this anti-semantism! Enough already!
I'm a friend of a friend of the working class.
Cannibals capture three hunters an American, a Briton, and an Israeli," begins a classic Israeli joke. The first two hunters make last requests typical to their nationalities, then it is the Israeli's turn. He asks that he be punched in the face.
The surprised cannibal grants the wish, at which point the Israeli pulls out a gun, shoots the chief, and frees himself and his friends. The American and Briton, furious, demand to know why he prolonged their terrifying experience when he had the power to free them all. The Israeli replies: "What? Are you mad? The UN would have condemned me as the aggressor.