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.'"

Comments

Er,

[Anonymous Coward]

Aren't DoS attacks illegal? If so, why not?

Re:Er,

[Dunderland1]

Its like complaining someone was murdered because they broke into a house. Simple solution - stop breaking into houses dummy, and then you don't have to worry about the, actions which are completely illegal and immoral, which follows.

No, this is like sears fighting shoplifting by sending assassins after shoplifters.

Yes, the pirates are breaking the law, but that doesn't mean the **AAs get to respond by breaking it in kind.

Two wrongs don't make a right.

Re:Er,

[SCPRedMage]

It's more a store fighting shoplifting by tracking down people they think might be shoplifters and setting fire to their cars.

And yet if someone actually did that, everybody would be in agreement that it's deplorable.

There is a very good reason vigilantism is illegal.

Re:Er,

[TheReaperD]

They never prove any of the accusations they use to justify their actions, which makes them FAR worse than vigilantism.

Actually, that is the core problem with vigilantism. It is based off of a perceived crime and usually not compared to any unbiased standards. Though how truly unbiased you can be in any case is a discussion for another topic. But the stated goal of the court systems of most developed countries is to give the accused a fair trail in front of either an unbiased judge or jury of their peers. Thus, hopefully, preventing the innocent from being punished and the guilty to be punished fairly.

What this is and many other actions of the copyright cartels, says is that they have seen the results of fair trials and don't like the results. So they have decided that they are going to write their own rules to get what they want. This is perhaps one of the better objective standards to determine when an group has gone from a lawful organization to a criminal institution.

Re:Er,

[Dr Max]

Its arguable that the pirates don't steal anything. personaly i see it as closer to some one taking pictures of a painting and the gallary sending some one to there house to burn down the walls, saying "lets see you hang your photo now".

you wouldn't download a car

Really?

[telekon]

If DDOS attacks are suddenly legal, there are a fuckton of servers I want to point at the MPAA right now.

What could possibly go wrong.

[mirix]

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?

How is he going to pull it off?

[Haedrian]

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.

Re:No kidding

[mayberry42]

I think most will, but to be honest this sounds more like a desperate call for free press to me. I mean, c'mon a guy basically goes out of his way to say "hey, they've hired us to take down torrent sites, and guess what? we're awesome at what we do!" Sounds fishy to me. Then, of course, there are the legal issues:

At time, we have to go an extra mile and attack the site and destroy the data to stop the movie from circulating any further

So, not only does he plan on launching a DoS attack, but he also plans on destroying the data? Sorry, even governments investigating CP won't do that, let alone some small private company.

Now let's assume, however, that he's telling the truth. Would major motion studios actually be that stupid (jokes aside) to give him discretion to bring up their names? He brings them up as if it were nothing.

Sorry, but this is all too much for me - let me be the one to call bullshit on this article and to the author who fell for it bait, line and sinker

Actually, here it's even worse

[Moraelin]

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.)

Re:Wrong wrong wrong

[TheRaven64]

Every time this kind of topic is discussing, I see a lot more posts claiming that everyone on Slashdot defends piracy than posts that actually defend piracy.

RTFA

[mcgrew]

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.