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Darknets Coming Soon?
Anonymous Stalwart writes "CIO.com is running a story on darknets and their implications for security. With the ruling against Grokster, darknets seem poised to become a reality. How this will impact the future of the workplace, from top-level IT/IS managers all the way to non-IT jobs will depend on how the tech community that is developing this technology treats it."
Shouldn't the first sign "something" is up be an increase in bandwidth?
Try monitoring a campus network where you have several thousand users and an obscenely large amount of bandwidth. Oh, and you have live research data being generated on campus and moved to places like the NCSA etc... Bandwidth consumption may vary by tens of megabytes by the minute. So I ask you, in that situation (which I work in) what is an "increase in bandwidth" a sign of?
I don't understand why this article has such a tin foil hat slant to it. Darknets tell nothing about acceptable use, they primarily identify malware and misconfigurations.
For those that are asking, a darknet is used in this context as a closed P2P system (i.e. you, your mates, your mates' mates and others by invitation only sharing what you have with each other over the internet).
Reminds me of something me and my brother used to do. We wanted to play a game online over the Internet but didn't want to sign up to yet-another online gaming service (The Zone or something it was called). We both had legit copies of the game, we both had internet connections and we just wanted to play online against each other. We couldn't do a straight TCP/IP connection for some reason or another so the only options left in the software were LAN, Modem or this Zone thing.
So what we did was set up PPTP between our routers, assigned nearby IP addresses on both sides that routed across the connection and played a "LAN" game over the Internet. As far as I can see this was a type of darknet if you like.
If we'd had non-legit copies, many games of the era would let you plan LAN without the CD so long as one player had the CD but not across the Internet. Or, say we'd cracked or VirtualCD'd the CD so that neither of us had a legit copy but could still play online. Then this sort of "PPTP darknet" would be used to let groups of friends without the legit CD to play over the Internet without needing the authorisation or intervention of the person running the gaming servers.
A further thought, bringing it up to the modern day, would suggest that things like Steam could be played over this sort of "PPTP darknet" as a LAN game (connecting to PC's spread over the internet, all disconnected from the "real" internet and bypassing restrictions on who / what is allowed to play)?
It's a interesting idea, sort of like a hidden black market for the internet (which I'm assuming is where the name comes from). As companies crack down on people lending movies to their friends and similar other quite legitimate activities, things like this are going to appear, translated from the real world where this happens all the time to the Internet.
It seems to me that these sorts of things have existed for a while, though. I've heard that things like paedophile rings are already using such tactics? Detection is much, much harder than for a centrally administered P2P network. The only way to detect is to infiltrate the network itself, which is basically social engineering?
I have no problem with uniformly enforcing product liability laws. My problem is with the insanity of today's copyright laws. TFA was very sloppy starting off with a falsehood like
The Supreme Court said no such thing. But the RIAA/MPAA will of course do everything they can to take a mile from this very straightforward inch.
This is not my sandwich.
From TFA:
... And although [darknets are] attractive as a way to get around the entertainment industry's zeal in prosecuting digital piracy, they could also create a new channel for corporate espionage''
``The Supreme Court might have stirred up a bigger problem than it settled when it ruled last June that file-sharing networks such as Grokster could be sued if their members pirated copyrighted digital music and video.
Since then, some programmers have announced they would pursue so-called darknets.
Am I the only one who thinks that if darknets are attractive vehicles for corporate espionage, they would be built no matter what the Supreme Court rules on filesharing?
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
The Supreme Court found that Grokster "promoted" abuse solely on evidence that Grokster employees planned to use growth from abuse in scaling their network, and considered ways to use that abuse. They did not find any evidence that Grokster publicly promoted abuse. They found "intent" by a corporation, which is not a person who can "intend" (even if you believe that a person's intent can ever be proven). Hence my comment that Grokster "appreciated" abuse, but did not promote it.
I don't believe that people who promote illegal acts, whether advertising products or mere advocacy, are liable for the actions of those who take them up on their promotion. I do believe that their free speech can be found to be contributory, a lesser liability, when they have either demonstrated expectations of satisfaction of their promotion, clearly reasonable expectations, willful neglect of developing prior expectations, or even negligent passive ignorance of such expectations. Yelling "fire" in a crowded (nonburning) theater is a lesser crime than shoving someone down the stairs. Liability, especially liability for speech to people with freedom of choice, is not quite so simple. The Supremes have made such speech even more complicated, by ignoring its absence, and finding liability where criminals act without even the speech, just the benefit. That's an economic argument, but not a legal one. And the economics of the industry now employ the prohibitive expense to keep new distributors they don't control out of the competition. With the Court as their enforcer.
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make install -not war