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."
Yes I do, i'm only 16 now, was 13 when this happened.
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.
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.
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
actually the first rule on all sites is always something like "this site doesn't exist, don't talk about it [deluser]"
The individuals this article recognizes are more commmonly known as FXPer's. These are often legitimate and illegitimate FTP server operators.
l for explanation) stole the HL2 code, was a botnet coder. While botnets are designed primarily for three purposes: DDoSing, File Trading, and Spamming, they are not used for stealing source code. Instead, this is someone that acted of their own will to use a botnet to hide their identity when stealing the source. The source was also propagated via this method.
Ago, who reportedly (see http://www.livejournal.com/users/gravito/2197.htm
The FXPer's are actually an echelon higher than botnet herders. The FXPer's have nothing to do with stealing Half-Life 2's source code. They are, indeed, the closest thing we have to romantic pirates. They also purchase the majority of the software they crack and distribute, ironically. They do this as a philosophical movement, and do not believe in copyright law or IP law.
A good deal of the FXPer's also contribute to open source and are active on Slashdot.
If you had read the Wired article, you would find that the reporter states that the current practice of piracy distribution can be traced back to 100 or so people operating C-64s in the 80s.
You aren't in business, are you. VPN's are quite common among businesses that operate at dispersed locations, and don't want to broadcast their inner secrets to anyone who can monitor e-mail (i.e., nearly all of them).
The fact that you only think of it in terms of copyright infringement says loads about both the purpose and the effectiveness of the article. (Or it says that you are a troll or an astroturfer...I'll assume not.)
I'm not particularly interested in secrecy, but even I know what a VPN is and, theoretically, how to set one up. (I've never felt the need to do so, so I don't really know if it's as easy as is claimed. But it sure sounds trivial.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Not at all. In fact, I know that the name "courier" really stuck as a name for the guys trading copies for points, because USR eventually released Courier and Courier HST modems, and only crazy rich warez puppies could invest that kind of money or get their parents to buy them, while the rest of us were still using 9600, 2400 (MNP5 in software, maybe), or even 1200. The name had been used before, but so had a lot of others. I wonder why that's not in wikipedia?
Would you believe it, some other person here claims that FXPer is the real name for them?
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0137523/quotes
Tyler Durden: The first rule of Fight Club is - you do not talk about Fight Club. The second rule of Fight Club is - you DO NOT talk about Fight Club. Third rule of Fight Club, someone yells "Stop!", goes limp, taps out, the fight is over. Fourth rule, only two guys to a fight. Fifth rule, one fight at a time, fellas. Sixth rule, no shirt, no shoes. Seventh rule, fights will go on as long as they have to. And the eighth and final rule, if this is your first night at Fight Club, you have to fight.
That statement is accurate, if maybe misleading. Valve did rewrite and revise a lot of HL2 code. A lot of that was stuff that needed more work anyway, but some of it was perfectly good code that had to be rewritten to foil cheaters in HL2 multiplayer. Thus, by exposing some of the anti-cheating code and making it worthless, the leak did, in a twisted sense, "steal" the code form Valve.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
Hit up a good garage sale, and I can get a few months worth of reading for an hour's worth of pay. Going rate is $.25-.50 per paperback, though good luck finding things other than romance novels, self-help books, and Tom Clancy.
Yeah, I know I'm cheap.
The 350lb man with the glock is going to have an easier time forcing his way in in the event that he doesn't have the door opened for him
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
havent u ppl noticed that most of these *insiders* are under 18 why 'cos the law is easy on them and they can be set free no matter how much the industry lost 'cos of 'em. BTW i'm 17
17 and you type like that? Your not the sharpest tool in the box I suspect.
You are not mystically exempt from punishment because you are 17 - and that applies virtually everywhere.
The age of criminal responsbility is about 10 (in North America and Europe), but I never cease to find it surprising how many people are aware of this. From the age of about 14 you can expect to be tried as an adult (NOT as a child). If you're 16 (or in some cases 18) mummy and daddy are liable for all your fines, and will end up paying for your crimes by having their salaries docked till the amount decided upon by the court has been repaid.
Though in the event of an prosecution (or serious threat of prosecution) your realistically likely to have a large cripling fine imposed on your family, probably in an out of court settlement in which the company prosecuting will make an offer thats considerably more lenient than one the court would award (to say nothing of legal fees involved for the defendant). This is what happened to the 12 year old girl (and others) caught in an MP3 warez ring if you recall.
Additionally, another popular myth is that all records of things you've done as a child are simply automatically destroyed as soon as you reach adulthood. That isn't so, though typically after a certain number of years you can at least request the records be sealed, in some instances (such as if you are part of a warez ring) the information can remain on record permenantly (as there are specific exemptions for certain circumstances).
Disk space is memory: http://foldoc.doc.ic.ac.uk/foldoc/foldoc.cgi?memor y.
You're kidding, right? Those of us on the 21st century side of the digital distribution divide have been screaming at media companies for over half a decade now that they need to use the amazing (nigh unto frightening) power of internet distribution rather than fear and suppress it. Some of them get it, most still don't. Forest works for the ones that get it.
No this would likly not be tax fraud though a strong argument could be made for aiding and abeting.
[elsewhere in the article it is mentioned] he runs a business alerting a prominent movie label[s?] about zero day releases. IANAL but I would assume that this would not be so dissimilar from employers who contribute write off laptop[s] for their IT staff, the main contention point being that he is donating to an (assumed unregistered) non-profit rather then an actual employee. I think one could (fudge the numbers and) make a pretty good case about the legitamacy of this practice.
How do I keep track of people who are fingering
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.
Thanks for reminding me... Bruce Sterling's "The Hacker Crackdown", the chapter "$79,499". Though it's not NASA, it might (or might not) also be the incident you're thinking of.
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. Not that I'm saying file sharing and drug dealing are analogous...
No. The guy who deals with the customers is the dealer. The mule is the guy who smuggles drugs from the growers/chemists to the dealers. They're pack animals. That's why they're called "mules".
If they'd told you that they needed to put the price up to $99 to cover it, would you have believed that too?
Valve were slipping badly, and were going to get torn a new one. There's a convenient "leak" of code that's basically unplayable, which drums up a lot of publicity and gives them an excuse to spend the extra half a year or so making the actual game work.
What exactly do you believe the "anti-cheating" code does? Is it a powerful AI/ heuristic behaviour analysis module that took months of work? No, it checksums files on your hard disk and does some primitive graphics driver checks. If they even had working anti-cheat in the release that was "stolen" the most they'll have been able to change is a few constants and so on. Not six months work, not even six weeks work.
If they were just re-wiring the anti-cheat you'd expect them to lay-off or re-assign all of the media resources team, and practically everyone else except a few QA people and a couple of programmers who knew that code well. Instead the whole team death-marched their way through another year. What were those people doing all that time? Taking it from "that's a neat demo, oops, it crashed" to a saleable product.
The Feds: You have an encrypted filesystem. Give us the keys, or else...
StegFS user: Sure - here it is. ( gives the keys to the first layer of StegFS )
The Feds: You got to be joking, there are only mpegs of you impersonating a Jedi knight! Give us the keys to the next layer! Or else...
StegFs user: Prove that the next layer exists.
The Feds: ...
Of course there are ways to acquire the encrypted filesystem keys - little cameras above your keyboard, trojans listening for passwords, picking up electromagnetic emissions from your machine, beating the shit out of you etc. No absolute security and all that. But StegFS is still cool :)
This is neccessary for all anonymous networks. If most of the traffick that goes to your node is content that you are downloading, then the nodes you are directly connected to can tell what you're downloading (or uploading), simply by monitoring the stream passing through them.
On the other hand, if your node is mainly acting as a router, with only a tiny fraction of the traffick being generated by you, then it becomes virtually impossible to figure out what you are doing on your node.
Sure, someone could figure out that since all the pieces of a particular movie are going to a certain node, that node is likely the downloader; however, since each file chunk is downlaoded spearately, with different chunks requested from different nodes, it would take a lot of cancer nodes to establish even reasonalbe suspicion, much less any kind of proof.
And the same for uploads; the chances are that your node was simply forwarding the content being inserted, and was not the actual source.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Also, if they're under 18, they're very useful because they're more likely to take bigger risks than someone who might end up in federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison. As long as you're just infringing and not outright stealing, you're usually pretty safe if you're under 18.
However, I did know one guy who got caught carding over $10k worth of stuff that he would have sent to his friend's house in a nearby county. His friend's mom found a bunch of stuff they had carded and were going to sell in his closet, and the kid who did the carding went to juvie for a year and a half.
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. -- Gandhi
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!