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.
These people talk and probably spend a better part of the day or night on IRChat and do so because they have no more social life, than the average /.er.
God bless them
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
The first rule of the shadow internet is, you do not talk about the shadow internet. ...
The second rule of the shadow internet is, you DO NOT talk about the shadow internet.
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.
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
spending hours and hours developing contacts so you can get a copy of a movie filmed from inside a theater.
yeah, that'll hurt the industry.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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?
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.
I think I just read about these guys in The Da Vinci Code.
.. 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. --
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!
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
Yes I do, i'm only 16 now, was 13 when this happened.
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/
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
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.
So the pirate the feds arrested, interrogated, and impounded in April, but didn't file charges yet against, is the Half-life guy. That narrows it down quite a bit.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
we read this the week before it was published.
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
"These people are highly organized and very paranoid about secrecy."
That`s why they made Wired.
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.
When I was 13 I still wasn't even allowed to use the phone without asking. Didn't matter, my ZX81 wouldn't even talk to the Dataset, let alone a telephone.
Cogito, ergo sig.
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.
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.
The Shadow Internet is just like the real internet, except we all have goatees.
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
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
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
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.)
Robin Hood didn't take from the rich and give to the poor; he took from the tax collectors and gave to the taxed.
Now, it turns out that most of the taxed were poor and most of the tax collectors were rich (or those working for the rich), but Robin Hood did not steal from, say, merchants and traders, who were better-off than average, nor did he give to beggars, who were worse-off than average.
Robin Hood should be romanticized because he fought against unfair taxation, not because of the rich-to-poor myth.
(Also, when he finally (re)gained his earlship, it wouldn't surprise me if his moral outlook changed and he engaged in some taxation himself.)
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.
Please do not take the above as an endorsement of the RIAA and MPAA and their non-American equivalents, who have engaged in some very scummy, immoral, sleazy, unethical, slimy activities.
Deciding who to root for in this conflict is like trying to decide who to root for in a conflict between the KKK and the Black Panthers in the 1960s and 1970s, or between Iraq and Iran in the 1980s, or between Bush and Gore/Kerry in the 2000s, or between the Israeli Defense Force and the PLO at the current time, etc.
Oh, one final thing: the copyright violators do not "take [steal] from the rich and give to the poor"; they steal from rich (??AA executives and lawyers, movie and record studios, A-list actors and musicians, etc.) and poor (non-A-list actors and musicians, extras, grips, concession stand operators, roadies, grunts who work in your local record store/DVD rental place/movie theater, etc.) alike, and give to all, rich or poor (but not too poor to be able to afford computers), who are willing to compromise their integrities by downloading copyrighted material to which they are not entitled.
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
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.
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.
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.
I had some friends who were a ways up in the rankings on the Amiga. When FAST, the Federation Against Software Theft (look them up on Google, they did some hilarious print ads) were busting people locally, these two friends panicked. One buried his disks in his back garden. The other, worried they'd come calling and find his 600 or so disks... Kindly bought them round my house to hide them.
I didn't mind. Gave me time to go through them all:)
Oh, and said friend who buried the disks in his garden was also into phreaking, and buried all that stuff too.
Ah, those were the days...
Yeah but did you have an Amiga 1000 in a suitcase that you could use from in a car while dialing out via alligator clips to a neighborhood SAC point?
10 geek cool points to anybody who remembers QSD's Telenet NUI...now those were the days...
(Cause I never heard of any of those kinds of things).
teeker
Back then, you called long distance to the BBS of interest.
And let me tell you, using a 300bps modem really was like walking to school in the snow, uphill, both ways...
94% of Repubs and 21% of Dems voted to renew the Patriot Act
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.
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.
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
<? include ('signature.inc'); ?>
I can't wait for the **AA to try that one.
---
"I did nothing. I did absolutely nothing and it was everything that I thought it could be."
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.
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!
From the article:
Does Slashdot really need to publish rubbish like this ? The whole article reads like the writer had infiltrated the Mafia (oh, sorry: "criminal conspiracy"), when in reality he simply interviewed some copyright infringers.
For those who can't tell the difference between real criminal conspiracies and copyright infringers:
Please note: I am not protesting the information content of the story. It actually had some interesting parts, like the joyrney of new files into consumers. However, I must protest the writer calling the warez people a "criminal conspiracy" simply to try to give the impression that he was infiltrating a real criminal gang.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
"In reality, the number of files on the Net ripped from store-bought CDs, DVDs, and videogames is statistically negligible. People don't share what they buy; they share what is already being shared - the countless descendants of a single "Adam and Eve" file. Even this is probably stolen; pirates have infiltrated the entertainment industry and usually obtain and rip content long before the public ever has a chance to buy it."
Assuming that this statement is true, then the RIAA and NARAS have got the whole thing backwards. While they devote prosecution dollars to individual users, the real players in the industry are playing behind a curtain.
Without question, the RIAA suits are then like the DEA going after individual users instead of focusing all efforts on those who are doing the real dirty work.
So, the big question- do these shadowy corners actually help or hurt the film/software industries?
When I needed to get to software before release, I had an insider who knew just where to go. Major magazines can get material before it is released through the same illegitimate channels that the pirates use. And, it's better for the industry for the pundits to have the stuff in hand before release- do you think that those industry "just released" articles on releases just materialize out of thin air? No sparky. There are others who snoop with impunity.
Oh, and there is not a problem getting films before their release. It's an easy scoop for a reporter.
befuddled (noun) 1. Unable to create a pithy sig
> 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.
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.
Unless the projection operator cares about the entire chain (maybe because they get a reasonable living out of it - there may be other ways, but that seems the easiest option) why not mandate that everyone who has the ability to leak your "crown jewels" is appropriately rewarded for that responsibility.
Otherwise, any leaks are all your own fault.
That doesn't excuse anyone for stealing the stuff, but it is a reason why it happens - get a month's wages for 2h work? Most people would go for that deal. It's human nature.
Author, Shell Scripting : Expert Re