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Film Industry Hires Cyber Hitmen To Take Down Pirates
thelostagency writes "Girish Kumar, managing director of Aiplex Software says his company is being hired by the film industry to attack online pirates. He says if a provider did not do anything to remove the link or content hosted on its site, his company would launch what is known as a denial-of-service (DoS) attack on the offending computer server. From the article: 'Kumar said that at the moment most of the payment for his company's services came from the film industry in India. "We are tied up with more than 30 companies in Bollywood. They are the major production houses." As for Hollywood films, he said they, too, used his services.'"
Aren't DoS attacks illegal? If so, why not?
If DDOS attacks are suddenly legal, there are a fuckton of servers I want to point at the MPAA right now.
To understand recursion, you must first understand recursion.
In other news, I've decided I'm going to start shooting out the tires of cars that I witness passing on the right.
or should I be going after Ford?
Sent from my PDP-11
Pretty sure DoS attacks have landed many a hacker with extraordinarily long prison sentences... So when are we raiding the corporate HQs of the hollywood studios?!?
My websites generally sit on shared servers. What if a different customer on the same server as my sites hosts something subject one of these DDoS attacks? Answer: I'm boned!! Yeh great idea geniuses! Like others, if these sort of attacks are now legal, then I've got my hitlist ready to go.
Essentially, if the Justice Department, and more importantly DHS and 'CyberCommand' doesn't step in hear and shut this down as willful domestic 'cyber-terrorism', their existence and purpose is officially complete and utter bullshit.
As far as I know, these DoS attacks will be on the same networks that they are so hell bent on protecting from the evil entities over-seas. I guess if Corporations attack citizens online its ok, but if it crosses international boundary, it's suddenly technological warfare.
And as for Aiplex? Aside from the fact that you can't defeat piracy, it's always good to know who your enemy is. Thanks for the announcement.
/hates using the word 'cyber' as much as anyone else
//can't believe the MPAA still thinks these efforts will stamp out piracy
DDOS attacks require a ton of people to properly work. Torrents sites are going to have a very large bandwidth and the ability to service many clients at the same time. So he's probably going to need more than one company to do it.
Secondly, if they're all in the same company, chances are they have a similar IP range - which means that any admin worth his salt can disconnect them from the network.
Of course, if they use a botnet, to do so - which is probably the only plausable way - they're going to be breaking quite a few international laws - and get sued into oblivion.
So yeah, I think this is going to end up in tears.
All I've got to say is if we see this on our (a university) network, we will go after them. Conveniently we've got a company name now and them admitting who hired them. I'll be looking up some IPs and adding them to our network monitors. If these guys decide to DoS our network, we'll get the logs and turn it over to the lawyers and the police.
Stealing shit left and right is okay but stopping people from stealing shit is completely illegal and immoral.
That's not the case at all and you know it.
DOS is illegal. Period. But the claim here is that if you're doing good works it's not illegal. That's bullshit. Otherwise the pirates they're taking down could make the same claim.
That's the way the law is. Something is illegal, or it isn't. If you claim to be on the side of right and good, you follow the law. Or you don't. That lets you know what the real gist of this battle is all about. This isn't about good versus evil. This is my interest versus your interest. There aren't any good guys in white hats in this battle.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Be interesting to see what happens when someone "In country" gets ddos'ed and their base commander considers losing his uplink an act of war.
This kind of business should have been kept completely hush-hush and shady by this Aiplex company. Going public with this stuff essentially defeats the purpose.
Actually, this one goes even one step further and illustrates yet another aspect of what's wrong with vigilantism, namely: harm to innocent bystanders. You know, people who even the vigilante never accused of doing anything wrong.
DDOS-ing a hosted tracker somewhere, essentially can DDOS the whole colocation company. There'll be a bunch of small company servers there, a bunch of kids' blogs, some community page, maybe a couple of Teamspeak and Ventrilo servers, stuff like that. It's not even a hypothetical scenario. The Pirate Bay servers for example, as probably the most famous tracker, were hosted at such a company. And basically then everyone else there is colateral damage, even though they never did anything wrong with those servers.
DDOS-ing enough users of an ISP essentially stuffs the pipe for everyone else too, even if they never torrented even legit stuff. Maybe not completely if it's a major ISP, but still lag them majorly, and if it's essentially a cable ISP trunk that only has the max bandwidth of cable, it's possible to actually cut a whole building or city block in the suburbs off the net.
And that doesn't even have to mean just the inconvenience of living a couple of hours without lolcats or porn or WoW. In the meantime a bunch of people rely on VOIP for their phone. So they could prevent someone from calling an ambulance or the cops. It's not just got the potential to cause a little collateral damage, but actually very disproportionate collateral damage: it could cause a grandma somehwere to die, just so the fuckwits can annoy a file sharer.
To use the earlier sending-assassins-after-shoplifters analogy, it's more like sending someone to torch the whole city block down because they followed a shoplifter to that location. Even by the standards of criminal organizations, it's like torching the whole condominium down because the guy running the grocery store at ground floor didn't pay his protection money. I'm pretty sure even the mafia generally avoided something that disproportionate, if nothing else, because they were trying to not alienate the population all that much. (In fact, quite the contrary, for example Al Capone was running soup kitchens for the poor to whitewash his public image.)
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
My bet is that it will only take a couple of initial DOS attacks before the pirates will strike back with some DOS attacks of their own, and aimed right at the heart of the motion picture industry-- and it won't be pretty. No more online movie tickets-- the sites are blocked. No more movie trailers, the sites are blocked. No more fan forums-- well, you get the picture. Er, or rather, you won't.
1. TFA says that if they shut down an Austrailian site, they're in deep poodoo.
2. The DMCA only applies in the US. Nobody else has to worry about it
3. I see DDoS war on the horizon. How long until Aiplex Software is knocked off the internet? I'm betting it won't be long.
4. I'm also betting that NOBODY from the US film industry will spend a minute in jail over their blatantly illegal activities. In the US, if you have enough money you're above the law. A rich, powerful man only goes to prison if a richer, more powerful man wants him there.
Free Martian Whores!
I know! Why go through the trouble of downloading all that data, when you can buy bootleg DVDs on any street corner for just a few rupees?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.