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Hack Exposes Pirate Bay User Data
tsu doh nimh writes "A group of hackers from Argentina recently broke into the database for thepiratebay.org, the Internet's largest torrent search engine, exposing user names, Internet addresses, and (MD5) hashed password data on more than 4 million users, according to Brian Krebs. He interviewed the leader of the group, Ch Russo, who said they briefly considered what the information would be worth to the RIAA and MPAA before going public with the breach. From the story: 'Probably these groups would be very interested in this information, but we are not [trying] to sell it,' Russo said. 'Instead we wanted to tell people that their information may not be so well protected.'"
Nice troll, but there's a difference between publicly available information (copyrighted works) and private information (peoples' personal info, login credentials, etc).
That Anonymous Coward guy is pretty annoying. Can we have the government censor him or something?
Open information and knowledge is always for the better, right?
I don't believe anyone has ever said that, other than trolls perpetuating it as an arguement we never said.
MOD UP PARENT.
Explain how this post get hit with troll pts.
UGH.
Such lists have been many times published on TPB - for other private torrent trackers too.
I wonder how many instant enemies these guys have made overnight?
or my name isn't Bobby ';Drop Table Students;--' Tables.
xkcd
Because it conflates privacy issues with intellectual property issues. There is nothing hypocritical in trying to contain private data but not copyrighted works.
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
Because it conflates privacy issues with intellectual property issues. There is nothing hypocritical in trying to contain private data but not copyrighted works.
Are you saying The Pirate Bay is mostly used for illegally transferring copyrighted works? I thought TPB admins have always tried to make a point that they're solely allowing people to transfer information and files with each other.
Explain how this post get hit with troll pts.
Well, you are correct. The very last statement is worded specifically to insight an arguement, so really it SHOULD have been moderated Flamebait. Come on Mods, get your head in the game.
Part of Krebs's story is that he joined TPB's IRC channel in order to bring the issue to the mods' attention. He says he was taunted by mods who didn't believe he was a journalist or that he actually had anything, and then was kicked/banned after he posted the md5 sums for some administrative passwords. In this manner he makes the channel mods look like immature jerks, but I talked to the mod that actually kicked him not long after the story broke. Evidently the guy was typing like an idiot (multiple messages per sentence) and acting in a rather unprofessional manner. Too, the kick was not because of the hashes, which he posted over half an hour before the kick. I just want people to know the other side of the story.
Oh, and for the record, this leak isn't as big a deal as some might think. IP addresses can be gathered from the swarms themselves, email addresses used by TPB users should hopefully be throwaway addresses, and torrent hashes are inconsequential. Login details might be a problem for Trusted/VIP/staff accounts, but any serious users are not that concerned about this and would have changed their passwords/emails by now.
That Anonymous Coward guy is pretty annoying. Can we have the government censor him or something?
I like how *random hacker group X* is not accountable to anybody.
It offers possibilities for good and bad... all depending on the poltiical agenda of said group
Which only makes it even more incredibly sad that so many hacker groups go for a ridiculous Nationalist-with-a-big-N route.
Chinese, Iranian, Turkish, American, Argentinian, Chilean... fucling pathetic for a subculture that generally prides itself on non-alliance and independence.
narks.
C'mon guys...don't register your info with pirate bay. That's just stupid. It was only a matter of time. Just be glad it came from a hacker group and not the courts. Use these services anonymously until the legal crap is sorted out.
Even if that is true, not only does it not matter because it was likely a user that posted them and not the site itself, but my point is still valid: we make a distinction between personal data and public data.
That Anonymous Coward guy is pretty annoying. Can we have the government censor him or something?
What's inconsistent between those two things? Just because people use TPB for copyrighted works, doesn't mean TPB itself is providing anything more than a matchmaking service between different clients.
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
So here's a question. Who else has gotten into PirateBay's servers and NOT told them about it?
I'd think that an organization like PirateBay would be the very last people on Earth whom you'd want to give any sort of personally-identifiable information. I guess we can put this one into the "Darwin Filter" category.
side question: how many accounts are from president@whitehouse,gov, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington DC 20050 USA?
Everybody gets what the majority deserves.
To answer your joke seriously: No. Opening up of the little guys info, so that the big bad guys can exploit it, wouldn't be appropriate, I think.
Some of my favourite people are from th US; Vonnegut, Chomsky, Bill Hicks.
What the administrators set up the site for and what the users use it for can be different, albeit related, things. This post was pointless- it's undeniable that TPB is mostly used for piracy, but the point that personal data != public data is, again, still valid.
That Anonymous Coward guy is pretty annoying. Can we have the government censor him or something?
He's confusing the quote; "information wants to be free". I think that might have been Doctorow who said that, but the misinterpretation is just as sad. Passwords and logins are NOT public information, otherwise we'd all use no authentication, or the same login and password everywhere, or not care. Content is the info being referenced here; music, films, written works. THOSE are data sets that need to be freed. Why? Why not? I can listen to a song for free on the radio, or video on the free digital wireless signals of HDTV, but I'm not supposed to copy those and share them with my friends who missed, or are not aware, of this work? Same thing with a CD or DVD I purchase and make copies for my friends and family. I am protected by fair use and no one can enforce that on me. NO ONE. Good luck if you think otherwise. Tell me how the wall tastes? Thanks for letting me beat your dead horse though! ;)
This is the NSA, we're gonna geet U h@x0r5! Also, what is a h@x0r5?
Are you saying The Pirate Bay is mostly used for illegally transferring copyrighted works? I thought TPB admins have always tried to make a point that they're solely allowing people to transfer information and files with each other.
Ah, but if it IS mostly used for illegally transfering copyrighted works, than the host of the file cannot be held liable for the copyrighted work if they are in a country that does not hold up that copyright agreement (and as far as I know ACTA hasn't been passed). So the most the **AA could sue someone for liable damages would then be ~$1. If you ARE going to somehow create the host responsible, than these Argentinians would be liable for the crime of hacking a database, regardless that hacking is legal in Argentina.
So - I mean, they can't exactly have their cake and eat it too.
$1 per song I mean, which is funny because the Tenenbaum update was just posted moments ago.
The RIAA downloading the leaked file of TPB user credentials would go precisely against everything they are working for.
Actually, they do interfere with the service, insofar as they remove fake torrents and ban the people who upload them. Why would it be inconceivable for the site to act in its own self-interest, along with the interests of its users, and take down a torrent that included the private information of its users?
That Anonymous Coward guy is pretty annoying. Can we have the government censor him or something?
From your perspective, sure. However whats the difference between a private item and a public item?
Many of the things you consider private, you also share with other people, likely because they agree to use that information in a way you agree with. Is that not the exact same as what intellectual property issues come down to ... the owner of the information will let you use it, but only if you use it the way they accept.
Funny how its only YOUR information you care about that you want laws for YOUR protection, but if its someone elses information the only reason you want it protected is because its the same class as the information of yours you want protected.
You say the confusion was on the original post, I say you are the one whos confused and you don't even realize it.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Yes, they do. While they say they don't, this was actually one of the major reasons why TPB earlier lost in court, as copyright holders were able to prove that TPB admins monitor and delete the torrents. This put more liability on them.
Nothing at all.
1 - If they accept stolen information anything they do with it will be tossed out of court and taint any pending or future litigation.
2 - Having an account isn't grounds for anything.. I doubt even logs of what you searched for would be.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
No, it's not the exact same. Private information (ie, name, address, medical records, SSN) is meant to be inclusive in that only certain people get to know about it. Copyrighted works, on the other hand, are supposed to be seen, consumed and known of by as many people as possible (in theory). You're comparing apples and oranges.
That Anonymous Coward guy is pretty annoying. Can we have the government censor him or something?
The difference is they had to hack the website to get the content. In the other case, they bought the content legally, so that copy is effectively theirs.
Nobody "shared" the hashes with Mr. Russo and told him "you can't redistribute this". Mr. Russo took it by force (hacking the system). That makes *all* the difference, imho.
Your analogy would only be valid the TPB themselves had shared the password. In that case I wouldn't think law enforcement should do anything. I'd simply never do business with them again.
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But we're not talking about whether TPB should censor such a list (though they undoubtedly should), we're talking about whether the haxors should redistribute it in the first place.
So yes, per your point, if they did do this, TPB's complicity in the act of distribution would be minimal, and if they did stomp it out but the haxors were even moderately determined, they could ensure that the list's contents become public knowledge. But this does nothing to address the hypothetical dick-moveness of their endeavouring to redistribute this data in the first place.
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
...is why having to register for a tracker is utterly retarded. Having any kind of identifying info linked to any piracy is just dumb. Yes I know IP addresses and all that, but folks can use proxies. But a proxy doesn't stop anyone form gleaning your true whereabouts via cookies and other login related stuff.
Your name, essentially, is not private information. Once you tell anyone your name it can be legally shared with anyone without your express permission.
What you are seeing right here in this article, is paid for marketing, promoting fear tactics to scare the masses. Registering at the Bay does not provide proof of illegal activities. There are plenty of legitimate torrents out in cyberspace and on Pirate Bay. Nothing to see here, move along folks.
It's irritating that you're post is marked down as Troll, because you make a very good point. Why shouldn't the information be put up as a torrent and distributed via Pirate Bay and WikiLeaks? Is it not hypocrisy otherwise?
Your IP address and the md5sum of your passwords, not so much.
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
Since when does The Pirate Bay have a policy of only distributing "publicly available information?" Pprivate information has been distributed via Pirate Bay before, such as the leaked Half-Life 2 source code or Paris Hilton's hacked cell phone pictures. Why should this information be any different?
Because it conflates privacy issues with intellectual property issues. There is nothing hypocritical in trying to contain private data but not copyrighted works.
If you want to lock people up in a rape room or kill them because they know something or told someone something they know, you're a monster. Please read up on libertarianism before you reach voting age.
Since when does civil law make criminals?
Anything can be found funny, from a certain point of view.
They're facilitating the illegal transfer of copyrighted materials via their tracker. If you were the guy organizing the travel routes of a cocaine trafficking trade, you'd still be guilty even if you never handled the cocaine.
If a torrent for the users' info appeared on the site and the admins ignored a community demand to take it down, you bet that community would ditch the site and TPB would die. It's in TPB's best interest to keep user information secret; I do not understand why this is hard to grasp.
That Anonymous Coward guy is pretty annoying. Can we have the government censor him or something?
Sweden doesn't have separate civil and criminal laws or court, they're both the same.
The Pirate Bay no longer operates a torrent tracker. All they offer is a torrent indexing service (this is not necessarily a torrent hosting service, either, thanks to magnet links) that is indifferent to what the users choose to do with it (except for fakes and malware).
That Anonymous Coward guy is pretty annoying. Can we have the government censor him or something?
I don't care - I live in Spain. Bring it onnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! ;-)
on the piratebay that is worth any salt is an idot..
you know you can fry stuff putting things into things that dont like the things you put into it...
Thepiratebay didn't salt their hashes. This site deserves to die.
If a torrent for the users' info appeared on the site and the admins ignored a community demand to take it down, you bet that community would ditch the site and TPB would die. It's in TPB's best interest to keep user information secret; I do not understand why this is hard to grasp.
Which again would make their actions hypocrisy, especially when they in turn laugh and try to ridicule people who ask them to remove such info from the site.
In other news, people login to the most notorious torrent site around. Film at 11.
In that case you'll excuse me while I break into your computer/smartphone/$device and all your online accounts, harvest as much personal information as I can, and release it on TPB and Wikileaks.
After all, there's no difference between publicly released copyrighted works and private information, right? And it'd be hypocrisy to complain about the distribution of this information, right?
That Anonymous Coward guy is pretty annoying. Can we have the government censor him or something?
[citation needed]. Show me one event in which The Pirate Bay refused to remove a torrent for the personal, private information of an individual or a large group of individuals.
That Anonymous Coward guy is pretty annoying. Can we have the government censor him or something?
That phrase is way before Doctorow(he actually dislikes the phrase, see his article "IWTBF considered harmful"). It was first used famously(that I'm aware of) by Stewart Brand in the 1984 Hacker Conference.
Why would anyone wanna hack into the pirate bay? Leave that up to the morons at the RIAA/MPAA... even if they can find a competent tech guru to work for them, at any price.
The RIAA/MPAA are the enemy, which means, you try your best to refrain from benefiting them. We already know that our private information isn't safe... all it takes is for a HR
rep at a government agency to lose their laptop.
This might be time, to eat our own. I certainly do not applaud this skit.
I believe this to be false - crimes fall under public prosecution, allmänt åtal, and this is not the case for civil law like a patent dispute.
.torrent or it didn't happen. ;P
Carbon based humanoid in training.
> THOSE are data sets that need to be freed
Arrrgh...
Perhaps it should be expressed instead as "information tends towards the public domain".
The meaning of IWTBF is the antonym of what you stated; instead of having to "be freed" by some liberator, information *will free itself* if constraints to its movement *are not applied*.
The activity is on the part of the anthropomorphic information itself.
That is: passwords, secrets and proprietary information will gradually drift towards becoming public knowledge unless an entity spends time, money and resources in stemming that movement. For information to become free, no-one has to do anything. It will gradually happen as an aspect of daily human interaction.
>>>Which again would make their actions hypocrisy, especially when they in turn laugh and try to ridicule people who ask them to remove such info from the site.
You have any songs or movies or games recorded to CD, DVD, or hard drive that you never purchased?
Then you are hypocrite too, so shut up.
"Do not criticize your neighbor for the splinter in his eye, when you have a log in your own." - Buddha
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
you bet that community would ditch the site and TPB would die
I'm not responding to any other point (of the many) that you have posted so far but the one quoted above made me laugh. The "community" in question is merely a group of opportunistic* users who come to TPB for downloading free stuff. I would be less surprised to see satan stepping out of my shower drying his goatee than to see this so-called community take any such organized action against TPB. TPB could kill kittens everyday and post the pics on its home page and it still wouldn't be boycotted =p
Having said that, you're probably right that TPB would pull down the torrent to protect its own interests. It's hypocritical but also good business sense.
The whole thing is a rather amusing 'for teh lulz' - good for an afternoon chuckle. Kudos to the hacker group for picking the most ironic victim imaginable =) and also one that it knows won't get any official sympathy whatsoever.
_____________
*this is merely a matter of fact, not a qualitative judgment.
There is also a decent number of users who are essentially top uploaders (think trusted/VIP users) and that are kinda important to the site. A great deal of them are, for example, active on TPB's forums. If many of them decided to leave TPB, it would be rather detrimental to the overall community. Remember, for BitTorrent (or just about any peer-to-peer network) to work, you need good seeders as well as downloaders.
That Anonymous Coward guy is pretty annoying. Can we have the government censor him or something?
I agree with you - in principle. However, if you think the vast majority of TPB users are using it for such noble purposes (pirating things they already own in some form or have paid for otherwise), you're being extraordinarily naive. For that matter, you conveniently left out software, all of which falls squarely in the "not public information" (unless it's free to begin with) and which accounts for a large fraction of traffic on TPB and other torrent sites.
Bottom line - freedom is limited to what you can enforce. So are laws. If laws can be broken easily on the internet because enforcement is spotty/problematic, this story should serve as a grim reminder that this fact may not always work FOR you. Also, there's precious little you can do if you get burned trying to do things that are illegal in the first place. Note that I'm not defending those laws, just stating the practical consequences of not following those laws.
....scare tactic.
hypothetical dick-moveness
Aw come on. Where's our traditional admiration for sheer chutzpah? =)
I guess they could, and they may give RIAA executives multiple orgasms, but they''ll get shunned in the court of public opinion.
You see, this is why I support whistle blowers. Because despite the claims of national security threats and the ridiculous conflation of government abuse and individual privacy rights, the ultimate judge is the public, and it just so happen that whistle blowers have an excellent record of watching over the best interests of the public.
But... the future refused to change.
'Probably these groups would be very interested in this information, but we are not [trying] to sell it,' Russo said, just before going to jail for hacking, much less mebbe selling.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Well, the RIAA might find out that millions of people are downloading artistic material that they claim to 'own'. And they would know who.
Would they launch millions of lawsuits against these people? Would they go to the ISP providers and demand that that these millions of people be denied service? And would they offer to compensate the ISPs for the millions of dollars in lost revenue?
Would they put a microchip like an RFID into the brains of each of these millions of people so that if these people ever again tryed to experience an artistic work by an 'artist' that they have downloaded then they would get a splitting headache for a day? You downloaded a Lady Gaga song once long ago to check out what the buzz on her was about and now whenever you see her picture in the mall the RFID chip in your head starts to blast migraines. So you don't ever go to shopping malls anymore and do retail shopping over the web instead? How many millions of people are going to be subjected to this before the mall owners get pissed?
Never forget: the RIAA is based on extortion. They don't care how many millions of people are downloading their product. They select a few people at random and focus their extensive brutal legal teams on these people, making their lives hell until they get paid off. The RIAA copyright 'violations' are just an excuse for extortion. If it wasn't copyright, then it would be something else.
We do have laws against this kind of thing. It's called RICO. It worked against the mafia and it will work against the RIAA.
If you ran a record company, and someone came to you with a list of the songs that people are willing to risk extortion to download and the names of those people, then you would have the perfect marketing tool. You know exactly who wants what in terms of artistic product. All that you don't know is the price that they are willing and able to pay. If they are downloading instead of buying, then the starting price point is too high. It's a negotiation beginning point; not a fucking Interpol crime. These downloaders are your customers, they are your best customers. Cultivate them; don't unleash the dogs of war against them.
There are many actors here contributing to/affected by the action you're calling hypocritical. Let's break it down so it's clear who would be hypocrites and who wouldn't.
(a) the hackers: they did something illegal - distributing this ill-gotten information would be immoral for them (though just a bit funny, but I digress). Whatever they do though, there's nothing hypocritical about it.
(b) TPB: it's their site. They can choose to host the torrent of that information or not. Since they routinely allow torrents of illegally obtained material to be indexed by their site, they can either (hypothetically) let this one stay or remove it. They have no stated morality however, so it wouldn't be hypocritical of them either way. Unwise perhaps, for it would piss off their users.
(c) Wikileaks: since they routinely host illegally obtained information (and even private information such as emails, memos, etc.) it would be hypocritical of them not to publish because it would go against their stated morality. The question is moot because they have not been given that opportunity.
(d) TPB users: the ones who traffic in material stolen from content creators - hypocritical (but understandable). The ones who don't (perhaps the ones who use it to find torrents of F/OSS stuff - not hypocritical.
See now, isn't it nice when we state things clearly? =)
Well they did lose hard core 4-0...so they have had plenty of spare time.......
Interesting. I didn't know that. Since I share a wireless connection with no access to the router (for port forwarding setup), I'm unfortunately cut off from the entire torrenting world. Good thing I guess - keeps me honest through no fault of my own ;)
By the way, I took back the "TPB is hypocritical" comment in a later post.
It's irritating that you're post is marked down as Troll
You wrote "you're". That is stupid. The word to use in that context is "your".
If you can get basic things right so that a glaring flaw is not found within the first four words of your (not "you're") post, it will become much easier to take your (not "you're") position seriously.
You're (not "your") failing basic grammar that elementary school students are expected to have mastered.
perhaps everything has been dumped.????
I'm guessing you know this, but for anyone else's information, the above was actually said by Jesus.
So you're saying a travel agent organising flights for someone smuggling cocaine in their luggage is an accessory?
Sorry, but unless they were explicitly told of this (and its not their place to ask) then I seriously doubt that would stand up in court.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Yet those bastards couldn't beat Germany, and now I've got to watch Spain in the finals.
They just set the data free and shared it. Only a fascist dinosaur shill for THE MAN would think otherwise.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
You mean there were no users among those 4 million that came from a country where the pirate bay is not considered criminal?
You don't have to hack it...I'll tell you, I did it.
(Waving flag, jumping up and down, flashing lights)
The Arboga case, just google it.
I know I shouldn't reply to ACs, especially ACs who are most likely fundamentalist Christians, but the Buddha lived approximately 500 years before Jesus.
who wants to bet these ackers get a supoena from the RIAA and MPAA to realease there findinds on the basis of aiding and abetting copyright infringement. it will probably never fly in court but i can see them surely trying.
The case in which someone uploaded autopsy pics of two dead children to the site and they refused to take them down on principle? Yeah, I was asking for something about peoples' personal information. That isn't what I asked about.
That Anonymous Coward guy is pretty annoying. Can we have the government censor him or something?
Now if the airline were called "Air Cocaine", the analogy would be better. The pirate bay is for pirated movies, music, software. Everyone, certainly including the admins, knows this. It's amazing that the same weasel words and legal foot-shuffling that Slashdot would be up in arms about were this a politician or corporation, is celebrated as a great thing when done by people stealing movies and music.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
Why would it be hypocritical of him to complain about you sharing his information? He's not sharing anyone else's unless you know otherwise. It's hypocritical for the pirate bay to condemn people for sharing data though, because they do share other people's data.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
Wikileaks do not "host illegally obtained information (and even private information such as emails, memos, etc.)". Wikileaks host illegally obtained information (and even private information such as emails, memos, etc.) that is pertinent to the public good, e.g. evidence that the US military tortured, government corruption, etc. They don't just do it for the sake of it and refusing to host a bunch of random people's email addresses and passwords is not hypocritical at all. Ridiculous thing to say!
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
Don't be absurd. First you deny that it does so and in the next breath qualify why it does so - your post is a mass of contradictions. I'm perfectly aware of why Wikileaks does what it does. One might argue that exposing a bunch of thieves is also "pertinent to the public good" - you know, the part of the public that does not indulge in such actions. I imagine the F/OSS community would also want filesharing to be permanently decoupled in the public perception from petty thievery. TPB is hardly the bastion of glorious revolutionary idealists - it's more of a hangout for common shoplifters.
I would only add a qualifier to my original statement to the effect that mass-publishing such information (again, this is so hypothetical that I have no idea why I'm even arguing about it) would catch the good guys (legit file sharers) in addition to the bad guys and that's the only reason it would not be advisable as is. If you recall, I actually did make that distinction in the final item in my list. So, if someone actually filtered the list accordingly and gave it to Wikileaks, that should conceivably fall within its mission statement.
Essentially, there are many idealists out there (particularly in the F/OSS community). They are however routinely lumped together with the petty thieves and the resultant mess lavishly used by RIAA and others for propaganda use as well as to push toxic legislation such as ACTA (which I fully expect will soon be a reality). This is because, for whatever reason, sites like TPB index both the legal and illegal torrents. Outing the users who traffic in the illegal stuff is, I would argue, very much in the public good. I really wish that the legal torrents were kept completely separate (in terms of trackers, indexing sites, every way imaginable).
What? I said 'wikileaks don't do x, they do x to a particular subset of people'. It's not hypocritical for them to treat people in the subset differently - it's what they do. Might as well say it's hypocritical for the police to only arrest people who are committing crimes and not target people who aren't - it's what they do. (Okay, bad example given recent police behaviour but you get what I'm saying).
/. is pro-piracy, but in fact there are many of us that give reasoned arguments against it. We're usually the ones that are modded down -1 Troll / Flamebait / Said Something We Didn't Like.
Anyway, perhaps we're talking at cross-purposes. I get the vague impression from your post that you think I'm defending the Pirate Bay by shooting down the wikileaks analogy. I'm not. I despise the pirate bay and piracy in general. I'm just shooting down a bad analogy that caught wikileaks in the collateral fire. It's understandable that one assumes any given post on
Conceivably. But that isn't what was proposed and I think it would fall more on the side of law-enforcement than wikileak's general stuff. Wikileaks are more about defending the masses from those in positions of power where the law might not otherwise pursue them, than they are about aiding prosecutions against individual people. True, mass-piracy has put people en masse into a position of power over companies and they are using that power to massively abuse those companies. But it doesn't fit the popular conception of "those in power."
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
Indeed. I did go a bit overboard making my last point, which was contained in just one sentence: "Outing the users who traffic in the illegal stuff is, I would argue, very much in the public good." I wasn't concerned so much about TPB users abusing the companies than I was about their actions hurting the common good (by helping create an environment where [for example] something like ACTA becomes more likely to pass as a direct result of their actions). In that sense (and only in that sense) did I feel that it was within the mission of WL. It would be a leak in the sense that it would finally expose exactly what fraction of users were dealing in illegal stuff or otherwise. Otherwise, all we have is rhetoric on either side of the argument (RIAA: OMG filesharing is teh fully illegal! FOSS: Nuh uh! It are mostly teh legal free software - well, the latter is probably exaggeration on my part but you know what I mean). Having said all that, I agree that I'm probably reaching =p
I wasn't assuming that you were pro-piracy and I apologize if it came off that way. I just tend to be too verbose in a perhaps over-earnest attempt at clarity (damn! there it is again =))
See, I knew we were more or less in agreement. I don't know if I'd want culprits released to the public - I'd prefer such things to be handled via normal legal channels. But it could be considered a public good, yes. Definitely showing how much of the Pirate Bay is used for illegal, rather than legal content would be great.
Regarding the extenuated verbiage, no offense (at least to myself, I obviously cannot speak for others) has been caused and, I must emphasize, the clarification, even though itself an ironic example of such profligate verbosity as to make Dogberry, (the comical character so prone to malapropisms in Shakespeare's, himself no miser with the tools of his trade, Much Ado About Nothing) seem briefer than a glutton's grace and, I must tell you, struck a chord with me for it is a weakness shared, though an affection for sub-clauses, born of a premature exposure to Quadratic Equations, is my true nemesis.
Cheers,
H.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
... a premature exposure to Quadratic Equations ...
and the square of the hypotenuse no doubt =]
(epic sentence by the way - *golfclap*)
Allegedly broke in, until they actually show some proof, I find this just another tactic by those movie companies that are trying so hard to close down these sites...and secondly, for someone wanting to post anonymously or not using an account to post torrent files...
seems pretty simple to spread....just don't take in usernames and passwords, or log who posted what, but still have a star rating to know if the posting is worth downloading...
please tell, were those MD5s salted?
-- I was raised on the command line, bitch