Slashdot Mirror
Feds Shut Down Elite Torrents
honkimon writes "Cnn Money reports,
"Government agents said the onslaught included 10 search warrants and
the shut down of a central Web site used to coordinate all file-sharing
activity on the Elite Torrents network. That Web site,
Elitetorrents.org, had a selection of copyrighted works
that government officials described as virtually unlimited.""
no problem. there's always http://www.thepiratebay.org/
:)
and http://www.bittorrent.com/ of course
Damn.. the FBI needs some better web designer. The site looks like crap and could cause a seizure.
Homeland Security isn't 100% terrorism. When the department was created there was a reorganization of existing agencies. Immigration and Customs, which handles stuff like copyright enforcement and counterfeit items, was put under Homeland Security.
Help me take back Slashdot. When did 'News for Nerds' become 'FUD and Conspiracy Theories for Extremist Nutjobs'?
Terrorist fighting powers - funny! You didn't read the article, did you?
It was immigration and customs, by the way, and nobody but the magoo who started this thread made any connection to terrorism. What a bunch of lemmings.
ICE is just the tip of the glacier that is DHS. Its like a business unit or something.
rewriting history since 2109
No, it is real. http://www.fbi.gov/dojpressrel/pressrel05/bittorre nt052505.htm
Actually thats totally wrong.
This is what the actual irc channel topic is:
* Topic for #elitetorrents is: Site is down forever. please part. > http://www.ice.gov/graphics/index.htm
* Topic for #elitetorrents set by SithLord- at Wed May 25 13:00:56 2005
It's easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
The FBI's jurisdiction covers all Federal laws not primarily handled by another branch (for example, counterfeting is handled by the Secret Service). Copyright infringement has long since moved from a purely civil to a criminal matter and therefore falls under the jurisdiction of the FBI. The *IAAs can certainly send cerase and desist letters, and I believe are required to to maintain some of their rights under civil law, but being a private agency they have no say over the enforcement of the law in question (they can choose to cooperate in the prosecution or not, of course, but they don't have any control over what the DA decides).
Yeah, more FUD.
I really think you people take pride in your ignorance.
I say this in another post, but Immigration and Customs, which handles copyright infrigement, is part of Homeland Security.
Homeland Security was created partly to battle terrorism and partly to combine the domestic agencies into one group. This issue has nothing to do with terrorism, even though it adding the word makes it all juicy and gets everyone all riled up.
Someone broke the law, and the government did its job by shutting them down.
Please get a grip and focus on the real issues of the day.
Help me take back Slashdot. When did 'News for Nerds' become 'FUD and Conspiracy Theories for Extremist Nutjobs'?
Title 17 defines criminal violations of copyright. Title 17, Section 506 says that any infringement for more than $1,000, commercial or not, (and any commercial infringement, regardless of value) is a criminal offense.
So, whether you see it or not, what is alleged is clearly criminal in scope.
IRC Channel says it's down for good:
http://www.ice.gov/graphics/index.htm
Trust me, it's not a fake.
The site, for all purposes, was actually hacked. The ISP (LeaseWeb) was NOT in the turnouver.
We originally thought it was fake too - hence the "ET Was DNS Hacked" message. Nothing added up. The DNS didn't foward to the real dhs.gov, and the page was crappy (and written with MSWord!)
Then we got messages from some of our "high member staff" that said they got busted. That's when the door was slammed tight.
It is real, I can assure you.
Funny, Immigration and Customs must have different meanings in Canada. Here in the great white north they mean control of people coming into the country, and contol of goods coming into the country. Neither of those has anything to do with copyright law.
It doesn't matter, this is a fake. They were DNS hacked and are trying to figure out what the hell is going on (according to their IRC channel). The Feds don't put up websites like that and they don't go around boasting about morals and copyright infringment on sites that they shut down. The feds also use style sheets on their sites and don't put 1337 sigs at the end of the page many line breaks past the end of the content. But the biggest offender is that that images don't have alt tags (as well as a few other things wrong) and thus the site doesn't comply with federal regulations for disabled people to be able to access all of the content of a federal page, if this were a government site, they'd be breaking their own laws. Not to mention that the feds just take a site offline when they shutdown a place (and they've never done it for copyright infringement), they don't dick around with new homepages for visitors to see like the MPAA did with lokitorrent.
Regards,
Steve
Damn straight. On ET, I would regularly get 400kb/s and up from each torrent. It was really 24 hours that saw 10k copies, but ... that was the magic of EliteTorrents.
However, getting your ratio to recover after downloading at those speeds often meant you became a window-shopper for a week. Like after EVERY season of Stargate SG-1 I downloaded.
This site is saying it's a DNS attack and a hoax.
http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=801
anyone confirm this?
Karma: Bad. Calmer, good.
I just found a Press Release from the FBI saying they were going to shut down EliteTorrents.
At the bottom of the page we read:
"The Motion Picture Association of America provided valuable assistance to the investigation."
So nope, it's not a hack. It's official.
How difficult would it be to host these trackers in China or any other country that the neo-cons in Washington don't have against the wall?
The neo-cons? The neo-cons in general hate Hollywood. No, my friend, unfortunately for you its the Democrats that are really in the pocket of Hollywood.
google for "oil for food scandal" - You must be kidding, half of that money went to US companies, the US knowingly allowed some of the "stolen" oil to pass through thier Naval blockade. All of the "facts" in the scandal were passed on to the security council at the time they occured. The US had plenty of opportunity to stop it but like the other veto-wielding members of the security council they deliberately ignored the warnings. The real scandal of the UN was the Rawanda massacre, this is when all of the world's leaders saw the slaughter of one million people happening before thier eyes and did .... nothing!
As I see it there are a couple of loudmouth politicians pushing an adgenda in the US. They blatantly pick and choose, (or invent), facts in the oil-for-food scandal and use them to call the kettle black. The probem with the UN is not corruption it is ineffectual because it is undemocratic and controlled by the winners of WW2.
You are spot on when you say "power comes from the people". Every ruler rules by the "consent" of the people (even Hitler & Stalin), get rid of the rulers and there is anarchy until someone steps up to fill the power vacum (ref: Iraq). This is not the planet I would choose to live on either but we have nobody to blame except our collective selves. Since the thought of bearing collective responsibility for the planets woes is repugnant to most, we simply choose to blame "the great satan", "the terrorists", etc, and hope they will go away.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
departments like the CIA, FBI, Secret Service, Coast Guard, Customs, and FEMA; have all been moved to, or are in the process of being moved to the DHS
Perhaps the people that are modding this as "interesting" should ask themselves whether or not the comment is, or is not, BS. As an example, the CIA is not a piece of DHS, and is not being moved to DHS. Rather, we've got a new office (now occupied by Negroponte) that is coordinating the intelligence output (though not necessarily operations) of several disparate agencies or units within other agencies. While DHS has a strong interest in coordinated intelligence, it is not an intelligence agency, per se. The FBI, likewise, is still part of Justice, and neither are, or will be, part of DHS. Get your damn facts as straight as your tinfoil hat.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
TOUGH SHIT. You have the right not to watch the movie
No I don't. Movie distributors often advertise on television, with a 30 second trailer. If I see one of those, then under the "subconscious copying" doctrine established in Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music, I'm forever barred from making similar movies myself.
It was the trailer, which they probably got previously from Elite Torrents. Look at the filename. It was taken from the first airing of the trailer on fox.
The CIA and FBI are not part of the Dept. of Homeland Security, nor are there any current serious plans to move them to the DHS. It was talked about a few years ago, but those agencies resisted.
But with this statement I agree:
This is a BIG change... it's the most signifigant restructuring of the US government in the last 50 years.
"The UN is corrupt because it's ineffectual"
Ineffectuall does not mean corrupt, you are parroting the "UN is corrupt" mantra that comes only from the mouths of some of your own politicians. I have no idea who ordered the tankers to be allowed to pass through the blockade and on to Turkey, but I doubt it was a corrupt individual in the UN. Also I do not think the US is soley to blame, the security council is to blame and they know it. Some have backed Kofi calling for reform of the council. The US has gone the other way and is running a transparent smear campaing against the UN and European anti-war politicians in a lame attempt to avoid responsibility and push thier own anti-UN agenda.
"re-evaluate your knee-jerk anti-American attitude"
My bias is not "anti-american" and has nothing to do with my knees, it is bias against the corporate stand over men that pretend to be a government "for the people". Given thier stunningly two-faced record it is perfectly rational for me to think this way.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
If I go and post an ad in the paper (for example) telling people where to go and buy illegal drugs from, I am breaking the law.
.torrent file is is a note saying "talk to to machines x,y,z to download this file" (or something like that anyway, I dont know the techincal details of bittorrent). And, like the hypothetical newspaper ad, a .torrent file for an illegal copy of a movie/song/program/game/etc serves no other purpose than to aid people in breaking the law (downloading the item without permission from the copyright holders).
By the same token, the newspaper would probobly also be breaking the law because they published the ad (knowing full well the ad was for something blatently illegal)
All a
As for the sites themselves, the sites being shut down tend to have only (or almost only) torrents for illegal files so its quite within the rights for them to be shut down (depending on what country they are in)
Don't forget about all this free-trade stuff with China and other 3rd world countries that allows Walmart to manufacture stuff in China for cheap and sell it here for a huge profit. This replaces well-paying jobs with McJobs. I'm gonna stop there before I go on ranting. There's an episode of FrontLine that asks "Is Walmart Good for America?" (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/wal mart/)
"My local state school has in-state education costs of under $500 a semester."
Obviously that does not include the books right? And BTW WOW, what state do you live in where school is that cheap?
Anyway here is a question for you, please answer honestly if you are capabable of it.
Did you pay 100% of your schooling? By that I mean you received 0% of your education costs from your parents. If you got loans that's OK, you can also count grants as being "your money".
"'Not obtaining a quality high school education is the first mistake most people make."
Yes, it's a bitch when you live in some inner city to get a quality high school education.
"The real way a person gets into an untenable position is by making poor decisions."
Nah, it's all circumstance. I am a nice white boy who grew up in the suburbs. Like most nice white boys I drank and smoked dope when I was in high school. Lucky for me I lived in the suburbs where the cops were not constantly patrolling the neighborhoods. Also lucky for me I could drive my dad's car out to the "woods" where we could party safely away from the law. My friends who lived in the city didn't have that luxury, they drank and toked in the alleys of heavily patrolled areas. More then one of them got caught and one ended up in jail because of it. Too bad he didn't live where I did, now he has a record and will never get a decent job.
Being a nice white boy also saved me when I got caught for shoplifting once. The cop looked me over and decided to let me got with a stern warning and a call to my parents. If I was a nice black boy I am pretty sure the cop would want to scare me straight and haul me off to jail.
Trust me being a nice white boy has million other advantages, I am grateful for every single one of them. If it wasn't for my parent's money, my well appointed high shcool in a upper middle class neighborhood, my access to first class libraries, teachers, books, I would not be where I am today. I would probably be just another statistic, black man with a record.
evil is as evil does
Hot grits/Natalie Portman
Back in the day, an anonymous troller (aka the "hot grits guy") would post a reply to every story with a simple "I have poured hot grits down my pants. Thank you." While he mostly got modded down as a troll, the hot grits guy is really the first recurring troll on Slashdot.
Natalie Portman is a popular target for this troll. When referring to her, they frequently profess their endless love for a statue of the naked and petrified actress, preferably covered in hot grits. Naked and Petrified is now such an infamous troll that it virtually epitomizes Slashdot trolling, and is often referred to and parodied in Slashdot comments. Other incarnations of the troll suggest that Natalie Portman pour hot grits into their (the trolls') underwear.
Nouvelles de jeux et technologies en français. TC
I'm afraid I have to join the chorus of voices who will inevitably respond to your modded-way-too-high-for-such-an-ill-thought-out post.
You said: A person cannot end up a single mother with 3 kids working a minimum wage job without making some stupid decisions.
Meet my mom.
Before I was born, she got a graduate degree in Zoology, and performed cutting edge genetic research. She met and married my father, a doctor, who is now one of the top anaethesiogists in the nation. She stopped doing research to raise her 3 kids - I'm the eldest.
So far so good, right?
Well, around the time my littlest sister was born, my dad was working around 100 hours a week. We'd see him once a week or so, and he'd always be angry and throwing things and cursing. Scary for a kid. Even scarier for my mom - her threw her down the stairs and rammed her head into a wall, giving her minor brain damage. Of course, she divorced him, and took us kids and headed to another state. However, ten years had passed since she worked in research, and she couldn't get a job in her field anymore. She managed to get jobs making cold calls on the telephone and secretarial jobs. So there she was, a single mother with 3 kids working a minimum wage job. Perhaps you could tell me the bad decision she had made? Was it marrying the rich doctor who loved her and treated her well for ten years? Or was it leaving her academic career to work on something much more important to her?
Now, I'm doing fine, but I'm about the same age as my mom at the "so far, so good" stage. I haven't made any seriously bad decisions, and I've made a few good ones. Who knows where I will be in a few years? Maybe struggling like my mom had to.
You are correct that there is more to life than luck - decisions do count. But you need to realize that as we are all humans, the information that people use to make their decisions is imperfect. Sometimes decisions which looked good at the time look bad only in retrospect. In addition, while bad luck isn't everything, it does happen - death, illness, abusive families. Just because giving up to bad luck isn't the answer doesn't mean that it doesn't make things much harder. I suggest before you go around judging those minimum wage mothers with 3 kids, you think about how their kids are going to judge you when you tell them from your privileged position how stupid they are.