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Sony Pictures Leak Reveals Quashed Plan To Upload Phony Torrents
retroworks writes Motherboard.vice offers an interesting scoop from the hacked Sony Pictures email trove. A plan championed by Polish marketing employee Magda Mastalerz was to upload false versions of highly-pirated Sony programming, effectively polluting torrent sites with false positives. For example, a "Hannibal"-themed anti-piracy ad to popular torrent sites disguised as the first episode. Sony Pictures legal department quashed the idea, saying that if pirate sites were illegal, it would also be illegal for Sony Pictures to upload onto them. There were plans in WW2 to drop phony counterfeit currency to disrupt markets, and I wonder why flooding underground markets with phony products isn't widespread. Why don't credit card companies manufacture fake lists of stolen credit card numbers, or phony social security numbers, for illegal trading sites? For that matter, would fake ivory, fake illegal porn, and other "false positives" discourage buyers? Or create alibis?
Youtube is full of phony videos about "full movies" with a stupid blonde talking, or with malware links. Last time I started reported them, a received a message back as was flagging to many movies.
Why get your hands dirty with that sort of thing when there are so many contractors in the world?
That is the most stupid thing I have read all day and I went on 4chan earlier.
Pirate sites are illegal, so that OBVIOUSLY means anything uploaded to them are illegal.
This is the kind of retards that work in business.
This doesn't even get on to the fact that they aren't exclusively pirate sites most of the time.
That's basically what law enforcement does with undercover agents pretending to sell drugs / cruise for sex in public places / trade under-age porn. Not only do they do this, they make it known that they're doing it, with the intention of scaring people away from it.
And what happens to you when you sell fake dope to the mafia? You get taken out, kind of like, you know, what happened to them? *harumpf* *cough*... Maybe Kim Jong Un got pissed he wasted an hour downloading a file full of anti-piracy ads!
The whole lame-brained idea of dilution of the "stolen" or "illegal" product, so "buyers" won't know if they are getting the "genuine illegal" product or not is not going to stop anyone, and usually people with half a brain will know approximate file sizes, so they won't waste their time trying to download a 3 GB MP3 file... Duh...
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
Because it doesn't work?
It takes a handful of comments to stop a fake torrent being seeded any further, and why would you continue to seed a fake-torrent anyway? It's just sucking up bandwidth for something that you know is worthless.
Similarly with CC numbers - if you flood a ton of fake ones, it'll be next to no time before someone flags which ones work and which don't, and which uploaders were reliable and which not.
As such, it's a pathetic idea to do either.
How about you offer a DRM-free copy in a reasonable format for a half-decent price on a half-decent timescale? Or is it too hard to DO WHAT YOU'RE PAID TO DO? Make a movie, sell it to the masses.
The Imitation Game I went to see in the cinema - my first cinema movie in about 10 years. Unless I want to pay full-price again, I have to wait until the DVD comes out to watch a movie I'm interested in again. When will that be? God knows. But I can't watch it until they choose to bring it out. And then it will be region-protected, copy-protected and almost certainly won't work on my laptop (like most Disney movies).
I'm sure they'd rather I went to the cinema multiple times, like my ISP would rather I take out multiple lines. I'm sure they'd rather I pay a fortune for a DVD I can't backup or watch on a laptop, like my car company would love to be able to stop me adding on third-party components and only use them. I'm sure they'd rather I wouldn't be able to download it or stream it until it's a 10 year old movie or more and generating no income for them, like I'm sure my local McDonald's would rather give me an old piece of lettuce instead of a new one.
But if you want to keep your customers, it might be an idea to not seed fake torrents, and spend your time in court shutting down torrent site, but sell your damn product in a less restrictive way in the first place.
Uploading a fake torrent would only work for about an hour before all the leechers find out it's bad and stop downloading, reducing the number of seeders to less than a dozen.
All these studios (not just Sony) need to realize that people don't want to subscribe to an entire suite of channels just to watch 1 show. HBO seems to get this, but I imagine their new service will only work in the US, meaning the rest of us will have to get Game Of Thrones the usual way.
Summation 2
IIRC, there was a Madonna music video from many years back (before YouTube had pretty much every much video available), where the pirate sites were flooded with a fake video of Madonna bad-mouthing pirates, posing as the real music video.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
So, real cash?
-----
Sorry, I'm only a 1336 h4x0r.
Go to usenet, you'll see countless copies of mainstream movies and shows, usually just a few hundred K. In addition a lot of the downloads are pretty poor quality.
Torrent sites don't have that. They have ranking mechanisms and other techniques that allow real users to say whether something is real. They get rid of the crap pretty quickly.
Chances are the fake films are better than the one you thought you were getting.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
How about fllooding flea markets with fake DVDs or CDs? Or fake books?
As someone that gets pretty much all of my media from peering... they didn't "Quash" anything. They (or someone) used to upload all kinds of fake files to try and disrupt the community a few years back. They even got clever and would intentionally fake seeders so it'd look very popular.
That's why the aggregate sites have a comments and up-vote section. There are usually dozens of versions of any particular movie and you can sort by vote. That effectively killed the attack. They don't really try this anymore because their fake will get down voted almost instantly. You can even preview what you're downloading in most clients.
To be honest, I think they should be happy with the system they have now. It's pretty hard to get something before it hits DVD in a quality that's worth watching. If you want to see what's new and hot, you need to go to the theater. Getting a DVD or better quality version of a film is difficult enough that I bet most people just buy it. Their real problem is their continued fight against modernizing with some sort of streaming service. For example, imagine if you had a "Pandora" television station... TV shows were sent to you, you upvoted/downvoted them, etc... I'd pay for that. Keeping track of thousands of files for my kids TV shows is a PITA.
I tried to sell Ivory to a guy once. He was not amused.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Unless your name is Chewbacca.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
While it might have the effect you suggest of reducing the market for actual child porn, I still think that there would probably be the urge to see, and pay for, the real deal.
Its the same reason that many people like amateur porn these days over the produced stuff. The people in the produced stuff simply look like they are putting on a show, and reality is what gets a lot of people off. I don't know what gets pedos off, but I suspect that there could be the same dynamic there too. Not to mention that a lot of people simply like "forbidden" things.
> While it might have the effect you suggest of reducing the market for actual child porn,
> I still think that there would probably be the urge to see, and pay for, the real deal.
and I have to point out, what you think is something I really don't know about. In fact, I think its something we can't really evaluate just by thinking about because there are too many things that COULD happen and little real way to say what would.
Does satiating sexual desire with porn increase the frequency or amplitude of desire? Does it make one want the real thing more if so, is that even relevant? Perhaps the desire increases but the satiation is enough to lead to apathy?
That certainly would line up with the claims other people make about porn. "Porn is why my husband no longer sleeps with me", may or may not be a legitimate claim but, is NOT an infrequent one. To be honest I think the real relationship between sexual desire, sexual action, and available means of satiation is, well, a sticky issue to say the least.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
The real problem with CP is that it's made, not that it's consumed. I think you have the entire issue backwards.
Pedosexual is more accurate and respectful of diversity of sexual orientation. The LGBTP community lead the way to a more progressive society.
This "diversity" is the kind that belongs in the DSM-V. It's a condition that must be managed.
But the fake ivory is still fraud, just as Sony's upload would be. Just nothing you can do about it.
Of course downloading the fraudulent files wouldn't be illegal if you actually know it's uploaded by Sony...
There are crimes against intellectual property and there are crimes against humanity. I think your example falls under the latter.
For credit cards anyway. Put a bunch of "fake" credit cards out there. Some of them "work" but are actually traces. Users of these CC numbers get investigated and arrested immediately, because there are NO authorized users.
--PM
Sony's lawyers will want to emphasize that generally, it is unlawful to build something specifically designed to be part of an unlawful act. Court rulings vary based on the actual facts , the jurisdiction, and the particular court, but in general building HollywoodTorrent.com, which has links to torrents of the top grossing movies of the week on the front page, would be PART OF an unlawful plot.
This makes sense of you think about another unlawful act, such as a bank robbery. Suppose I gather together some body armor, ski masks, a getaway car, etc. and hand them to my friends so that they can go into the bank and rob it. I'd rightfully go to jail because I willingly participated in the plan to rob the bank. Not only the team members who went into the bank are guilty- the guy driving the getaway car, the gal monitoring the police scanner, and the guy who acquired and assembled the equipment are all part of the robbery gang.
Contrary to what some believe, the law is not dumb; this does not imply a sporting goods store that sells winter apparel is guilty because they sell ski masks along with boots and coats. The store is selling things to keep you warm, the bank robbery guy is assembling the items for a bank robbery - his intention is to help people commit the unlawful act of bank robbery . Not the same thing at all.
Similarly, Google provides an index of the web. The entire web, all 5 billion pages. That's not unlawful. Maintaining a site full of unlawful material for the purpose of assisting people in unlawful activity, as links, is generally unlawful.
How about fake rhino horn laced with a drug that reduces sexual appetite. That might work.
LGBTP? Oh hell no. There is no such thing as the "LGBTP" community.
FC Closer
I remember genuine fake oiginal spare parts. Say you have to change a tailpipe you could buy the original or you could buy the same piece made in the same factory the original one is made. The only difference is the cardboard sticker....
... if there weren't some jurisdiction in which Sony could enlist a proxy to do the deed, without blowback.
I can't speak to the other fake flooding ideas, but I do recall hearing a story where the reporter was shocked to learn that many who sell compromised CC lists offer a refund for any CC numbers that don't work. Putting out a long list of free numbers might district a few newbies, but the people with the experience and the financial backing wouldn't have been distracted by such free lists of dubious origin.
for this sort of practices --> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torrent_poisoning
Bull. The majority of pedophiles transition between fantasies to actual rapes. The pattern is well known to law enforcement and mental health professionals.
The only realistic alternative for allowing pedophiles to be free is to force them to have absolutely no contact with children.
Spoken like a true pedophile. Given that you are talking about "sexual partner" of children I think it's safe to say that you either transitioned to rape or is likely to do so soon.
Try to get some help before you ruin the life of innocent children, while most pedophiles can't be helped there are those that actually can learn to control their sadistic urges.
I do believe you've been trolled. It was a fairly well-formed troll at that (in that it initially doesn't appear to be an aggressive attempt at trolling, but rather uninformed commentary), but still best not to feed them.
Both are a problem. It's created because there's a market.
The mafia isn't he consumer. The junkie is.
BUT! Sony reportedly considers the leaked data itself worthy of uploading phony torrents.
http://www.theguardian.com/tec...
It is amazingly simple to create a script to:
While (1) {
1. Open your browser and go to Amazon, Google, Ebay, etc with embedded "search" for random words out of the dictionary or strings of words out of a text.
Note: Search terms can be embedded in URL
2. Pause (some of these sites will stop you from doing it X times per second)
3. Close browser
}
I've run a script like this before. What follows are some amusing Amazon recommendations.
I've always wondered what would happen if my script searched for some hot button NSA phrases? What would happen to the market cap of these customer information based sites if everyone started running this script? Do these have the intelligence to distinguish between my searches and the script's searches?
Bull. The majority of pedophiles transition between fantasies to actual rapes
You, err, have actual evidence of this?
The pattern is well known to law enforcement and mental health professionals.
Law enforcement find that people they arrest for raping small children also have fantasies. Big fucking surprise. Still doesn't follow that A causes B.
The only realistic alternative for allowing pedophiles to be free is to force them to have absolutely no contact with children.
This is quite tricky, given most pedophiles come under the category "Parents".
I was under the impression that the sharing of copyrighted material was the problem. I don't see what's illegal about Sony uploading an anti-piracy ad and naming it "DOWNLOAD Fury (2014) 720p BrRip x264" so long as they own the copyright on the ad. I mean, it's a pretty horrible name for an ad, but whatev. I was unaware that the protocol itself had been outlawed.
Let's let the court speak for itself, rather than you making shit up right out of your ass. The court ruled:
"one who distributes a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright, as shown by clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster infringement, is liable for the resulting acts of infringement by third parties."
That's a restatement of the Sony rule (1984), in Grokster this time. See also Napster, in which the court ruled that Napster was "promoting its use to infringe copyright".
Sony's lawyers are quite familiar with the rule since it was decided in the Sony Betamax case is is therefore called "the Sony rule". In Sony, the court ruled that VCRs could legally be sold, if the seller didn't promote their use for infringement of copyright, but only becuase they had "substantial non-infringing use". So the two-prong test under Sony is a) does'the product have substantial non-infringing use and b) does the seller / manufacturer/ superior promote the product as useful for infringement.
Or password protected RAR's which is even more infuriating because they're the correct size but the password collection thing is just a scam... I don't know how to get SABnzbd to stop downloading them and I don't know how to get Sickbeard to select a different one...
Back in 2005-ish a friend of mine worked for a MPIAA contractor. His job was to seed bad torrents. THat is torrents that would go to 99% complete but never finish (I forget the trick for that, I think it was to control.remove all the 100% seeds after a couple days or something). Another was to simply mis-label torrents, give people a PBS show or something instead. The thing is, all the torrent sites are self-moderated, which roots out the shady torrents pretty quickly.
Yeah, except for the YouTube part. They believe (and courts agree) that sites made for specifically unlawful purposes are unlawful, but Sony themselves wouldn't be doing anything unlawful, they'd just be "hanging out with criminal gangs". That's something I personally avoid.
Additionally, and maybe more importantly, under the 1984 Sony case, "substantial non-infringing use" is hugely important. Sony wants to argue that the sites contain virtually no legal content. It's harder to make that argument if Sony PUT the legal content there.
Contrast that with YouTube- YouTube is mostly non-infringing videos now, so it certainly meets the "substantial non-infringing use" criterion.
"I wonder why flooding underground markets with phony products isn't widespread."
it is, it's called 'made in china' a bit stereotypical but anytime a corporation convinces one group of people to pay more than fair market value, on come the copiers who make substandard duplicate items.
"Why don't credit card companies manufacture fake lists of stolen credit card numbers, or phony social security numbers, for illegal trading sites?"
credit card number the first 4 id the bank the last 4 the account number with the numbers in between being a 'code' of numbers that are random and which leave fake numbers between real ones. at the time it was 'good enough' because they would use carbon imprints at the wares store which was difficult to make a duplicate of the card just from the store copy (until 3d printers came along) credit cards are horribly insecure the magnetic stripe made it so that they could add three more numbers (also on the back of the card) to have more people with credit cards and supposedly more secure... anyways because of the legacy support issues credit cards releasing fake accounts would be an exercise in futility. as they would then have less possible working numbers from the ones they have available.
"For that matter, would fake ivory, fake illegal porn, and other "false positives" discourage buyers? Or create alibis?"
fake ivory is easy to find. fake illegal porn is out there too i think they were calling it 'child abuse' evidence. and don't think this is something new, magazine photographers from nation geographic, famous images of Vietnam when the usa igniting whole towns and some of the burn victims were children but still got published.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
I thought Sony already did that with P2P networks. Did I confused with something else?
I don't know about "most", since I haven't done a survey. I'm guessing you haven't either. What I can say is the freemoviestorrents.com is completely and obviously all about infringement, of Hollywood movies specifically. http://linuxtracker.org/ , on the other hand, is clearly not.
The protocol is as neutral as http. There are lawful web pages, and there are unlawful web pages.
Everybody else went ahead with their phony torrents. They're all over the web, and usually have a worm or somesuch. We all know this.. so somehow Sony decided NOT to follow through with it? Suuure..
I don't know about "most", since I haven't done a survey. I'm guessing you haven't either. What I can say is the freemoviestorrents.com is completely and obviously all about infringement, of Hollywood movies specifically. http://linuxtracker.org/ , on the other hand, is clearly not.
I say "most" because when a site does not meet both of those criteria, it tends to get taken down. So maybe transient sites that pop up and are then taken down might constitute a majority. I don't know. But I can say with some confidence that the majority of long established and successful sites do meet those criteria.