Slashdot Mirror
Inside the Shadow Internet
Paladin144 writes "Wired has a report about the mysterious 'pirate networks' that obtain new movies, music & games before they are released and spread them throughout the net. It's not as simple as putting a movie on LimeWire. These people are highly organized and very paranoid about secrecy. They maintain a hidden network of top-level FTP sites that get the best files first and allow them to trickle down the pyramid and into many a slashdotter's sweaty little fingers."
Well... I used to be apart of one of the pyramids, before I got caught.
I used to have access to the Distro section of an elite IRC channel, known across the net.
They would give movies to those few, who would then take them to the regular channel.
It's really crazy, and insanly hard to get in to, but you would get stuff very early.
Also, easier to get caught, as I found out.
These people talk and probably spend a better part of the day or night on IRChat and do so because they have no more social life, than the average /.er.
God bless them
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
The first rule of the shadow internet is, you do not talk about the shadow internet. ...
The second rule of the shadow internet is, you DO NOT talk about the shadow internet.
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.
The tone of the Slashdot article summary makes these people sound like rather romantic pirates (in the original sense), having exciting adventures with clandestine societies and having a strict code of secrecy.
The truth of the matter, as the article reveals, is that it's people like these that caused so many problems for our friends at Valve and are responsible for most of the other irritating leaks of software. While I'm for P2P, fair use, BitTorrent et al as much as the next Slashdotter, I don't think these people are really up to any good. They are not much more than Internet criminals.
apterous.org
All I want to know is where to get FlexLM crack kits... All the files I got that were supposed to be like this great information were copy-and-paste jobs of 1994 usenet posts.
spending hours and hours developing contacts so you can get a copy of a movie filmed from inside a theater.
yeah, that'll hurt the industry.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Well, that's a great way to portray yourself to the world. Yep, sounds like Linux users are a bunch sweaty, movie-stealing, game-theiving copyright-infriging hairly smelly hippies.
Nothing like reinforcing a stereotype on a Saturday night.
Back in the day, these sites were run on BBSs whose phone numbers were non-published and which only a few people had access to. These days it's FTP sites, but the principle is the same. And frequently it's not their own FTP sites, but someone else's site which isn't properly secured, but this happens more at the lower levels.
Anyway, the networks run the same as they always have. You're either in or you're out. And most people are out.
How am I supposed to fit a pithy, relevant quote into 120 characters?
Without the threat of piracy, its a good bet that CD's and DVD prices would be 50-100% higher than they are today.
If economics and history teach us anything, its that producers of any product, whether its widgets or music, or movies, will raise the price as high as they can in the absence of any competition.
Since Government sponsered "Intellectual Property" is a defacto monopoly supported by the government, the only relief we have is to just grab the stuff if they charge too much.
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You live with your parents?
" so many problems for our friends at Valve"
Valve is a business. They're not your pal, they're not your relative, they're not the cool people next door.
They're a business that is out to make money. Never forget that about any company. Even Apple.
I think I just read about these guys in The Da Vinci Code.
.. not 'shadow internet'.
Virtual Private Network.
The oh-so subtle difference between positions (shadow internet vs. VPN) is that if someone does a google for VPN, they'll realize just how damn easy it is.
"Shadow Internet"-way just sounds comic-book super-hero, and as we all know thats as literary as most peoples thoughts go, it won't be obvious that 'any joe can build their own private and secret Internet on top of the Internet'.
(Not just 'elite techno-psycho-fascist' types hell-bent on destroying 'systems'. *Anyone*.)
Obscure, eh?
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Anyway, I always wondered that is they kept things such a secret, how does *anyone* find out about them, or get access to them, etc. I used to own a local ISP, had dual T1's and dealt with thousands of users and net-friends, spent sleepness nights +O on numerous icr #'s /ctcp & /dcc and fserving what I could get and give back... but nothign worked. And hell, at that time I was merely looking for early release of OS's, prior to buying them so that I could get a techincal jump on questions from customers who were running those OS's. I always bought my software, I merely liked being ahead of the game.
Never try to beat a professional at his own game!
Don't make me laugh. Anyone who belives for a moment that geeks racing each other to crack warez are going to defend their 'turf' with contracts against journalists is a fool.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
These villians have resorted to Gopherspace! No one will ever find them now.
If you do this, that would make the MPAA and the others "THE LIGHT" of the Internet. This makes me want to up-chuck TocoBell food and re-eat it.
And by that I mean AGE old struggle.
Every pirate eventually hits puberty, discovers girls, and suddenly has better things to do then rip off "da man". Just like almost all those hippies are now lawyers.
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
wired doesn't seem like the most honest magazine to me. they hype a lot of their stuff. about a year ago they had something about some programmer who was supposedly setting up cladestine gambling servers for the mob. no way to verify these stories, and obviously sensational. you make the connection
This sig is o Unfunny o Funny
Of course, I do recall many years ago being extremely envious of those folk who constantly upload the latest and greatest everywhere. The ones with the best ratios and the like. The guys that always annoyed the ones trying to download stuff on a ratio.
Of course, they had to be careful too - for the credo "there's no honor amongst thieves" holds true. May seem stupid, but one pissed-off kid, tired of fighting for access and stuff might just decide to screw it all and report the site. And it's not easy to balance the line - the kid you pissed off may just decide to make a "tip" out of spite or revenge. It's a tough life. The only thing that makes it easier is the ??AA - sure that guy on the FTP may piss you off, but the ??AA piss you off even more, so it's not worth making the "tip". (Just goes to show... even O'Reilly's Safari service gets notified of people pirating their books.)
Mess with the best, die like the rest.-Crash_Override
Now then, Dmitri, you know how we've always talked about the possibility of something going wrong with the Bomb...
This article, and whoever it was they interviewed... really has some of these guys pissed off. http://www.vcdquality.com/index.php?page=nfo&id=46 020
The article didn't mention The Brains - the crackers who break the copy protections for games/apps or The Carders - people who use stolen credit cards to purchase a valid serial # for games/apps. Insiders are pretty rare.
And what's with the glorification? It's pretty boring stuff, expect when two groups release the same thing just a few minutes apart. You mainly sit in front of IRC all day long. In the Western countries it may be about bragging rights and prestige. In Asia, these releases are big business for a lot of computer stores. You feed your ego, they feed their family. What a waste of time.
With what's left of P2P from the glory days, what do you expect from a bunch of ppl not wanting to get sued.
This was brought to you buy the Department of Redundancy Department
At that level of the game, it doesn't really matter what the bits are. It's about controlling the flow of the data. I really think at that level, they could care less whether the files eventually hit P2P or not. I'm sure there is a lot of stuff that no one really cares about (Gigli, anyone?), but it's new and it's important/valuable data to someone.
The upper reaches of the network are a "darknet," hidden behind layers of security. The sites use a "bounce" to hide their IP address, and members can log in only from trusted IP addresses already on file. Most transmissions between sites use heavy-duty encryption. Finally, they continually change the usernames and passwords required to log in.
I would think they'd just use freenet, tor or i2p and be done with it?
So the pirate the feds arrested, interrogated, and impounded in April, but didn't file charges yet against, is the Half-life guy. That narrows it down quite a bit.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
As far as I can tell, this story was about (or planted in support of) a P2P-distributed miniseries called "The Scene". Sponsored by Sony, this fake docudrama takes a member of one of these 0-day groups from someone who just wants to share, to someone getting paid to supply DVD pirates with video, and probably eventually to his being caught and prosecuted.
we read this the week before it was published.
THE INSIDER: Industry and theater employees run their own straight-to-video operations. Hackers looking for prerelease videogames target company servers. And before that long-awaited CD hits Amazon.com, moles inside disc-stamping plants have already got a copy.
Big deal - we had these 20 years ago, in 1985! Wired news, always on the cutting edge.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
A solution needs to be found for finding .torrent files that are cryptographically authenticated to be from a certain trusted release group. Then, third parties cant poison tthe network with fakes without cracking the trusted release group's keys.
Hmmm, once again a post about piracy seems to be populated with replies warning about The Danger, and telling how some guy has mended his ways and now refuses to be a pirate. Coincidence? An attempt to make file sharing seem a lot more risky than it is?
Don't these posts seem to have a real "Reefer Madness" feel to them?
What the Wired article really demonstrates is how it will continue to be difficult if not impossible to stop electronic piracy.
Even though I don't condone such theft, and would prefer that all media be acquired through legitimate channels, the fact is that the genie is out of the bottle. The folks who like to distribute music, film, and warez will continue to stay one technological step ahead of the RIAA, MPAA, and the police.
Three Squirrels
Or run by Dick Cheney from a secure location?
What is it with Vice Presidents getting all the crap jobs?
...But I digress. TREMBLE PUNY HUMANS!ONE DAY MY SPECIES WILL DESTROY YOU ALL!
My bad; I thought the Slashdot story was about this article.
Those damn internet criminals that take from the rich and give to the poor. How dare they be romanticized.
the guy who git half-life was german, and was arrested by the german police after the Germans learned that an American(HINT: it was his computer that was comprimised) was trying to lure hime to the states so the FBI could arrest him.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
so let the Billionaire Benefactors of Boneheaded Benevolence BITE it once in a while. Maybe the guy that invented the CD....WHO GETS NOTHING FOR HIS INVENTION...contrary to the propaganda from the well heeled....will have the last laugh.
Lets all sing a few verses of the 'Internationale'
for all of them and let the spirit of Lenin reach out from the grave and find a new Ekaterinberg for lords of the RIAA and MPAA.
I'd imagine there are probably about 10 - 15 major peering points for traffic exchange in the global internet (more, less, you tell me?) It would be very simple for law enforcement to do a quick top 100 users graph from those points, a little bit of correlation, weed out the obviously ok sites (CERN, etc) and voila! Your users exchanging gigs of data on a steady basis and out like sore thumbs. Then the Feds drop by for a closer look...
Has everyone forgotten that what appears to be a point to point connection in fact travels over many public routers, each of which are subject to whatever level of scrutiny it's owner feels like applying? They might not be able to tell exactly what you're exchanging, but based on timing and size, can make a decent guess.
the Feds have already infiltrated some or most of this, but there's no pressing reason to move in immediately. These people aren't scheduling gang hits or anything.
Maybe I'm naive.
My wife left a book someplace, and asked me to go get it. I spent 1.5 hours in traffic.
I got home and told her, next time I'll just work an extra hour. That way I can buy you a new book, and 4 more books for me.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
"The ack-acks have the law enforcement groups running their donut-encrusted behinds off on on things like these, so the best way to let others know, is not to be hasty about it."
Maybe the third rule should be "Don't underestimate thy enemy"?
"Swelled egos + big mouths = big trouble down the road."
Then again, don't.
Fuck Hollywood, ppl used to entertain themselves. Thety come along, steal our culture and /demand/ projected revenue.
Bluegrass sucks somehow, yet Buffy the Vampire Slayer rules - too bad ppl don't remember that hot chicks attended wicked hoedowns back when it was cool.
Sellout bitches.
"These people are highly organized and very paranoid about secrecy."
That`s why they made Wired.
They do a service to all the people who want movies, but do not want to get looks of pity from snot-nosed teenagers at blockbuster on fridays.
This article came out like 2 weeks ago moron
Am I the only one here old enough to remember Bulletin Boards and the 0-day-warez BBS's that cracked C=64 games on the day they were released?
In those days you had to be ElYte! to download at 1200 baud and you had the famous upload/download ratios.
And their system was usually even more secure and secret than what these so-called hackers have now -- usually because you had to know the sysop personally to get on those BBS systems.
However, if you were a decent social engineer, or just a decent chatter, you could usually talk you way into those places.
So really, what is the difference between now and then? The downloads are larger, the bandwidth is higher, the networks are more connected, but that's about it. It's basically the same stuff that been going on since the mid-80's and even before that (when people copied paper tape).
Why does "Wired" have to play it up like it's some cool new thing? Because piracy now is mainstream, and everyone wants to get into the action?
It's only a matter of time before we have a reality-TV show about this kind of lifestyle. But what the real dummies don't understand is that this is the same culture that has existed for decades.
How lame.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
on large public web sites by various techniques, all with the common property that they remain completely invisible to uninitiated visitors of the sites. One technique involves embedding the information within a coded image such as a jpeg. Another involves making a Slashdot post as an AC.
"The tone of the Slashdot article summary makes these people sound like rather romantic pirates (in the original sense), having exciting adventures with clandestine societies and having a strict code of secrecy."
Sounds to me like the word "pirate" may be closer to the truth. Even if one's not speaking about the action it's centered around.
Well, you could just READ THE DAMNED ARTICLE.
Damnit Rucas. Damnit.
Isn't it possible that such a powerful and exclusive ruling group of warez illuminati could have supplied this reporter with false information? A supposed squealer dishing out red herrings? Or perhaps there are two duelling top-level release organizations and one is trying to rat the other out.
Thanks for posting this. Reminded me of the good old days when I was pretty heavily involved in the IRC pirate scene.
Shattered Glass
MOD HIM UP - HE'S CORRECT!
" Without the threat of piracy, its a good bet that CD's and DVD prices would be 50-100% higher than they are today."
Without threat of shoplifting the prices of good would be much higher.
"If economics and history teach us anything, its that producers of any product, whether its widgets or music, or movies, will raise the price as high as they can in the absence of any competition."
If history has taught us anything. A society decays from the individuals on up.
"Since Government sponsered "Intellectual Property" is a defacto monopoly supported by the government, the only relief we have is to just grab the stuff if they charge too much."
Relief from what? If you don't purchase the product, you get to keep your money.
You may still have that itch to purchase something? But it's not societies responsability to scratch it. At least OSS authors have the honesty to create their own solution to their itches.
If you mean relief from reprecussions of being a thief. Americas Most Wanted disproves that every week.
I'll choose mine.
Businesses may have a primary aim of making money but they are made of people too and those people do have an effect on how a company behaves, especially in smallish companies. There's no harm in supporting and appreciating a good company. At the very least it gives them some encouragement them to keep being good.
I don't know much about Valve and I've never played one of their games but they look like people trying hard to produce good software. There's no shame in liking that.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
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This is kinda funny to see.. However, anyone who has spent time roaming IRC knows this already. We have all been DCC'd a master list of FTP servers by some form of social engineering or another, or simply seen a list of what these servers contain.. Honestly, I think the real 'romantic pirates' are the guys actually ripping this stuff and selling it. You think they do it for free? Perhaps..
Hrrm... I usually just sign my name.
"Say what you want about the greedy 'rich people,' they got to be that way by trade, not theft."
Hahaaaaaaa! You have absolutely NO comprehension of how business operates, do you?
Ludlow. 20 dead, no convictions. That is business in action. It's only more subdued now.
Get a $10/hour job doing tech support, and you can see first run movies during matinee for $3.
DISCLAIMER: I`m not in any way part of the scene, so everything I say may be uninformed and wrong.
.nfo file?
This "pirate" network or "the scene" isn`t that hidden at all.
I`m pretty sure every slashdotter at least knows someone who knows someone who is in some way part of the scene. If a 14 y/o with some talent and enough free time can make it into the scene, so can almost anybody.
And from the very beginning of the scene when software was traded via snail mail the scene always needed new people because most people retire from the scene at some point of their lives.
And what is so secret about a group of people who don`t even release something without an
IMHO it is still pretty easy to get into the scene and maybe even into some higher ranks if you can provide anything scene groups need.
But that is not the point, the point is that they are still secret and paranoid enough that they will stay as long as they want.
If one group falls there will pop up three new ones.
You can almost compare it to how other illegal things are distributed. And you don`t think that any 14y/o will ever have any problems to get some weed, do you?
That said, please stop calling them "pirates", they don`t have ships, they don`t wear eye patches and peg legs and they don`t kill and rape. They are just some high level copyright infringers. And you can even argue about if copyright infringement is wrong at all.
Hey, you made it. I didn't think the idiot parade would be here so soon.
"What the Wired article really demonstrates is how it will continue to be difficult if not impossible to stop electronic piracy."
Destroying a society is never impossible. Just undesirable. The question is: would a tsunami in the US, or meteorite to the midland do what laws can't? Maybe humanity should step back and start making a realistic assessment of what's really important. Instead of fighting turf wars in a never ending spiral, which could easily be ended with the flick of a gods's finger (or a belching earth. it doesn't really matter who, or what).
What else do Santa's elves have to do in the off season, besides calibrating funny dice?
--
make install -not war
It shows an innocent-looking list of files from an FTP site. The uppermost file says, "Hellboy.SCREENER.Proper.READ NFO PRE VCD." Translation: The DVD of one of the year's biggest box office hits has been pirated two months before its intended release date. "The FBI would kill to be sitting here looking at this," he says.
Can't FBI wiretap all his network data by getting a warrant for the ISP and break in??
I would think they'd just use freenet, tor or i2p and be done with it?
Or how about just sftp? The original "darknet" paper and articles suggested that filesharing would turn into from large anonymous groups to small groups of people that knew each other and were suspicious of newcomers
I remember discussions of ftp servers used for small sharing "clubs" and I can't figure out why sftp isn't used for this. Knowing how to set up OpenSSH properly is a widely held skill that has value outside "piracy." Use DSA authentication instead of passwords for a start.
It should be nearly impossible for outsiders to gain net access to the server. The mere presence of a secured box shouldn't be enough for court ordered physical accesss. While it's also possible to have encrypted filesystems, if they can get my box out of my house, I fscking give up.
I'm planning to write an sftp "browser" front end in python or maybe just figure out how to use rsync over an ssh tunnel.
Traffic analysis in the absence of IP "bouncing" (whatever that is) could reveal who's in the network, but not what they're trading. A "chatter" app that keeps the channels full of noise (or files- who's to know?) could make traffic analysis more difficult. I'd be willing to sacrifice download time so my real downloads can be hidden in an always-on 16kbps stream. I'm trying to share my 20GB of rock with a friend who has 50GB of jazz. If it takes a couple of weeks to exchange collections, that's OK.
Maybe we should just FedEx hard drives to each other.
"In fact, Forest freely admits to being a supplier. "I have bought everything from hard drives to complete computers for various people in the scene. I've probably bought 15 camcorders alone." He says he considers it a business expense, and writes it off on his taxes."
Wouldn't this be tax fraud? I'd think the FBI could pull a Capone on his ass and use him as the link to the topsites. I don't think the IRS would consider copyright violation a legitimate business. I certainly wouldn't shed a tear if he were busted for either copyright violation or tax fraud.
Elder statesman? He sounds like a poseur or wannabe that might have known someone who might have sortof known of someone else that was a courier for one of the second rate cracker networks who distributed their warez to ftp sites, newsgroups and other BBSs in their network.
It's somehow strangely comforting to know that not much has changed since I ran a dial-up BBS as well as the fact that Wired is still doing retreads of old news.
Thus spake the SysGoddess
Inside the Shadow Internet
That would make a nice SOUTH PARK episode title.
And judging from a previous SOUTH PARK episodes that dealt with copyright infringement and it`s socially context it might even be more insightful than a Wired article.
There was an article like this about the warez group in the summer 2004 issue of 2600. The difference being it was less sensationalized and more specific, going into more detail about FXP and IRC chans.
We'll double nail them with a slashdot effect for complaining. I love your work man.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
The Shadow Internet is just like the real internet, except we all have goatees.
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
So very true. I remember I was talking to some ops on this channel calle-*NO CARRIER*
"Whatsmore, I hear they are heavily encrypted nowadays as due to the FBI's recent involvement it is very, very secure. The pirates are paranoid."
Of course. However what get's most people is that they forget the intelligence community has been dealing with the paranoid, before there was computers, or an internet. Quite frankly the guys in the article are amateurs against that backdrop.
If I wanted to become a "courier" how could I go about doing that?
Did anyone else's bullshit detector get pegged by this?...
...Specificly, the "almost a year of reprogramming" part.
It seems that when people hear that the HL2 code was "stolen", they interpret that in the literal sense. It was "taken" from Valve so they had to "reprogram" it because they didn't have it anymore. This bogon seems to appear even among people who should know better (like Wired reporters).
I guess Orwell was right: Control language, control thought.
Imagine how productive OSS developers would be if they didn't "give away" all of their source code with every new version.
Dude, the mafia are stupid, sick fucking psychopaths. Not only do they hurt people, but they're BAD at what they do. And they turn on each other in a New York minute these days.
Stop watching your Sopranos boxed set.
Why not?
Without this duplication and distribution structure providing content, the P2P networks would run dry.
Holy flying pony... is the Wired author clueless...
I never realized how sad and pathetic the warez scene really is. A bunch of kids with only goal in their lives: to release warez! The saying "get a life" really takes on a new meaning. Hopefully, they'll all go to prison.
"Wouldn't this be tax fraud? "
Why should that be surprising? If an individual has demonstrated (repeatedly) that they don't give a damn about societies laws? Why should we be surprised that they would violate one or more of the other laws? Copyright infringement is a gateway crime to other crimes. Some harder than others. This is why I lamented awhile back that illegal P2Pers were trashing their futures, in exchange for some entertainment. No longer will they be trusted with anything, and it'll remain like a dark skeleton. Waiting to be used against them by the unscrupulous (I know what you did last summer.)
...because it's not about a book, it's about whether you care enough about her to go get that book.
And to think, it only took 19 years of marriage for me to learn this.
So THIS must be one of the other internets G-Dub was talking about...
"Haven't they?"
Can you provide peer-reviewed, scientific class proof that it did? Seems your side lacks as much proof, as you claim the other side does.
that had 1200 baud. I could type faster than my 300 could transmit.
But it was cool, 'cos I only had 64k. I was running a microsoft firmware too, in case ppl have forgotten.
... Doing a "user graph" like you say could be done, but it wouldn't be that easy. Think of how much data is going through the Mayes, or other major "junctions" of the Internet (big "I"). Granted every individual packer will have a source and a destination address, but the sheer number of packets going through these routers makes it difficult to do such large statistical analysis. That's not to say its impossible, just rather difficult.
Not to mention the legality of doing something like that. Courts don't issue search warrants for fishing expiditions, and although the government may be able to get into a Maye without a warrant, when two private ISPs meet up, they might not want to let them in.
And you can say Carnivoure all you like, but it looks for specific things and logs them. It examines everything and discards all but a small portion. Thats very different that keeping a small record of everything.
Encrpytion also makes any scrutiny irrelevant. Not to mention that most people want a privacy policy saying that not everything they do on line will be observed by Big Brother.
It's possible, but if it were simple, the Feds would be doing it.
CitrusTV (http://www.citrustv.net): the Nation's Oldest & Largest Entirely Student-Run Television Station
These people are nothing but a bunch of sick freaks!
WARNING: DO NOT LET DR. MARIO TOUCH YOUR GENITALS. HE IS NOT A REAL DOCTOR!
There is no way to validate the content of the Wired Article. The person who wrote it could very well have pulled the entire thing from their ass. I agree that there is a great deal of romanticism injected in to the story. The physical details of the parties involved read like some novel. I think a percentage of the story was made up. Fiction based on non fiction, but not experienced at that deep of a level first hand, thus the romanticism.
Prices are set by what the market will bear verses manufacturing costs. Is there excess profits at times, yes. Are there losses, absolutely. I hate these posts because they alway degenerate into taking the moral high ground for stealing. You aren't striking a blow for liberty by stealing. They didn't throw tea into the harbor to get free tea! They did it because of a lack of fair controls. The government taxed and there were no options, not even the vote. You have the option to not buy a film if the cost is too high. We aren't talking food and shelter here. Trust me you stop buying they will drop the prices. Be pissed at the people paying the high prices not the person selling their wares in a free market. It's called capitalism people.
"...Specificly, the "almost a year of reprogramming" part."
Depends on what was "reprogrammed"? Maybe since piracy effectively reduced the value of the product to zero. They spent a year putting value back into the product.
"Imagine how productive OSS developers would be if they didn't "give away" all of their source code with every new version."
OSS developers aren't a business, and aren't constrained by it's precepts.
"They maintain a hidden network of top-level FTP sites that get the best files first and allow them to trickle down the pyramid [...]"
Because there are sites that are called top sites doesn`t mean scene FTP sites are hirarchically organised. They are most certainly not.
If they would be they all would be gone a long time ago.
The best and most popular clubs in a town might be called "top clubs" by those who frequent them, but that doesn`t mean they control all other clubs in town or are directly connected with them in any way.
On a site note, it is pretty obvious that most content on top sites and p2p networks is originally leaked by journalists and other people that have pre release access to software, movies, music, etc...
I always wondered why you can't get a decent looking properly encoded movie on the web. Now I know why - it's 13 year olds doing it!
The article says that quality if very important. BS I say.
And you would know this because your a pirate? Or are you just pulling it off your AOL keyword list?
This guy's business is to tell the industry what the scene is doing. Keeping contacts in the scene by buying a camcorder is no different then taking somebody out to a fine restuarant. It could actually be legit.
CitrusTV (http://www.citrustv.net): the Nation's Oldest & Largest Entirely Student-Run Television Station
"... and it's a bit sad that they do. If they don't believe in copyrights/IP law, then the license under which most of them release open source material, the GPL, is invalid, as per their own beliefs. Not saying that their contributions should be thrown out, but it is a bit hypocritical."
It's worse than you can imagine. Any OSS they've touched is now tainted. Apparently pulling an SCO will now be much easier, and Microsofts allegations (and any potential IP attacks) will be much easier.
Even if there's no "infection" (ironic in the face of MS's 'GPL is a cancer' no?). The community will spend years defending itself (like the BSD'ers found out).
What's the moral of this lesson? Crimminals are no one's friend. Period.
Well stop looking and go to http://dcplusplus.sourceforge.net Direct Connect is your daddy and the secret is out. Want to be on top without any work? http://www.keydesigns.biz Order a dc server for as low as 15 dollars a month, heck they will even fill your hub up with users free of charge. Small contribution = unlimited amounts of unconditional access to shared files. Then again you can always be just a user and build up your stash to get into more exclusive hubs with better releases. My advise, start at the top and get what you want.
PRINT "Signature line broken."
GOTO 1
If it's these stupid kids I've run across on IRC, there's nothing elite about it... just a bunch of people stealing movies, and the kids on the university connections with more bandwidth get distro privileges. Until they get caught and expelled, of course.
Go to http://dcplusplus.sourceforge.net Direct Connect is your daddy and the secret is out. Want to be on top without any work? http://www.keydesigns.biz Order a dc server for as low as 15 dollars a month, heck they will even fill your hub up with users free of charge. Small contribution = unlimited amounts of unconditional access to shared files. Then again you can always be just a user and build up your stash to get into more exclusive hubs with better releases. My advise, start at the top and get what you want.
The net used to be a forum for openness, sharing, and community. It still is, of course, but now it's also a den of thievery and darkness. It's too bad.
One thing about this article is that it makes it seems as though the guys at the top of the pyramid are the ones to blame. They are, of course, but the little guys at the bottom of the pyramid are just as bad. If it weren't for the guys at the bottom, there wouldn't be guys at the top.
If you engage in illegal file sharing, the first place to point your finger should be in the mirror.
The late '80s was after a "generation" of pirates had been and gone; Apple II pirate boards, etc. If he's mid 40s in age and he got into it late '80s, he wasn't trying very hard.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Robin Hood didn't take from the rich and give to the poor; he took from the tax collectors and gave to the taxed.
Now, it turns out that most of the taxed were poor and most of the tax collectors were rich (or those working for the rich), but Robin Hood did not steal from, say, merchants and traders, who were better-off than average, nor did he give to beggars, who were worse-off than average.
Robin Hood should be romanticized because he fought against unfair taxation, not because of the rich-to-poor myth.
(Also, when he finally (re)gained his earlship, it wouldn't surprise me if his moral outlook changed and he engaged in some taxation himself.)
Note that the actions of these "pirates" and their cheerleaders has actually caused unfair taxation in places like Canada and Germany, in the form of tariffs on CDR media, computers, etc.
They should not be applauded.
Please do not take the above as an endorsement of the RIAA and MPAA and their non-American equivalents, who have engaged in some very scummy, immoral, sleazy, unethical, slimy activities.
Deciding who to root for in this conflict is like trying to decide who to root for in a conflict between the KKK and the Black Panthers in the 1960s and 1970s, or between Iraq and Iran in the 1980s, or between Bush and Gore/Kerry in the 2000s, or between the Israeli Defense Force and the PLO at the current time, etc.
Oh, one final thing: the copyright violators do not "take [steal] from the rich and give to the poor"; they steal from rich (??AA executives and lawyers, movie and record studios, A-list actors and musicians, etc.) and poor (non-A-list actors and musicians, extras, grips, concession stand operators, roadies, grunts who work in your local record store/DVD rental place/movie theater, etc.) alike, and give to all, rich or poor (but not too poor to be able to afford computers), who are willing to compromise their integrities by downloading copyrighted material to which they are not entitled.
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
"It's just that they used the system to create a license that prevents people from locking up software--and for that license to be invalid, so must be copyright."
1-Legal means aren't the only way to lock up anything.
2-No the genius of the GPL isn't a "poison pill" strategy. The genius is that if the GPL is found invalid, regular copyright takes over. A two-layered defense.
If there's no copyright then OSS becomes public domain. And as I mentioned with one. That's no defense at all (it wasn't ment to be).
Hardly, but I've posted quite a bit on eBay forums, and after two years of doing that it's easy to see the common themes in online "communities". I'm obviously not going to admit to doing anything that is not proper, but why did my one comment, and the response to it repeating it, get moderated insightful? Because it's the truth. I can't help if you're offended because you have no definable social life. I do understand though, and know that online communities can be quite entertaining and net some very nice friends.
I wish you luck with your Internet life, and your real one.
VCDQuality.com isn't where warez comes from. They're merely a byproduct of the scene.
This site seems hidden from google: http://www.cargafiscal.com.ar/
some parts seem to be copied almost verbatim...
No, it's a VPN, one of the other "internets" that President Bush mentioned.
ssh allows to remotely run processes (maybe why ftp is used instead of sftp, because sftp requires ssh access). This is already used directly by things like sshfs. Why write a new browser when you can just use Nautilus on a mounted sshfs?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
There is no doubt distributing material which you do not have the rights to do is theft. This is wrong and illegal behavior. But like prohibition, when enough people do it the only answer is to make it legal to do it, but the key is to profit and control it. Liquor stores and distilleries now pay taxes. And in most US states (but not Kanada) it is legal to distil for personal use. The rum runners and gangsters, even the Kennedy's went legit. So why does the industry not allow us to download movies in an open format that works on Linux, OS X and Windows? Perhaps sign our name into the copy on download and allow us to download it for the cost of a DVD rental and allow coping to a PC or video player as needed providing it is for your own use? And do it so the customers like it. Hey, this maybe good for another useless patent? RIAA and MPAA SS tactics only cost money and keep lawyers and macavellian types happy but is doomed to fail because it does not address the social causes of the issue. And they are not always right. If they detect a lot of VPN traffic from my system and I copying as video or uploading a Linux or Solaris ISO images? But the whole industry needs to look at why people are doing this and adapt their marketing model to suit. Might I suggest plain old ISO DVD images or MPEG for download? You could have an image and stego the licensee into it and in years to come players could display the "Licensed to John W Smith... report violations to 1-800-123-MPAA". I sure would not let my images get out as I could loose my download privileges. Make it attractive. I hate going to Blockbuster when it is -29 degrees Celsius and snowing to return videos or eat late fees. My bet is if I could download first run movies for $5.00 and get older ones for $1.50 to $2.50 then I would call it my movie source of choice. It would also be worth $12 to download a season of Star Trek. Keep in mind, SBC and others make money at nicles but billions in the bank as so many us it. Change the business model
The other point is that if they were simply greedy and wanted to make up the losses they would raise prices. They haven't. A lot of research goes into pricing and seeing what the market will bear. If they raise prices there can be a backlash and they will actually loose money. Theaters have actually lost viewers because of prices but the high prices have offset this. The feedback has been strong though that if they raise prices more attendence will drop substantially so prices have been basically frozen for a number of years. People are only willing to pay so much so the maker has to find some way to make the prices reflect this. Eventually though the maker can be driven out of business by tight or nonexistent profit margins. Walmart has tighten profits for vendors so much that most are on the edge of bankruptcy. A small increase in energy prices can easily erase profits and drive them into a loss. They deal in high volume but the old making it up in volume joke applies. They can only sell at a loss for as long as the banks will float them credit. Ask the airlines about that one.
The more profit margins tighten up on entertainment the more the smaller companies that can't buffer the losses will go under. What you'll be left with are the very companies that people are now complaining about. Entertainment will be nothing but the major player. Same thing happened with the airlines. There used to be dozens of companies. Now there are just a few left and they are struggling. It wasn't thieft of product in their case but similar financial problems. Tightening profits drove out the little guy and left the majors. The best way to fight back is to patronize good films and buy good music and ignore the crap being put out. Downloading doesn't make a statement, patronizing products you like does. It provides financial resources for the better producers to make more music and films and takes that money away from the companies putting out the crap everyone is complaining about. Simply removing the money entirely makes the music and films go away. Without government funding they need a source of income to actually produce all this stuff people want to steal.
a movie group? even matine? and on the biggest topsites of the world? that frank guy is stupid n00b and article is bullsh*t.
"I wish you had have been around when Ghandi was alive to tell him that."
Actually I'm glad that Ghandi, and Martin Luther, and all the others you ride coat tail on are dead.
So they don't have to witness, you and yours taking their names in vain. And tarnishing their selfless acts with your selfishness.
There's not a noble bone in any copyright violaters body. And none will ever perform the "ultimate sacrifice that any man can do for another" and give their life for..."a movie".
Yes I'm glad all of them are dead, because I couldn't stand to look at the pain on their faces, as they're defiled.
I also love the quote: Valve stood helplessly by watching its big Christmas blockbuster turn into a lump of coal
Ease up on the melodrama man, Valve is doing JUST FINE.
Gee whiz ladies and gents...
I'm not the smartest geek on the planet but this sounds like another run of the mill law enforcement/media tag-team.
They know we geeks are parinoid. Probably because simple psychology will tell you anyone doing something they KNOW is wrong will be paranoid. So tell the world there's a mole, make em more paranoid hoping it might slow traffic by creating discent in the ranks. If they're _REALLY_ lucky someone will crack and they might actually get in... (NOT!)
I wonder how much wired got paid to run that article?
Now that I posted to slashdot I better find my asbestos underwear and my titanium/berrilum alloy helmet to protect me from the orbital mind control lasers.
Cheers,
Kili
First of all this is probably one of the first times I've seen an in depth article like this pulished in a while.
;)
I'll post this as anon.. this is purely fictional by all means, any relevancy to any actual events or information are mere chance. I will engulf you into what I can imagine to be such a network.
sources... I'll share what I know - this stuff is a waste of your time If you think it is cool; go get a job and make some money - fxping takes hours of your days away. Of course I wouln't know as IANAF (I am not a fxper)
As some of the posts have mentioned - these pyramids are meant to be stable and secure but they are not - you need to trust everyone involved.. and hey I am posting this so theres got to be leaks everywhere, right?
I noticed one poster admit to his dealings with said activity but in relation to an IRC channel (first post). First of all - this is where the security breaks down. IRC channels are public and so with your public channels you have your social engineering.
Through social engineering I was able to gain access to terrabyte pyramid sites within months. The key to gaining peoples trust? With all the secrecy they need someone to show off to. I will not go in depth on how I was able to pull this off, as this is another story for another day.
Back on topic...lets formulate a fictional structure of the shadow internet. Lets say all the really good ftp sites invite the people who are able to obtain the material which filters down to bittourrent etc. to use their space and bandwidth. In doing this - these ftps become a little more respected for having these groups using their resources. Lets say theoreticaly each shadown internet "release group" uses 5-10 of these big ftps. The people who use these ftps now have instant access to whatever these release groups make available, and so they now have a good "source". This is how you get into other ftps. People like your "source" so they want you to send to their ftps also as soon as you get it. Thus the pyramid begins. Now the second ftp in the chain is still a good "source" for many, and so it too sends the material down the pyramid. By now the material reaches IRC channel pyramid schems and is propagating down through smaller ftps and people are creating bittourrent seeds.
Given such a senerio, if you are able to social engineer your way onto the first or second ftp in the pyramid scheme, you can easily get into any ftp that more social engineering may bring you across.
Security on the higher up levels would probably be really tight, but for the second and third parts of the pyramid the security is probably translucent at best I'd assume. Since there can only be so many top level ftps, we'd have to assume some of the second level ftps are also top level ftps for smaller groups. Hence, there are top level pyramid schems nested in the existing pyramid schemes. Technically you oculd probably be at the root of the pyramid for a smaller "release group" but be the 4th-5th line in another pyramid. If taking this into account as being true, then it is not technically a pyramid. In a geeky sense, you can concider it as a filing system for a website. Only the admins and people delegated as trustable will have root access to the drives, but the web users see themselves as being the room. You can even have multiple virtual directorys and hence multiple roots. You can even nest the root of a website inside another folder for another website. Not altogether a pyramid you see, but an inter-twinding networking.
Some of these top level ftps might use a great deal of security. itent lookups, special ftp ports, mandatory IRC commands, and more social engineering. These people probably don't trust many people, so if someone is missing for a period of time they are no longer trusted, so you would probably have to maintain social contact with the peers of said networks frequently or you may be outcast.
As with all computer based solutions there is often a flaw.
I think somebody made all this up to impress Wired, and they fell for it.
As Stallman (Free Software, Free Society; pp. 190-191) said, calling it piracy implies that unauthorized copying is tantamount to armed robbery, kidnap, and murder on the high seas. They both involve theft of a sort -- but are vastly different. Copyright infringement generally involves cheating someone out of their rightful royalties; piracy involves depriving sailors and their employers of life, liberty, or property (maybe all three!) without due process of law. I'd say that copyright infringement is not morally tantamount to this.
i'm not making a case that what the warez pirates do is legit, i'm just making a case for a genuine philosophical difference, which DOES have trickle down implications for legal/ social differences, whether you admit to it in the spirit of intellectual honesty or not:
if you steal a laptop, you have one laptop. you will only have one laptop. the person you stole it from will have one less laptop. and it's difficult: you have to grab the laptop and run, in the real world, as yourself, risking physical meatspace repercussions.
but if you steal a song, you have as many copies of that song as you like. and the person you stole the song from still has that song. and it's effortless: hit a few buttons, and thousands of other people also have that song. and there are no cyberspace repercussions for this, perhaps even benefits such as a higher ranking or something (maybe real world repercussions of course though).
again, i am not making a case for this to be legit, i am just saying in the interest of intellectual honesty that "stealing atoms" is nothing like "stealing" bits, not at all.
so maybe the word "stealing" should apply to only atoms, and we need a new word to describe what this effortless copying of bits is that still has real world property implications, and i just don't know what that word is, but we need a new word here.
because to call stealing atoms to be the same thing as disallowed effortless copying of bits is not intellectually honest.
yes, we are talking about something bad and immoral, and we are talking about something that should have legal ramifications, but it is not honest to call what the warez pirates are doing to be "stealing."
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
One of the biggest complaints that is used as justification for downloads is that music is over priced. This argument wasn't made in the 1970s. I rarely heard anyone complain about the price of albums. Well gas and housing prices have since trippled at least since that time. As I remember in the 70s albums were selling for between $6 and $8. Can't remember for sure but I know it wasn't much less than this especially on average and that was for 45 minutes music, give or take. Today albums are 60 minutes or more and sell for on average $15 to $18 an album. Some for more, some less popular and or older considerably less. They haven't kept up with inflation. Where is the corporate greed I keep hearing about? Any increased profits have come from volume and squeezing the artist not the consumer. Trust me the more pressure put on profits the more it will fall to the artist to make up those losses. Execs don't take pay cuts royalties get cut. Runaway costs and runaway profits are a myth. The industry hasn't changed that much since the 60s and 70s. The numbers just don't bear up the inflated prices theory. I remember when I started working the minimum wage was something like $3.65 an hour. These days you are barely middle class at 50 grand a year. People make more and costs have increased across the board. Most of the cost in music is labor. The product itself is cheap. Labor costs have risen dramatically. The disks may be cheaper to produce but that was never a major factor in pricing. If the disk is 5% of the cost and it's cost of production is cut in half you can't cut album prices in half. Especially if labor has increased in the meantime. The overall costs may have actually increased inspite of a drop in the cost of striking the CD. There was a disparity in the early days when CD first came out. They were more expensive to produce and cost more. People liked them and paid the inflated prices. There was a period when costs dropped and prices stayed the same or increased. That time has passed. Increases have been slow in coming and costs continue to increase as growth, the source of most new profits, has stagnated. The industry is in a quadry, Downloading has stiffled growth but the markets can't bear higher prices. They can't win. Either they reduce downloading or profits drop. You can say they get what they deserve but remember overall profits haven't increased. Who's being greeding the companies that have been around doing business in much the same way since long before most downloaders were born or the downloaders themselves. Have profits changed or have attitudes about paying for music? If you want free music might I suggest a new invention called the radio?
"Copyright infringement is a gateway crime to other crimes."
Oh god please, no, stop me before I jaywalk again!
"P2P Madness", coming to a theatre near you (well, unless it's available for download...)
While botnets are designed primarily for three purposes: DDoSing, File Trading, and Spamming, they are not used for stealing source code.
Sorry, that's utter bullshit. Botnets sprang from the need to maintain IRC channels and, much like P2P networks, can be used for other more illicit activities.
Now most IRC networks provide built in bot services for each channel but this was not always the case. And even still many legitimate botnets exist for some other forms of channel maintenance and or things like polls, games, and information.
These '133T W4R3Z kiddies are somehow going to cough up the money to hire a hitman to go after Jeff Howe for mentioning the name of their little piracy operation?
Don't make me laugh.
I call B.S.
Thanks to piracy ppl consume many many more culture, otherwise they would not because of the price. Stuff like anime or books, for example, take years to arrive to where I live, if they do.
Students benefit from digitalized copyrighted books, not only poor students, also rich students who would not read nor buy the book if they have to pay for it.
Piracy helps ppl become more literate and intelligent.
For those who undestand spanish, search for an audio file called "las mentiras mas grandes sobre la piratedia ogg" , it's a talk by a funny spanish guy that will change your mind about piracy.
The very end of the article mentions how "Forest" has setup a company to promote stuff by actually seeding the topsites:
"The topsites don't care where their files come from, as long as no one else has them," he says. Last summer Jun Group dropped a collection of live videos and MP3s from Steve Winwood on the topsites. "We got 2.9 million downloads," says Forest, "and album sales took off."
It is interesting this guy could even find a client for his promotion methods given the outrage towards piracy within the industry.
Hexy - a strategy game for iPhone/iPod Touch
I mean, they are.. no--I mean, uh.. YES I'M AWESOME!
How do you type with boxing gloves on?
Okay, so pirateing blah blah blah, Bad blah blah blah. Think of some of the Advantages, I have gotten into so many types of music that i didint know i liked, thanks too all the mp3s on the internet. And there is alot of music that u can get from the internet, that you cant always get access too in ur local HMV. Another thing, im all for supporting the artist, but im not into supporting the MPAA and IRAA. The artits see maby 10% of the money thats from a CD sold in the stores. Another thing, Id much rather download a copy of a movie, find out if its good or not before I shell out 30$ to go do the whole Movie theater deal. I only see maby 3 movies come out a year that are actually worth the Money to see.
As for software... Lets take Adobe Photoshop for example, I love this program, but being a highschool student, there is no way I can afford Photoshop, or other such programs as 3D Studio Max. I have alot of friends that are now in the graphics industrie because they started off with illigal copys of software, Got good, got into a good collage, and now are makeing Big bucks doing what they love, And they all owe it too the pirate seen.
Just some things too think about.
"Phasing out the human race by voluntarily ceasing to breed will allow Earth's biosphere to return to good health."
Nowhere on their website do I seem to be able to find a reason why the good health of the biosphere is both mutually exclusive with and more important than the continued survival of even a reduced-population human race.
+++ATH0
You could re-phrase "Shadow Internet" as "the dark side of the internet". It has nothing to do with a network within a network, and everything to do with living in the shadow of the internet where you cannot see unless you are brought there.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
back when i started out in the scene, guys who were in geographic proximity would just bring a hard drive over. Capacity wasnt too large back then... the largest hard drive among my friends was 120 MB!
:)
For the most part in the early days we'd just run around with massive amounts of floppy disks.
even nowadays on occasion people send external hard drives over, fastest way to transfer 200+ Gigs of data
It's a commonly held belief that P2P is about sharing files. It's an appealing, democratic notion: Consumers rip the movies and music they buy and post them online. But that's not quite how it works. In reality, the number of files on the Net ripped from store-bought CDs, DVDs, and videogames is statistically negligible. People don't share what they buy; they share what is already being shared - the countless descendants of a single "Adam and Eve" file
Let's start with reason #1 for going to a filesharing network, YOU CAN'T GET IT LOCALLY OR AT ALL. Nowhere is this mentioned. Nor is the fact that only a tiny fraction of all media is still in commercial production. More importantly, I'm not going to find music from non RIAA acts in a music store or at WalMart. P2P is the only way to get music out of production and a good way to get new music by acts that are as good or better than monopoly pushed crap.
The whole purpose of copyright protection is to encourage publication, but file sharing turns that on it's head. Encouragement has traditionally been done by granting an exclusive franchise to the author. Authors never had much bargaining power, and now have virtually none, thanks to media consolidation brought on by insane copyright laws. The point of the exclusive franchise was to allow the publisher to recoup the price of the publication and make a little money, some of which might actually trickle down to the author. But today, THE COST OF PUBLICATION IS ESSENTIALLY ZERO. The whole basis of granting exclusive franchises in the first place has dissapeared.
Today, copyright is more restrictive than ever but it's not working. While media companies are indeed enjoying "best years ever" and record profits, they do so at everyone else's cost and fail while doing so. The very fact that people go to to P2P shows that traditional publishing is not meeting people's needs. The vast majority of YOUR CULTURE has been locked away in vaults, unpublished, until it has lost it's social relevance.
You say,
I don't condone such theft, and would prefer that all media be acquired through legitimate channels.
If you don't believe in theft, you should avoid all RIAA and MPAA publications. They are the biggest thieves of all. Support a local band or one that's giving it's music away by going to a show. You might be able to find them right there on your P2P client.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
That part was rediculous. The thought that it was the leak of the source code that would have unleased a wave of cheaters - instead of the wave of cheaters you always get anyway because games like these are never designed with any kinds of real security.
I think they just were not done and used that as an excuse.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
A few examples:
I think the writer desprarately tried to write something interesting and almost failed. Then he spiced it up so badly that it seems a pale shadow aof reality. He should have kept writing about desalination.
Say what you want about the greedy "rich people," they got to be that way by trade, not theft.
Most of the large fortunes you can name were reaped through amoral or unethical means.
Warren Delano (as in, Delano Roosevelt) got his money through the opium business.
Joseph Kennedy was involved not only in some shady stock deals, but later ballooned his fortune with alcohol during Prohibition.
John Jacob Astor made his initial fortune trading alcohol for furs with native americans.
Bill Gates bought QDOS from Tim Paterson for a pittance, only to license it to IBM for millions.
Of course, one could argue that these men weren't actually breaking any laws, they were simply taking advantage of the situations at hand while disregarding moral or ethical constraints that might bind us "normal" (read: unsuccessful) folk.
omg dawg u got to tell me the keyword for the shadow intarweb thing!!!!!!!!! that sounds so kewl!!!!!!!!
k thx
(wtf is an AOL User Voice anyway?...)
I actually loved the article. It was a cool read regardless of it's accuracy. I'm not into any of this distro-piriting-p2p stuff, but I know a few people who are and seem to almost live for it. My old apartment building was all networked via ethernet cables dropping out of windows and off balconys. The bulding was nextdoor to the ****** ambasadors residence and we picked up a wifi signal from their providers. Once the guys at the building figured out where the signal came from, they rented out an office in the building itself on the side facing our building block. (Its the Casablanca building by the GTS server-farm at the Zelivskeho Metro stop- that's a little guess the country trivia for anyone who might be reading) They then bought highpower wifi equipment and linked up our building directly to the buildings line. As I recall they never returned to the office, they just used the rented office to set up a large antenna to hook us up. I don't know how fast the connection was in technical terms, but we had almost as many movies and new releases online at our house as the big videostore i regularly rented at (before I moved to this place of course). Interestingly enough, (or unforutnatly enough) I figured out they were also responsible for quite a high volume of spam once my isp starting informing me that my Ip was regularly being blacklisted by spamcop and then relisted. Go figure.
This makes it seem like these movie warez groups are mafia-esque, dangerous underground groups. In reality, these are all 13 year olds (with some pathetic 33 year olds) living in their parents' house, or parents' basement, who all make Steve Urkel look like a scary college jock. And while it can get bad cam's of Star Wars Ep. 2 before theaters get it, their combined brain power all together still doesn't know what the inside of a vagina looks or feels like.
http://topsites.bvdesigns.net/?uid=2934
Hard to get into? Pfft. No damn way.
Back in my callow college years, I was a ripper for EPiC. I only did three or four releases; I was flush with the success of having learned to encode amateur porn using DivX (these were the heady days when DivX 3.11 with all that toolkit crap on top of it was the preferred encoding solution), and I put it to use.
The guys had an ad on one of the XDCC channels---#imp-iso on EFNet, if I recall---asking for encoders. So I joined a chat channel, they helped me get set up, I got a Netflix account, and started encoding.
Then Netflix didn't send me the DVDs, and kept charging me until I notified my card company and they stopped the autopayment. I don't know if it's changed since then, but there was no fucking way to get in touch with Netflix.
But in the meantime, I had ratio access to some great big FTP dump in Europe. I was, at the time, frickin' amazed at how easy it was, and how clearly the feds either (a) didn't care, at that point, or (b) were horribly inept. I leaned towards (a).
But, indeed, I was impressed at how sophisticated the tools (RaidenFTPD, mostly, seeming way, way better than the basic FTP daemons legit sites used) and organizations were, for people who never bothered to spell right or use there real names.
And it wasn't like it was a really big or impressive group like Centropy. (They were, maybe still are, the guys who had telesync releases of every new movie the week it was in the theater. Watchable ones, which was the impressive part.)
Ah, youth.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
...but the technology. Back in the day (Uh oh... Here we go...), a buddy and I were on one of the few non-ESS phone systems remaining in the country. Almost everything was still analog. Hacking that system was almost too easy (with the help of some online anarchy files and a phreaking utility), and that was good because 6 hour phone calls to Europe could get pricey back then.
:)
We also had no love for the phone company for a number of reasons - most of which were related to the absolutely shitty service (2400 was all we could manage on the local lines back then). In a strange twist (which I better understand now), error-free 9600 connections were only possible when making a call OUTSIDE the local area. Anything faster locally would get you garbage! Then you had the fact that most of our local calling area consisted of cow pastures and rolling hills full of NO BBS's! All of which meant long distance was a must.
We were fairly small time specializing in Atari ST warez at 2400 baud. Nonetheless, our access to Europe got us lots of download credits more locally. Our big break came when we met one of the big couriers in the state. To show how there is simply no honor among thieves, we looked over his shoulder when he logged into the 'Dark City of Fear'. This was a BBS out of Philly with lots of Satanic symbols, characters randomized in upper and lower case, and tons of warez and anarchy files. When we got back home, we found we had the top access level and carefully picked a few files to seed elsewhere.
Using this guy's account got us more of the latest and enabled us to compete with some of the newer, USR 19200 modem users (which were close to $800 at the time). We were even able to seed some of DCoF's files since our Euro connections liked seeing what few American warez we had.
So why did we do it? It was fun challenging the system. It was cool to see what we could get - especially since Atari ST software was all but impossible to find anyway. Sometimes the group intros/demo were far more interesting than the games/utilities we got. Also, since this was before the public form of the Internet, it was our chance to be armchair world travellers, 'meeting' people online whose first language wasn't necessarily English.
It ended when I moved away. My buddy continued it for a while, but was busted by the BellCops three months later. He got a $700 fine - 100 times that would probably have been more accurate! Damnit, I told him to rotate those codes!!!
Good times being a punk in the underground.
real pirates don't talk about their pirating - much less to Wired.
Take a popular tech subject at the moment (all those **AA suits going atm) that's near and dear to everyone, throw in enough techno stuff that makes it sound real enough to who know just enough... & voiola - everyone's a courier or knows one personally.
All this article is is a fictious scare tactic aimed at making the casual, would-be pirates get nervous and stop joining P2P/torrent networks. Hopefully it works.
Something is missing in the report: the business of pirate copies. Sure - it mentiones people who buy camcorders and computers. But how can you pay the traffic? Who pays your lawyer? Will he get a 10000$ camcorder? There are people out there who sell the copies - and they are part of the network.
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"In fact, Forest believes the scene will eventually go legit, and he's even started a company, called Jun Group, that uses the topsites to promote movies, musicians, and TV shows."
Now, let's pretend you are FBI. You would go to http://jungroup.com. Click on people. Find those guys and interrogate them, some of them is "Bruce Forest"...
Why are they telling things which gets them identified?
"Unlike the flawed anolgy to shoplifting where something actually is stolen, depriving the original owner the ability to sell it, the owner of the original still has it and can sell it."#
1) In both, there's the movement of something of value from one individual to another.
2) With perfect duplication, and distribution. The original owner is essentially competing with themselves.
3) The original owner has financial obligations plus the original.(1) While the pirate has none of the financial obligations that the original owner has, and has a perfect copy.
4 ) Stealing of a physical object likewise leaves the original owner with a financial burden, and the thief with none of that cost plus the item.
5 ) The only difference is that in the latter the original owner isn't competing with a shadow of themselves, while in the former they are.
6) So one can conclude that piracy is actually a worse situation than stealing on a physical object.
(1) The scales are even more unequal when it comes to distribution methods. The pirates distribution method favours someone already connected. The original owner even with benefit of same network has the additional burden of servicing those customers that the pirate can't easily reach. Customers who can't/will not be connected to the network. The pirate also doesn't have an advertising network, but benefits from the effects of the original owners efforts in that regard.
So essentially piracy is a non-business competing with a business, using the product of the business against them.*
*Which is were all the "Robin Hood" arguments come from. Problem with that is that the only one's burdened with the "losses" are the honest customers. They cover all the business costs and the profit margin. Not an unlimited process, I assure you. Nor something pirates face.
#I'm thinking aloud. Don't mind me.
1-Are you making the argument that only physical stealing can have negative reprecussions?*
2-What does that mean for inflation, and identity theft? Or those other "intangiables" we have.
3-Maybe, just maybe what's stolen isn't "atoms" or"waves", or any other form you care to wish for. But "value"
"1. The property or aggregate properties of a thing by which it is rendered useful or desirable, or the degree of such property or sum of properties; worth; excellence; utility; importance."
Something that "atoms" and "intangiables" can both have.
*Maybe the stealing of physical objects has the same positive effects that you attribute to intangibles? Increase brand awareness. Steal Nikes.
2600 did an article on this subject last summer, discussing the terminology and such.
y 018kx.jpg/
y 029sx.jpg/
http://img144.exs.cx/img144/3299/2600guidetopirac
http://img144.exs.cx/img144/5493/2600guidetopirac
I hear there's rumors on the shadow internets!
"My loyalty and respect aren't for sale."
Number11 meet Apple user. Apple user meet number11. Talk amoungst yourselves. And we do take American Express.
"The core of the GPL is still 'copyleft': copyright turned upside down. It is all about freedom surviving in a hostile enviroment."
Pretty much. However the public domain isn't a benign environment either. The GPL organizers recognized that fact. Else they could have adopted public domain, and simply used the same technique that BSDers use to keep ahead.
Sorry, JeffTL, but the word "piracy" is not meant in a literal sense, just like people who wear sneakers are not "sneaky" and a modern laser printer does not really "print" like a printing press of old.
I have heard this word game a lot, and it was always just a trick to argue that copyright infringement is not that bad. Copyright pirates do not help anybody but themselves. They are parasites and freeloaders. If you want free stuff, join the open source movement.
If only all of this effort was better used to produce independent content (movies and games) outside of Hollywood tripe or bland sequels from uninspired game studios, eh?
'Thats they exact same thing a banana wrench monkey.'
To hear studio executives tell it, the bootleg went straight to the P2P networks and spread like a contagion. "Bullshit," says Forest. "Trying to distribute The Hulk through the P2Ps would take months, not hours."
......
In a 24 hr period wouldn't the distribution be something like 2 to the power 24?
Isn't that like saying P2P isn't capable of doing what it was designed to do?
Start with a one movie/one hour download at midnight. At 1am you have 2 copies, at 3am 4 copies
Plus, according to Nielsen and NPD, there are now 10+ million users on P2P.
From the desk of the lllegal Pirates of the Internet Who Must Steal Everything No Matter What, Re the article:
No text.
Re RMS:
That information wants to be free. Those who knew in the days when goat buggery was "Wired" not "Tired" give much hot grits to our distributors.
Signed, The Illegal Pirates of the Internet Who Must Steal Everything No Matter What
p.s. USDA /\
They're a business that is out to make money. Never forget that about any company. Even Apple.
Right on. That's what I always say about Apple, when someone tells me how "we only have friends at Apple, right?":
"We might only have friends at Apple, but they only have customers"
(dislaimer yada yada typed on powermac yada yada OS X rocks yada yada)
Hello! I'm a disaster waiting to happen!
He's found the plagarist.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Note that the actions of these "pirates" and their cheerleaders has actually caused unfair taxation in places like Canada and Germany, in the form of tariffs on CDR media, computers, etc. They should not be applauded.
I'm always annoyed to read things like this. The only people who caused unfair taxation are the lunkheads who actually passed the taxes into laws. They're the ones who should get 100% of the blame.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
I have been a part of the highest level of the scene. What made me quit the scene was simply the time it took - time which actually wasn't needed for me in order to maintain my high level position - it was the thrill, the amusement and the late nights when the big releases were pre'd.
;)) then it also must be in the right location of the world to get the right affils (groups to pre) on them, I mean having 1-2 .us site's with i.e. MONEY on them is enougth - also, sites compete with each other. After the link is found its speedtested to the high ranked sites around the world - .us --> .nl 7MB/s+ would be considerd 'okay' for a 100mbit (would get the competition in ex. the TV scene started from the dominating LOL group).
Anyway, I wanted to reply to this thread as I think that not many seem to relize what the scene really is. Being a part of a "elite IRC channel" is NOT the scene. The scene goes beyond this, and these distro sites and channels are the sources that ppl inside the scene sees as the 1st main source of attention to the feds, as its from here the release goes onto P2P and become widly spread (the whole purpose of the scene is to keep it inside the small box, but few individuals makes this impossible, this is alot because of jealousy and the need to brag as these individuals are ppl who are lower down in the scene pyramid.)
The scene has become a place of lies and status, and as time has passed MORE money has come to be involved. I think that it has been hard to miss what happend to a few FLT members in Operation FastLink (ironic operation name) - One FLT member had sold access to a pretty big site, one of the topsites (ranked very highly when I was in the scene). I mean paying for access to such a site might not seem like that much, but often a minimum price can be like 1-2TB SCSI drives for 1-2 leech accounts, and that is (think 2 years ago) alot of money.
Back to my thoughts about what the scene really is beyond the Topsites (ranked by charts updated weekly, different charts exist depending on release type, i.e. APPS-iSO, iSO (games), MP3 and so on, also site-rings (a number of sites hooked together carrying currier-groups which compete in who's curried the most each week)), and the thousands of smaller sites around. Topsites are managed by different groups, curriers grp with maybe a few releases, but also bigger groups (FLT had their own local sites which the pre'd on to keep the FTL-iSO core secret). These highly ranked sites are very expensive to keep up. The work behind getting one of these running is enormous. The 1st thing which is done is finding the link, offcourse 100mbit+ (2,5Gbit is nice
Link is fine, then there is all the HW which is required, if u find this guy who is hooked on 2TB 100mbit, you kinda know that its a fed or something is seriously wrong. Anyway, HW is expensive - Getting a damn stable BOX packed with TB's of ususal IDE and some SCSI for that 100mbit is not that cheap. A new site need to have everything to get the grps to affil on it, and off course, whoever is setting everything up needs to know the right ppl to push everything around. Sometimes even trips can be made to the location of the server to get everything right done right (glFTPd and traffic bncers and other various TCLs can be bitchy)... So what are we up for? $3000-4000 for just the set-up? For this HW-suppliers are found (they get leech). BW is usually what comes free in the scence that its leeched on big fat corporate pipes, but transfer would be counted, depending on type of site, from 15TB to 1PB/mnth...
This was only some information that i would like to share to make ppl realise what kinda money is being spent on other things then getting movie-screnners and such (Think about what it costs to maintain the fastest HDTV recorder in the scene)
Its a very secret society were no1 really knows who the other ppl are (some exceptions) - another fact is that the idea was not to make the releases public (isonews, nforce, swedupe, mp3shitter and so on, P2P, stupid egoistic individuals and so on)
I'm though very glad that I quit this nonsense! Happy New Year!
As someone already pointed out, you do not talk about these things, you only act. Bragging is for losers who will get caught eventually and take others down with their stupdity.
"Fridge" Perry, former Chicago Bears linebacker and Super Bowl ring holder, could run 50 yards in less than 5 sec. in spite of an overbearing 400+ pounds of weight.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
You have some interesting thoughts, but your arguments are as sloppy as your use of grammar. And for goodness sake, start employing some <BR>'s and <P>'s.
Otherwise, just stop typing. Please.
-FL
they don't know what they are talking about. wired has been losing its credibility and this surely won't help fix it
I have been a part of the highest level of the scene. What made me quit the scene was simply the time it took - time which actually wasn't needed for me in order to maintain my high level position - it was the thrill, the amusement and the late nights when the big releases were pre'd. Anyway, I wanted to reply to this thread as I think that not many seem to relize what the scene really is. Being a part of a "elite IRC channel" is NOT the scene. The scene goes beyond this, and these distro sites and channels are the sources that ppl inside the scene sees as the 1st main source of attention to the feds, as its from here the release goes onto P2P and become widly spread (the whole purpose of the scene is to keep it inside the small box, but few individuals makes this impossible, this is alot because of jealousy and the need to brag as these individuals are ppl who are lower down in the scene pyramid.) The scene has become a place of lies and status, and as time has passed MORE money has come to be involved. I think that it has been hard to miss what happend to a few FLT members in Operation FastLink (ironic operation name) - One FLT member had sold access to a pretty big site, one of the topsites (ranked very highly when I was in the scene). I mean paying for access to such a site might not seem like that much, but often a minimum price can be like 1-2TB SCSI drives for 1-2 leech accounts, and that is (think 2 years ago) alot of money. Back to my thoughts about what the scene really is beyond the Topsites (ranked by charts updated weekly, different charts exist depending on release type, i.e. APPS-iSO, iSO (games), MP3 and so on, also site-rings (a number of sites hooked together carrying currier-groups which compete in who's curried the most each week)), and the thousands of smaller sites around. Topsites are managed by different groups, curriers grp with maybe a few releases, but also bigger groups (FLT had their own local sites which the pre'd on to keep the FTL-iSO core secret). These highly ranked sites are very expensive to keep up. The work behind getting one of these running is enormous. The 1st thing which is done is finding the link, offcourse 100mbit+ (2,5Gbit is nice ;)) then it also must be in the right location of the world to get the right affils (groups to pre) on them, I mean having 1-2 .us site's with i.e. MONEY on them is enougth - also, sites compete with each other. After the link is found its speedtested to the high ranked sites around the world - .us --> .nl 7MB/s+ would be considerd 'okay' for a 100mbit (would get the competition in ex. the TV scene started from the dominating LOL group).
Link is fine, then there is all the HW which is required, if u find this guy who is hooked on 2TB 100mbit, you kinda know that its a fed or something is seriously wrong. Anyway, HW is expensive - Getting a damn stable BOX packed with TB's of ususal IDE and some SCSI for that 100mbit is not that cheap. A new site need to have everything to get the grps to affil on it, and off course, whoever is setting everything up needs to know the right ppl to push everything around. Sometimes even trips can be made to the location of the server to get everything right done right (glFTPd and traffic bncers and other various TCLs can be bitchy)... So what are we up for? $3000-4000 for just the set-up? For this HW-suppliers are found (they get leech). BW is usually what comes free in the scence that its leeched on big fat corporate pipes, but transfer would be counted, depending on type of site, from 15TB to 1PB/mnth...
This was only some information that i would like to share to make ppl realise what kinda money is being spent on other things then getting movie-screnners and such (Think about what it costs to maintain the fastest HDTV recorder in the scene)
Its a very secret society were no1 really knows who the other ppl are (some exceptions) - another fact is that the idea was not to make the releases public (isonews, nforce, swedupe, mp3shitter and so on, P2P, stupid egoistic individuals and so on)
I'm though very glad that I quit this nonsense! Happy New Year!
How to loose your job with a single interview.
Bruce Forest, a self-described "elder statesman" in the piracy scene, started ripping and trading in the ancient days of the late '80s. While he no longer actively traffics in bootlegged media, he maintains contacts that give him access to the most exclusive topsites. What the topsites don't know is that three years ago, Forest came in from the cold. "Basically, I'm a double agent," he concedes. "Though I don't fink anyone out. I'm not a cop."
'Forest runs his business from the first floor of his rural Connecticut home. He's in his mid-40s but moves with jerky, adolescent energy. His brown hair is in perpetual disarray, and he pads around his office with bare feet, dressed in cargo shorts and a faded polo. Gold and platinum albums from his days as a producer at Island Records, MCA, and Arista line one wall.'
This story smokes like crack.
For a start the last I read about half-life 2 source was that the game wasn't any where near complete and would have taken a year to get to the state it's currently in.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Name four men that Anna Nicole Smith would date without hesitation.
From the article:
"30 or so underground, highly secretive servers where nearly all of the unlicensed music, movies, and videogames available on the Internet originate."
"One file became 30 files became 3,000 files became 300,000 files"
"You do not need some 350-pound hit man with a Glock at your front door."
"I hear a soft ping. "That tells me a movie just made its first appearance on a topsite.""
Very nice story. Top it off with a soft ping.
"As a consultant for one of the world's largest entertainment companies, Forest notifies his bosses whenever one of their movies appears on a topsite."
"In 24 hours, SMF's single version of The Hulk had metastasized into at least 50,000 copies. Within 72 hours, the movie was all over the most popular P2P networks. Before it reached even a single shared file folder on Kazaa, Forest estimates there were already several hundred thousand copies in circulation, guaranteeing that casual computer users would be able to find and download it easily."
OK, the guy gets financed as a consultant by the large record companies and they give him enough money so that he can not only afford a nice living and very expensive hardware, he also takes money he gets from the movie/record industry and donates hardware to piracy groups, just like other rich patrons do.
Also tens of thousands of little "helpers" race to put a new file that "trickled down" on more and more online space. Where would they put it? Certainly not their own servers that they rented. Did they crack their own computers and installed ftps on them? Do they own botnets?
P2P is there for a reason. My brother does Kazaa and they don't really dl movies off this. The eDonkey networks do. And the distribution is really simple. Just take a hub at some college with a fat connection and the eDonkey protocol (forced upload of at least the file you just dl, somewhat like torrents) and the clients will do the rest for this eDonkey hub. Though I certainly believe
""Bullshit," says Forest. "Trying to distribute The Hulk through the P2Ps would take months, not hours." That's because files on the public file-sharing networks, where no single node is much more powerful than the next, spread at a glacial pace."
that, modern p2p doesn't work this way anymore. Direct Connect and eDonkey or BitTorrent are not Gnutella anymore. Forest puts the right word at the beginning of this paragraph.
"The top telesync groups, like Centropy, VideoCD, and TCF, are using $10,000 camcorders they get directly from Japan, cams you can't find in the US," says Frank. The least desirable releases are "cams," made by an audience member with a camcorder.
I ask Frank how his group could afford such exotic toys. "People buy them for us," he says, as if this explains everything. "Usually, these people were in the scene at one time, and now they just want free downloads without having to contribute." As it turns out, much of the extensive hardware - from superfast processors to servers with terabytes of storage - are donated by these well-heeled patrons.
Do topsites exist? Certainly! Specialized rippers? Absolutely! But is there a vast conspiracy with topsites for every genre with an organized hierarchy of thousands of people toiling away to pirate every singe piece of IP on the market like the article suggests? I don't think so!
Some genres have fans. Some of those organize and make topsites. But from there on I don't believe in thousands of little racers mainly because modern p2p apps are way beyond this.
Huh. I thought the Shadow Internet was just an informal name given to gestalt of all the packets that have the Evil Bit set.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
You have to understand that a lot of people who download material and "infringe" have to do it because of their mindset. Take teenagers for example. If they were not allowed to do that, they will turn to other things. Which will most likely be much werse. I.e. fights on the streets or more drugs, ... or stealing cars just for a fun drive.
:)
I can go on and on with examples of other theft or much more annoying to society things that can be done. 15 years ago, when I was a kid back in Moscow oh man how much real crazy stuff I have done. I'd say God bless the Internet and all these semi-legal activities that do not really hurt people directly.
The monetary loss from a copy infringement is a huge BS. Yes it is noticeable. I can say that from the piracy of one of the programs we wrote for PDAs and try to sell. Over half of our soft is pirated as we can see from the stats. And it's pretty sad since its the money I live on. BUT I would much rather prefer people to do that than for example vandalizing my car (because of illegal mind deprevation). Stealing my CD player, or breaking into my house.
On a large scale, I'd say FBI realises the situation and that's a reason why they don't shut down everyone at once. If they do, US will definitely have many problems inside the country. And most people that will commit the annoying small crimes will be left uncaught. Most likely physical targets will be cars, roads, small stores, windows, garbage on the streets...
I can go on. Its not pretty. I'd much rather see someone stuffing his 100Gb drive with illegal movies and MPAA shut the hell up about this whole "money loosing". They have a lot of billions. They are definitely not loosing. That's why I personally contributed $100 to the LokiTorrent fight against MPAA. But if they stop movie downloading - I am sure entire LA will be loosing quite a lot for fighting other crime. Which unfortunately will be "in real world". Most likely minor but hell of annoying.
I still remember when I was 14, after school we'd break into the elevator control rooms and manually control the elevators for a few minutes after ppl get in. I wonder what the teenagers would do now if they didnt have to spend the time downloading movies or software
How come these guys do so much of trading from their home PC's?Are they so sure of their ip morphing methods?[ If they use one. ]
If they are so much engrossed into this Warez business ,are they really going to be doing anything else?I would find it hard to accept if someone said they do it only in their free time.What they are doing looks like too hardcore,for time to be spent for any real work.
Looks possible only for teens .
As for adults in this warez thing,dont know how they manage to support themselves.What could they be doing for livelihood?
They boast proudly that they got the print from the theatre for the "Spy kids 3D".To see it with all the nice effects on a theatre screen or on a snazzy print on computer?Which one is better?
If at all they are seeing all the movies they are downloading ,it is a serious case of addiction to Hollywood movies, instead of the many worthwhile things they can do.
Why cant they just go to the Cinemas and watch the movie / get a DVD , and then concentrate the remainning time on useful things instead of thinking all the time about which projector print to get [they have quality check for these prints it seems...The amount of time a movie requires a persons attention is only as long as you watch the movie.Not all the time in this world.
Kiddies , get a life.Get moving.
Why does yahoo do this
So far I only bought about 50-100 non-russian CDs. Mostly in used CD stores. At $5-10 each. I also bought about 200-300 CDs with russian music in NEW YORK. Because they are $2-4 each there. In the past 5 years I refuse to buy expensive CDs and only buy russian ones. I can hear american crap on the radio a lot already and dont want to feed RIAA.
Every time I go to one of those "Tower Records" I see people leaving with 1-2 CDs spending about $40 on average and TR profiting $20. I dont buy anything. Every time I go to St Petersburg selling russian CDs, I see people leaving with bags full of cheap CDs. And I buy 20-50. The store profiting more than $20 from each customer.
Its all supply & demand. Have the CD prices not been so freaking artificially raised up - we wouldn't have had the problem in the first place.
Of course I can buy all music cheaper at AllofMP3. But I dont do it. Its easier for me to buy 20 CDs and listen them in the car, and then MP3 what I like. Its a reverse concept with todays pop music in US. RIAA, MPAA and all the labels are just greedy bustards. And they totally divert the facts and make it look like P2P hurts artists when in reality it makes more concert shows thus benefiting artists (as some Harvard Graduate concluded in his psycology research).
So, while the "lunkheads" who passed these unfair taxes into law do deserve part of the blame, the blame must be shared with the special-interest groups and the copyright infringers.
An analogy is the increasingly totalitarian legislation that has been passed in the USA and some other countries since September 11, 2001.
Congress and the President are largely responsible for the increasing erosion of our civil rights, but they would not have been able to enact such measures if it hadn't been for the terrorists.
The blame for the increasing totalitarianism of our federal government must therefore be shared among Congress, the President, countries harboring terrorists, and the terrorists themselves.
Similarly, the blame for DMCA, CDR tariffs, etc., must be shared among the various legislative bodies, the **AA and their equivalents in other nations, and the copyright infringers themselves.
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
I remember these days from 1980's with Commodore 64 and Amiga.
I knew a guy who would upload new games to BBS boards (pre internet) to get points. He would use points to dl new content to upload at other boards. Do this enough and he would accumulate games galore.
In the days of the C64 I seldom played games, merely collected them. I spent more time trying to fit as many games on one floppy than I ever did playing them. This mentality was extremely prevalent and still is in heavy downloader circles.
This is why I laugh myself silly whenever I hear the powers that be claim every download was a lost sale.
During my ealry teens when this was going on. I noted that the games I played the most were the ones I bought. Because if they were really good, I wanted the manual/maps etc.
Even with hundreds of "pirate" games backed up on C64 floppies, the games I spent serious play time with were the few that I actually purchased.
Today I have much more money than time to play games,I don't collect downloads anymore, but I still have a use for Warez. Try before buy. Since you can't return a game for being crap, a consumer needs some way to protect himself. Sometimes I buy on reputation alone, but I still DL cracks to make the game more usable (no cd type things).
If the warez community were to fall, I would be very saddened by its loss of the valuable service it provides in consumer protection.
I was a member of the scene for roughly 3 years and I got out of it a couple of months before the busts that took down Fairlight (Operation Fastlink). While the Wired article certainly is the most accurate summation of the scene that I've read, there are some glaring errors...
.nfo/.diz/.sfv.6 020
:( Personally, I don't know anyone who supplied hardware. But some of the servers for the sites were as big as closets and held 2+ terabytes of data, so someone had to be buying all of the equipment.
f acto2.net/
Page 1...
-There are not 30 topsites. There are at least 10 in each country, with many more in the connected European nations. While not all of these sites are as respected as the others, they all would receive the releases within *minutes* of it being first released (pre'd). I can remember that the mags that ranked couriers used at least 30 ranked sites. The highly-exclusive Checkpoint dupecheck also scanned more than 30 sites.
-I don't know Frank and I was never on Anathema, but he would not have just posted the HL2 source code as is. He would have "released" it with proper zipping and an nfo. Also, adding "yo" to the end of a phrase for emphasis has been out of style for a while. Rarely did I encounter a scener who used a lot of slang or 'leet speak.
-"Darknet" sounds a little extreme. However, someone told me that after the DoD busts in December '01 (when the whole scene basically shut down for a few days) the amount of data being transferred through the 'net decreased by some incredible amount, on the order of 10%.
-Sites did use bnc's and ssl. I never recall changing my password though. Updating my IP address on all the sites was the real pain.
Page 2...
-The full release name of the Hellboy screener that Forest talked about was: Hellboy.SCREENER.Proper.READNFO-MaTinE. I don't know why it would have "pre vcd" in it. Sites were anal about preserving the original folder name and
-In regards to the Hulk release, the article makes it sound as if sceners hear about releases "through the grapevine." On the contrary, everything is automated. If you hang out in one of the dupecheck chans/site chans releases are announced the instant a folder is created. And again, it's not within an hour, its within in 10 minutes. It's pretty damn easy to transfer files at 10MB/s+, especially when you have couriers competing from across the globe (so different connections/routings).
-I laughed when I read that "half the kids in the scene work at Best Buy or Blockbuster to get their hands on stuff they can release." These stores don't get movies months early. And not all sceners are kids.
-Frank sounds pretty dubious. MaTinE has put out a release saying they were not involved at all with the interview. Available here: http://www.vcdquality.com/index.php?page=nfo&id=4
Page 3...
-No one ever bought anything for me in the scene
-Kevin sounds dubious as well. He's a member of a release group... yet he's not on good sites... but somehow he performs his job as a courier. Doesn't add up. The 1:3 ratio is accurate, but anyone who isn't a courier and possesses some kind of skill, gets an unlimited or leech account.
Page 4...
-The exclusive relationships are called "affiliations." Typically groups have one in each country.
Final commments...
I look back fondly on my scene days. While I would never go back to my position, it was a fun experience. There is something exciting about breaking a serial number scheme, writing a keygenerator, and then seeing the product of your labor distributed and glorified. The members of my group were all exceptionally nice and intelligent guys. We were all laid back about things and never spent more than 1-2 hours on scene stuff a day. Of course, having access to releases the second they came out was a nice perk, but I thoroughly enjoyed the friendship and the reverse engineering.
And no, I'm not pimply or ugly or fat or weird. I have a nice family, nice girlfriend, and go to one of the best universities in the country.
More stuff...
http://www.welcometothescene.com
http://www.de
-F
This is fun! Here's another analogy:
When I was about 15, I drove my bicycle at high speed into a parked van because I was daydreaming and nearly broke my leg. It never would have happened if the van had been parked there. If the library had been closed, I wouldn't have been daydreaming in the first place, etc. The blame for my accident must therefore be shared among myself, the owner of the van, the library, the manufacturer of my bicycle, my parents, and the city.
Oh wait, no, that doesn't make any sense.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
"But they wouldn't have passed the taxes into law if they hadn't been pressured by special-interest groups, and the special-interest groups would not have pressured them if people had not been engaging in copyright infringement."
The special interest groups are big media corporations and this unfair taxation changes were done in Canada before there was any large scale net RobinHooding (from now on I use this more proper term in place of the corporate medias "pirate").
It was done as a response to fair use. You might make a mixed CD for your car thus depriving them of the right to charge you twice for using the same song, therefore the tax everyone buy CD's, blank tapes etc...
It was not a response to RobinHood activities.
When i was that age, we didnt even have those.. It was apple II's, Atari 800's, TRS80's, and home built S-100's running on acoustic modems...
C64? Not out yet.. PETs were for those strange commodore people...
But i agree, the kids today really dont understand, nor appreciate what they have today.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
"The truth of the matter, as the article reveals, is that it's people like these that caused so many problems for our friends at Valve and are responsible for most of the other irritating leaks of software"
Valves problems had nothing to do with the leak. If you read the interview with Gabe? at Valve, you will see that the leak was more a convenient scapegoat than anything else.
Note that these groups had nothing to do with the intrusion at Valve, just that someone passed the info on to them and they distribute. That is what they do, distribute.
The main activity mentioned seems to be cam copies of new movies. Does anyone give a rats ass about this? I laugh everytime I see some article freaking out about camera rips. It is clearly more like a harmless prank than anything else. Why the heck would anyone want to see a crappy camera copy of a movie with crappy sound. Revenue lost to this must be approaching Zero.
To me it looks like and adolescent race to see who can be first.
From the Wired article: Bruce Forest, a self-described "elder statesman" in the piracy scene...Forest runs his business from the first floor of his rural Connecticut home...In fact, Forest believes the scene will eventually go legit, and he's even started a company, called Jun Group, that uses the topsites to promote movies, musicians, and TV shows.
Let's follow those clues. Actually, let's just go to the Jun Group website.
Prices have moved in both directions. Let me explain. For a long time regular CDs (ie not double albums etc) have been priced at about 12-16 UKP, ish.
In recent years a large fraction of CDs have begun to be sold in supermarkets in the UK for about 9.80 UKP (yes this is still a ripoff if you do the dollar conversion compared to US prices but is positively cheap for Britain). These are only chart CDs though, new releases and perenial favourites etc. Nothing even slightly obscure though.
I have also recently seen (during the Christmas sales no less) a CD released in 1999 for sale in Virgin priced at 20 UKP. This is a single disk, regular CD, not a Jap import or anything special or unusual that might be used to justify a price like that.
Places do rent out movies for people who don't need the experience of seeing it in a theater and don't want to buy the thing.
It's also perfectly legal.
-- My Weblog.
Did not cause unfair taxation in Canada. CRIA or SOCAN did.
Secondly, with what justification do you feel you are entitled to anything, specifically music on optical media you have purchased?
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
I implore you; spend 5 minutes Learning about Milton Freidman. Try checking out these videos.
Part of the Second American Revolution!
Wait, they're so secret that they use an unecrypted protocol? Probably default ports no less.
Gimme a break, I smell rotten fish.
-- Note: If you don't agree with me, don't bother replying. I won't read it.
nuff said, commie scum
From the article:
Does Slashdot really need to publish rubbish like this ? The whole article reads like the writer had infiltrated the Mafia (oh, sorry: "criminal conspiracy"), when in reality he simply interviewed some copyright infringers.
For those who can't tell the difference between real criminal conspiracies and copyright infringers:
Please note: I am not protesting the information content of the story. It actually had some interesting parts, like the joyrney of new files into consumers. However, I must protest the writer calling the warez people a "criminal conspiracy" simply to try to give the impression that he was infiltrating a real criminal gang.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
But of course it is!!!?
For non-US peoples, what is this "smoking a doobie behind the local Kroger" you speak of?
Excellent article! Fun to read and learn just how its nearly impossible for the industry to stop. Time to reinvent the wheel!
But, it also illuminates how the RIAA's lawsuit happy lawyers are targetting the wrong group of people. They are killing the end user, and after reading this article, that is about as effective as taking water out of the ocean a bucket at a time!
Thanks for posting this!
I'd be surprised if they didn't use their own client/server software programs, along with their own protocols, to (re)distribute their software across the 'net and things like BitTorrent, Kazaa, http, ftp were left to be used by those along the bottom most rungs.
At least in times gone past, I've used other software specifically written for pirating software on the 'net and I can't see why it wouldn't still be used today, except enhanced with encryption (of course.) That way it isn't susceptible to accidental discovery by someone who hacks a ftp/http server with the latest sploit posted to bugtraq.
Back in the early to mid 90s, when archie still worked, it was easy to find unprotected ftp pirate material if you knew the right kind of strings to search for. Sigh, I miss archie. Web search engines aren't a (and don't look likely to be) replacement for it.
"In reality, the number of files on the Net ripped from store-bought CDs, DVDs, and videogames is statistically negligible. People don't share what they buy; they share what is already being shared - the countless descendants of a single "Adam and Eve" file. Even this is probably stolen; pirates have infiltrated the entertainment industry and usually obtain and rip content long before the public ever has a chance to buy it."
Assuming that this statement is true, then the RIAA and NARAS have got the whole thing backwards. While they devote prosecution dollars to individual users, the real players in the industry are playing behind a curtain.
Without question, the RIAA suits are then like the DEA going after individual users instead of focusing all efforts on those who are doing the real dirty work.
So, the big question- do these shadowy corners actually help or hurt the film/software industries?
When I needed to get to software before release, I had an insider who knew just where to go. Major magazines can get material before it is released through the same illegitimate channels that the pirates use. And, it's better for the industry for the pundits to have the stuff in hand before release- do you think that those industry "just released" articles on releases just materialize out of thin air? No sparky. There are others who snoop with impunity.
Oh, and there is not a problem getting films before their release. It's an easy scoop for a reporter.
befuddled (noun) 1. Unable to create a pithy sig
Didn't we all hang out at warez places when we were young(er)? :P
I remember in the beginning the real hot boards had 0-3 days warez, after a few years this changed into 0-3 hour warez. This day and age they talk about minutes or even seconds...
If you can keep up with stuff like that, you should go work as a stock broker or something
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
That "right" is government created and not much of a right as it infringes on my right to copy your work, or perhaps to share it with my friends, and the price you get will be determined by market forces beyond your control. Your "right" is a negation of behavior on my part that does you no real harm beside deprive you of some potential income. Your "Fly to Britian" nonsense is a "right" people like Ben Franklin violated with joy. What people do with legitimate coppies of your work after they purchase it is none of your business and they might export it.
Laws which are obviously designed to protect the wealth of a few at the expense of others are bad for morals and the law itself. As Lessing points out, such laws are corrosive. How do you expect people to obey and respect law when it is normal to violate it? Modern copyright is a gross example of a law that's designed to enrich a few at the expense of others. The proportion of works no longer in commercial publication demonstrate that copyright is not performing it's purpose of encouraging publication. It's working to thwart competition and control culture. The choice before you then is to be controlled like a slave or to violate the law.
Me, I'm a slave with some hope. The costs associated with rebellion are too steep for me, so 20th century popular culture is something I can not really enjoy. The copyright warriors have made it impossible for me to legally collect and enjoy early jazz, for example, and the works may dissapear before it becomes legal for people to share. My hope is that free culture will break the big publishers. My rebellion is to simply not give those publishers my money. Authors will do better when that happens too as you will receive the reward a free market gives rather than monopoly slave wages.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Recall Ireland in the 19th century; the situations imposed on people were the result of pure capitalism in the sense of laissez-faire unmitigated trade of more value given for less value. Capitalism, as implemented without social regulations for the societal benefit, does not work and is a disease that opposes the survival of the human species. In that sense, no, capitalism is not the answer. Labour, agriculture, and all people of all nations must stand against the extensions of feudalism and throw the overseers over the cliff's edge for the greater good of life and sustainability over profits that are used later to make up for the losses of the capitalistic and short-sighted economic systems.
In both cases though, there is a (granted morbid) curiosity that drives the populace to acquire (via tabloid or torrent) the said illicit pictures/source code.
When I say moderately legal, I mean that sure, maybe it's not nice... but if it were trivially illegal, we would be living in a police state.
At the end of the day, Valve made it's money, so get off the high horse... Half-Life 2 is *not* a lump of coal.
> What's with the very young kids sharing files?
It is simply a question of economics.
These young kids have computers, or access to computers, and a whole lot of time.
Unlike adults with paying jobs and disposable income, these kids have the motivation to enter the piracy scene: They want a game, a CD, or a movie, but they don't have the funds.
In time, that motivation become expertise.
Bring it up to the level it is happening at now, and everytime someone releases a half-decent program it gets snagged onto this sort of network and passed around the world. Who but an idiot isn't going to take advantage of that? What I don't get is why *anyone* bothers to buy stuff that is available on warez sites.
And the old "make them pay for support" line. Ha. If you have anything that even half decent it better not need any "support". How often do you call for support on Microsoft Word? How about Kazaa? How about Firefox? Would you pay for support?
[quote]
;)
Imagine how productive OSS developers would be if they didn't "give away" all of their source code with every new version.
[/quote]
imagine how unproductive Microsoft would be without open source software -- I think the open source community should rise up against the devil of OS Developers and prove that Microsoft was out of good ideas when code was stolen from Apple all those years ago
Cool! I always wanted to have an image of people humping livestock seared into my brain cells for the rest of my life. Thanks very much asshole.
The first and second warez groups were The Apple Mafia and The Untouchables, running Apple II apps.
I don't understand why journalists can't figure these details out.
It's like saying, "The USA has been around for quite a while," instead of bothering to fact-check for "1776."
When I was 16, I got a cablemodem connection, and I started downloading mp3s left and right. Eventually, on EFnet, I got deeper and deeper into mp3 trading, and I met some people who were in a mp3 release group. We had our own specialized set of tools, formats for file naming, nfo files and dupechecking system. I imagine that I released about 25 cds, and I courried files from server to server to get credit to download files. Most servers had a 1/4 ratio, some had a 1/10 ratio (upload 1mb get 10). Anyway, the mp3 group of which I was a member was only a branch of a warez group, so I had access to tons of 0-day material on the servers. I was getting deeper and I absolutely loved it. I downloaded and spread so much music and software that I never listened to or used, but mainly music.
However, when I was 18 I got pretty nervous and decided to quit the group -- I don't want a criminal record, and I don't have the money to pay lawyers in civil suits. But it was a lot of fun while it lasted -- for now, the best place to get mp3s is on a usenet server -- no risk there for the downloader.
Whether they know it or not, the vast majority of folks here on Slashdot would not object to copyright if it embodied the original ideals under which it was created, rather than the bastard system we have now that big companies hide behind to line their pockets at the expense of the true innovators.
I disagree, the smme thing was siad about marxisim - "if it was only done in a more enlightened way", bht the problems we are seeing now are copyrights simply being taken to their logical conclusion. The peoblems we are seeing now would pop their ugly head up one way or another no matter how enlightened we tried to make copyrights. No matter how you stack the deck - copyrights are about trying to controll information in the information age.
Allot of people here get mad at the RIAA and the MPAA, but the truth is you can't go telling people that they have some type of glorious right to controll how others use, distribute, and profit from information - but then not allow them to secure those "rights". It is hypocritical, but might have been workable when the biggest copyright issue was xerox machines, but now it is impossible to go back. Copyrights half to die.
I agree. I've known allot of people who "illegally copy" and allot of people in "shady orginasations" and allot of people who "hack" and even share "shady information". But I've never seen any top down super org that pulls all the strings behind the scenes. When I first read it a few days ago, I was laughing thru the whole thing, and shaking my head in disbelief that people would go thru all the effort to make this up.
Now maybe the RIAA, MPAA, and the Gov want to believe such an org exists, because that gives them a nice top down org to target for the kill. And they can understand big fat juicy top-down orgs, because they are one. And no doubt that people do self organize, after all that's why we have government. But this sounds too much like the way people in the govt organize, not the way people in the internet organize. You know, narrowly defined roles in super entrenched positions.
Knowing how the government works, I wouldn't be supprised if this was some type of setup. You know, luer interested people in, nail them, and then go on TV to justify their over-rated over-paid, under-productive jobs.
Another RED ALERT warning flag: It sems people who "rise up" in this org would be lewered away from difficult to track and enforce p2p technology to more direct, tracable, and accountable technologies. If that doesn't go against the grain, then I don't know what does.
Is anybody getting anything tangible out of participating in this 'criminal enterprise'? (Or are they doing it because belonging to a 'criminal enterprise' makes their paltry little peckers feel bigger?)
I'm sorry, but if I were going to break the law, I would do so for better reasons.
Beeep. Big problem, George. 'Intellectual property' not 'physical property,' 'intellectual space' not 'phsyical space.' DOES NOT COMPUTE. Beep.
Take a look at jungroup.com now, they have a link pointing to their "entertainment division" and their latest project "The Scene," a TV show about an NYU student who is the leader of a top movie group in the darknet. After watching the series, it seems that much of the information that is in the darknet article is displayed (graphically) to create a TV drama. Take a look if you're interested.
So, if there are individuals in the movie and music industry, their motivation really must derive from the process of warez or they get an ego boost. I mean, imagine you're some PA for a new movie coming out and you start seeding the movie to some "elite warez group" a month before release. If you weren't seeding the movie for any of the aforementioned reasons, what could you possibly be thinking: "Oh, I just seeded a movie I spent hundresd of hours editing so people don't have to.. give...me..payment..for it." There's no nostalgia in warez.
Sorry, fellow idiot and AC. We had to start without you.
Yet another dink misses the sarcasm surrounding the running "overlord" gag that keeps getting +1 funny mods.
the way software companies distributed their apps. Before the 'net took root, a fledgling coder or graphic artist would have to rely on BBS' to provide programs such as C++, Photoshop and other utils to gain some experience. Keep in mind that it would take a loooong time to get them because of slow ass modems. The reason the average kid would looked towards BBS' to supply such programs was because they were too damn expensive!! Granted, the argument of a high sticker price would never hold water in court, but that's the way things were. Money was tight, and as many have stated -- it was exciting.
The emmergence of ever faster modems and high-speed lines such as DSL didn't go unnoticed by software makers. They quickly noticed that the impact of pirated warez from a BBS was child's play compared to the global reach of the 'net. FTP sites and IRC channels spread like wildfire and the companies watched helplessly. That's until the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) took hold in 1998. This would be in addition to the enacting of the "No Electronic Theft" Act of 1997, which was designed to close a loophole that let pirates distributing warez off the hook as long as they didn't profit from their actions.
To the original point: Good or bad, pirates DID change the way software manufacturers distributed their apps. The advent of "Trialware" gave the average user a chance to try the product before they forked over good money to buy it.
In today's world, the quality of OSS [Open Source Software] is improving -- sometimes in leaps and bounds. This offers a means of using very functional software without the need to look over your shoulder fearing the men in black would knock down your door any minute with a search warrant from a secret council. The kids of today have it so much easier!!
Happy New Year to all!
In other words people would rather spend time and effort in a never ending quest of the unobtainable perfect technological solution to what's essentially a social problem. That applies as much to corrupt governments as it does to corrupt business organizations. But when it comes to other viable solutions. We all get to listen to a never ending litiney of reasons why not e.g. I'm pathetic...
I can see why you all glom onto strong figures like Gandhi, and Martin Luther. They at least didn't hide behind technological solutions to solve their social problems. Putting their words and deeds right out were all could bear witness. And their supporters could stand right beside them...in the daylight...were enemies could see, and be changed by their selfless acts.*
And more than willing to die for what they believed in. So far there is no pirate who's died for the right to be entertained. Let alone having been seen by the general public. You have to drag them into court, just to get a good picture.
*If all those civil rights leaders had used selfish acts and words to try to change people's hardened hearts? Do you think we'd be were we are now?
"These young kids have computers, or access to computers, and a whole lot of time."
What's that about idle hands being the devil's plaything? Maybe the Amish (and others) are smarter than we think.
No, it's a matter of civil law in the civilized world. Sharing ideas, words and songs should never be a crime.
I am disgusted by the idea that bits of our culture will be lost because some moron who owns the right to it is overprotective.
Me too, and that's a larger crime to me than plaguerism, which would be the nastiest of copyright violations. Nothing is worse than throwing your work away, not even taking credit and profit for it away from it's creator.
Create your own free art and give it to the world if you want and if anyone is interested.
I do, thank you. All of my photographs and classwork are posted for anyone to use as are my wife's music. I'd rather people not use them for commercial purposes or to promote things I don't believe in, but I doubt I'll be able to enforce my "rights" the same way Disney does.
Those are your words not mine. There are plenty of ways to make money without 100 year copyrights and other laws that throw away the vast majority of popular culture.
You talk about it being unfair that art isn't free. ... recognize the act that you are just trying to get something for nothing.
I recognize no such thing and the suggestion is offensive.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
:D
We need more nerds and less people who are essentially zombies-walking-around-in-a-fog. There are too many of those.
+++ATH0
...and it always has been.
OTOH, there is a very good argument for treating pirates and those who provide piracy tools as terrorists attacking the United States' economic infrastructure.
The US economy depends on intellectual property. Not coal, steel, natural resources or manufacturing, but intellectual property. (This includes everything from films and music to hardware designs.) If this can be copied for free without revenue being generated, the US economy will be in serious trouble.
In the 1980s, Iran printed billions of dollars worth of counterfeit US dollar bills, partly to attack the economy of the "Great Satan" (whilst also making a profit). This could be regarded as a terrorist attack on the US economic infrastructure, as much as blowing up power distribution networks would be an attack on the US physical infrastructure. (Not all terrorist attacks involve direct attacks on civilian targets; some involve indirect attacks on their support infrastructure. It's not as immediately spectacular, but the long-term effects can be far more devastating.)
It wouldn't surprise me if, as this problem progresses (and pervasive DRM is unlikely to be the magic bullet the IP industries hope it will), legislators start regarding piracy and facilitation of piracy (read: setting up BitTorrent indexers, writing anonymous file-sharing software without law-enforcement provisions) as equivalent to terrorism, with commensurate penalties.
> Warren Delano (as in, Delano Roosevelt) got his money through the opium business.
Not amoral or unethical.
Really? The Chinese fought (and lost) two wars to kill the Opium trade because of the effects it was having on their people.
As prohibition was a crime, Joseph Kennedy's actions were not amoral, nor unethical.
Joseph Kennedy made his first round of cash by conspiring to inflate a stock's price, then selling it before investors got wind. And Prohibition wasn't a crime. Selling alcohol was the crime.
I'm sorry, is that supposed to be "amoral" or "unethical"?
Yes, you nitwit. There were several treaties later passed by the U.S. government to prevent the trade of alcohol with the Indians because of the disasterous effects it was having on their social order. They didn't do this because of the strong Indian Lobby, you know? They did it because it was unethical. Educate thyself.
Bill Gates is worse than Ted Bundy and Jeffery Dahmer put together!
Oh, I get it now. Please, crawl back under your bridge and go back to eating little children.
"They maintain a hidden network of top-level FTP sites that get the best files first and allow them to trickle down the pyramid and into many a slashdotter's sweaty little fingers."
Micheal, irresponsible. Inconsiderate and stupid. Given the day and age, a database of possible and likely hubs of p2p distribution is priceless in the manner of evidence for a civil law suit. Especially those brought on by the 4-lettered monsters in the entertainment industry. Now that it has just been exposed as a public forum, many of your readers are now vulnerable to legal action due to the fact you have proclaimed many of us to be participants in highly illegal and malicious criminal activity.
I hope you realize quickly how many of your readers did not appreciate that comment.
Of all the Universal Constants, here's one I know: Nice guys finish last
Unless the projection operator cares about the entire chain (maybe because they get a reasonable living out of it - there may be other ways, but that seems the easiest option) why not mandate that everyone who has the ability to leak your "crown jewels" is appropriately rewarded for that responsibility.
Otherwise, any leaks are all your own fault.
That doesn't excuse anyone for stealing the stuff, but it is a reason why it happens - get a month's wages for 2h work? Most people would go for that deal. It's human nature.
Author, Shell Scripting : Expert Re
Yeah. Very funny.
The fact still remains that legislators tend to be rather lazy and only enact laws when prodded.
When I was about 15, I drove my bicycle at high speed into a parked van because I was daydreaming and nearly broke my leg. It never would have happened if the van had been parked there. If the library had been closed, I wouldn't have been daydreaming in the first place, etc. The blame for my accident must therefore be shared among myself, the owner of the van, the library, the manufacturer of my bicycle, my parents, and the city.
Oh wait, no, that doesn't make any sense.
You're right, it doesn't make sense. Here's where the analogy breaks down: Was the van illegally parked in a hazardous place? (Ie, double-parked in a bike lane on a busy street). The library thing doesn't even come close to matching the situation mentioned by the original poster.
I hate the various laws covering IP recently, but the difference with your analogy is that these laws were passed to combat illegal activity.
But yeah, I understand your point. Those movie studios at the time were dirt-poor and struggling to get some rice on the table for the starving actors and producers..
Stab me. Stab me now, and end my shame.
Once upon a time, I mocked those who made typos in their haste. It'll happen to you, whippersnapper!
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
That's because you were what is called a "mule" in the world of drug dealing. A mule is the low-end pusher/dealer, the person that deals with individual users, and always the fall guy.
I would suggest doing a bit more research before trying to sound authoritative - a mule in the context you are using refers to smuggling, not dealing.
The blurb at the head of the Wired article reads:
"They start with a single *stolen* file and pump out bootleg games and
movies by the millions. Inside the pirate networks that are *terrorizing*
the entertainment business."
(My emphasis). Now there's a sub-editor that needs to be fired. Or is
Wired just a propaganda organ for the mass media industry? (OK, OK,
sorry I asked... I'll get me coat...)