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Was the Lokitorrent Suit a Hoax?
kamhp writes "Recently earthreactor.com published an article
stating that the whole Loki Torrent suit was a fraud and that it was all staged to collect donations toataling in the tens of thousands then sell the domain.
"It seems that the owner of LokiTorrent decided to take the donation money and run, and to cover his tracks, scare the hell out of the entire p2p community. The scare tactic was probably nothing but a decoy to convince intelligent people not to ask the right questions" "
Like so many here, IANAL - but how exactly would you mount such a case?
"Your Honour, I used this website to knowingly violate copyright law, and then gave the owner of said site some money in the belief it was in order to defend a case against him, and therefore keep the site up. I want my money back, because no such case existed".
Response:
"So, you gave money in exchange for the possibility of continued use of an illegal service"
It would be very, very hard to argue that you gave money without previously using the site to download illegal material, or that when you parted with your money you had no hope at all it would result in the continued usage of the illegal service LokiTorrent provided.
That's the problem with centralized distribution methods :P Torrents are a great design... but they're only part of what you need. You also need an effective torrent distribution method which guarantees anonymity. It's not impossible.
I'm working on a library called Uso designed to send encrypted data from fake source IPs/ports to fake dest IPs/ports (faking as much as physically possible while still allowing the information to make it; it does various network probes to determine what it can and cannot do). You use libnet to write raw packets to the network and use pcap to sniff them back off; clients don't recognize each other by the source and destination IPs, but by codes contained in the UDP headers. The codes are unique per client, but not across the system, making recognizing the packets to firewall them quite a challenge (easily recognizable content is inside the encrypted section). I'm about half-done (I've got my encryption classes (Blowfish and RSA - both wrappers around openssl) done and tested, and have sent basic packets back and forth with part of the probing done; I need to do remote probing and implement the full protocol spec - plus some arp flooding and cache poisoning would be nice options). It should be able to tunnel through most NAT setups, although I won't know for sure until I get the full protocol spec implemented.
Another option is limited proxying. If you proxy a small but significant percentage of your traffic, you can't tell who was requesting the content and who was just being an unwitting proxy. It makes mass lawsuits unfeasable. Plus, proxying can confer some advantages on its own, especially if you use a "smart" target selection method.
Don't take a knife to a gunfight, or even a knife to a knife fight. Take a gun to a knife fight.
Yes SharePro is not to be trusted. That mp3 search engine on earthreactor.com's first page was written completely by my friend and myself. We were having financial problems and posted the fact on our website, which is when SharePro offered to help out. We were happy to have a new host at no cost and we hadn't heard anything of SharePro at that point. After a while we raised enough money to move onto our own server again, but when we did that, SharePro decided to keep the search engine online and then decided to change the graphics to his own. You will however notice that his mp3 database is quite out of date due to the fact that he did not get a copy of our spider. The second I saw that SharePro had anything to do with this, I figured it was a big lie.