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RIAA Targets LAN Filesharing at Universities
segphault writes "The RIAA has sent letters to 40 university presidents in 25 separate states informing them that students are engaging in filesharing on their campuses using the local network. Apparently, the RIAA wants to get universities to use filtering software on their networks to detect student filesharing. The RIAA did not disclose the methodology they used to determine that filesharing is occuring on those local networks, but it probably didn't involve asking permission. The article goes on to predict that the RIAA will eventually try to get the government to require use of anti-filesharing filtering technologies at universities."
1. Emule - This is one of the best we found out there. Hint (Search for server.met on google to update your server list)
2. Bearshare - Nice Gnutella client, lots of good hits
3. Limewire - Another Gnutella client. It even works on the Mac!
4. Shareaza - A beautiful Gnutella client with no spyware.
5. BitTorrent - Perfect for downloading movies, or that latest linux distro
6. KaZaa - Old favorite. Oh yea - Aussie users, you can't download - Yea Right!
7. Azureus - BitTorrent client that works on Mac, Linux, and Windows 8. Morpheus - Wow. They are still around? Wha happened!
9. Gnucleus - Open source Gnutella for you freeloading open source hippies out there - Yea I am talking about you
10. Napster - Ah, just put this one here to see if you are still reading, and I guess for shits and grins too
So there you have it folks. These are slim pickings. Get um while they still work!
This is all we had, and we LIKED it! Napster? What's that? iTunes? iHuh?
but it probably didn't involve asking permission
Despite the implications of this statement, what it probably really involves is paying off a student or two to sniff out and inform on filesharing activity, either by running RIAA apps or just manual searching. It wouldn't be the first time they've used this method.
Really, what are they going to do to enforce this? It's not as if they have a way to snoop on lan traffic, and if they did it would be illegal. I know that for one, my university has a "don't know, don't want to know" attitude about filesharing, so long as you keep the traffic below about 1.5GB per day. I really don't think they have the muscle to do anything about lan sharing.
And it's really no big secret if you just ask either. Having just finished school, probably almost all of the filesharing is in copyrighted material which they have no right to "share". Therefore it is illegal and should be stopped. It was disgusting to me how much people were trading movies, games, and music which didn't belong.
The schools probably will realize they could be liable if they don't try to put a stop it or slow it down. I like how the article and slashdot makes no mention of the copyrighted nature of the material, as if everybody is just sharing Linux distributions. At least be honest about this, guys.
I have more than one computer on my home network and I share music between all of them. Are they going to get me too? What is the law regarding file sharing on a private network? What if my girl friend copies my music from my laptop? Is that piracy?
fuvoo: watch something
So are the universities (and all networks, by extension) supposed to sniff every packet and look for "copyrighted material" so it can take whatever action the industry think is "appropriate"?
Perhaps every car should also have a sensor to detect speeding and automatically cut the gas?
Fuck the music industry. Their ever more desperate measures only mean they are painfully aware of how irrelevant they are about to become.
I don't know if everyone hear has heard of it, because it doesn't really work well at all outside of large campuses, but Ourtunes is definitely the primary method of music sharing at my school. It allows you to download music from other people who have itunes. I can turn it on while on campus and see hundreds of thousands of songs and download them immediatly. We have apple to thank for this great opportunity :)
It looks like they will soon send messages to parents informing them that their kids are engaging in filesharing amongst themselves at their homes using the home network.
I don't remember, maybe it was Einstein who said the definition of insanity was to repeatedly do something and expect a different result. Is the RIAA insane?
This is cutting their (RIAA/Entertainment industry) future profits off at the source on a number of levels.
Also, it is so problematic to try and institute filtering in an academic arena. There are probably any number of legitimate ways and reasons to see file sharing on a college campus that would not be legal outside. This will force universities to layer artificial distribution mechanisms they otherwise could have handled with firewall policies. (All this at an added expense to universities, and eventually to the cost of an education.)
So, once again the music industry goes to the "we don't know for sure, but to be safe we're going to assume you're a crook" mentality. The RIAA needs to listen to clue.mp3.
So how are they planning to block SMB and sneakernet? Thats the most common ways files are shared where I am...
That won't work very well.
If I can get onto the same network as 10 of my buddies, chances are very high that they have stuff I want to steal.
There's no way you're going to lock down to layer 7 filtering (looking at the program data itself, very intensive to comute) at a layer 2 scope (your local IP subnet, or close enough). So you either block SMB ports (file sharing altogether, the lifeblood of a computer network with actual users), or pay $$$ to filter it, poorly.
Rumor has it that if I have my laptop at the library, and so do some other people, that we can magically create a network between us that has no juristiction by the University. Or maybe they *do*, but they have no idea about it.
Any way it gets sliced up, the dollars can't keep up with the ways to get around it.
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
ahh the fight against students. The fight against anarchy and the "girls gone wild" crowd. Good luck RIAA. You might as well start another war on drugs, but this time call it a "war on compressed shit quality audio archives". See how much of your profits go down the drain :)
and demand that Congress pass a law requiring every person with a social security number to purchase 5 DRM loaded cd's per month, and staple their receipts on form 1040 come April 15th. After all, the government requires us to support the insurance companies by purchasing auto insurance. Why not entertainment too? I mean, EVERYBODY is guilty of pirating music anyway, right?
What about fair use?
Is this new filtering software going to protect file sharing legally allowed under the fair use doctrine?
How far will these greedy bastards go, what is the extent of thier selfishness and dishonesty?
This is sad
* Carthago Delenda Est *
Usenet and irc will always survive.
I don't think that anyone is under the illusion that filesharing doesn't go on in universities. All they have to do is get the university to give them a fishing license to get a new group of people to sue. It's easier than developing new talent for their labels I suppose. The universities that are reluctant to comply, well, that's what the threat to go to the government is all about. Similarly to their cases against single mothers, grandmothers and dad people, they like to go after the low hanging fruit, and fear of the expense of litigation is their biggest tool. Will this make a difference to filesharing, no, not really. Nothing else has worked, but they may be able to squeeze a few bucks out of some students. Is it underhanded, sure, but that's been their stock in trade for qite a while now. I used to think they would eventually wise up and put out product people want to buy, but it appears they are a lot thicker than I thought.
At my university, the majority of the sharing that occurs happens because tons of people use iTunes and turn on the share my music feature. At the very least this allows you to listen to other people's collections, but thanks to programs like myTunes, you can also download from their collection. While there are some restrictions that are put up (like 5 users each times iTunes is restarted, and only being able to see people on the same branch of the network as you are), you can get quite a bit of music this way. I guess if the university wanted they could block these ports, but that would also block the streaming feature, which the RIAA doesn't seem to actively object to. Telling users not to install iTunes would just be silly, since it seems like half the campus has iPods.
This isn't anything new. The RIAA has been policing campus network traffic. USC's campus DC++ hub was busted by the RIAA after the RIAA came in and convinced the University to allow them access.
All the RIAA has to do is politely ask (more like......we will hold you harmless if we are given access to investigate) and the Universities usually will bow in and allow access to the campus network.
As for stopping campus filesharing, it's pretty hard to stop as long as it stays within the borders. And moreover, with students in such close physical contact, it's fairly easy to set up rogue networks, or even just swap burned DVDs/memory sticks.
Title: Use Creative Commons idea(s) not DRM!
To: those who want to protect digital copyright... use Creative Commons!
Can Creative Commons protect works for "commercial only" purposes?
If so, then...
Use Creative Commons, with a meta-data tag, that gives a digital file a digital ID that is search-able, filterable, and then protect that meta-data from changes or removal by creating a law that prevents the change or removal of a file or it's meta-data. ISP's could filter the meta-data - like how anti-virus software works, and notify a user (ISP has their email address for billing purposes) that the users account is being used to exceed "fair use" of copyrighted material, beyond a quota, or established "fair-use" limit. Of course Creative Commons or the government needs to establish a Creative Commons style of "commercial only" license with a way to register (on-line) a creators digital meta-data. Shareable meta-data (See Creative Commons Share-alike) would be not filtered or audited, only commercial only meta-data would be filtered. The notification process would first be friendly, then a process of questioning by the ISP could happen if the "commercial only creative commons meta-data" continued to be shared beyond fair use! If all friendly attempts to stop the infringer from exceeding fair use quota did not affect the traffic the ISP could then notify a central world wide infringer data base providing a "hidden" Pseudonym email address to the database where others could email this Pseudonym address and the ISP would then forward the email to the infringer (the creator of the works, owner of copyright, or fans of the work could then ask the infringer to stop (could be digital and automatic once the infringer's pseudonym email address hit the database listing the files meta-data along with the pseudonym's email address. Friendly notification, only amplified could continue, before enforcement action via law suit or criminal process could continue. IP v6 could allow an ISP customer a "assigned IP address" and even if the user had a open wireless network that was usable by anyone, they could be advised in a friendly way to investigate the users of the network or be able to "block the sending of certain files on their network" at a central router or firewall. Final penalty for user who infringes on "commercial only creative commons copyright digital meta-data" would be the termination of the Internet account by the ISP (private ISP or public if the municipality were providing free Internet access)! No one would like to loose their Internet access, would be worse than fines (as a repeat infringer could be targeted in a database with the risk of being black listed for X amount of time from using other ISPs). Of course, other Internet anonymous use could continue as only "commercial only" meta-data would be filtered or audited! China does a similar thing now to control Internet access there, only in violation of human rights. Blocking content is possible as well and the creative commons license, once violated, revokes future use of the licensed work (meaning that the ISP could block that one file from being shared, etc). Auditing traffic of certain file types is possible because of the meta-data idea with creative commons! 12 year olds sharing files should not be criminal, yet does need attention of parents who don't want to lose their Internet access due to illegal sharing. Remember that Creative commons can also have meta-data for sharable works that use the various degrees of creative commons protection and notification of the terms of use with the license.
No DRM at all!
Friendly to all.
See Creative Commons web site and use your imagination as to see how easy this would be to get going all over the world.
http://www.creativecommons.org
The music, movie, and other artist's are a bit paranoid. Some industry folks have a second interest in DRM (protected by law), and that is to profit from the sale of many diffe
When interviewed, the majority of congressmen said point blank that person to person "dormroom" sharing of music was fair use and in no way objectionable.
.. "in the news today the RIAA demanded that automakers comply with new requirements to prevent passers by and non-drivers from "illeagally hearing" music from car stereos which "by law" is only entitled to the owner/operator of the vehicle alone."
Further, the DMCA's notice and takedown only applies to the internet, not local area networks.
Any university complying with these bs "complaints" has to have the stupidest administration ever, and any claims made by the RIAA are now utterly specious.
What next.. "illegal sharing through car radios"?
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
The RIAA will be going after Microsoft for allowing people to share files on their computer over a "network neighborhood". After which, hard drive manufactures will be sent letters informing them that their products are used in the distribution of copyrighted material and must include anti-file sharing technologies. Tesla will be woken from the grave and bitch-smacked for his accomplishments in electro-magnetism, and finally they will sue God for giving humans ears in which they can listen to stolen songs.
Wow, that slope was slippery...
Last year, I got contacted by the net admins at my university and had my internet shut off because they'd been contacted externally by Paramount for downloading a 'tagged' movie. The movie had evidently been scripted with some kind of tracing code that reported its movement and transfers back to the source it originated from. Whether or not this technique is commonplace or can be done to any file, I don't know, but this tracing method is definitely one way that the moving of copyrighted files can be detected.
Am I wrong to think that a program like WASTE (http://waste.sourceforge.net) is the easy fix if they started sniffing the local traffic?
In short, the students will always remain one step ahead of the filtering.
...and they'll just use another.
;)
are you going to block all of ftp, scp, mail, and so on? unlikely.
I actually love watching this arms race. I know how it will turn out, too.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Don't buy RIAA member CDs, make music mixes for friends and support the indie scene. If someone chides you about filesharing, tell them to get stuffed.
http://www.downhillbattle.org/ http://www.eff.org/ http://www.riaaradar.com/
Glad to hear Georgia Tech and Boston College are safe!
The Blaster Master Fighting for Truth, Justice, and Evil Pie since 1979
Why don't they just ban data transmission all together?
I will forever be a student.
I've got a list of all universities in the USA. Maybe the RIAA would be interested in buying it from me, for say, 10000$ and a life long guarantee that I won't get sued.
And how the heck are they going to filter all that? My file sharing goes through NNTP, HTTP and FTP (and recently more often through SFTP)
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
the eventual inventor.
You could be sending encrypted information. Heck, even using some sort of Vignere system would probably suffice to hide the content. So packet sniffing isn't worth much, if it's checking content. It has to check format, and then it only checks format. So if you have substantial non-infringing usage, that looks the same, in a cryptographically secure system, as substantial infringing usage.
So, if you simply target peer-to-peer systems in a campus network (connections between any two student computers), well, you'll stop me from using SSH on my computer, and I'll complain bitterly. Then if you allow SSH, I'll just have to use port 22 for all my filesharing. (Which means I have to run BitTorrent as root, and I'm not willing to do that....)
By coincidence, though, today's keyword is 'bootlegs'.
when they outlaw loudly distributing music over the atmospheric network. Thus I will finally be able to get some sleep...
I heard that if the LANs were shut down, students could be sharing files using CDs, Zip Disks, or, help me, USB Flash disks!
I think the RIAA needs to call on everyone to install antipiracy guards (otherwise known as superglue) into USB ports and disk drives of all computers!
That'll solve piracy forever!
(Note, that was sarcasm)
this is the use for a wireless mesh.
if each dorm area has a person or two who knows how to set up a file server with some indexing and request code so the users can log in to any server in range, or ask for a list available on out of range server, out of range file requests would be processed by passing the file to a moderate sized temporary location on the intermediate file servers until it was accessable by the original requestor.
a file in temporary storage which is requested often would be moved to a semi-permenant storage that way a file should not have to move across campus more than once or twice to reach everyone who wants it.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
1: gain unauthotized access to the network: a crime
or
2: pay off students, who are not experts, or potentialy worse, students with know-how and malis to collect the data, so how can they prove that the data is valid, and not tamperd with?
Any lawyers in the house? Care to give it a shot?
This would be a great time for students to start setting up wireless meshes on their campuses. The university can't regulate it or give RIAA a tap to go sniffing around. The infrastructure would be easy to set up too.
Lord High Crapflooder The Right Honourable Vlad Craig Esther McDavenpherson III
Destroyer of Mercatur.Net
Share a copyright file on a major p2p network. Log all direct connections. See who the IPs belong to.
About two weeks ago the direct connect hub at the university of texas was shut down due to outside pressure from the **aa. Our ITS department already imposed strict bandwidth restrictions on amount of bandwidth used (4gb-12gb a week with more bandwidth costing more money). We used the hub to share files (primarily new tv shows) so everyone could get what they wanted without runnign out of bandwidth. Before the letters, ITS looked the other way because the hub accually saved them money on bandwidth. The owner of the hub had his internet revoked and was orderd to shut down the hub a facebook group and serve 40 hours of community service in exchange for not turning his name over to the copyright holders for prosecution.
You mean a samba search engine to find such files isn't allowed either?
Now, it's personal!
I'm pretty sure I saw this article on /. some days ago...
In the UK, almost every university has at least one DC++ hub that a large portion of the student body knows about and uses. Many have customised installers that make it easy for lay people to get starting filesharing and, with computers so ubiquitous on campus, almost anyone has the knowledge to get involved.
The thing is, these massively efficient networks that often contain dozens of TiBs of data would not be nearly as widespread as they are if it weren't for unwritten university policies. If the university isn't on JANET, external bandwidth is expensive. If it is, bandwidth isn't metered as such, but it's in the institutions' interests to not rinse their external traffic too much especially with high upload rates favoured by P2P protocols such as Bittorrent. As such, students using massive amounts of external P2P bandwidth are quickly clamped down upon while they are simultaneously reminded that the existing LAN costs sweet fuck all. What's more, untold masses of viruses come in from kids searching for warez ftp sites or loading up KaZaA.
It doesn't take too long for the computer scientists to put two and two together and test the waters with a DC++ hub either within the university or outside. As long as users do not saturate the university network and hence impinge upon academic use, it's a win-win situation. College kids get the new Tool album for free without getting busted and the university avoids angry letters from the xxAA while seeing its bandwidth bills fall. As long as students don't make it the university's problem, they're happy to ignore it.
It's hard to see how the RIAA can achieve anything by this. After all, they are private networks and no university's computer office is going to give them access to their network if they have any sense. The kids will be forced back to torrents and such. As long as those running hubs are intelligent enough to delete logs and people are prepared to migrate to something like WASTE, the RIAA's efforts are futile.
Turkeyphant
I thought FERPA didn't allow college administrators to disclose personal information to outside authorities without proper documentation like a search warrant.
What next.. "illegal sharing through car radios"? .. "in the news today the RIAA demanded that automakers comply with new requirements to prevent passers by and non-drivers from "illeagally hearing" music from car stereos which "by law" is only entitled to the owner/operator of the vehicle alone."
;p
You don't know how good an idea that is. I'd love for someone to legally shut those subwoofer hydraulics the fuck up.
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
4-21-06 Never Forget.
The day our hub went down.
We even made tshirts.
The * at * works great, noone will take down our *. The RIAA can't get into our * legally......
How about the MPAA and RIAA focus on creating music/films WORTH the money they are asking instead of going after the consumer? If a film is worth watching I will go to the theater/buy/rent it. When you constantly put out cliche manufactured music/movies then they won't get my money. It's that simple.
From the sounds of it, we're talking about open network shares here. It would hardly require any invasive software to find or browse them, and not likely anything illegal. In fact, ruling software that scans open SMB shares would probably be just as much a slippery slope as anything.
Gonzales wants to track users on the Internet for the sake of "fighting porn". This in of itself is scary because it's not difficult to imagine the potential for abuse. Now the RIAA wants to monitor college networks for "file sharing". This could easily be manipulated to filter out certain ideas and beliefs as a means to suppress freedom of speech. It could also be used to target students for their beliefs.
First of all, why is the RIAA monitoring colleges' LANs? Is that even legal? Secondly, I fileshare on my LAN all the time. The sharing of my clients' orders and bills is necessary to the survival of my business. Don't flame me for asking this because I honestly don't know the answer: does the RIAA have any authority or legal right to be monitoring students and their actions on private college's LANs? Where does the Recording Industry Association of America get off thinking that they have any authority over the sharing on local networks?
Good thing I live off campus!
As soon as everything gets encrypted with a public key system, the filters won't be any good. This can work in a closed environment where people know each other (sort of) and can trade keys ahead of time. But I do wonder how well these filters will work if the sharing uses protocols like NFS, SMB, FTP, RSYNC, and some obscure thing called HTTPS. Of course the RIAA will still be able to see what's happening through the use of spyware and such. Then the RIAA will eventually try to get the government to require the universities to prohibit Linux and BSD.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
How will this affect NAS? Am I not allowed to have a computer dedicated to storing my music now? What about actual commercial products that are labeled speicifically for NAS?
Come on. Chant it with me people. R-I-A-A GO AWAY
My karma makes buddha cry.
really. of course not. but if I happen to own a piece of the network between 2 of your computers, such as a router that traffics between your home computer and your office computer, then I am perfectly free to look at the traffic and act accordingly. Thats the position these university networks are in.
And we both know that they are not interested in the people that casually toss a song somewhere... to draw their attention - a nasty letter generally, you have to be sharing lots and lots of stuff. Think about it, they want to find who is the worst file sharers, they see who is sharing the most britney spears or n sync or whatever. theres plenty of teenagers with lots of bandwidth that probably have no idea they are sharing all 1000+ songs in their collection. and those are the people who get the attention, which again is usually nothing worse than a evil sounding letter in the mail.
and then they are also the least likely to put up a fight in court. if you even know how to set up a home computer network that instantly puts you in the top couple of percent of computer users, and also the ones the RIAA would rather not meet in court... not that they couldn't destroy you easily, but why do that when there are far easier pickings...
but I think you know all that and just went for the +1 obvious comment that really could have been posted on any story regarding file sharing.
Sure, there might be some other short-term solution, but the end result is going to be one of these two alternatives. China has already discovered this, and there is no more "professional" CD audio production for sale.
I wonder when the RIAA will ban sneakers because they help file transfers on sneakernet?
*It's not what you can do for the Dark Side but what the Dark Side can do for you!*
Because the university made all the students sign some form saying (among other things) that the university could monitor their network usage and so forth.
You're right that the RIAA can't install this themselves, and cannot *force* the schools to install this (well, unless they get additional laws passed). However, if they convince the school to voluntarily install sniffing tools, the school can do whatever it wants with the data, including sending it to the RIAA.
Of course, college students are educated, vocal, often hard-up for money, and the prospect of a lot of them with incentive to hack on P2P clients that encrypt or hide their traffic has a certain degree of risk for the RIAA...
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
Screw the RIAA entirely. Go get decent music, GOOD music, from artists who haven't sold their souls to the corporate beast and actually give a damn about their audience and listeners. Check out the Podsafe Music Network.
http://music.podshow.com/
--
Christopher S. Penn
Be sure to tune in to my daily podcast!
http://www.financialaidpodcast.com/
Subscribe for free to my show!
Banning MP3s on Military bases?
(Then I look forward to the letter demanding the MP3 trading to stop with the Congressional staff and members)
The copyright enforcement organizations will find it hard to push around public universities, without a direct federal court order: the states, and by extension state agencies, cannot be sued in federal court for money damages without their own permission.
Mod parent up. Interesting.
FYI, smb is not just a Mac term, it's the actual name of the protocol for sharing files, printers, etc on a Windows box.
The Samba client used in OS X and *nix (smbclient) just refers to plain old "smb".
From the Wikipedia entry:
Sorry to nitpick
What's the ugliest part of your body? Some say your nose, some say your toes, but I think it's your mind. -Zappa
... over my cold festering corpse will I filter out filesharing on the LAN.
There are plenty of legitimate LAN filesharing uses, and we use quite a few of them for perfectly legitimate needs (e.g., we share A/V updates/definitions via filesharing technology, etc.)
Yeah, we "could" simply block stuff like OurTunes and crap like that, but then the developers will just switch to doing things like allowing users to use CIFS or AFS shares, which no campus in the world can simply disallow. They're far too prevalent.
In other words: Fighting it is a pointeless gesture, and I won't commit man-hours -- which are already far too overtaxed in Universities -- to being sucked down that particular black hole.
These fools never get it. everytime they try to crush something, a better one pops up on a side note.. i work in a computer lab and the other day i get a call from a student around midnight with a concern that his paid file sharing program isnt working. I wanted to speak to him as a student but couldnt!
It may take a while, but eventually they're going to run that tap dry. Being a fruitless-effort hobbyist myself, I'll try to hasten the day by pissing and moaning at my elected officials. Hey, someone has to, what with all the actual grown-up problems sitting on the back burner while public servants pour ever more time, money & former constitutional rights into legislating a perfect digital Fort Knox for the entertainment industry.
Pi Ran Out
http://www.aselabs.com/articles.php?id=190 Stuff like this makes you wonder how far it will go.
As other posters have suggested, this is indeed a copyright infringment ("piracy"). Fair use doesn't protect you just because you aren't selling what you've copied. In the end, fair use comes out to a series of somewhat guided prudential evaluations and some surprisingly unreliable case law. So...
Has an unlicensed copy been made? Yes. Is the character of the use to derive personal, idiosyncratic benefit?. Yes. Can I, the judge, imagine this effecting the market? Yes. Is this space-shifting/time-shifting? No. Oops.
Are the hubs internal to the university or outside somewhere? Also, which university has the best hub?
"The RIAA did not disclose the methodology they used to determine that filesharing is occuring on those local networks, but it probably didn't involve asking permission."
"probably didn't involve asking permission". That's about as good an argument as the RIAA uses to invade our privacy. We're probably pirating music because we're using lots of bandwidth and we're probably pirating because cd sales are down.
I am not a defender of the RIAA by any right, I hate them as much as any slashdot nerd, and I am not flamebaiting, but if probably is the kind of arguments we're going to use against them, we're making their own use of such reasoning sound reasonable.
Install COX in your backend today!
I think if she listens to your stereo that's considered piracy. As if it's the RIAA's business.
My book, podcast
Sneakernet for the win! Anyways, has it come to RIAA's attention that decreasing sales could be a result of boycott? Do you know what the best way to protect intellectual property is? Keep it to yourself and don't let anybody have it, duh? Oh, my God! That's such a big innovation, I think I deserve the Nobel prize for it!
Restrictions rarely, if ever, fly without stepping on a huge load of people's toes. Take SSH/SFTP for example. Block that and we have irked ITS staff. Or how about BitTorrent? That has legit uses too.
I find it real unfortunate how some people (to be politically correct) will try their best to quash anything that will sting now but will pay off "manyfold" in the long run. What bigots they are, what bigots they are! But don't worry, folks... bigotry costs money too! :D
Most of the time when I read the modded up comments below the summaries, someone has already said everything worth saying... but for this paticular article it seems like even a lot of the the +5 comments are, well, crap.
I am a student at the University of Texas. One week ago our DC++ hub was shut down. This was unexpected and unprecedented. A few months earlier the school news paper even interviewed people with ITS who basically said they could care less about the hub. After the university received some type of a cease and desist letter, our school's ITS contacted the primary HUB admin, and long story short within less than 24 hours the hub had to shut down forever. Amoung other obscure sidenotes, they even ordered that the facebook group "Direct Connect Users Group" be deleted. My friends at Texas A&M have told me their hub is down right now too, similar story.
Both our colleges had hubs constantly sharing about 20TB of data, 24-7, with net download speeds of 1.5Mbps. Every TV show was on our hub within 4 hrs of airing. Adobe Acrobat 7 and Office 2007 were both readily avaialable before I could, not that I ever would of course, download them from private bittorrent trackers. The files were never corrupted, there was no risk of getting caught, and everything mainstream you could ever want was on the hub.
One huge appeal of the hub also was it's simplicity of use. 5GB share minimum was pretty much the only barrier to entry. I know friends who downloaded from DC++ who never heard of BitTorrents in their life, and for that matter, have asked me for help reinstalling windows. It was so simple and easy to use to the average non-geek that now that it has gone down people ask me what to do and give me blank looks.
So in response to every post about other alternatives to file sharing or otherwise really miss the significance of this, I think it is quite a significant win for RIAA.
When interviewed, the majority of congressmen said point blank that person to person "dormroom" sharing of music was fair use and in no way objectionable.
Sounds interesting. Link?
I really don't understand this witch-hunt against file sharing - peer-to-peer. etc. The Internet is all about moving files from A to B - http, ftp, scp, nfs, email, bittorrent...these are all just ways of moving data around.
You can illegally copy copyrighted works using almost any protocol you can imagine - so the existance of a community of people moving data around means NOTHING. Unless the **AA can show WHAT is being moved around - and that it's illegal, there is no reason to single out any one particular protocol as the cause for worry.
Even if you imagine one particular protocol is predominantly used for wrong-doing - you can't reasonably penalise the legal uses of that protocol. If you actually succeeded in shutting down one protocol - another can be invented overnight. This is simply the wrong approach to dealing with copyright violations.
Argh.
www.sjbaker.org
I usually have a delusion of having something more meaningful to say. Though if you think of it in the right way, it *is* meaningful in this context to try to draw attention to your sig, now isn't it?
I'm overthinking this, aren't I? Sorry.
Pi Ran Out
... supermarkets have been requested by the RIAA to enforce customer filtering (earplugs) or desist from allowing customers to listen to "The Best of Kenny G" at no charge. Consumer groups have rushed to support the move.
THIS is what's next.
for a minute there, i lost myself...
Dude,
Out in the real world, we're downloading that much *in an hour*.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I suppose it's possible this guy isn't a shill. We've all met somebody with that self-righteous fundie attitude, right? Gravitating that kind of crap to a religion is more common, but there are other things to attach it to -- the point is to feel superior to everyone else...
So, I'm tempted to say vulgar things about sock puppets, but on the off chance that this guy is for real (and since on the internet nobody knows you're a dog), I'll reply on that basis:
Surely by now, even the most naive of you understand that each /. post about you results in a dozen links to places a user like *me* could go get "free" media from your artists.
Surely by now, federal law enforcement has come to accept that prosecuting every case of US-based piracy is absolutley futile. If you think you have a hard time paying bills now, just imagine the cost of keeping 15,000,000 music-stealing college students in jail!
Surely by now, even the most tyrannical policy makers understand that college students barely afford Romen noodles and beer. They can assign all the random fees and fines they like, but as the old axiom goes, you can't get blood from a stone(r).
Surely by now, this psuedo-police state realizes it has fucked itself, shot itself in the foot. Don't we all understand that, at this point, its just a matter of time until the "Nintendo Generation" steps up and tosses these animals out? How exactly did they expect to support this orwellian grid without "we the sheeple" running the backend anyway?
That said, here is my question:
What's the point, RIAA? No, really, what's the point?
barack to the future?
Actually, university students have traditionally been one of the music industry's best markets. On average, they have more disposable money and time than they ever will. Most will have more money when they land the increasingly rare, "real" job but they will have much less time to keep up with music and will realize that the limited value of canned expression.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
since i can remember.. oh wait.. i remember.. i stopped sampling music on napster (illegal version that time) i have 252 real cds.. hardware.. i am 30 years old.. my old way of listening music = drive to college.. liked a song.. download on napster.. download a few more.. BUY the CD at store.. new way of listening music = drive to work ( make more money ), liked a song.. DIDNT download on napster/others.. slept peacefully.. next day.. tune to different station on FM.. many stations playing the same song again and again.. listen many many times.. i get bored.. dont care.. saved money.. DIDN'T BUY THE CD.. who gains = ME i dont care about music companies.. i dont care about song singers/writers/artists/anywho.. the bottom line is.. IF I LIKE I BUY.. IF I DONT U CANT FORCE ME.. WHEN WILL RIAA/RECORD COMAPNIS GET THIS.. people who downloaded songs illegally will always will/have/screwed on companies faces.. and for that matter never got revenue for that.. i could buy a legal tape (i am old) for 2-4$ equivalant in India; I could get a legal CD for $7-8.. similar current CD, i got to pay 18$ at walmart.. NO WAY.. I might tbe earning much more.. (10x) this time.. but i wont be burning money.. RIAA/ Companies can and should turn things over.. i dont know how.. i dont know when.. but i know.. its got to happen..
FERPA
HIPAA
DMCA
Any number of corporate espionage laws.
The RIAA has (self-purportedly) crossed the line here and I sure hope a U Board somewhere has the Cajones to clean them out. There is no way for them to have made this sort of determination without also having illegally accessed student's academic and medical records, as well as lord knows how much federally and corporate sponsored research data. This is criminal. Criminal in a manner that is FAR more important than music swapping. Depending on where they have been snooping, they may very well have sniffed at DoD funded research, consituting an act of treason and/or terrorism. This is a VERY SERIOUS allegation they have made against themselves and I can't wait to see the look on their faces when they see what is in Pandora's box!
And for the minimalists who hate bloat, or the h4x0rs want to download torrents with their zombie linux boxes, there is ctorrent.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
But perhaps a more significant file sharing program comes built into Windows. The Windows file share and samba allow people to share data between their own computers. If my university blocked samba shares I would be greatly inconvenienced. My main computer is a laptop that runs windows. It has a small hard drive, so I keep most of my files on my Linux box via a samba share. The Linux box isn't powerful enough to replace my laptop, it's just there to provide storage space. I'm not sharing my files with the world, or even a few other people on campus, so the RIAA has no right to tell me (or my university) that I can't share files between my own computers.
As much as the RIAA pisses me off, I think the pirates are largely to blame. If some people weren't always trying to get copyrighted works without paying for them, the media producers wouldn't have nearly as many excuses to bind users to certain platforms in order to use the media.
Lets forget that this is a university for a second. This is a LAN. A LOCAL AREA NETWORK. I know, I know there might be illgal sharing at a university. But if we let the RIAA have it's way then what's next? Manadatory filters on home PCs and LANs? I don't like the idea of my PC being controlled by someone else. I might be a control freak, I disable windows services, I unistall stuff I don't want, I edit my registry, I built my PC. I control every aspect of my computer and I hope to never see the day when I don't know who does. This may be slightly off topic. But the problem with the RIAA is that they only understand piracy. They don't understand computers, or the spirt of the internet. When US goverment agencies start trying to control the internet you know what hapens? More offshroe servers, more outsourcing, less jobs in america because of offshroe servers and outsourcing. You see, the more laws that get apporved that behinder productivity or the freedoms of the geeks, nerds, and hackers, the more we are screwing ourselves over. Unfourtunaly we the people no longer have the power to say no. The system is to complex and shadey to be at the right place and time to vote against the right bill or law in order to preserve what you belive. Say for instance New York puts put laws against LAN sharing, well if you live in Georgia you can't fly up to New York to say no. Well then Virgina does it because NY did. Then it gets to Georgia. BY popular Vote on some BS board it gets apporved because you and only 5 other people were there to say no. A university might be goverment funded but at its roots it's a private school, a place of Work, a companay. A bisinuss such might have a LAN. Joe in graphics needs the video on how to use photoshop. You have it so you send it to Joe. WHOOPS. You can only get this video by paying for photoshop. You are now a horrible person as far as the RIAA is concerned. Insted you say nope, can't do it Joe. So joe hunts arround for his photoshop serial key so he can match it up with the correct video. 3 hours later Joe still can't find it. He gets fired for it. Now that is what I call extreemly counter-productive. Now Time for some reality. The above is what will happen if we let the RIAA countine to do this stuff. What is happening is that there are alot of files being sent around by students. I actully doubt that even 10%of thoose files is music. I think that is would be better to burn a CD. It is probolly the videos of whom got punked at parties, the tests answers, homework info, pictures, etc. etc. And if the RIAA is looking for this stuff without asking permision then they themselves are even worse than the people that they are fighting.
It's not -1 Flamebait! It's +5 Funny. You just didn't get the joke...
Because university IT departments already have enough on their plates with all the Windows worms running amok.
My school blocked several ports to and from our comp.science senior labs (where we live 110% of the time). Due to the genius of bittorent, however, they couldnt entirely block us based on port numbers.
Also, LAN filesharing has made comp.science majors very popular here. All majors pay us visits to get our files on shared.We are heroes.We have more power than the president. He couldnt stop us if he tried.
What next.. "illegal sharing through car radios"? .. "in the news today the RIAA demanded that automakers comply with new requirements to prevent passers by and non-drivers from "illeagally hearing" music from car stereos which "by law" is only entitled to the owner/operator of the vehicle alone."
Already true in Finland for Taxi drivers - when there's a passenger, either the radio is switched off or the driver (or Taxi company) pay's levys to the RIAA equivalent here.
Doing this is just going to make them spiteful, and believe me, if anyone has the time on their hands to hurt you - it's going to be university students. Putting facist-style controls in place with the RIAA in cahoots with the Administration is going to get people mad.
You think the RIAA is mad now, wait until some crafty EE figures out how to get a UWB transmitter on the bottom of an ipod with a "instant share" button.
..don't panic
Here's a few pointers for sharing stuff on a school network.
1) Don't use windows filesharing.
2) Try these things called VPNs... you can use them very easily with Windows XP.
3) Use FTP... or better yet, SCP to transfer files with your friends.
4) Create a secret underground ring of illegal file swappers.
5) If you find that the RIAA is snooping at your school do whatever you can to thwart them. This includes: Creating false traffic, Sharing false video files, Creating a barrage of media traffic from one PC to another, Use disclaimers on your FTP servers and other filesharing devices.
-=Zeus=And=Hades=-
If the RIAA wants the university to filter their network to protect their copyrights and their bottom line then they should pay the university for all of the network equipment, bandwidth, employee/consultant hours, and any other expenses necessary to conduct the filtering. The mission of any university is to provide higher education and policing the student body so that a private industry organization, which is entirely external to the mission of the university, will not suffer from potential loss of profits is NOT the responsibility of the university. The question is not whether file sharing is legal, but rather to what extent the university can be compelled to shoulder the cost of protecting the intellectual property of someone else, especially in the expensive and escalating arms race between the RIAA and the file sharers. If the university makes a good faith effort to inform students in their acceptable use policy what is and is not acceptable use and complies with reasonable and specific subpoenas (subject to reasonable charges for research, copies, and other legal expenses that any other civil plaintiff would have to pay) the I would say that they (the university) have satisfied their obligation under the law. If the RIAA et al wants more extensive monitoring then they can shell out the $100,000+ for extra servers and network monitoring gear along with the consultants to operate it all and the university employees' time (billed at least $100 per hour for interruption of normal university related duties). They cannot compel us to pay to protect THEIR property, only the government has the power to tax. Anyway, no other private business gets anywhere near the cooperation from law enforcement at the expense of the tax paying public and still they complain. The FBI should be traking down the identity thieves, terrorists, serial killers, and other really nasty criminals...not wasting their time busting copyright infringers on behalf of the entertainment industry. The RIAA should get off our campuses and they should take their craptastic "music" with them.
their congressmen and demanded that they deal with the mad dogs that are the RIAA, they'd geek in about 20 seconds. We need to speak up and put an end to this insanity.
Stay in school kid. The phrase is "could not care less" not "could care less." If you were in school learning something you would have the critical thinking skills to not sound so stupid.
http://www.hamachi.cc/
Encrypted, simple, fast speeds over LAN, and can connect long haul as well .
Network neighborhood even works clear across the world as long as you can
configure the special conditions for firewalls .
You just need some kind of common forum for ppl to register and get on the network,
and periodically do a total reset, perhaps even schedule them amongst known users .
They keep pushing and it is just going to drive us to crypto, and underground
communities online that are like friendster, where you cannot get in unless
your invited and vouched for .
A 2 tier referral system would be very brutal, ie. 2 referrals to get in .
Package this with auto updating black list firewalling like peer guardian 2
and its gonna make life pretty hard for the RIAA/MPAA and whoever else .
In a way a setup like this would remind me of the BBS days .
Peace,
Ex-MislTech
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
Keep in mind these letters were sent to the Presidents of the universities, NOT to the IT/network department. This pressure from above (who may not entirely understand the situation) forces the network admins to do something about it, even given the legal gray area of snooping on campus networks.
The IT/network department may condone filesharing internally to a point, as it would significantly reduce the load on the external Internet pipes (as well as the fact that BitTorrent can open an insane # of connections that quickly saturates a link.) Also, do not forget the cost of deploying such network-based p2p control devices like the ones suggested in the article and the impact they may have on normal traffic, as well as the cost of performing an audit of the computers on campus to determine the actual extent of "infringement." These things are generally not in the budget for an IT department, so IMO the **AA may have to push extremely hard to get any action done.
What are the odds that some idiot will name his mutex ether-rot-mutex!
You can read the actual press releaseon the RIAA's website. It is written in a style that spreads fear among the accused and placates shareholders. Get a load of this - "The perceived security and privacy of these campus LANs give many students incentive to engage in activity they have otherwise learned is illegal and unacceptable."
.ogg files and allow others to connect via my personal router - who is gonna know? I wouldn't doubt that the .ogg format slip right under their proverbial 'noses' since they show no knowledge of that open source format. (Scanning the alleged PC for .mp3 and .wma)
Perceived security? No one is safe from the all pervasive RIAA!
And in closing, for the shareholders - We know from past experience that bringing this problem to light can effect real change. We are hopeful that this new systematic program will yield even more positive results.
Of course they don't site sources or mention specific schools.
This is FUD. Obviously they don't see the real privacy obtained with a private network. If I set up vsftpd on a debian server full of high quality
Of course it would be foolish to assume ignorance on their part with their teams of lawyers.
Alternatives?
Boycotting CD's doesn't seem to be an option with all their moaning. The only option I see is to listen music NOT peddled by the RIAA. A good start might be magnatune. They may notice competition.
Especially the disapointment of discovering they don't hold any copyright to any file on your computer.
When interviewed, the majority of congressmen said point blank that person to person "dormroom" sharing of music was fair use and in no way objectionable.
Person to person, yes definately fair use. Sharing it on an University-only P2P hub with 27,000 (my ex-Uni) of my close friends, that's quite a stretch. Alright, so not all students were on it but quite many at least.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The RIAA's fundamental problem is that sharing mp3's is like the 6-degrees of bacon... User A & B copy each other's music then they each have a copy so A has A+B and B has A+B. Then B does this with C and now C has A+B+C. And so on until Kevin Bacon has all the music every published. That's their real problem.
Sharing of files 'on demand' like in direct connect or bittorrent or kazaa or *mule or whatever is just convenient. But mp3's are too small and drives are too large these days so with actual swapping by actual people in person (which at least previously was considered fair use) you could just copy everything. A single optical disk will be able to hold a month's worth of continuous music just this year. So the real problem for everybody not RIAA is how to know what to play.
as a student i don't have time to watch shows on monday @ 1900 everyweek, ect, i can only watch shows those rare periods of time when i dont have some test or essay to hand in, my schedulde is too unpredictable. if they allowed me, somehow, to watch the shows when i want to and can watch them, i wont download them from campus. they need to work on their distribution, till then i've solved my problem.
This is my sig.
Students would have had a "say" in the matter.
One way...or the other
According to recent legislation, they do. Many states are considering laws banning malware that collects personal information and scans victims' computers to identify and delete software, but declaring that said laws don't apply to software makers looking for illegal or unauthorized activity.
Revive the Constitution.
Strangely enough, I will say I thought about the expression when I typed it. I did a makeshift check on google...
- "could not care less" returns about 321,000 Results
- "could care less" returns about 5,480,000 Results
Check the hit count yourself; there really is that big of difference in results. I merely stuck with the most common usage.Disclaimer: For anyone who did happen to think critically about what I said, I will qualify that "couldn't care less" returns about 3,270,000 Results. That was the original cliche phrase, which over time has evolved for whatever reason to omit the "not" part. The real bottom line is that both versions are almost equally used, and the average person could care less which version you pick.
As a side-note, a bit offtopic, here in Holland we've just got mandatory health insurance.
...
That's right, tax on being alive, payed directly to insurance companies.
(did i mention that health insurance prices went up as soon as it became mandatory to have one?)
I reckon this would be a beter model for the "tax on being able to hear", payed directly to RIAA.
<rant>
As a foreign, EU born, freelance IT professional, paying income taxes of 55% (due to the stupid way freelancers have to work around here we get to pay more that the maximum straight income tax) i would like to announce i'm leaving this crappy place. I'm sure the illiterate person that will probably take my place will really contribute a lot to increase this country's prosperity
</rant>
Bearshare, nice? Yeah, nice as long as you enjoy SPYWARE! Whoa! Your computer will be melting.
They'll never stop LAN sharing. While I'm an engineering student, most people can understand Filezilla, a nice ftp client that supports SFTP. Hard drives are cheap these days, and anyone with a weeks linux experience can set up an SFTP server and share the username password. I doubt my school will bother to track down and break the encryption on it, the worst ehy would do is shut off our connection for a day as a warning, and there are enough poorly configured wireless points that losing the ethernet for a day isn't a problem.
SAILING MISHAP
There are many great examples of abuse in the civil courts, but I don't think the McDonalds coffee lawsuit is one of them.
See this.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
students. If any of them are recent graduates, they would know the truth. God, our network was loaded with all sorts of music. Did you hear that, RIAA? Perhaps some of them read slashdot, too! It is not a secret that university lans have zillions of copyrighted files for free.
In the letter that the RIAA sent to these colleges, they specified DC and Mytunes/Ourtunes. Now I have no idea how common DC hubs are at universities, but I do happen to know that iTunes pirating is very popular. How many campuses out there are absent of this form of piracy? Maybe the one without computers? The RIAA could have sent these to any campus with a listed administrative email account (Though I'm sure they went for larger campuses...)
I looked up the two devices that they reccomend. One has taken heavy flack from the EFF and is seems easy enough to defeat. The other's website hasn't been updated in years, and their 'news' lists events that vaguely occur with piracy. I'm sure that these 'solutions' would not be inexpensive, especially if the average campus's networking situation is anywhere near as kludged together as the one I attend.
I don't see what the RIAA is getting at here, unless they get some profits from however many of those filtering devices sell. If they do, though, I think that falls under the category of racketeering, though I'm far from an expert on the subject.
Its obvious that the RIAA has no future. I just want to know when they'll get around to realizing that.
Copyright destroys honest hard work and innovation. That is its true intention, its purpose, and its effect. Rationalize it however you like, but relying on copyright makes you a thief, a sell-out, and a liar.
Strangely enough, when you remove even more words from that query, there's even more matches. WOW! Who would have thought that that would happen.
could less - 760,000,000
could - 2,710,000,000
stay in school, kid.
They wouldn't notice, they're lawyers after all, so not really sentient.
Anyone with half a clue would realize that when 99% percent of the population does something like file sharing that happens to run against the law of the day, then it is the law that is wrong. The population has voted democratically by their actions, which is the only way to do it since the politicians are in the pockets of big business.
But these lawyer scum are happy to underpin bad law, as long as it lines their pockets. Such is the filthy underbelly of civilization, effectively the mob working under the protection of the law.
But yeah, nuke away if you think it'll help. But it won't, there's no shortage of lawyers, the putrid filth replicates like maggots.
Napster was around since 1998...
You forgot the excellent cross-platform e-donkey client aMule!!
It can run on your linux server, with remote GUI/command line access, and it can run on your Windows/MAC box. We've run it on our server for months now and its excellent....
www.amule.org
it's the RIAA. A dinosaur whose right to exist has expired.
In my capitalism books, what is obsolete has to vanish to the market can concentrate on material that is valuable. Now, capitalism has been turned upside down. Obsolete companies and market structures are kept artificially alive with laws.
Roll back about 100 years, when the automobile came into existance and hackney coaches became obsolete. Remember the laws that look so stupid today? The "man waving a red flag that has to walk in front of automobiles" and similar rubbish? Same shit.
What did it serve? It was annoying then, and it's something we can only shake our heads at today. Who'd come up with a STUPID law like that?
Well, now you have it all over again. Instead of traffic laws, now it's copyright laws that come up with harebrained ideas to protect a business that is essentially dead.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Try looking up "affect" and "effect" in the dictionary some time!
> What next.. "illegal sharing through car radios"? .. "in the news today the RIAA demanded that automakers comply with new requirements to prevent passers by and non-drivers from "illeagally hearing" music from car stereos which "by law" is only entitled to the owner/operator of the vehicle alone."
A similar thing has already happened in Germany. A GEMA (German equivalent of RIAA) representative was going around harrassing shop owners who had a radio on, because that was unlicensed use of the music "to attract customers".
I'm currently attending Trinity College, Cambridge. While they're quite fine with you sharing stuff over LAN via shared folders etc., but they've totally cut down on file sharing applications. Their excuse is actually because they want to save bandwidth, rather than the copyright reasons though, and interestingly they let you run an ftp daemon. But as soon as you start direct connect, even if you connect to an intranet hub, BANG, you get an email from them. Even if you run it on different ports. They seem to be sniffing all the packets and cutting out the stuff they don't like. Not only that but now they're out-lawed BitTorrent too; regardless of whether you're downloading movies or slackware. You just can't use the protocol without a good slap. Yeh, this is only one college, but it's the largest Oxford and Cambridge college and it's highly influential. It sucks.
From a college student at an effected University
While you are still in school, it might be worthy of learning what "effected" means, so that when you're an adult "in the real world" you won't embarrass yourself.
- Mandatory helmets and helmet cams to ensure that no one lends a copyrighted cd to his/her friend
- Mandatory mic implants to ensure that noone murmurs a copyrighted song while going to work and back
- Mandatory in-house representatives to ensure copyrighted lullabies are not sung to babies
- Mandatory arse cams to ensure that noone does sharing while 'online shitting'
Read radical news here
Actually, "could less" returns about 43,900 - learn to use Google!
In the perspective of their new objectives, the RIAA has decide to change its name to WIAA, Wiretaping Industry Association of America
You know, I really don't care what schemes the RIAA attempts, or even what oppressive laws they lobby for, because they don't hold the key to make any of it happen. Government ultimately holds the key, and therefore, if any of the RIAA's tactics work, I put the blame 100% on government. They decide the law, not the RIAA. After all, what would the RIAA be without a piece of this pie, this unique "right" to employ coercion, i.e. government? They would be nothing at all.
Let's call a spade a spade -- government is the root of this problem, and that's exactly who I blame for this problem.
Gentlemen, Please!
As geeks, you should know how to consuct your disagreements in a civilised manner.
May the Maths Be with you!
Has someone right a screen saver that sends out packets to other screen savers that look like file sharing packets ... except make these packets totally bogus ... i.e. no file sharing is going on ... it would make these BS sniffing tatics absolutely useless. This could be done easily by using torrent type technology and pulling play list off the right URL's.
Assuming university computer networks are not public, wouldn't that constitute illegal access to their computer systems? I don't remember anything in the law suggesting it was okay to illegally access someone's system if you thought there was abuse of your IP going on...not that we're buying RIAA's definition of abusing IP in the first place.
Why isn't the FBI asking RIAA how they got access to those networks? Perhaps they're busy out intimidating Republican political opponents. It is getting down to six months before the election, this would be their busy time of year.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
So the lesson here: everyone else is doing it, so it must be right.
It's this college mentality that probably lead the RIAA to target college campuses; if they can somehow get the majority of college students to pay for things again, a landslide is sure to follow.
As to your language usage, and the fallacy in your Google search: the phrase "could care less" is perfectly valid, but means the opposite of "could not care less" (or "couldn't care less"). I use both phrases with moderate frequency. Of course, I'm more likely to be speaking with derision, spite, malice, sarcasm, or irony when I use the affirmative expression.
...and I, for one, can't wait to see it happen.
These schools (and, eventually, all others) are going to have to ban all RIAA recordings, in ANY format including CD and tape, from their campuses, with violations subject to immediate seizure and disposal. That includes blocking any radio feeds and frequencies that carry their tunes. That's the only way to end the legal exposure to RIAA racketeering.
There's plenty of good music out there that isn't RIAA-tainted. Blanket-banning the tainted stuff will be a GOOD thing.
We've determined that since you have a LAN and people using it, you have files being transferred over it. Since we know your lan works just like the internet, you must be using it for pirating music. All your lan are belong to us.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
That is an idea. Just have one really loud stereo in the dorm, supplying the music for everybody. Anyone can go an take cds and play them. Sure it is loud, but if you want to study you shouldn't be staying in a dorm anyway.
I understand your point, but I think the end result of this may well be just the opposite. As you mentioned - a lot of those people wouldn't have the know-how to find out about alternative P2P or Bittorrent on their own, I don't doubt this for a second.
However, there will be a large minority of uni geeks who do have this magical information, and once one or two of the non-technical people see how easy it is to install a torrent client, they will tell their friends who'll tell their friends and within a very short timespan, everyone will be doing it. These people will then leave university pre-armed with this knowledge, knowledge they wouldn't have otherwise had. Meanwhile the people still at university are telling the new intake of students how to do the same thing and the knowledge spreads.
If, on the other hand, the free and easy method had remained in place, the vast majority of students would be leaving university without this forbidden knowledge. Now, unless they were fortunate enough to have counted one or two geeks amongst their friends while at uni, they will no longer have such easy access to this information once they leave. The likelihood is that most of them won't investigate alternative P2P, some who do will get frustrated with the process but the majority will be used to the convenience of digital content and the chances are they'll end up consuming "legal" downloads instead.
The RIAA needs to just accept that people in school will share content - they've been doing it since probably before the RIAA even existed and they'll continue to find new ways to do it. If they're forced to use "illegal" means, they will do so (and probably feel better about it for "sticking it to the man"). Just the same way that most prisons are now schools for criminals to learn new skills, the RIAA are in danger of making universities into training centres for the kinds of technology they want to kill off...
4) They studied them all and published data on the worst offenders claiming it was the "average".
No sig today...
Also, if you actually *look* at the results, all the front page results for "could care less" are literary sites complaining about how often it's used incorrectly; hardly supportive of the idea that google popularity determines correctness...
and the average person could care less which version you pick
Because on a scale of caring from 0 to 1, the vast majority care 0, and hence couldn't care less, while some people like to avoid idiocy, and are 1. The average is 0.1, so the average person could care 0.1 care units less :)
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
But none of your equivocation changes the fact that
a) you got the cliche wrong
b) the choice you made DOESN'T MAKE ANY FUCKING SENSE
Use you head guy, "could care less" means exactly the opposite of what you intended. Why keep trying to justify it?
Just say "I didn't know it was wrong, now I do" and you won't have to find any more excuses for saying something stupid (this time at least).
Or illegal sharing through thin apartment walls.
I for one would welcome such a rule. At least then I could get some sleep ;-)
The parent poster (quoted above) basically pulled an ad-hominem statement out of his ass. But, it's ad-hominem agains the RIAA, and this is slashdot, so it gets modded +5 Insightful. Come on, people - mod parent down. This is ridiculous. The parent didnt add anything to the discussion but his own baseless wet dream.
Maybe in America it did. But in the rest of the world it didn't, and you sound like a bloody fool saying "could care less". But hey, if you want to sound like the rest of the uneducated hicks, go right ahead. I have no problem with Americans sounding stupid :)
When considering issues of fair use, there are no hard and fast rules, but guidelines that arbitrators must follow. However, in the examles I gave above, the current interpretations are pretty clear-cut.
About 100,000 results from .uk use "couldn't care less" or "could not care less"; and 44,000 use "could care less," so it looks like things aren't much better over there either. Although, it does appear the phrase "I couldn't care less" originated in England, and then twenty years later the US bastardized it. So it appears we spread our ignorance back to you.
What?
just as there are millions of people using VCR's around the nation. That's not really a valid point.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
No, they will try to make it mandatory for all LAN's.
Any router or swtich made will have to filter content, if they have their way. Be it at a megacorp or in your own home.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
"Use of unencumbered encryption is illegal"
When that happens, and it will eventually 'for the children/terrorist/pirates/etc', content wont even matter, just the very act of communication can get you in trouble.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Since we are giving people ides of what to attack next:
1 - IRC The old stand by
2 - FTP Even older
3 - HTTP Yes, y ou can get files from a web page using this format
4 - SMB Well, doesnt work across the internet but it can on those evil LANs
5 - CDROMs oh god, you can copy a cd and give it to a friend and never touch a network?
etc etc etc
Point is its a losing battle, until they totally outlaw unencumbered A/D and D/A converters ( and CPU"s ).. Even then it will be possible, but not for 'everyone' as you will actually have to work at copying someting.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Curious, if a student 'squeals' on the school, do they need more permission to go in and verify? Most schools are funded in part by public funds so its not like they are a 'coroporation' where you need a warrant ( not that its hard to get one of course ).
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Am I missing something here or do we live in a world where it is impossible to prevent file sharing without a complete disassembly of the Internet?
There seems to be an assumption on the part of the RIAA/MPAA that it is feasible to somehow detect sharing activities. There seems to be technology available to (a) allow one to encrypt all of ones data & (b) choose arbitrary ports on which to share data. So minor extensions to existing file sharing software would seem to make it relatively impossible to detect that sharing was taking place or what was being shared. How precisely do you determine one is sharing the latest Linux ISO vs. the latest episode of Lost? (If one uses encryption and is relatively careful about who one shares things with?) One would presume that anyone who "outed" a within-campus sharing network would be cast to the lions in the center of the campus quad.
So don't current technologies effectively make it impossible to detect sharing of restricted material (or restrict it)? The only way I could see this working is if Universities started charging each user on the basis of bytes sent/rcvd. And even that will soon be defeated by distributed peer-to-peer WANs over 802.11g/n. Or am I missing something?
What I find interesting is that these kids have grown up in a world where free music could always be downloaded from the Internet.
Students are creative. No set of laws, regulations, filters, ACLs, firewalls, VLANS, etc, etc will stop the sharing, copying, theft, passing, trading, swapping, etc, etc. Next the **AA will say the Universitys must require a shadow (paid administrator) to follow every student; everyone knows students don't know how to use DVDR, CDR, USB drives, external HDs, private WLANS, private LANS, etc, etc. My favorite is a Cat5 out the 5th floor down to the 4th connneting 10 users via a Gb private network... holy pron batman!
First, Universities run PRIVATE networks, no different legally than a business network. If the RIAA can make universities police their netowrks this way, then can make Microsoft do the same to their own network.
Second, wether the activity is happening on a private or public network, it's not the RIAA's job to manadate policy. The RIAA legally has the power to notify authorities that illegal activity is happening through a particular external IP address. Having the knowlegde of internal LAN activity means someone from the RIAA has illegally obtained access to or acquired data from these networks, which are private, and that information is not admissable in court. Besides, all they can do is provide the AUTHORITIES with information. Contacting the schools, their board, or students directly can be seen as harrasment.
The school's only motive to police their own networks internally is to increase availible netowrk bandwidth. They'll do that at the pipe because bandwidth costs a lot, and a single firewall filter does not. However, adding a packet sniffer to each subnet and each switch is really damned expensive, much more so than increasing bandwidth to account for it, so there's no reason they'll do it.
All the university is legally responsible for is to warn students about the law and set forth policy for evicting students who abuse it or break the law from their networks, and possibly turn evidence over to proper authorities. However, since there are no state or federal lawn dictating that the campus actually police those networks they operate, we leave it to the FBI to determine who may or may not be breaking the law. So long as the university is ignorant of an individual's activity, there is no legal standing to force them to try to find out. The University may choose to call the FBI in to do the job, but I'm sure the FBI has more important jobs to do and could care less.
besides, block a port or a protocol, and someone will just open another one. Sooner or later, a common port needed for PC use will be open sourced, and the networks will start using an encrypted stream over a common port that can't be blocked without disrupting network access to basic functions. At that point, the RIAA can neither stop it nor police it (because the fine for cracking encryption far exceeds that of downloading music).
There is no contest in life for which the unprepared have the advantage.
"students are engaging in filesharing on their campuses using the local network."
And in other news - water is wet. What would have been news is if the RIAA told the Universities that their students didn't participate in music sharing or that they weren't having sex in dark corners between classes.
i agree to a degree. BUT,, for anyone who wants to take 5 - 30 minutes out of there life, there are countless alternatives. It's an RIAA win against the lazy and people who don't really care about downloading much. i've been downloading whatever since long before Napster (which i actually never really liked myself), as far as music goes, i'm still up on what FTP servers are out there. torrent's are good too, especially to invite only sites.
so your school has been forced to shutdown file-sharing hub running DC++, just spent the 10 minutes of effort to put an FTP server on an odd port with no anonymous access. unless the school has got a budget for sniffing out the traffic or monitoring (which i find most schools don't) than your back in business, in fact I could have had a new server up and relatively tucked away in the time it took to type this. and the client for FTP is even easier than DC++
Why bother going to college if you are going to base your English grammar on what Google tells you?
The people who want to trade will still find each other, they will still find a way to swap stuff. The most the RIAA can do is force file trading underground, limited to groups of friends trading burnt disks, or setting up their own adhoc networks.
Eventually a new file trading application will be written. And a new LAN trading network will spring up.
The RIAA cannot win this war.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
The RIAA did not disclose the methodology they used to determine that filesharing is occuring on those local networks, but it probably didn't involve asking permission.
Oh please. RIAA sets up a computer with busted music that is titled under some of the latest his name. Some kid from a college uses his fileshare program to access this music. When you download from a fileshare program the person uploading the file gets to see your IP address. No permission required.
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
No - you're wrong - they know the meaning of the word, they just can't SPELL it - that in itself means they need to go back to elementary/middle school, where they learn the basic rules of spelling and the differnces between effect and affect, their and they're, etc.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
The ONLY difference between "Could not care less" and "Couldn't care less" is the fact that "could" and "not" are joined by an apostrophe, with the proper letters omitted according to normal rules. Give me a fucking break. There is NOTHING different between the meanings. Even my high school English teacher (who is still on the phone as I type this,) agrees. Get a grip on the English language, EVERYBODY (not EVERYONE.)
A particular George Carlin quote comes to mind.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
"Maybe you need to chill.
Just because things are the way they are today, doesn't mean they have to be. Works of art were produced before copyright and they would continue to be produced afterwards."
Bullshit. As long as lazy fuckers like YOU *AND* *ME* continue to sit on our lazy asses and do nothing pro-active to get rid of this bullshit, things nowdays always WILL BE, no matter what. I *FINALLY* got off my ass and sent more than a leter to Congress - I sent them the "You are my employee because I helped put you in here with MY vote, and you will either do our bidding or you will be fired" letter, plus I went straight up to our local city hall and our local representative's office and I told him that exact same thing, with dead-level eyes and a very cold tone. Let me tell you - he got the picture VERY quickly, especially when I pointed out that by not following my point, I had the ability to very easily point out to the public that he was not only a liar, but a hypocrite as well, and a self-interested person. Not only that, but I could show he was also in support of Mafia beliefs and business practices that were deemed illegal many years ago.
Perhaps we should all use our supposed reasoning skills to directly confront these people and convince them to our point of view?
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Other students are file sharing and they didn't tell me? I feel so alone...
No - you're wrong - they know the meaning of the word, they just can't SPELL it - that in itself means they need to go back to elementary/middle school, where they learn the basic rules of spelling and the differnces between effect and affect, their and they're, etc.
To continue on the trend, you should go back to kindergarden because "they" is a plural pronoun, and the original post was made by a single person. Since you emphasise your superior spelling and grammar knowledge, the problem inherently is your inability to count.
P.S. If you are going to be a grammar Nazi, don't negelect things like "differnces"
A nation of informants and snitches. Not only do Americans hate their freedoms, they seem hate each other even more. I have a question. What is wrong with you people?? Two million immigrants are out marching to protect their rights. French protesters managed to get a bad law thrown out. The people of Nepal are getting their government back. Since you will never get the majority to vote for freedom, you need to go out and take them back. You don't need anybody's permission. These freedoms are yours, take them and don't let go. If you do let go of them, then you never deserved them to begin with. Why won't you all get it together and show YOUR clout?
What?
Did you mean "worthy to learn"? Dumbass.
We cannot ignore the growing misuse of campus LAN systems or the toll this means of theft is taking on our industry.
It is NOT theft. Theft is a criminal act and involves taking possession of something away from someone else. Copyright infringement is NOT a criminal act and does NOT involve taking possession of something away from anyone. You know it, I know it, we all know it. Well a know you (RIAA/MPAA) use this term because it's loaded, but it's simply wrong.
I would think that installing filtering software (and paying an employee to occasionally monitor same) would increase universities' costs. Maybe not much, maybe a lot--who knows. But my question is, is the RIAA planning on providing any sort of incentive for universities to do this? Or is it the usual "do it or we'll sue?"
When you listen to what they say and see what they do, it indeed makes no sense. But if you realize that these are amoral liars it makes more sense; in fact, perfect sense.
They'll PAY to get radio play and risk huge fines for it. FM radio is higher quality than even a high bitrate MP3. KSHE in St. Louis still plays whole albums on Sunday night... hmmm. You can record ENTIRE ALBUMS, 7 each week.
The indie bands like this one can't get on the radio. There are only three ways for these guys to get known: live shows, P2P, and MySpace.
The RIAA labels don't give a shit if you download Metallica. They know fuill well that increases, rather than decreases, Metallica's sales.
However, if you spend ten bucks on that Posamist CD and another ten bucks on that Station CD, that's twenty bucks you don't have to spend on the Metallica CD.
The only reason for any band to want a major label is radio. P2P is radio for the indies, is it any wonder they want it stopped?
Don't be surprised when they try to stop MySpace.
-mcgrew
Go home and rip my cd. In the process, burn every MP3 I have for my friend and he does the same.
Go back and exchange CDs and burned MP3 CDs. Guess what, I just increased my library by about 1000 songs.
Rinse and repeat.
Click Click Bloody Click PANCAKES!
You misread the parent article.
The student who is working for RIAA is the student proposed for punishment.
---
It's like the government these days...
They pass 20 laws.
Everyone breaks at least one of them.
The government only prosecutes the person who irritates them.
Likewise, the university could ignore all the students abusing the network in various ways yet expel the one student who was working for RIAA for abusing the network.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
There's a world of difference between your two scenarios, and the appropriate reaction to them.
An unauthorized, but strictly internal, usage of a private network is a concern, yes. But as long as it's not a malicious usage, and it doesn't have a derogatory impact on the network, servers, or other users' computers; then it's a relatively minor concern. And usually (And especially on an academic network.) there are more important issues to be dealt with.
An unauthorized usage that provides access to, or information about, to an outsider, on the other hand, is a serious security issue. And that *does* need to be dealt with swiftly and harshly.
cya,
john
Imagine all the people...
I hate to even suggest this because I don't think that artists should be punished for being part of a record label.
However don't you think it's time we boycotted artists who belong to record labels that are in the RIAA?
If we boycott enough concerts and stop buying cd's and such, while vocally advocating that we are doing so because we are sick of the RIAA bullying us, wouldn't that have the effect of getting them to rethink this. I'll sue you policy?
If they have the ability to detect if copyrighted materials are being traded, they have the ability to just block it. No need for lawsuits.
Has there ever been a day that someone didn't misuse then/than or less/fewer?
What about rampant spelling mistakes?
The future of grammar and spelling may look more like text messages. we R fukd.
12:1 A great sign was seen online: a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of distributed hubs.
....and it goes on like that.
12:2 She was with child. She cried out in pain, laboring to give birth.
12:3 Another sign was seen in heaven. Behold, a great red dragon, having seven heads and ten congressmen, and on his heads seven crowns.
12:4 His tail drew one third of the students of the universities, and threw them to the earth. The dragon stood before the woman who was about to give birth, so that when she gave birth he might sue her child.
12:5 She gave birth to a son, a male child, who is to rule all the nations with a rod of PGP. Her child was caught up to God, and to his encryption.
12:6 The woman fled into the usenet, where she has a place prepared by God, that there they may nourish her one thousand two hundred sixty days worth of music.
12:7 There was war in the courts. Michael and his coders made war on the dragon. The dragon and his lawyers made war.
12:8 They didn't prevail, neither was a place found for him any more in heaven.
12:9 The great dragon was thrown down, the old serpent, he who is called the RIAA and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world. He was thrown down to the earth, and his lawyers were thrown down with him.
Even if you did manage to get a boycott working it really doesn't matter to the record industry much because direct CD sales is becoming less and less important to them.
What most RIAA members make money on is: LICENSING. If you watch TV or a movie, shop at a store that's plays music under an ASCAP/BMI-type license, or listen to the radio - you've just contributed more money to the RIAA scumbags.
The only real way anything will get done about the ridiculous copyright situation in this country will be if the legislature steps up. Given how much money our legislatives take out of the entertainment business, I wouldn't count on this happening anytime soon.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
When interviewed, the majority of congressmen said point blank that person to person "dormroom" sharing of music was fair use and in no way objectionable.
Source? I can't turn up anything with Google.
Comment of the year
This devious networking scheme has been known to move data as fast as 10 GB/second (over very short distances), is known to deal heavily in stolen content, and is extremely hard to detect, measure, or stop.
To help protect revenues from this threat, the RIAA is proposing legislation forcing universities to shut down these networks. Proposed measures include mandatory personal searches every time a student enters or leaves any room on campus, including their dorm rooms, issuing RFID's that must be worn at all times and will be used to track all student's locations at all times, and restricting and tracking sales of blank storage media including CD-R's, DVD-R's, USB-keys, external hard drives, ZIP disks, tape backups, and 3.5" floppy disks (a less popular medium sometimes used to pirate copyrighted text files).
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
Suddenly the tween market seems to make sense to me. Get the stick out of your ass, for fuck's sake.
By the way, it's worth learning, not worthy of learning, you ignorant hypocrite.
Excuse me, "differnces" is a spelling Nazi job, not a grammar Nazi. Secondly, with no mention of gender in my statement, they is actually a legal usage for a singular pronoun, because to assume a gender is fallacious. If you don't know who "they" are, then "they" is by every means legal. It's a pronoun, and as such can be used in any situation, where it's appropriate. Perhaps you should study declensions and extended persons in Latin class? After all, Latin is the ROOT of our language, as well as most other European languages.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
True command line folks don't download MP3's
;)
They download the sheet music!
Sorry could not resist
I submitted the actual Daily Texan article to Digg last week: http://digg.com/technology/ITS_shuts_down_file-sha ring_hub
org 0x100
mov dx, SIG
mov ah, 9
int 0x21
int 0x20
SIG: db "UnclePow$"
Because your suggestion doesn't hide the clients from each other.
The original proposal should have included the ability to do a multi-threaded/source download.
The entire point of this theoretical program is to prevent anyone outside from snooping in AND preventing anyone inside from having anything to snoop at. No one will know where the bits are coming from, nor where they're going.
A precedent was set allowing taping of radio programs at home AHRA is the law you're looking.
Mandated sniffing?
Yes... and it smells like fresh moist horse shit!
Libertas in infinitum
Unless you are doing it to turn a profit, then you don't get prosecuted. You get sued. Specific amounts are below the threshold of criminal copyright acts and fall into civil torts. Civil law is party x vs party y. Criminal law is party x vs the government.
Libertas in infinitum
Actually, English is a Germanic language, while Latin is an Italic language. The root of English lies in Common Germanic. The connection to Latin is through the common ancestor, Indo-European, and then some borrowing later, after the language was formed.
"They" comes from English's Germanic roots (namely, Old Norse) and therein has no connection to Latin whatsoever.
It is a plural, whose proper generic singular term is historically "he". Contemporary politics, however, render the singular term inappropriate, and so people search for a convenient replacement. Many have found "they" to be the easiest to understand as well as speak.
What about "shared" "piracy (I only use the term for comprehension)?" If the act of downloading songs is illegal for the downloader, what if said downloader burns the tracks to a CD and gives them to his friend? Can the friend get into trouble as well, under current law? (assuming that said friend doesn't distribute further...) Or does it get into the whole the friend "must know it's illegal" mumbo jumbo...? Just wondered how ridiculous these laws are...
:( Now crappy artists (I use the term loosely when discussing this particular industry) will finally join the rest of us and get real jobs!!!
What about downloaded music burned to CD's given to ex-girlfriends...? You can start to think of all kinds of silly scenarios but it begins to make one wonder--what is the RIAA trying to salvage??? It's over, technology wins again. It's about damn time music finally became free. I only wish I knew this was going to happen years ago, BEFORE I purchased hundreds of albums...
P.S.
For all the morons on the Internet (98%--I see this almost every day), it's "lose"--I win, you LOSE. People LOSE things. Some people are LOSING money. Some have LOST their brain. Why is this the most difficult concept I have ever witnessed for so many people? And it's never the other way around ("I have lose change..."), what the fuck? THIS IS NOT DIFFICULT. Do they not teach the existence of the following word anymore?: LOSE Was there some massive typo in most school textbooks over the last 50 years???
Excuse me? You're full of shit. Germanic and Romantic languages were derived from Latin, and I have my teacher's chart on my wall from high school. Think a little harder, because through using Latin I can derive the meaning of approximately 45% of the words spoken thanks to a LATIN root, regardless of Latin being a "dead Language" or not.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
I didn't mention Latin as being the root - I mentioned Latin as being the root of our sentence structure, and as such, with 'they" being used, in the appropriate sentence structure we use today Or, more accurately, make the mistake of using today,) it is VERY accurate. Unless you know the gender of the subject you are talkign about (He/She/It) Other plural/POSSESSIVE (There's the key difference) pronouns can be used in their place. (OH, no gender there!) Therefore, "They" (Male/female/non-gendered) can use the same pronoun, as in I may not know who a person is, yet I know that "they" went to the store. Enjoy the wrath of my 64-year old English teacher. (She did not proof-read this entire post, but she gave me corrections where it was truly needed. Bite her, not me.)
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.