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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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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.
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.