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Brazilian Pirates Hijack US Military Satellites
blantonl writes "Brazilians all over the country are using modified amateur radio equipment to communicate with each other using US Military communications satellites — effectively creating their own CB radio network on the backs of the US Military. Recent efforts to crack down have resulted in arrests of some of the users, however the behavior still continues today."
What exactly are the "pirates" pirating? Does mere communications count as "piracy" now?
read up, whoever tagged this story with "!pirates"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirate_radio
piracy has widespread meanings, from the somali crazies type pirates to software/music/movie/etc. pirates to pirate radio communication.
just like hacker vs cracker, that battle was 'lost' many decades ago, probably before you were even born.
With defense appropriated funds accounting for a large chunk of the USA's annual budget, you'd think they could use something newer than 1970's era technology for long range com...wouldn't the time/money/resources spent on busting the "pirates" be better spent on a new (secure) system?
Wait, what? Modern piracy of SNES and NES games didn't hurt their sales at all. Copy protection in those days was the fact that you couldn't make a copy of a cartridge (disk systems excluded). You made your money, and things worked. NES piracy was rampant by the time the N64 was ready, and they still didn't care enough to make a serious attempt to copy protect those cartridges.
The industry was and is focused on *current* copy protection, as everyone is well aware that all systems will eventually be cracked or emulated. The Dreamcast was rather well protected against this for a while. It used GD-Roms, which could only be copied to smaller CDs if you removed most of the content. And even then CD's only ran through a loophole in a system to facilitate magazine demos. The PS1 and PS2 both required hardware hacks of increasing sophistication to get around copyprotection schemas.
Really, the industry is so focused on selling a game next month, that they hardly think about ten years down the line when emulation catches up. Short-term protection is the name of the game.
The ______ Agenda
So now pirate is going to be used for anyone using something for nothing?
So now "prostitute" is going to be used for anyone selling sex?
So now "pilot" is going to be used for anyone flying a plane?
Uh, hate to break it to you, but sometimes the right word is used properly. But if you prefer, we could always call them "hackers" and really stir up the geek shit pot...
Asides from the fact that these operators were way outside their respective allowed band, they did no harm as these satellites aren't even used anymore by the US-Navy (for whom they were built). They should repurpose them for civilian use if possible - which would be cool as they are geo stationary.
If the incompetent soldiers at the U.S. Navy can't figure a way to secure their own satellites, why should the citizens of another country on the other side of the planet be prosecuted, fined, or worse, merely for sending out a radio signal that happens to match the same frequency the U.S. military used? This is insanity. It makes me angry that the Brazilian government is cooperating at all with the U.S. Defence Department in targeting these individuals. They should be protecting them! If a U.S. soldier is wounded in the field and is unable to radio for help, he or she should curse himself first, for joining the military, and second his idiot government for designing such an insecure satellite.
I hope more Brazilians and others from around the world get in on this act! Perhaps there's a way we can use it to multicast data as well, that would be brilliant!
So now, we will refer to anyone who does anything we don't like as "pirates"?
I guess they were getting tired of using "terrorists", "muslims" and "liberals" all the time.
You are welcome on my lawn.
When I saw that the CIA had waterboarded a terror suspect 183 times, it made me wonder how the decision was made after they had waterboarded the guy 182 times and not gotten what they wanted to try just once more.
You are welcome on my lawn.
> Brazil?
What do you know of Brazilian techies? Ever worked with Brazilian engineers? Ever been to Brazil? I can assure you they are every bit as good as any Chinese, Russian, American, Indian, Brit, Czech, Japanese, or Pole I've worked with. Slashdotters may also be interested to know that Brazil has a very open-source, creative-commons sort of culture.
> And not an organized military either. Pirates.
It's likely that the recently reported Chinese cracks of US military systems were freelance.
It's true that our current income tax system is complex... but it's hardly true that this is an essential feature of income tax systems. We could have a simple income tax system, but we've chosen not to. Similarly, excise and sales taxes can be complex, and some of them are... at the very least, they vary wildly from state to state and product to product.
This is utterly ridiculous. The reason for having an income tax is that it can be made progressive (in other words, you can make rich people pay proportionally more), in ways you can't with sales/excise taxes. That's the benefit of an income tax system... and yes, it is in fact a benefit. The carrot & stick effect is by no means exclusive to income taxes, either - excise taxes on, for example, cigarettes, are explicitly a stick being wielded against tobacco use.
No, they put that in to maintain a monopoly on the manufacture of cartridge and software for the NES. They didn't want just anybody to be able to sell their own software directly to customers without Nintendo getting a paid. It wasn't to stop piracy. It was to stop the legitimate writers of software from selling their work.
They're pirating bandwidth, which is an extremely scarce commodity in a military situation. Bear in mind that even a small ship has something like 300 people onboard, and most of them have some considerable amount of official business in sending e-mails, making "phone calls" (voice radio transmissions), sending/receiving teletype data, exchanging sensor/intel data, etc, etc, etc. When some of the available bandwidth is "pirated" (for lack of a better term) by folks who really need to talk about the performance of the local futbol team, it affects the ability of the US Navy to do its job.
If you, for example, used a lot of VOIP, (or online gaming, or whatever) and found out that your call quality had deteriorated because your neighbor had tapped into your network connection for his communication needs, how would you feel about that? Do you think it ought to be illegal? After all, this is bandwidth that you are paying for (and the neighbor is not).
I was with you right up until "income tax." The income tax is proof that there is a Satan.
Close. MONEY is proof there is a Satan. Income tax is proof that he has a sense of humour.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth