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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."
These guys are the biggest thieves of the lot.
Maybe they should have a taste of how rootkits feel like.
I always been saying that the entertainment industry was the real pirate as what they were doing was closer to sailing the seas to sinking ship, steal booty and murder crewman then simply sharing data over the Internet. Now anyone not seeing it that way has no excuse.
"This is the mechanism that crooks use when they deploy ransomware."
Enough said.
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
Let's say this does get legalised, somehow. Have fun trying to export any infected products to the rest of the world!
And for everybody else trying to sell entertainment products made in the US, all the people who make sensible data with no rootkits in it, have fun trying to convince the rest of the world to trust you! People will just see "Made in the US" and read it as "This will destroy your computer" regardless of whether there's malware present or not.
So, if I do something that is legal but Sony thinks should be illegal then the laws are changed.
If Sony does something that is illegal but they think should be legal then the laws are also changed.
Seems reasonable.
Also, never let a product with the Sony-logo into your home. You never know what approach they will use to contaminate your computer.
It deeply saddens me that people continue to support companies that pull this kind of crap.
I'm sure that Sony/Microsoft et al would change their tune of their products weren't selling. But, when their selling millions of crippled or bugged titles, my lone voice is crushed by the cacophonous accusations of paranoia.
The RIAA tried to get an amendment added to the Patriot Act in 2001 that would do the very same thing. This is domestic terrorism on different level, but terrorism just the same.
I would accept that if politicians and big companies also install some sort of "corruption-detection rootkit" in their computers.
In fact, this proposal will probably be refused.
But this is a strategy:
1) propose a tough law
2) wait for its refusal
3) propose a "lighter" one
Since the lighter one will appear innocuous and since the first one has been refused, the second will be accepted.
And you can bet that they wanted to propose the "light" one first, but it would have been probably refused if submitted first.
With the dreadful formulaic schlock that Hollywood puts out, it's fair to say that they've already incorporated an anti-theft device, called "bad writing".
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.
it would lock your computer up and take all your files hostage until you call the police and confess your crime
Or until you use repair tools to remove the rootkit. Once they figure out people can do that, then they'll ask to make it illegal to remove their rootkits.
My karma is in a nose dive
I do not trust a rent seeking organization of any sort to not "make mistakes" on calling people pirates.
They're trying to be judge, jury, executioner, AND witness.
These people sue grandmas and dead people to get settlements. I wouldn't trust them not to frame someone that happens to have a fat bank account.
And even if they were simply incompetent, I still wouldn't trust them to actually care about making mistakes.
Use the fear.
Obviously allowing media companies to deploy root kits will increase the number of vulnerable machines on our nations part of the internet. Assuming this some how only finds its way on to home PC it still leaves many machines more vulnerable to attack by additional malware which might make them botnet members which could be used in DDOS attacks against critical business sectors like Finance and Healthcare.
Clearly the desire to do this shows the media companies behind it are irresponsible citizens endangering our national security at best actively aiding and abetting our enemies and terror organizations at worst. These are unAmerican activities and the industry participants need to be call out on it.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Now is the time to think about how the entertainment industry can be hit back with their own law. How about legally deploying rootkits on their computers to grab copies of their newest products before they are released.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
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.
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.
In the end, socalled IP can only be enforced in this manner: Control over the machines used by the buyers, ie. the potential buyers, ie. the rabble. Only when we no longer control our machines, can you "sell" access - you need a gateway to extract money! Since the "you need the LP/CD/DVD"-model has died, the only possible gate is access and control over the machine.
So, the Free Software movement asks again: Who should own and control the machines we all use for work, entertainment, living?
IAIFARSIJDPOOTV - I Am In Fact A Reality Star; I Just Don't Play One On TV
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.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
Director Richard Ellings, Deputy Director Roy Kamphausen, Casey Bruner, John Graham, Creigh Agnew, Meredith Miller, Clara Gillispie, Sonia Luthra, Amanda Keverkamp, Deborah Cooper, Karolos Karnikis, Joshua Ziemkowski, and Jonathan Walton.
I wish news articles put faces these types of outrages. The above people are the commission.
We've seen similar approaches in the past where some company installs a root kit into their product. Sony did this with some music CD once and there have been other instances. The problem arises when the hacking community discovers the rootkit (and they always do) and they make use of the rootkit for their own purposes and it turns into a gateway for malware getting onto the person's computer. Again, this is not conjecture, this has already happened.
Additionally, this would lead the way to false positives where a company thinks a person has pirated software but has in fact not. Look at the headaches with Windows activations where the software suddenly assumes that it has been pirated and is disabled / crippled until the user gets it sorted out..
Like any weapon, this kind of stuff can be turned against lawful people and it is not worth implementing.
If companies are so worried about piracy and the costs to them, they should stop attacking the enduser sitting at home and go after the large organized crime groups in other countries where piracy is rampant and effectively sanctioned by the local government. THAT is where the big numbers for revenue lost to piracy comes from, not from some kid at home downloading games or music to try a few times.
Many large corporations, including the entertainment industry, are using -- or are looking at using -- proactive strategies as part of their security playbook. There was an interesting report on NPR concerning this a few months back. Currently, deploying malware is, to all intents and purposes, simply illegal. As it should be. These guys want a self-defense avenue for deploying destructive or surveillance programs against their perceived enemies. IMHO our corrupt congress will -- sooner or later -- be bribed into letting them have their way.
YOYO. You're On Your Own.
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy
If you want to be safe from malware, use torrents. It's "legal" downloads that are riddled with crap. Starting with the Java installer for Windows being bundled with Ask Toolbar malware, through big sites pushing repackaged open source stuff wrapped up in a rogue installer, up to most commercial games installing rootkits like SecuROM or Steam. And don't even start with "only light DRM" or by twisting the definition of rootkit to exclude Steam: it needs root, holds it, uses it against you, so it's a rootkit, period.
In the Windows world, it's captain Anakata's bay where safest software comes from.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
That is the value of having a torrent community. You go to a place like TPB and read the comments before downloading a torrent. People have a way of looking after each other when they are part of a community.
I wonder if they will eventually ask to be allowed to just take the money directly from citizens' accounts. Their ultimate goal is to control the entire development and consumption of all things culture.
Signature intentionally left blank.
As I read it, this plan constitutes a conspiracy to commit extortion; such a conspiracy is a felony under California law. I think it should be brought to the attention of the Attorney General of the state of California.
Right. Next time, their stock price will go up and the CEO's will get a bonus.
Those poor corporate elite won't have to bear the excruciating and embarrassing agony of a "wristslapping". They have very tender wrists, you know. Limp, in fact, which is why they need government's protection of their massive profits.
You are welcome on my lawn.
A Rootkit on your cellphone, that you use to listen to music, would make you jump and react, though. Correct?
Steam is not a rootkit, no matter how much you dislike it.
Does steam need root? I needed root to install it (like any piece of software) on Arch linux, but it runs at low privileges. Also if you run the windows version under Wine it is completely unprivileged and only active in your assigned WINEPREFIX.
Steam has root access? That's news to me. I run as a non-admin user, and have never seen elevated privileges outside of Steam client updates. Games are stored in ~/Library so there's no higher access needed for installing and updating games. I don't see any kexts or system level daemons.
What makes you suspect Steam is doing what you claim?
-- Using the preview button since 2005
> It seems to me that our emotional reasoning is the biggest enemy humanity has. .. need to learn to set feelings aside
Having been called "Spock" for being completely unemotional / detached when interacting with people, I think I can provide a different perspective. I shared your conclusion most of my life but within the past year I have seen why that is an incomplete view.
You are indeed correct emotions are a problem but you are (partially) solely focusing on the negative and ignoring the positive. i.e. Don't toss the baby out with the bathwater. There is a saying "Show me your strength, and I'll show you your weakness." and vice versa.
When you take away emotion you also take away the joy. I have 4 loves in my life. Programming is and always has been the first. When I program I literally enter into a "time warp" because I so engaged in writing / debugging in solving an interesting problem (applied math.) The "time warp effect" also happens in other things I love doing such as riding motorcycles, playing drums. This weird perception of time is your soul's way of communicating to you that you are practicing applied meditation -- "Becoming one with the Source." To lose access to the joy that programming enriches would be a extremely boring life.
Regardless of the spiritual over-tones EVERYONE has a passion in life. The hard part is knowing what the hell it is!
Emotion is not the enemy. It is a "symptom", not the cause. Emotions _almost_ always follow beliefs. The TWO biggest problems with humanity are:
* Greed
Greed is due to an archaic belief system: "There is never enough." Ask people the simple question "How much money is enough?" WHY do they have such a difficult time pinning down an exact answer?
Greed is like a cancer upon everything it touches. It corrupts politics, entertainment, art, science. Humanity keeps killing and fighting one another petty wars over idiotic objects due to greed and sometimes you have to wonder "When the hell are we going to get 'it'?" One of the main problems is that we as humanity have not realized the next level of truth -- "The Universe Will Provide For You." This century we will discover free-energy. This will be the catalyst to help people understand how to use this power responsibly. We are already starting to see this different perspective with respect to software. All code+data is just a number! Why is it "illegal" to share/trade numbers??
* Free-Will
You may think it quite tripe but Neo in the Matrix 2 said "The problem is choice." and he is spot on. Earth is one of the few places where humans have free-will. You can't as truly allow someone to be who they are / decide who they really are unless you give them the freedom to make their own choices. Which means they will make ignorant (based on lack of experience), stupid (based on lack of wisdom) choices from time to time. :-/ Would we better without our free will? Partially, Yes, but then we would lose a sense of our individuality. When you cross over you will find out you no longer have free will. You will still be unique but your "direction" will be more focused.
One thing that helped me to "just let it go" was "Why am I unable to respect another people's choices whether it be regarding greed, free-will, etc even if I disagree with it?? They don't know any better!! Yes sometimes there totally awful consequences but they are eventually learning 'What NOT to do.' (which is JUST as important.)"
So nay, emotions are not the biggest enemy. Would we do better to keep our emotions in check? Absolutely! Being balanced in both sides: Love & Logic is THE key to our spiritual growth / ascension / enlightenment. Humans are still spiritually immature compared to the truly advanced species -- the difference is that we are exploring the "negative" side and are now ready to start exploring the "positive" side. As we "grow the fuck up" -- we will start
This would just backfire so fiercely that it would turn the Entertainment Industry inside out. Publishers are not needed. They add no value to the work. The bits are in infinite supply, thus no value. What's valuable is the ability to create new works. We now have the ability to pay the artists directly for their new works -- They can simply withhold their efforts until money is assured -- Like Mechanics, Home Builders, Burger Joints, 100% crowd funded projects, etc.
With a burger, home or car, there is one customer purchasing the work -- The work benefits one customer. With arts the customers are all mankind. Marvel of Marvels: The bits are infinitely reproducible! Is this a match made in heaven? No, it is the nature of information. Humans are information duplication devices, right down to their very DNA. All Life Is.
The current publishing model runs counter to the Nature of the Universe, and employs evil economically untenable practices such as Artificial Scarcity, and Data Sharing Restrictions. To force the people into a system counter to human nature is what it means to create a police state. This has always backfired. The sooner, the better.
Please. Go ahead. Get Congress to authorize you to deploy rootkits. While you're at it, better make sure Congress also holds you immune from any damages done to the user's computer by either you or a third party who exploits your rootkit on the user's machine. I really want you to do this. I really sincerely hope this legislation goes through.
Because that will be the end of you. That will bring to an end the era of Big Entertainment .as people take special pains and use soon-to-be-written FOSS software to ensure that no part, fragment, snippet or bit ...nothing, NO-THING of what you produce ever has any contact whatsoever with any machine they own.
One way to kill your enemy is to give them everything they want. This works especially well when the enemy is the coke snorting sociopathic lawyers and executives in an industry who would corrupt every last vestige of civil society and even democracy and free speech itself in order that they can go on making money in just the way they've set themselves up to make money.
So please, go ahead .. make my day. (footnote 1)
Footnote 1-t
The phrase "Make my day" is copyrighted by Warners Brothers and is used here without permission despite the fact that Woofy Goofy was fully cognizant of the copyright and also the need to seek legal permission before using the phrase "Make my day" and further, it was Woofy Goofy 's intent to, with malice of forethought , defraud and and deprive Warners Brothers of its legal right to compensation for the usage of its copyrighted material and this defrauding was not intended by WoofyGoofy as a political act or protest but rather and only to secure financial gain for WoofyGoofy, regardless of the amount of such gain or whether such gain could reasonably be inferred to have materialized through any means, and for no other reason whatsoever.
Cellphones? How about if they come prerooted from the store?
That would be most desirable ;-)
www.Buy-Proxy.com - A "buyer-driven" global marketplace.
They're not the victims. We are.
Right... and it shows what happens when you assume. Steam runs as a regular application... the DRM is checked by the application since each game and sub-app is launched by the Steam client itself.
It's probably one of the best-behaved apps I've seen on my Mac, Windows box or Linux box :)
What's really surprising is that torrents aren't infected up the wazoo with malware anyway.
Why would they? Pirates are far more worried about reputation and repeat customers than the RIAA appear to be.
No sig today...
The root of all problems is greedy. Who have a thousand U.S. dollars wants more, who have a million dollars wants more, who have a billion dollars still wants more. If was possible the guy have a trillion dollars, it still would not think it is enough. We will end up extinct as a race because of greed.
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
Think about it, the only way to avoid malware will be to pirate everything.
Huh? It doesn't surprise me at all, that Bram Cohen didn't think to make torrent files executable (or that no one I've heard of, ever extended them to make executing part of them become a requirement). If it were possible for torrents to be infected, they never would have become popular (because they would have been a fundamentally too stupid of an idea) and we'd be talking about some other scheme which fills the same niche, right now.
People sometimes say "security is hard" and they do have a point, but sometimes adding security holes can be hard too, or at least hard enough that designers don't bother to do it by default.
That's why we need laws like CALEA. ;-)
No doubt the law MPAA is trying to buy, would have some aspect to it where whether people pirate or not, everyone would be required to be compatible with the malware. They'd probably want some kind of system where everyone's fileserver is required to poll the MPAA malware server for self-destruct orders, and anyone manufacturing or selling or trafficking in secure computers, would be in violation. Then they'd go further and make the self-destruct polling protocol obscure or require a non-free trade secret license, just to remind everyone "insecurity is hard."
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
I have more faith in the power of voters and the desire and the whole "state monoploy on violence" meme to ever see this get anywhere near the light of day. If they want to go down that road with open hostilities...theres more of us than them...just sayin...
The whole undercurrent of protection = retaliation being peddled in TFA is equally nonsensical. Nothing is as it seems on the Internet..most source addresses are either total garbage or unwitting victims. Without human level AI any automated retaliation can and will be leveraged as a weapon by the very people you seek to defend against.
I've come across malware in pirate games before, but it's very difficult to get malware to work in a media file - there are player-specific exploits, but that depends on the downloader having an outdated version of the correct player.
If it has not been done before, can we coin the term Cyberlynching to refer to hanging up a computer in pursuit of an unproven allegation of crime without due process of law? It helps to have a clearly understood name for something you are discussing.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
Right... and it shows what happens when you assume. Steam runs as a regular application...
Right... and it shows what happens when you assume. Steam starts SteamService.exe, a service that runs with System privileges.
Try to install and run Steam in a restricted user account without ever granting any elevated access.
Starting with the Java installer for Windows being bundled with Ask Toolbar...
I was shocked when I first saw this as well... and here I thought Oracle was an enterprise level corporation?!
They are, but revenue is revenue. Larry Ellison would monetize his bowel movements if he thought it profitable - accessible only with a Service Contract, of course...
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
The ~/Library comment makes me think you're running Steam on a Mac, which is fine, but not the majority of users and obviously not the OS the GP was talking about.
On Windows check out SteamService.exe (aka the Steam Client Service), it should be in your services list.
Most Steam users also have Steam installations that are older than the ability (before late 2012) to install games to different directories (excluding using symlinks/junction points/whatever) so games are installed into the default steam directory which is usually in a location that requires admin access to edit and a lot of games don't play nice with that.
For example, if you take every copy of a work and lock it away, then it's been stolen.
If you claim copyright or patent control over a work without valid justification, then it's been stolen.
If you take from the public domain then copyright it so you alone now own it, it's been stolen.
In all three cases, the right of others who have the right to copy have had that right removed at least semi-permanently (if you get your stolen iPhone back, it doesn't mean it wasn't theft).
What ISN'T theft is making your own copy of something. Unless you stole someone else's copy, rather than make your own.
I take it you've never had to deal with Oracle much? If you thought the Geek Squad guys were drooling, arrogant assholes you've never dealt with Oracle support. Had trouble uninstalling a piece of their client software once and they told me, "Open a command prompt. OK, now type Format C: /u/q. What do you mean you're not going to do that? If you won't use a clean installation of Windows then don't bother calling back."
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
and despite that, rootkit doesn't mean "something running as root" but rather "something running in kernel mode"
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
This isn't "Funny", but simply true. Reputation is what it's all about since you don't earn money for releasing pirated stuff. Just teh fame. RIAA is able to choose between consumer satisfaction and $$$, and their choice is pretty obvious.
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
I start steam in offline mode all the time in Windows 7. It asks if you want to go online but you can say no and it works.