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:Xubuntu

[msuarezalvarez]

I hope they are making the sources available, so as to comply with the license of the software they are distributing...

Re:MPAA Chasing the Money?

[Sique]

Scarcity is a necessary economic principle even for intellectual items, and without it, you won't see anyone interested in producing intellectual works. 1. I am producing lots of intellectual works and never got paid for them. I just happen to like to create them.
2. If the only reason to limit access to a resource of plenty is creating the ability for a few to profiteer from it, then I would call this theft. That's like putting soldiers around a well to allow a person to sell more bottled water.
3. The intrinsic value of information lies in the fact that it is connected to other pieces of information, and the value of information increases if it can be connected to more information. Limiting the ability to interconnect information is thus degrading the value of said information.
4. There is always the famous quote (sometimes attributed to Isaac Newton or Robert Hooke, but both were also just quoting, thus pirating valuable intellectual property!): "If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants." There is no work of Art or invention or other intellectual work that stands all for itself. It is always the result of a huge body of knowledge and art it builds on. Limiting access to this body of knowledge is limiting the ability to create new intellectual works.
5. Thus, while the argument that a creator should be able to somehow get rewarded for his creation, has something for itself, it's not the sole reason for the creation itself. There are many others, and limiting access to creative works is in fact reducing the ability or the joy of new creation. Encouraging creative works thus has to take other things in consideration, and access to already created works is one of the most basic things.
6. Most economies were growing fastest at the moment, when limits of access to the body of knowledge were lifted, when duplication of works was getting cheaper, when monastry libraries were opened to the public, when access to universities was facilitated, when the number of people learning a music instrument by playing music works was increasing, in fact when creative works were turned from a scarce resource to a nearly unlimited source.