"Since Freenet is really about anonymity, I don't think there's going to ever be any authentication happening."
Anonymity and authentication aren't always mutually exclusive. It depends entirely on what you're doing.
Case 1: Bob the Anarchist is browsing information on making bombs, so that he can strike out against the government. In this case, he certainly wants anonymity, and he has no need for authentication -- the bomb-making text is the same regardless of anything else.
Case 2: Ted the RIAA-hater decides to publish his 20 gig collection of high-quality mp3s that he's personally ripped from commercial CDs without the permission of the copyright holder. Because of the risk of getting sued, he obviously wants anonymity to prevent these mp3s from being traced back to his real-world persona. Beyond that, however, he wants to make sure that the mp3s he's publishing are verifiable as the real deal -- no badly encoded rips or other garbage should be able to misrepresent itself as being part of Ted's publishing effort. So Ted wants to be able to authenticate to a made-up identity that's used just for Freenet. No one but Ted can use that identity, but that identity can't be traced back to Ted (unless he leaves unencrypted, incriminating material on his harddrive).
"I didn't view the former before it was shut down, but as I understand it is was a bunch of links you could click on to feed file information to the BitTorrent client, just as Share Reactor is a bunch of links you can click on to feed file information to the eDonkey network client."
On a technical level, Torrentse was both a source for file information and the server through which the clients contacted each other to transfer piece of the file. So it was the only actual server involved in any of the sharing -- every other machine that a torrentse user would connect to would be that of just another torrentse user.
It sounds like Share Reactor, in contrast, is only providing information on material that's available via user connect to other servers (i.e. the eDonkey network itself). Whether or not that distinction is enough to shield them from legal trouble is anyone's guess.
"The phone company is not allowed to record your conversations wothout a court order, why should your ISP be allowed to log your packets?"
I think you're changing the issue by turning this into a case of packet-level/conversation-level monitoring. Tracking which customer was using a given IP at a given time would be more akin to the phone company keeping track of which customer owned a phone number at a given time.
If I were to get a court order requiring the phone company to tell me who the phone number (555) 867-5309 was assigned to as of yesterday at 4:32 pm, they'd have the customer logs to tell me. If I were to get a court order requiring the provider of a WiFi access point to tell me who the IP address of 192.168.4.2 was assigned to as of yesterday at 4:32 pm, there's a decent chance that I'd get an answer of "Sorry man. No logs." In both cases, no content-level tracking has occured -- the provider only knows information that tells nothing unless combined with other records and an outside party would be stuck at the phone number/IP unless a court deemed the privacy invasion acceptable. (Of course whether or not courts do the right thing is a whole different debate.)
"Server cost is negligible. We're not talking fuckin' Metallica here, alright? At worst you're looking at maybe a few thousand page views a month combined with a couple of hundred song downloads."
The $60k dollar figure was based off of 5000 subscribers at $12/year. So even if every subscriber only downloads 3 songs per month (at 4 megs per song), we're talking 58 gigs a month.
And then there's the whole community factor that HanzoSan's pushing. Running a 5000 user messageboard is going to push the costs up even further. You just can't host something that big off of cousin Pete's DSL line.
"Not letting people see what other files a user has might be a bit more useful, but I don't think either of these measures is going to do much to stop the RIAA from prosecuting people."
I'm not sure how much it's an issue with music, but "find more from the same user" is an effective way of finding the big fish (i.e. the ones it's most beneficial to prosecute) for software sharings.
As a proof of concept awhile back[*], I did a search on "Photoshop" on KaZaA. Then I looked for a username that popped up as sharing multiple versions of photoshop (in this case, version 6, version 7.0 final, version 7b43, and version 7 for Mac)[**]. A quick "find more from the same user" showed the guy had quite a few other commercial programs shared.
Whether or not this applies to music, I'm not sure. However, if I were to try and apply it, I'd search for the least popular tracks from various popular albums. That'd be the most likely means of pulling up users who have entire albums shared, which would lead you to the people with the massive collections.
Still, the RIAA could do a number of searches, save the results, and see which users get the most hits. But even so, removing the "find more from the same user option" still greatly reduces their ability to easily nail a user for every single song a given user is sharing.
[*] I was neither looking to actually download software nor was I interested in reporting the person responsible to copyright enforcement authorities. It was purely to see how easy it was to find someone that a copyright-enforcement group would be interested in pursuing.
[**] I know what was on the list simply because I have a screenshot saved from back when I was previously arguing this on another message board.
"You really think the RIAA keeps that Yanni CD around so they have a legal license to download it... I think not."
You're forgetting that there are other means to receive a license for a musical work besides purchasing a physical CD. In this case, the artist was probably required to sign over his copyright to the label as part of his recording contract, and the label presumably signed something allowing the RIAA to pursue copyright violations on their behalf.
Regardless, unless the copyright holder complains about the RIAA's actions, little would be done to them. If Bob's been complaining to his friends about trespassers, and Bob's friend Ted wanders on to Ted's property without explicit permission so that he could photograph stranger Joe trespassing on the property, Joe's not in the best position to argue that Ted was trespassing and Bob's almost certainly not going to complain about Ted's behavior.
A lot of people just don't find the low-level stuff fun. I agree that it defeats some of the purpose, but it certainly doesn't defeat all of the purpose. It's sort of like the grown-up version of getting a friend to pass the pain in the butt license tests for you in the Gran Turisimo games so you can get to the real racing. Yeah, money's now a factor, but then again you've also scaled up the time investment it takes to kick off the character.
Personally, the only thing that would tempt me would be a character account with the Jedi slot open. I'd feel a bit dirty about skipping over all the effort required to open the character slot, but since it's an account-level attribute rather than a character-level attribute, I could still rationalize it. However, I doubt I'd be willing to pay anywhere near what the asking price for those things will be.
"telling people how to do this themselves will probably violate DMCA"
Care to elaborate? The DMCA may be a bad law, but I fail to see how it would have anything to do with RFID tags on products. Even if you were to use the RFID disabling knowledge to assist in shoplifting, that still doesn't make the RFID itself a copyright control device and thus not covered by the DMCA provisions that you're apparently referring to.
"Most MMORPGs I know come with a month (or so) of free gaming time. During this month you have plenty of time to decide whether or not you like the game."
Personally, I'd rather pay for the first month but not have to pay the retail box fee unless I wind up sticking with the game. $50 is a lot to shell out for what can easily turn out to be a month of buggy servers and slow patch downloads. I don't mind that they're doing the "have their cake and eat it, too" pricing model (and I understand why it's somewhat necessary), but I'm a lot less willing to take a gamble on a game that's at the mercy of remote servers with unfinished code compared to just a regular computer game (which with only a few notably bad exceptions, generally has all its features in place at ship time).
Re:What gives?
on
The Bug
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
"A guy has an unsolvable problem that always embarasses him."
Sounds a bit like there's a problem with the metaphor itself. To non-geeks, the computer bug metaphor is going to be less than interesting. To real geeks, it's just too difficult to consider a computer bug as being something truly unsolveable. I think most of us have fought with obscure, insane bugs, and we've conquered them and become stronger coders in the process.
(A personal case was finding a bug in the newsreader tin that used fclose instead of pclose to close a pipe. The result was that on certain platforms (SunOS, IIRC), subsequent pipes would output to stdout instead of to the pipe file descriptor. It drove me crazy for a bit because it only failed the second time through. But I still beat it, and I still think there's no such thing as an unsolvable bug, barring stuff that's known to be computationally impossible.)
"my response is people don't pirate Harry Potter because they are happy to pay for something good, people pirate movies because a lot of movies are crap and don't deserve the cost of a movie ticket."
I'm not sure that's entirely true. A site I'm on happens to feature a number of bit torrent downloads. The thread for the audiobook version of the latest Harry Potter book has over 10 times as many views as the thread for the Hulk (4786 vs. 413). This would imply that it's an issue of ease of piracy more than anything else, regardless of quality.
"How i figure it, video game manufacturers dont have to worry about OS compatibility any more"
That ignores the larger issue of hardware compatibility. The video game manufacturer would have to make sure they shipped with working drivers on the CD for all possible hardware platforms that they're going to support. Furthermore, those drivers would have to be high enough quality to give gaming-level performance out of the hardware.
"windows users are USED to rebooting"
Windows users are used to rebooting when installing new software or drivers (which can be quite infrequent, depending). Windows users are not used to rebooting every single time they want to run an application. I, personally, would not purchase a game that required me to reboot every time I wanted to play it, unless it was the absolute greatest game ever.
"You didn't have quarters, or the school didn't have payphones?"
At my old high school, a trip between classes to the one payphone on campus would've made me late to my next class. Under those circumstances, a cell phone would have been less disruptive to my learning experience compared with the alternatives. But that's if and only if the phone were used responsibly.
"Going after the P2P software guys was like going after the auto manufacturers because they enable speeding violations."
I don't think it's quite the same thing. I've yet to hear of a case where they've gone after someone who only made the software. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if, say, the author of Bit Torrent manages to avoid ever being sued.
Instead, they've focused on P2P people that have some sort of contact with the network where the trading is going on. Napster had the ability to monitor and filter what was being traded on their server. The KaZaA people had to play the shell game with the company that managed the actual network to avoid prosecution. Even the college kids who were sued for running SMB search engines had the capability of seeing what was being indexed and searched for. This is nothing like an auto maker, who has no clue how a car is used once it leaves the factory.
Now I'm not saying the RIAA is definitely right in all the cases where they've pursued legal action, but there is a significant distinction here that needs to be recognized to better understand the various legal cases.
"The SPAM wouldn't be sent if they didn't order it."
That's not entirely true. Some spammers will send out fake spam, often as a means of retaliation against various anti-spam advocates. For example, here is one such case.
If it becomes standard practice to sue the advertisers in spam, spammers will just include more random, innocent third-parties in their spamming runs. The result will be enough doubt over guilt that it'd be impossible to figure out who was really responsible.
"On one hand this could help make the GameCube more popular, which it is bound to do if mod chips and ripped games are released, then this could mean more games available and better games available due to the increased interest."
I think you're being overly optimistic here. Modchips may increase interest in the physical console hardware, but the increased hardware sales likely won't be backed up with increased software sales. If someone goes through the trouble of modchipping their console, then they're going to want a return on their investment in the form of free games.
"He was basically saying that explicitly teaching how to write virii was a bad idea:
(1) It takes no skill,"
I have to disagree there. Awhile back, I was working on a benign project that involved fiddling with and understanding the low-level details of DOS executables. Some of the best online sources I found were virus-writing tutorials.
No. Considering that it's a public posting and that you'd be quoting it to respond to it, that's a pretty clear case for fair use. That does not change the fact, however, that I'm still automatically granted copyright to the comments I write. Hell, Slashdot even recognizes this with the copyright statement at the bottom of each page:
All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners. Comments are owned by the Poster. The Rest 1997-2003 OSDN.
"The only few who think its morally wrong are a few guys who happen to own copyrights"
Untrue. I think it's morally wrong, and I don't own any significant, commercial copyrights. (The distinction of "significant, commercial copyrights" is important in that even this publically available Slashdot comment is automatically copyrighted.)
So what's my interest in copyright if I don't own any significant, commercial ones directly? Well, I benefit from the notion of copyright in the same way that society as a whole benefits -- I enjoy the works that are produced because the creator of the work was guaranteed time-limited, exclusive control over the duplication of that work.
Now some people might argue that file sharing is different in that it's non-commercial in nature. Unfortunately, non-commercial copyright infringement is easily catching up to (and even passing) money-driven pirating in quality and scope. Thanks to the wonders of the digital era, duplication is easy and results in no degradation of quality. At the same time, the production costs of creating the IP (in other words, the investment protected by copyright) are still around, since there's only so much you can automate away.
Nope. Recommended viewing is handled entirely client-side. Furthermore, your actual thumbs-up/thumbs-down choices aren't uploaded -- just what you watch.
In short, disabling data collection will have no visible impact on your service. The only drawbacks are that TiVo makes less money (which could indirectly lead to their bankruptcy or an increase in rates) and TV stations don't know what you watch (which could indirectly lead to shows you like being cancelled).
Well, you're missing the fact that TiVo isn't exactly raking in the cash to begin with. Selling anonymous viewing data might be the thing to get them in the black without having to resort to raising prices.
"Is there an opt-out feature? Can I keep the anonymous data from getting to TiVo the first place (apart from unplugging the unit)?"
Other people have already mentioned that you can opt-out by calling TiVo. What they haven't mentioned is that when you do so, your TiVo stops uploading the viewing data altogether. I think there was some technical/debugging logs that might've still been sent though. It's been awhile since I've read up on it, but you can probably find more information on one of the TiVo hacking forums.
I find it interesting that there seems to be nothing that differentiates between whether or not the player is the law enforcement the violence is directed against. As near as I can tell, this law would equally apply to both GTA3 (a "pro-criminal" game) and the arcade classic NARC (a "pro-law" game, where the players are cops trying to take down a drug syndicate).
Also weird is that MK3 would be restricted, while MK4 wouldn't be. Both are violent, M-rated games, but the earlier one just happened to include a cop as a playable character.
Overall, this is just crazy, arbitrary criteria for restricting a game.
"To claim so is to call me a drug dealer for the following sentence. "There's a lot of drugs avaliable in Soho""
Try applying the following question to each case: "How much effort does it take to go from the information given to the final illegal product?"
In the torrent case, a link to a site with warez torrents gets you 90% of the way there. In the Soho case, you'd still have to randomly cruise streets, looking for a dealer.
Even so, I wouldn't say that linking to a warez site is necessarily illegal, but I'd say that under your drug analogy, it'd be a lot more like saying, "Ted in Soho sells drugs."
"The health authorities, rather than trying to re-vaccinate everyone effected, put the cure (100% safe and effective) into the public water system to help everyone as quickly as possible, prevent the spread of the problem, etc."
You're using the same flawed analogy as the last person. In the Fizzer worm case, it's like some random person with medical training dumping the cure in the water. That's a much more questionable situation, and it'll be worse if there are unintended sideeffects caused by the cure.
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Anonymity and authentication aren't always mutually exclusive. It depends entirely on what you're doing.
Case 1: Bob the Anarchist is browsing information on making bombs, so that he can strike out against the government. In this case, he certainly wants anonymity, and he has no need for authentication -- the bomb-making text is the same regardless of anything else.
Case 2: Ted the RIAA-hater decides to publish his 20 gig collection of high-quality mp3s that he's personally ripped from commercial CDs without the permission of the copyright holder. Because of the risk of getting sued, he obviously wants anonymity to prevent these mp3s from being traced back to his real-world persona. Beyond that, however, he wants to make sure that the mp3s he's publishing are verifiable as the real deal -- no badly encoded rips or other garbage should be able to misrepresent itself as being part of Ted's publishing effort. So Ted wants to be able to authenticate to a made-up identity that's used just for Freenet. No one but Ted can use that identity, but that identity can't be traced back to Ted (unless he leaves unencrypted, incriminating material on his harddrive).
On a technical level, Torrentse was both a source for file information and the server through which the clients contacted each other to transfer piece of the file. So it was the only actual server involved in any of the sharing -- every other machine that a torrentse user would connect to would be that of just another torrentse user.
It sounds like Share Reactor, in contrast, is only providing information on material that's available via user connect to other servers (i.e. the eDonkey network itself). Whether or not that distinction is enough to shield them from legal trouble is anyone's guess.
I think you're changing the issue by turning this into a case of packet-level/conversation-level monitoring. Tracking which customer was using a given IP at a given time would be more akin to the phone company keeping track of which customer owned a phone number at a given time.
If I were to get a court order requiring the phone company to tell me who the phone number (555) 867-5309 was assigned to as of yesterday at 4:32 pm, they'd have the customer logs to tell me. If I were to get a court order requiring the provider of a WiFi access point to tell me who the IP address of 192.168.4.2 was assigned to as of yesterday at 4:32 pm, there's a decent chance that I'd get an answer of "Sorry man. No logs." In both cases, no content-level tracking has occured -- the provider only knows information that tells nothing unless combined with other records and an outside party would be stuck at the phone number/IP unless a court deemed the privacy invasion acceptable. (Of course whether or not courts do the right thing is a whole different debate.)
The $60k dollar figure was based off of 5000 subscribers at $12/year. So even if every subscriber only downloads 3 songs per month (at 4 megs per song), we're talking 58 gigs a month.
And then there's the whole community factor that HanzoSan's pushing. Running a 5000 user messageboard is going to push the costs up even further. You just can't host something that big off of cousin Pete's DSL line.
I'm not sure how much it's an issue with music, but "find more from the same user" is an effective way of finding the big fish (i.e. the ones it's most beneficial to prosecute) for software sharings.
As a proof of concept awhile back[*], I did a search on "Photoshop" on KaZaA. Then I looked for a username that popped up as sharing multiple versions of photoshop (in this case, version 6, version 7.0 final, version 7b43, and version 7 for Mac)[**]. A quick "find more from the same user" showed the guy had quite a few other commercial programs shared.
Whether or not this applies to music, I'm not sure. However, if I were to try and apply it, I'd search for the least popular tracks from various popular albums. That'd be the most likely means of pulling up users who have entire albums shared, which would lead you to the people with the massive collections.
Still, the RIAA could do a number of searches, save the results, and see which users get the most hits. But even so, removing the "find more from the same user option" still greatly reduces their ability to easily nail a user for every single song a given user is sharing.
[*] I was neither looking to actually download software nor was I interested in reporting the person responsible to copyright enforcement authorities. It was purely to see how easy it was to find someone that a copyright-enforcement group would be interested in pursuing.
[**] I know what was on the list simply because I have a screenshot saved from back when I was previously arguing this on another message board.
You're forgetting that there are other means to receive a license for a musical work besides purchasing a physical CD. In this case, the artist was probably required to sign over his copyright to the label as part of his recording contract, and the label presumably signed something allowing the RIAA to pursue copyright violations on their behalf.
Regardless, unless the copyright holder complains about the RIAA's actions, little would be done to them. If Bob's been complaining to his friends about trespassers, and Bob's friend Ted wanders on to Ted's property without explicit permission so that he could photograph stranger Joe trespassing on the property, Joe's not in the best position to argue that Ted was trespassing and Bob's almost certainly not going to complain about Ted's behavior.
A lot of people just don't find the low-level stuff fun. I agree that it defeats some of the purpose, but it certainly doesn't defeat all of the purpose. It's sort of like the grown-up version of getting a friend to pass the pain in the butt license tests for you in the Gran Turisimo games so you can get to the real racing. Yeah, money's now a factor, but then again you've also scaled up the time investment it takes to kick off the character.
Personally, the only thing that would tempt me would be a character account with the Jedi slot open. I'd feel a bit dirty about skipping over all the effort required to open the character slot, but since it's an account-level attribute rather than a character-level attribute, I could still rationalize it. However, I doubt I'd be willing to pay anywhere near what the asking price for those things will be.
Care to elaborate? The DMCA may be a bad law, but I fail to see how it would have anything to do with RFID tags on products. Even if you were to use the RFID disabling knowledge to assist in shoplifting, that still doesn't make the RFID itself a copyright control device and thus not covered by the DMCA provisions that you're apparently referring to.
Personally, I'd rather pay for the first month but not have to pay the retail box fee unless I wind up sticking with the game. $50 is a lot to shell out for what can easily turn out to be a month of buggy servers and slow patch downloads. I don't mind that they're doing the "have their cake and eat it, too" pricing model (and I understand why it's somewhat necessary), but I'm a lot less willing to take a gamble on a game that's at the mercy of remote servers with unfinished code compared to just a regular computer game (which with only a few notably bad exceptions, generally has all its features in place at ship time).
Sounds a bit like there's a problem with the metaphor itself. To non-geeks, the computer bug metaphor is going to be less than interesting. To real geeks, it's just too difficult to consider a computer bug as being something truly unsolveable. I think most of us have fought with obscure, insane bugs, and we've conquered them and become stronger coders in the process.
(A personal case was finding a bug in the newsreader tin that used fclose instead of pclose to close a pipe. The result was that on certain platforms (SunOS, IIRC), subsequent pipes would output to stdout instead of to the pipe file descriptor. It drove me crazy for a bit because it only failed the second time through. But I still beat it, and I still think there's no such thing as an unsolvable bug, barring stuff that's known to be computationally impossible.)
I'm not sure that's entirely true. A site I'm on happens to feature a number of bit torrent downloads. The thread for the audiobook version of the latest Harry Potter book has over 10 times as many views as the thread for the Hulk (4786 vs. 413). This would imply that it's an issue of ease of piracy more than anything else, regardless of quality.
That ignores the larger issue of hardware compatibility. The video game manufacturer would have to make sure they shipped with working drivers on the CD for all possible hardware platforms that they're going to support. Furthermore, those drivers would have to be high enough quality to give gaming-level performance out of the hardware.
"windows users are USED to rebooting"
Windows users are used to rebooting when installing new software or drivers (which can be quite infrequent, depending). Windows users are not used to rebooting every single time they want to run an application. I, personally, would not purchase a game that required me to reboot every time I wanted to play it, unless it was the absolute greatest game ever.
At my old high school, a trip between classes to the one payphone on campus would've made me late to my next class. Under those circumstances, a cell phone would have been less disruptive to my learning experience compared with the alternatives. But that's if and only if the phone were used responsibly.
I don't think it's quite the same thing. I've yet to hear of a case where they've gone after someone who only made the software. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if, say, the author of Bit Torrent manages to avoid ever being sued.
Instead, they've focused on P2P people that have some sort of contact with the network where the trading is going on. Napster had the ability to monitor and filter what was being traded on their server. The KaZaA people had to play the shell game with the company that managed the actual network to avoid prosecution. Even the college kids who were sued for running SMB search engines had the capability of seeing what was being indexed and searched for. This is nothing like an auto maker, who has no clue how a car is used once it leaves the factory.
Now I'm not saying the RIAA is definitely right in all the cases where they've pursued legal action, but there is a significant distinction here that needs to be recognized to better understand the various legal cases.
That's not entirely true. Some spammers will send out fake spam, often as a means of retaliation against various anti-spam advocates. For example, here is one such case.
If it becomes standard practice to sue the advertisers in spam, spammers will just include more random, innocent third-parties in their spamming runs. The result will be enough doubt over guilt that it'd be impossible to figure out who was really responsible.
I think you're being overly optimistic here. Modchips may increase interest in the physical console hardware, but the increased hardware sales likely won't be backed up with increased software sales. If someone goes through the trouble of modchipping their console, then they're going to want a return on their investment in the form of free games.
I have to disagree there. Awhile back, I was working on a benign project that involved fiddling with and understanding the low-level details of DOS executables. Some of the best online sources I found were virus-writing tutorials.
No. Considering that it's a public posting and that you'd be quoting it to respond to it, that's a pretty clear case for fair use. That does not change the fact, however, that I'm still automatically granted copyright to the comments I write. Hell, Slashdot even recognizes this with the copyright statement at the bottom of each page:
All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners. Comments are owned by the Poster. The Rest 1997-2003 OSDN.
Untrue. I think it's morally wrong, and I don't own any significant, commercial copyrights. (The distinction of "significant, commercial copyrights" is important in that even this publically available Slashdot comment is automatically copyrighted.)
So what's my interest in copyright if I don't own any significant, commercial ones directly? Well, I benefit from the notion of copyright in the same way that society as a whole benefits -- I enjoy the works that are produced because the creator of the work was guaranteed time-limited, exclusive control over the duplication of that work.
Now some people might argue that file sharing is different in that it's non-commercial in nature. Unfortunately, non-commercial copyright infringement is easily catching up to (and even passing) money-driven pirating in quality and scope. Thanks to the wonders of the digital era, duplication is easy and results in no degradation of quality. At the same time, the production costs of creating the IP (in other words, the investment protected by copyright) are still around, since there's only so much you can automate away.
In short, disabling data collection will have no visible impact on your service. The only drawbacks are that TiVo makes less money (which could indirectly lead to their bankruptcy or an increase in rates) and TV stations don't know what you watch (which could indirectly lead to shows you like being cancelled).
Well, you're missing the fact that TiVo isn't exactly raking in the cash to begin with. Selling anonymous viewing data might be the thing to get them in the black without having to resort to raising prices.
Other people have already mentioned that you can opt-out by calling TiVo. What they haven't mentioned is that when you do so, your TiVo stops uploading the viewing data altogether. I think there was some technical/debugging logs that might've still been sent though. It's been awhile since I've read up on it, but you can probably find more information on one of the TiVo hacking forums.
Also weird is that MK3 would be restricted, while MK4 wouldn't be. Both are violent, M-rated games, but the earlier one just happened to include a cop as a playable character.
Overall, this is just crazy, arbitrary criteria for restricting a game.
Try applying the following question to each case: "How much effort does it take to go from the information given to the final illegal product?"
In the torrent case, a link to a site with warez torrents gets you 90% of the way there. In the Soho case, you'd still have to randomly cruise streets, looking for a dealer.
Even so, I wouldn't say that linking to a warez site is necessarily illegal, but I'd say that under your drug analogy, it'd be a lot more like saying, "Ted in Soho sells drugs."
You're using the same flawed analogy as the last person. In the Fizzer worm case, it's like some random person with medical training dumping the cure in the water. That's a much more questionable situation, and it'll be worse if there are unintended sideeffects caused by the cure.