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.
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
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?
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!
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
Heh heh. I'm 33 and let me tell you a 'when-I-was-your-age' story... When I was your age, you weren't even born yet, me and some friends had two C64s and two Amiga 1000s set up in an apartment. Back then, you called long distance to the BBS of interest. We used all the phreaker tricks to get free phone calls. The phone company knows when you do this and when you exceed a certain amount of time, they come to get you. And they did. Heh heh. I wasn't there when it happened, I was the hardware guy. But anyways those were the days.
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
You're exactly right. The people who do the most sharing, and especially the bleeding edge stuff are in it simply for the thrill of going against the Machine, and there aren't even enough hours in the day to listen to every song they have, or watch every movie. They simply have it, because it is there, and it gives them status with their peers. And I don't mean peers in the P2P software sense, I mean peers as in people. These people have no or little offline life. Their friends are mostly online, and may be in other countries even. I wasn't being a troll when I said they have no social life. I mean they have no social life, as 80%+ of society views a "real" social life.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
This isn't true - the topsites are usually hosted by people working at ISPs etc, and have a relatively low amount of traffic - 10 to 15 sites accessed by a small amount of people (they're impossible to get into). These are then distributed into more sites with more members, then couriered down to the downloaders via BitTorrent. It's a triangular shape.
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.
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.
But CDs and DVDs haven't always been widely pirated. It's not like prices got halved since bittorrent got released.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
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.
Back in my C-64 days, I knew a guy who tried to copy everything he got his hands on. Not that he used any of it, or even distributed it.
It was the thrill of trying to break the copy protection, of finding the "cRaK" to pirate the software.
He even went so far to paint his 1541 disk drive with "War Copy" paint....truely over the edge.
The thrill for these people is like breaking a code somebody else devised, it's an Ego booster. And like drugs that give you pleasure, it's addictive.
The process of getting the latest movie in the best quality on a 700MB CD (with DVD's so cheap..WHY do they continue to want to fit it on 700 MB CD's!) and getting it done first is somewhat similar.
"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.
I never really thought of it like that, but really the new ratio enforcing BitTorrent sites are more like old school BBSes than I would've thought. It makes sense though, the old system worked (more or less) all that needs to be improved is anonymity across the system, and that's what each incremental step in distribution has been doing.
That's right. We were noobies, twenty years ago! And the city was changing to ESS systems. It's a myth that Bell doesn't know what people are doing with the system. You just keep believing it, though. It just boils down to cost, what's cheaper: prosecuting, or letting it go? At the profit margin in the 80s, it took a while for the RCMP to come a'knocking.
Haven't they? Premier DVDs are on sale now for $9.95, whereas just a year or two ago nothing was available for less than $20-25. IMO, publishers have realized that crappy Hollywood blockbusters that lots of people want to buy but nobody wants to pay for are prime targets for piracy. God knows I wouldn't pay $20 for a copy of Hellboy that I'd watch exactly once, but I'd more than likely download one. But I might pay $9.95 for one, especially if that's less than I would have paid in a theater the first time around.
"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.)
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
I knew quite a few people who got taken down as part of a bust of a formerly well-known group. The ones who were minors signed a letter, for the most part. Those that weren't generally got very large fines (in the hundred-thousand dollar range) and some got jailtime. It's not really something you want to take lightly, and I'm not surprised they're "paranoid" about privacy. It's not paranoid if they're actually out to get you, however.
Reminds me of the case of a teenager who cracked into NASA and downloaded a bunch of C source that was useless to anyone but NASA. It wasn't secret code, there was no damage done. But prosecuters claimed damages equivalent to the cost of writing the code.
Again, as if NASA didn't have it anymore, and had to 're-write' it.
same thing happened to me when i was 13. My mom got a letter from verizon and uhh yeah. I got really scared then but they just told me to stop. I'm 18 now and the entire 'warez' scene seems like just another addiction and a really big waste of time.
Ah yeah, the mythical movie/music pirate pyramid distribution network. If there is one, the RIAA/MPAA or it's employees are the ones feeding the first layer. That's why the author was talking to some supposed "elder statesman" and uses the word "Pirate". Arrrr, me hardies!
The article intentionally ignores lots of things. Fundamental issues, the fact that you can get out of publication music on P2P, and the whole CD and DVD publishing industry that exists without computer networks. Those out of publication files were not put up by someone who broke into some server someplace, they were put there by someone who had they record. DVDs and CDs from intentional production over runs and other publications are in markets all over the world. It's not just in 3rd world markets either. I know a local store owner who got burnt by his supplier who sent him unlicensed coppies of Windoze. The packages were identical and there was no way he or the supplier could tell the difference. It took him years and nearly all of his money to beat Microsoft in Federal court. All of these little issues ignore the real change that's happened in publishing. The cost of publishing has gone to zero and the encouragement for publication needs to fall in proportion. It's silly that while publication is cheaper than ever, copyright is stricter than ever.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
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.
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
Not amoral or unethical.
As prohibition was a crime, Joseph Kennedy's actions were not amoral, nor unethical.
I'm sorry, is that supposed to be "amoral" or "unethical"?
Are you saying that the Indians were perhaps too "primitive", "simple" and "uncivilized" to be sold the White Man's "Demon Rum"?
My, how racist.
My God! Talk about heinous amorality!
Bill Gates is worse than Ted Bundy and Jeffery Dahmer put together!
Come to think of it, he's worse than Hitler! Starting a world war, building extermination camps and killing six million Jews pales in comparison!
The article specifically says that bittorrent does not need the pyramid system of distribution. Even still if you downloaded any software off Supernova you would know that 99% of pirated software comes from top level pirate groups NOT from people sharing the cdroms they bought at a store. How do you think software gets from the top level pirate groups to a torrent on Supernova? Magic? Because the groups certainly are NOT the ones seeding the torrents you see on those torrent sites.
The article talks about "seeding the P2P networks", like it was a push-technology. How is that supposed to work?
When a new software release is cracked a packaged by a pirate group how do you think it gets to the P2P networks? The top level groups do not share anything on the P2P networks and even if they did it would take a week for a new release to spread to enough people so the average user could get a reliable download. Seeding helps speed up the distribution process. It happens when people who have access to mid-level FTP warez servers download files and then put them up on P2P networks for sharing. It is more of a pull-process than a push.
It is not difficult to identify high-volume sites from abstracted traffic logs, such as used for accounting and network management. I f these mythical "top-sites" exists, my guess would be they are rather low-volume.
The high volume warez sites I've seen all operated out of datacenters used by ISPs. An ISP is already a high volume site so how do you tell the difference between a legit high volume ISP and a medium volume ISP with a top level warez distribution server running out of their datacenter?
<? include ('signature.inc'); ?>
Unfortunately, such torrent files would all have to point to the same tracker; change the tracker, change the signature. Take down the tracker, invalidate all those torrent files.
Of course, you could leave the the tracker address out of the signature - but then the RIAA could simply spread torrent files with honeytrap tracker addresses.
A better solution might be to use Freenet as the distribution method. Sure, it's slow, but:
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
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
Well just to prove a point to broderbound I copied prinshop. THey had such an arrogant copy protection scheme on the apple I had to do it to make them understand. Them telling me I couldnt make a back up copy I thought was stupid so I cracked the puppy and mailed them a copy. I recieved a very intresting letter a about 3 weeks later (keep in mind that in the 80s the there wasnt realy email address we sent letters using something called the U.s. mail...An archaic and over taxed method of communications that for some reason still exist) Well they proceeded to tell me I was wrong to have copied the disk. I explained to them in another letter that my apple didnt have an hd and that I need a back up in case the disk 2 dammaged the disk. THey replied with a warning. this irritated me a scad so I made many more back up copies for uh archival purposes (NOT THAT I WOULD GIVE THEM AWAY FREE) and I put the crack up on a bbs. (yes yes I cracked broader bound stupid print shop and I am sure that 6 other people did the same- My father says he should have made me go to girl scouts instead of buying me a computer- ) well I am sure that quite a few people copied it...I think these companies that are arrogant like this need a kick in the pants. LIke take divx...Ppv DVD's anyone remember? that went over like the lead zepplin...the only good thing it did was create a codec...another disk I backed up was Flight sim...what a silly little progam. keep in mind that the apple two was like a pretty hot machine back then...Oh 64k of ram (k mean kilo= 1000 64000 bytes not even 1 meg) and the apple had a 500khz clock from what I could tell. In my oppion though cracking a program is like solving a puzzle. Except when you get some moronic company telling you that you can not do that- That is when solving the puzzle become fun. So I suppose true if I were a pirate I would have a profit motive...Im not but If I got a piece of software and was told "no" like I was some little kid I would get just a tad upset and lay the woop azz down. What I dont understand is like the woman last year who was saleing boot leg copies of 'the passion of the christ' now tell me. what kind of moron does it take to sell it like that? And of all movies! what a piece of garbage. After he released the movie I am sure I will never repect Mel Again... And for those who think they need to flame me...let me first state that making backups is not illegal and Mel is a Weeny...
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.
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.
I don't even know what OS will support a TB of RAM!
How 'bout something like this:
http://h71000.www7.hp.com/
VMS on Alpha (and soon-to-be Itanium) can support memory over a TB of RAM (your wallet will give out before VMS runs out of address space).
The largest VMS system I have managed had 32GB of RAM onboard.
Thanks,
-Scott