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US Entertainment Industry To Congress: Make It Legal For Us To Deploy Rootkits
An anonymous reader writes "The hilariously named 'Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property' has finally released its report, an 84-page tome that's pretty bonkers. But there's a bit that stands out as particularly crazy: a proposal to legalize the use of malware in order to punish people believed to be copying illegally. The report proposes that software would be loaded on computers that would somehow figure out if you were a pirate, and if you were, it would lock your computer up and take all your files hostage until you call the police and confess your crime. This is the mechanism that crooks use when they deploy ransomware."
Do you remember when Sony sneaked rootkits on their CD's and USB-memories and got away with a slap on the wrist.
It won't happen again, the wristslapping that is.
More commonly known as:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Door-in-the-face_technique
Although one could wonder to what extent feelings of guilt and the drive to reciprocate are applicable in this situation.
They also want to allow private companies to make "aggressive actions" in retaliation against "foreign cyber spies".
Like, there's no way THAT could possibly escalate or cause the end of the internet as we know it...
Link
I'm a dreamer, the world is my playpen. But hey, I'm a serious person, I can't dream all the time.
umm they did, Sony got rooted. All it did was give them more ammunition.
Maybe it would of worked if hackers targeted individuals within corporation. Leak personal details of everyone above VP inside Sony for example? Schedules, bank records, credit ratings, private photos no one was supposed to see, this kind of stuff.
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
So they basically want the right to maliciously hack and damage other people's computers on their belief that someone is stealing from them.
No court, no proof, just what they believe. So they want to be judge, jury, and executioner.
OK Anonymous, there's your targets. Each one of the people who contributed to this report are now fair game. Since they've decided it should be their right to hack us, they're now perfect valid targets. Their families, bank accounts, and mistresses are good starting points.
What a bunch of douchebags. These guys would have us undercut all of computer security to give them special access to enforce their claims without oversight, and in the process, they'd probably make most computers far less secure.
If these guys want the right to commit what would be crimes for anyone else, then I suggest they don't deserve a whole lot of consideration.
This is shameful, and I really hope the lawmakers tell them a big "no friggin' way".
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
The last stripes of a so called "free market" are being washed away into corporte feudalism, where the corporations now take over law enforcement, and soon after, law creation and destruction.
Denying citizens all due proccess of a Jury of their peers, set up by a democraticly elected republican government is an assault on everything we stand for as a nation. This moves beyond the scary police state, dirrecty into feudalism. No longer do corporations control us with soft power, but they not have the right to directly interfere in our lives in place of the government, without the shred of due process the former has afforded us. This even gives them more power than the NSA/FBI, who to date have yet to request or start putting root kits on people's hard drives.
It should go without saying that the RIAA will likely use this based on past actions to:
1. Falsely labeling people as pirates, due to apathy. Don't give a damn who's really a pirate or not.
2. Falsely label random people as pirates due to malice.
3. Black Hat activities against critics. They could plant evidence of serious crimes(kiddie porn, bomb making materials, terrorist manefestos, etc..) on the hard drives of victims. They could also remotely wipe hard disks, spy, and delete or manipulate selective files, making it harder for people to mount a defense against their
4. Set people up. I.e. open connections to whatever machine they want and do whatever activity they want. They want someone to say something terrorist related they can now.
and locking there machines, wiping their hard drives, deleting files related to criticism, giving them virrii, planting evidence, setting them up for criminal activity, etc....
Just went you thought SOPA and PIPA cannot be worse.
I think we need to propose our own laws permanently banning the practice across the board, and stiff penalties for everyone who would try. The laws need to have the CEOs, and corporate officers go to jail. The law also needs to make whoever wrote that, go to fucking jail.
By go to jail I mean
1. Pre-dawn raid where they shoot they're pets, smash their houses, and intimidate their family
2. Denied bail, intimidated into making confessions with ridiculous sentences.
3. Freeze their bank accounts so they can't pay for lawyers.
4. at least 15 years in federal prison in general population.
Are we still having this conversation in 2013? You lost. It's over. Our society at large accepts and supports file sharing for non-commercial use. You can't put that toothpaste back in the tube, you can't roll back the cultural clock. You will not stop filesharing. Figure out a way to make money in this new economy or die quietly. Something as non-essential and ephemeral as the entertainment "industry" doesn't deserve a minute of face time with our government. There are important matters to be dealt with, going after filesharers doesn't even register on the importance-scale.
Is anyone really entertaining the delusions of these detached, clueless, dinosaurs? Meanwhile, our infrastructure is literally collapsing, and they want us to waste government time having a discussion about imaginary property. Grow up. Your racket is over, you had decades of a free ride, longer than you deserved, to see this coming and do something about it. You sat on your hands, so now knuckle under and let that sweet creative destruction wash over your entire industry.
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