MPAA College Toolkit Raises Privacy, Security Concerns

An anonymous reader writes "The Motion Picture Association of America last month sent letters to the presidents of 25 major universities (pdf), urging them to download and install a 'university toolkit' to help identify students who were downloading/sharing movie files. The Washington Post's Security Fix blog reports that any university that installs the software could be placing a virtual wiretap on their networks for the MPAA (and the rest of the world) to listen in on all of the school's traffic. From the story: 'The MPAA also claims that using the tool on a university network presents "no privacy issues — the content of traffic is never examined or displayed.' That statement, however, is misleading. Here's why: The toolkit sets up an Apache Web server on the user's machine. It also automatically configures all of the data and graphs gathered about activity on the local network to be displayed on a Web page, complete with ntop-generated graphics showing not only bandwidth usage generated by each user on the network, but also the Internet address of every Web site each user has visited. Unless a school using the tool has firewalls on the borders of its network designed to block unsolicited Internet traffic — and a great many universities do not — that Web server is going to be visible and accessible by anyone with a Web browser."

Comments

Re:MPAA Chasing the Money?

[compumike]

This makes no sense. What are they going to accomplish by going after college kids, who really don't have that much disposable income? Sometimes it's not about the money. Sometimes, it's about right and wrong. These are kids who should know better, and are committing lots of infringement (and worse than that, think it's OK). It's a self-reinforcing behavior to see lots of people around you pirating, but if instead you see people suffering the consequences for their illegal downloading, that activity will be deterred.

The privacy/security issues involved in the software they are trying to distribute definitely spook me. But I'll tell you what doesn't spook me at all: having the RIAA or MPAA or MediaSentry monitoring P2P networks, looking for their copyrighted material. It's the only way to stop this disturbing trend where a whole generation is growing up believing that the only things with value are physical items. Scarcity is a necessary economic principle even for intellectual items, and without it, you won't see anyone interested in producing intellectual works.

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Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation -- great gift!