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."
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
Those damn internet criminals that take from the rich and give to the poor. How dare they be romanticized.
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!
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.
Those are all euphemisms used to try to justify stealing the things other people worked hard to create. It's not about attention and respect, it's about getting something for nothing.
And you would know this because your a pirate? Or are you just pulling it off your AOL keyword list?
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.
You have a really shitty understanding of economics.
Your biggst problem is that you couch your response in terms of morality. The marketplace doesn't give two shits about your morality, it only cares about maximizing value and minimizing cost. Right, wrong or sideways, piracy is marketplace competition and the end result of increased competition is always reduction in pricing.
And if abstract economic theory is too hard for your little shitty mind to comprehend, read this for actual hard proof that the music industry has been reducing prices. If your morality-laden theories were correct, with the increase of music piracy costs would have gone up and so would have prices. Clearly you are incorrect and your beliefs false.
As another person has already said in this thread:
If you're so right, then why weren't DVD and CD prices much much higher before they were being copied and spread on networks?
Answer: they were priced about the same. Because you're wrong.
Apparently you don't like having your theft thrown in your face, otherwise you wouldn't be throwing the word "shitty" around like it's going out of fashion.
What's wrong? Feeling a little confronted by people who don't agree with your outright stealing?
Oh, and one more thing? That link you referred to. I guess that has nothing to do with the music companies being found guilty of price fixing a couple of years ago, huh?
Cause and effect. Learn them.
Coming soon - pyrogyra
Dude, you're an idiot.... they had to 'reprogram' it so it wouldn't constantly be compromised by hackers with full access to the source code... it is a 'commercial' application that cost serious money to develop and manage after deployment with hundreds of thousands of paying users who expect the product/service they purchased to work as described (as best as possible).
The code was 'stolen' in the same way that if you were to get mugged the pretty green paper in your pocket would be 'stolen'... you don't care about the paper do you? Not really, it's the work you put in that is represented by that paper that you care about. It's your time that has been stolen. In the same way the code for HL2 represents a huge amount of time that is suddenly useless when the code becomes compromised.
OSS isn't a very good revenue model for a game which isn't really a software application, it's a software product... and yes they are two very different things.
The Wired reporter was perfectly accurate.. you just misread the text and jumped to conclusions based on your own biased opinion of what was described.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
For fuck's sake. Yes the Publishers are in many cases charging too much for the products. Yes publication costs go down and prices remain static. Yes that's very bad. However when I write a book or create an album it is MINE. I should have the right to distribute it where and when I please. If I choose to charge 500 pounds for it then you can choose not to buy it. If don't supply it to some countries then I can understand people in those countries thinking it their 'right' to copy it and personally I sympathise. But if I didn't sympathise it would still be my right to say no, you can't copy my work even if there is no other easy way for you to get. Fly to britain if you want it that much. I'm not saying it's reasaonable or sane business practice but it is my RIGHT as the CREATOR of the work. And that right far outweighs the right of some random person who doesn't want it enough to pay for it. I do agree that the damge that piracy causes is hugely exaggerated by the various huge corporations and that DRM is restrictive and unfair, but piracy is still wrong.
My appreciation of Douglas Adams is far deeper than yours.