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 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.
.. 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
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.
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
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.
"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.
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
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.)
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.
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...
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!"
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
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.
<? 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!
> 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.