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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?
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
So, real cash?
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Sorry, I'm only a 1336 h4x0r.
Pirate sites are illegal, so that OBVIOUSLY means anything uploaded to them are illegal.
Pirate sites aren't in themselves illegal. It's the content, such as movies and such, that is illegal.
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
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.
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.
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....
That wasn't their point. Their point is that they *want* the pirate sites to be illegal, whether or not they currently are, which varies by jurisdiction. Their legal logic (which I think is sound) is that by uploading to a site they would like to be illegal, they might be implicitly forfeiting their claim that such sites are/should be illegal, and they would do themselves more damage than good by posting.
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.