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Grokster Launches Fear Campaign
An anonymous reader writes "Slyck is reporting on Grokster's new scare tactic. Suddenly it's become taboo to head over to Grokster.com. In a transparent attempt to scare potential P2P users, Grokster.com has reinforced its anti-P2P sentiment. The visitor's IP address is clearly displayed in large font on the Grokser's homepage while indicating the address was logged."
If its so bad.... How come they created it in the first place. Looks like Grokster(along with sharman) is more scared of the RIAA then we are of it logging "our" ip addresses.
Humph, 99% of the world population is outside the USA & could not care less.
Slightly off topic - I followed the Grokster link to www.respectcopyrights.com, and I *LOVE* this bit of argument for why you shouldnt pirate movies: "And last but not least, you're cheating yourself out of the movie experiance!" What - I'm cheating myself out of sky high movie ticket prices, jackasses who wont shut up during the movie, numbnuts with C-phones, screaming children at an R rated movie, and half an hour of commercials before the previews? And youre trying to convince me NOT to pirate a movie? Yeah, keep it up fellas - youre doing a REAL good job.
What are they trying to gain by scaring their users away, anyway.
Why don't they just close up shop and be done with it.
The context is the same as it has always been for the RIAA. In other words, every content protection measure (for that's all this is) is aimed at the people who are clueless about the law and the technology, and can be easily intimidated by such means. Unfortunately, that means we are talking about the bulk of the population of most countries ... fortunately, because most P2P users are clueless they're pretty hard to intimidate anyway since they have no idea what they're doing.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Oh, I just love the fact that they're hotlinking the script of someone else's web server. I just wish so badly it were mine...
There are 11 types of people in the world: those who can count in binary, and those who can't.
"The IP address, or Internet Protocol, is the unique numerical identifier assigned to each computer connected to the Internet."
It's hardly unique, except if you consider it to be 0-dimentional.
Many computers can have the same ip at different times. Also many computers can have the same ip at the same time within the same network. Indirectly, in hacking cases, even two computers can have the same ip at the same time and not really be in the same network. Well, even one computer can have some different ips assigned to it... or even many networks connected to the same computer... I could go on multiple people using the same computer... or many.
Ugh... this is funny, now even I don't know if I'm being insightful, informative, or if I'm trolling some modern physics.
It's pretty much the same wording as that which appeared on another p2p site that was shut down last year - I can't remember which. But they got busted and something very similar to this message apppeared. Was it demonoid?
by using Google's translate tool, just translate from English > English and you can use Google as a proxy. Works well when a site is blocked at work.
Grokster, by Google
My question is...
Will they sue China?
Believe with me, my saplings.
log this
/bin/true ; do /dev/null http://grokster.com > /dev/null 2>&1
#!/bin/bash
while
wget -O
printf "\r%d " $i
i=$((i+1))
done
6th Street Radio @ddombrowsky
Who really runs these anyonymous proxies? I mean if I were in law enforcement (and I might be), I would strongly consider creating a website of an anonymizing proxy (which I might have done), put in some text about how illegal actions will not be tolerated (which I think they all do). I would "report" all illegal activity (as advertised), then get paid to investigate it professionally (which I might do).
When I observe people using multiple anonymizing proxies in series, I'd probably create a few more, because especially when being randomized, it's just a matter of time before somebody uses all of my proxies in series for criminal activities.
Lawyer: Your honor, we want you to award us 1 million dollar in damages for copyright infringement against the defendant.
Jduge: Indeed, do you have any evidence of this charge?
Lawyer: Of course, the defendant visited a website!
Jugge: and?
Lawyer: AND we logged his IP!
Judge: and?
Lawyer: and? your honor I don't understand, we got his IP!!!
Judge: yes but what do you alledge the defendant did.
Lawyer: he visited our site!
Judge: and downloaded copyrighted material wich the original copyright owner did not give him permission to do?
Lawyer: wha? He visited our site!
Judge: That is not actually illegal you know. In fact I can see only one criminal act and that is your site records personal information without a privacy statement.
Lawyer: ah.
Judge: Indeed.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Which I assume covers web traffic only on port 80. When you start hitting sites with random, proprietary protocols on other ports, the chances are that the other end see your real IP address.
Your only chance of anonymity on a P2P network was if there were proxies set up between you and the powers that be that prevented you from following the trail. This in itself is non-trivial and requires lots of benevolent people to cover your tracks when you use them as a conduit for your illegal activites. Even such people existed (and weren't RIAA plants), performance would go the tubes. Hence the reason that Freenet sucks.
I would say that you're never going to cover yourself completely but it occurs to me (a naive thought no doubt) that a bittorrent-esque protocol could be formulated that made it a lot harder to prosecute people if all clients allocated 15% of their bandwidth for proxying some other data aside from the data requested. To make statistical analysis harder, the data you proxy would not change over time so all intents and purposes you would look like you were downloading it, except you're not.
You forgot System of a Down's "Steal this Album", er, album. I mean, who can blame the consumer when it's the band itself telling them to steal it?
If Murphy's Law can go wrong, it will.
"Mashboxx itself [mashboxx.com] is a sham RIAA front company"
Mashboxx is, of course, Wayne Rosso's company. Wayne was the pirate's best friend back when he was Grokster's CEO and when he later ran Optisoft, which provided Blubster -- he was not shy about defending the rights of P2P applications to exist, and regularly told the record companies to fuck off, in so many words. He even founded a trade group of P2P application providers called P2P United.
Providing a P2P application that's compatible with the rights and wishes of copyright holders does not make one a "sham RIAA front company." Yeah, yeah, all those greedy copyright holders are the enemy, and entertainment wants to be free, and all that, but Wayne saw the writing on the wall. At least he's having some measure of success -- remember when Kazaa printed those full-page newspaper ads to try to get the record company's cooperation in migrating to a permission-based P2P network? Kazaa wasn't a "sham RIAA front company," either.
For years, Mr. Rosso was trying to separate the concept of P2P (highly efficient file sharing) from the current primary application of P2P (piracy); now he's doing something about it.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.