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Operation Fastlink Nets 1000s in Pirate Sting
womanfiend writes "The Iowa City (Iowa) Press Citizen has been reporting the last two days about "'Operation Fastlink,' a multi-national investigation launched in April." Apparently, the investigation has netted a local college student hosting 13,000 titles worth a bundle of money both in simple value and liability for as many times as logs show the titles were downloaded. According to the P-C: "...'Operation Fastlink,' which targeted the underground community's hierarchy with [FBI] agents conducting more than 120 searches within 24 hours in 27 states and 11 foreign countries. At the time, authorities identified nearly 100 people as leaders or high-ranking members of international piracy groups."
Sounds like somebody's in deep doo doo."
The FBI has a considerable presence outside the United States: And: -kgj
-kgj
Well, you're crossing genre's of "crimes" there, but I think you're on the right track. Who the FBI, CIA, NSA, DoD, and the Pentagon ought to be going after is China, Korea, Thailand, and all the other Southeast Asian countries that are costing American companies millions, if not billions, in 'lost revenues' on computer software sales. Sadly, that would require an act of war, and since our government leaders know that this is not a viable solution for saving a select few American companies millions of dollars every year, they stand by and let the piss-ant agents go after all of the American citizens who aren't really making any money off of these thefts of computer programs to give the rest of the country's bumbling idiots a sense that all is well in our great nation.
It's pathetic, and sad, but such are the times we live in. If this were medieval times we'd probably just go try to kick some Southeast Asia ass, but then we'd also only live to be about 40 and could get burned at the stake for not kissing the royal scepter and worshipping the Pope.
The wholesale looting of others intellectual property is a very destructive thing. Of those 13,000 titles you can very sure that among them were titles by the non-industry powerhouses.
I've worked as an employee and contractor to a number of small niche players who wrote popular useful software but were ultimately forced out of business due to the direct and indirect effects of piracy.
It is criminal what is being done to some of these companies. When you have a potential customer base of perhaps 5,000 you really need to make sure that you do exactly what your customers want.
I helped organize a QA and customer satisfaction drive for a niche regional software provider. We surveyed every user of the software. Took suggestions and complaintants and feedback on every bit of the application. All told we collected, ranked, anaylzed and implemented 6,500 changes ranging from minor tweaks to major rewrites. It was an 18-month project. Every issue was documentated, analyzed, and every user, every issue recieved a human-authored note that dealt in depth with the issue.
At the request of several users the licensing was vastly simplified even though it meant - at best - a 15% decline in revenue. A solid base of the users/sysadmins complained about the technical measures used to prevent licensing violations. They were removed completely and the honor system was instituted.
After the project, the application won numerous awards within its industry. User satisifaction with the application went from 62% to 98% between the versions. The average site had about 10%-20% smaller licensing costs. Support calls dropped 50% in 3 months. A comprehensive professional written and edited user manual was given to every user, and a robust feature request/enhancement/bug tracker went live.
It was vastly successful. Yet, within 12 months of that release, the company closed its door, and released the code from escrow to the clients. 40 programmers, QA, and support people lost their jobs, and the owner - a very nice woman - was financially ruined. A number of the customer sites also went belly up - as many as 10.
The software was an investment to be sure, but allowed you to run an efficent, competitive, and focused organization. When the anti-piracy features were removed competitors with pirated editions sprang up, offering similair services at lower prices - part of which was because the new enterprises could escape making an investment in software that their competitors did have to make.
The fact is that in this situation everyone knows what happened. A few key employees from one established place took a copy of the server with all the data files and software and all that, and went to establish a competitor in an adjoining state. Same product, 25% cheaper. That 25% is almost entirely made up by the fact that they did not license the software everyone else has to pay for.
In this case, private litigation is useless and slow. The software company and several established reputable companies ended up being run out of business by a truly awful display of poor ethics.
Pirates destroyed the lives of many honest people here. This software package that was cracked and passed around so viciously on many of the big warez networks was the lifeblood of a vibrant partnership of interests. And it was trashed so that a quick buck could be made by a few destructive people (who ended up closing up shop when the easy money was over; they didn't charge enough or save enough to make it through the long slow periods that are inherent in the industry).
Bottom line is that this was a true shame. And it's not all that uncommon. Government acts on behalf of people, and many times, that means acting on behalf of businesses. It's sure easy to be pissed about the FBI spending moneny on anti-piracy, but it has very real economic effects.
Law-enforcement, including the FBI, is generally well-funded. There really isn't a great battle for r
But no matter. It takes very strong magnets to erase today's high density media. Yes, you can erase (or at least seriously distort the data) a floppy or cassette tape with your average magnet, but to erase a DLT tape requires something much more powerful. As for a hard drive, I'd expect the required strength to be similar to that of a DLT.
Why do I know this? Because we upgraded our DLT drive to a model that puts more data (20 gb native vs. 10 gb native) on the same tapes. But the tapes needed to be erased before it would use the higher density (and the drive couldn't do it itself.) A standard bulk tape eraser would NOT do it -- it didn't affect the tapes at all, no matter how much we tried. Neither would a monitor degauser. After some investigation, I found that this wasn't expected to work, and a company that could erase the tapes for us for about $1/each. Worked nicely ...
while not going after companies that use pirated software
You're kidding, right? The BSA actively goes after companies that use pirated software. Canada has CAAST who is also actively pursuing companies that use pirates software.
So where did you dig up the fact that the software industry is only going after college students and not companies again?
Saying Android is a family of phones is akin to saying Linux is a family of PCs.
Residual effect deals with the alignment of the heads on the disks. For each write, they arent perfectly in alignment with the last one, so older tracks get left as portions. The reason you dont see random r/w errors on a regular basis is that the disk itself masks them from you, they happen, but the disk wrote the data in several seperate places for just this purpose. A 40GB disk can actually hold a LOT more than 40GB, if you discount error correct and just wrote everything once to the disk.
Interesting, the concept of ownership is a construct to begin with. Most of these things 100 years ago were in the public domain. Lately the copyright, which was originally designed to protect the creator of the work and for some limited time his/her family, has comodotized the I.P. so it can be bought and sold by an "owner" not the creator, which makes a marked that wants to protect its assets, but for the most part, assests it did not create. Fairly recent legislation extended that period to much longer than the lifetime and family lifetime of anyone (priciply to protect Disney and the Steamboat Willy image).
If you were the creator of the work, I can see your beef. If you bought the work, or though a contract agreement with say a band or a scientist working for you, were able to "own" the work then it is a pervesion of the original intent of the law or if you will a much used "side effect" of the law.
If someone copies your song, have you lost it. No. If someone copies your image, have you lost it. No. If someone copies your program, have you lost it, No. What you have lost is the posibility of making money off that song, image, program... And it is property that you only own for a period of time that the law allows you to make an exclusive profit off it. A personal monopoly if you will. But that passes into the public domain as it should.
I think we need to go back to the 35 years it used to be, and get back protecting peoples life and safety not corporate profits.
Really, busting young kids by the FBI (not in this case) as mega criminals. Our businesses are Scrooging is up a little too much this holiday season.
No source code was stolen: a working copy of the software - which was newly setup not to require activation, and heavy onerus copy protection - was taken.
And what makes you call that "cracking"?
There was a small binary hack applied to a copy that was floating around. Certain advanced (dangerous) features of the software could only be executed with a support person on the phone. To control access you had to do a challenge/response with the support person. This was stepped over using a simple decompiler and a minor change.
Should have been more clear.
to GET access to other people massive shares so you can find some rare, hard to find file, you have to SHARE a massive ammount.
Actually copying without paying (theft) is not a right. It says so right there in the US Code and does not mention anything about copying in the Constitution.
Um...no.
Theft is when I take something from you, in such a way as to incur loss. For example, if I take your wallet, you no longer have it. You have experienced loss, thus taking your wallet is theft.
Copyright Infringement is very different. If I download a copy of a song, album, movie, or piece of software, the original is still there, and still in the hands of the person who "owns" it. They have experienced no loss. They still have everything they had before I downloaded anything. Therefore it's not theft. The person making the download available has, however, infringed the author's copyright, if this was done without permission.
Ahh, but stealing is a criminal offense. Copyright Violation is (except in recent select circumstances) a civil violation.
A used car salesman sells you a lemon, you cannot have him arrested, rather you have to sue him. Civil violations are considered less of a legal probelm than criminal ones.
Just a Tuna in the Sea of Life
They release a particular film. Nobody else can distribute this film without their permission. Therefore they have a monopoly over this distribution.
This monopoly is state controlled becase the state enforces this monopoly with copyright laws.
You may think this is a good thing. I may not, in certain circumstances, disagree with you. Nevertheless you do have to recognise that this is a state controlled monopoly.