Slashdot Mirror
Earthstation 5 Claimed to be Malware
Rob from RPI writes "You may remember the announcement about a company, or program, or both called Earthstation 5 who recently 'Declared War' on the MPAA. Well guess what? Turns out that it's got code in it that allows anyone to delete any file on your computer. I suggest that you un-install as soon as possible!"
A P2P service that ACTIVELY PROMOTES piracy? It sounded too good to be true, and it was. All of this wonderful information from some schmoe with an email @yahoo.com? This whole deal is shady, no matter how you look at it.
Wouldn't that be just the cleverest act of terrorism you can think of? Bait the "foreign devils" with all you hate about them and then, BAM!, nuke millions of computers in an instant. Takes more preparation to get off the ground than your garden variety virus or worm but the pay-off is much greater, isn't it? And if I was living in Palestine threat of legal action by some American interest group would be the least of my worries.
Hank! White!
This mofos were the ones behind the summer DoS attacks on all the big BT sites, and now this. Gentlemen, start your cracking...
Tinfoil hat on . . .
Let's say ES5 is an MPAA/RIAA front to discredit file sharing and harm filesharers.
Now, apparently, ES5 is in Palestine.
What better way to do "double damage" than to not only have a way to attack filesharers, but also to connect it to a location people associate with terrorism?
OK, tinfoil hat off now.
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
I'm sure everyone has at least seen one article where they tell you to NEVER install software from a company you've either never heard of, or don't trust. At this point, the internet has been around long enough that most people realize this, especially if you have data on your machine that is so important that you can't risk getting a virus or a trojan (such as this, apparently) on it. Live by the internet, die by the internet. Just because someone claims to be against the RIAA doesn't make them your friend. Just because someone is against SCO, doesn't make them about free software rights. There are such things as self-serving deeds, even if they appear to be good gestures to all.
today is spelling optional day.
I'm curious - how can it be determined without the benefit of source code for ES5 that the exploit isn't just a horrendous oversight instead of a malicious pre-meditated function of the software?
If it is malicious it seems odd that they would make it possible for ANYONE to delete someone elses files through crafted search strings, thus significantly increasing the chance of their nefarious plans being uncovered.
If it were me, and I was secretly working for the RIAA, I'd just code in a simple client/server protocol that the RIAA could use to delete people's files, entirely seperate from the normal operation of the program itself. This would be much harder to identify as malicious code.
Sorry, but this just looks to me like a bad "failure to chroot()" bug and not the big conspiracy theory its purported to be...
Um.... $2.00 doesn't cover the hardware costs of producing a professional cd. If your requests are unresonable, don't be surprised when they're not met.
On the other side of that, $16-20 is unreasonable. $10 would be fair, I think. Considering the hours spent in the studio recording, AFM scale per musician per song being $50 (and that's for low grade musicians), the cost of a decent engineer, cost of using a decent studio (that's not cheap), mastering costs... Then you've got to either spend $$ on an expensive fast cd dup'er, or pay someone to burn 10,000 cd's in a week, artwork for the j-page, printing of the j-page, cd cases, shringwrapping, a UPC, distribution, etc....
Do you honestly think all of that can be done for $2.00 per? Get real.
Saying Android is a family of phones is akin to saying Linux is a family of PCs.
Well, you know what Sun-Tsu said about knowing yourself and your enemies ( he who knows both is assured a victory ).
In a computer's case, it's knowing as much about the program you're about to install as you can and monitoring your computer to see what's going on with it. That way, malware stands a smaller chance of screwing with your system.
Stealing a book from a library == theft.
Photocopying the same book ==copyright infringement != theft.
Burning the book == damage.
See how simple logic is when you're not trolling
I was suspicious of this project from the beginning. The way they market their product, promising immediate access to copyrighted items, was just too rosy and would leave any company wide open for litigation. This passage in the announcement pretty much sums up my take on the whole affair:
"The question then is 'why did they do it?' I'm sure they won't tell us, but here's a theory: They could be working for the RIAA, MPAA, or a similar organization. Once they have enough users on their ES5 network, they would start deleting all copyrighted files they own which their users are sharing. The users wouldn't know what hit them."
Can anyone come up with a plausible scenario where a P2P company would release software that destroys a computer, if it is not connected somehow to these groups?
Told ya.
-72
-Those who dance are considered insane by those who can't hear the music.
After all, there's probably a GPS tracking system, data recorders that records the times when you're over the speed limit, and other potentially privacy-compromising system hidden in any car you buy.
Do you trust the drinking water coming through your pipes? What, you filter it first? OK, have you bothered to take the filter apart yourself to verify its components work as advertised or do you accept that government regulations will keep them from selling a defective product?
Consider Joe Average. Give him an open source program--he has to trust that you personally went through the code and verified it's clean, or that a bunch of unknowns on the net verified it. He sure as hell isn't going to go through all the code and compile it himself. And do you yourself trust that C compiler? There's that theory about how the original C compiler could have a backdoor put in, and every subsequent C compiler or program compiled could have a backdoor built into it during compile time.
In truth you can't trust ANYTHING you don't make yourself. But it's not practical to make everything yourself because of time constraints or inexperience, so at some point everyone has to put their trust in some system they didn't make themselves. And yes, sometimes that trust is violated, like tires that blow apart for no reason or the water is tainted with e-coli. But in the real world most people can't afford to distrust absolutely everything and still live a real life. Neither can most people who have a computer.
Like I said, I agree with the principle. But this is the real world, and many personal, idealized principles just don't play into it.
Anyways, I've now said EVERY SINGLE THING every partisan in this argument has ever said and will ever say, so you can all just STFU.
Because of what the implecations of the actions 5000 years ago that let to the current state of injustice, future attrocities 9 and 11 will be committed in anticipation of attrocity 8. And the other side will preemptivly perform attrocity 13 to prevent numbers 9 and 10, but in doing so will actually guarantee that numbers 9 and 10 occur.
Seriously: these people would do well to accept reality as it is, and start building their lives. Get rid of the leaders on both sides that are so hell bent on holding thier breath the longest. Exhale and get on with your lives. You only have so many years on earth, so why spend the rest of it fighting over things you have NO CONTROL OVER, DID NOT START AND REALISTICALLY CANNOT FINISH WITHOUT IT ENDING IN YET ANOTHER POMGROM? Neither side has the will or ability to kill off the other, and the world will not let that happen right now.
-- $G
When the origional Earthstation slashdot story came out, it ws claimed that this software had more movies and software than any other p2p system and was more secure.
I posted what was one of the few on topic posts, and asked if anyone had actually used this program and if it was any good.
Some kind slashdotter responded that it was very buggy and already installed many viruses on his PC and on that note I gave it a wide berth.
Meanwhile everyone else in the discussion was totally engrossed in the Isreali - Palestinian flamewar and seemingly forgot what the origonal story was about.
The moral of this all is:
Well, stay on topic and you might learn something, but then again, fuck it, a good flamewar is always fun too!