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."
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.
" 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.
.. 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. --
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
Menace to society, indeed. Maybe they'd do better to pick up programming and write free software rather than cracking someone else's, but I think you've hit the nail on the head; it's not even about the software or movies or music being pirated, in my opinion, when one gets in to the degree these folks have. They get nothing out of what they do but they get nailed harder than spammers or spyware purveyors.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
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/
While these are the same people that were involved with the Valve incident, they are also the people who actually began distributing movies/music/etc and made BitTorrent and other P2P so popular. Peer-to-Peer has always been a good idea, but it could have been another decade before it saw widespread adoption if not for these groups.
In many ways, these people are also responsible for there being a fight against the **AA in the first place. If they hadn't made piracy such an issue, laws would have continued to have been passed behind our backs.
This isn't to say they don't do harm, or that aren't many people fighting the good fight legally.
The real truth of the matter, as the article also reveals, is that these people don't *care* that they caused so many problems for Valve or any other company. They also don't care about breaking media monopolies, changing distribution paradigms, and only just barely care about possessing and using the media and programs they pirate. It's all about getting attention and respect, and being online lets them reduce the chance of getting caught and ignore any side effects their "races" cause.
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.
What's the motivation? Is is just self-importance?
Reading this article kinda made me feel sick, as if all these people were so addicted to all these horrible hollywood releases (Hellboy?!) and RIAA crap, they were compelled to share it like tape traders of old.
Seems like a huge waste of time and talent to bust your butt and possibly face jail time for the new Good Charlotte or Linkin Park.
I'm hoping the scene does this "because its there and it can be done" for this 99% or so terrible content. But the piece on the people making a "Netflicks content" server implies otherwise.
Wow. I agree with Jericho4.0. Kids. And fairly stupid kids at that, several steps below your average script kiddie.
For some reason I'm very strongly reminded of this line :-).
Some of the bits from the article were pretty revealing too - one of the group members who was failing a CS degree because he never went to lectures and never studied (too busy "ripping and burning"). I'm guessing he didn't do the exams either :).
And of course, who could forget that very scary and extremely serious and realistic </sarcasm> threat to the author of the article: "You do not need some 350-pound hit man with a Glock at your front door." Someone's been living a bit too much in movie fantasy-land, methinks.
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.
...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.
... 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
That's not entirely true. It might be different now, as I've lost touch somewhat with the goings on of the "underworld" but it wasn't like that in the old days.
I know a lot of guys who were big in the amiga scene some ten to fifteen years ago, and they all have pretty well-functioning social lives. One of them now works for a major computer game developer, others are completing various educations (and not necessarily comp.sci).
Hopefully they will not. What's actually sad and pathetic is that the American Government(TM) has convinced you that people who "steal" intellectual property deserve jail time.
It's simply fucked that for sending electrical signals down a wire can be worse then rape. (Refering to IP stuff, not hacking or virus making, which are actual crimes that need to be taken seriously.)
There is a vast gulf between disagreeing with how copyright is being used by big business, and disagreeing with the fundamental premise of copyright.
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 don't see that as being hypocritical.
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.
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.
Did anyone read the article?
Think about how they are slanting things; the article gives the impression that the vast majority of new material is being initially provided by these shadow networks.
Back in the day when I was dodging sundevils (a cookie if you get the reference), that was essentially true.
In the current picture, it's a vast overstatement; yes, there are "elite top level" groups, but they are mainly kiddies; the majority of app and game files circulating on the 'net are either done by 1 person who figured out the crack from standard deprotection tools, or from the established cracking houses like paradox, class, etc.
The wording and, um, flavor? of the article is to create a scary thing on the internet that even the relatively well informed have heard of remotely or even been a peripheral member of, much the same way the Bush administration manufactured links between 911 and Iraq, and for essentially the same reason.
It IS obvious right? if you stop and think about it? This is just a step down the path of making us accept fewer online freedoms, as a necessary aspect of the war on cyber-terrorism.
Why, yes, I AM a Pagan Libertarian.
So, for all you Slashdot readers who have partaken in the middle of this operation (i.e., a "distributor") or higher (not just a downloader), how much money did you actually make in it?
The point being, the spammers, the junkmailers, etc., even though they are really just human cockroaches, ultimately make fist fulls of $$$ from their petty little endeavors. $$$ means that one or more of them might have enough sense in their heads to hire competent lawyers.
Competent lawyers means that it is not a trivial effort for the FBI, Dept. of Justice, etc. to try and per...er, prosecute them, because it will cost THEM too much time and energy for very little PR value, and certainly NO support for them (or their political...leash holders) when the next election cycle is around.
So they go after these networks.
Not only do they sound much better than "a spamlord was busted in suburban Detroit yesterday for allegedly sending out 1 beeleeon spam messages per month. Meanwhile, he's out on his own personal recognizance awaiting arraignment" vs "a secret cabal of movie pirates was busted yesterday by a huge interagency, multi-state task force that has worked for over 3 years to crack into, gain and ultimately betray the trust of those involved. Spec. Agent Murphy says, 'well, these activities only lead to bigger and far more nefarious criminal elements acting in our borders, not only against you and me, but other counterfeiting operations, etc. We hope their testimonly will allow us to catch the really big fish.' Meanwhile, bail on the 17 accused has been set from between $500,000 and $1,000,000 each."
Ooo, these must be REALLY BAD BASTARDS if they have bail like that!
No, these nets are just sexier targets than the spammongers, not only because they sound much better in a soundbite, but the perps tend to not have a bunch of money burning a hole in their parents' pockets to hire a good, agressive defense lawyer or to have made prudent past political contributions.
Only and until AOL, Microsoft, and several of the other ISPs in the US decide that the loss of customer good will these simps cause everyone, and the additional work of their corporate customers, and fund these kinds of raids ala the MPAA/RIAA, then it just won't happen.
But we've seen at least what AhOL is doing now, really, just marketing noise. AOL I think still makes too much money for selling subscriber lists to really make an effective "this shit is going to stop NOW" stand.
The other part of it is that some of the people in the neo-money set have also figured out various semi- or quasi-legal schemes that make them lots of money, and combined with whatever other zealous drives or needs they have, makes them a bit more politically connected, compared to your typical working stiff. They protect their own, because if the spamschmucks go down, they could be smoked out too. The only difference between the spammer and the successful timeshare or RV salesman is really the job title (oh, and maybe the house, and car and multiple T1 connections in the house, and...).
I suppose you could fit a lot of small and family-owned businesses in there as well (taking wholesale goods from the store/shop/market for use at home is probably a common one. it's not a big deal if it's a few rolls of bumwad, Sticky-Notes and stuff like that or those cheap-ass Papermate Stic-pens. But using the company, and other peoples' jobs as collateral for personal/family loans probably should be a big deal)...
Also, when a "legitimate" group like the RIAA/MPAA feels it has to stoop to using spyware and other things to help "fight" that which it has deemed the Ultimate Doom and Evil (P2P), well...
WWJD? No, the wristband to have in 2005 is "LWSHTJ - Look What Still Happened To Jesus!"
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!
> 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.