Inside the Shadow Internet 954
Paladin144 writes "Wired has a report about the mysterious 'pirate networks' that obtain new movies, music & games before they are released and spread them throughout the net. It's not as simple as putting a movie on LimeWire. These people are highly organized and very paranoid about secrecy. They maintain a hidden network of top-level FTP sites that get the best files first and allow them to trickle down the pyramid and into many a slashdotter's sweaty little fingers."
Well.. (Score:5, Interesting)
I used to have access to the Distro section of an elite IRC channel, known across the net.
They would give movies to those few, who would then take them to the regular channel.
It's really crazy, and insanly hard to get in to, but you would get stuff very early.
Also, easier to get caught, as I found out.
Re:Well.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Well.. (Score:5, Interesting)
They shut off our internet, until they could get a letter to us, and we had to sign it, saying we wouldn't do it again.
Re:Well.. (Score:5, Funny)
Yours truly,
Undercover FBI Dude
Re:Well.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Just kidding (obviously), been clean for 3 years!
Re:Let me guess... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Let me guess... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Let me guess... (Score:5, Funny)
10 geek cool points to anybody who remembers QSD's Telenet NUI...now those were the days...
(Cause I never heard of any of those kinds of things).
Re:Let me guess... (Score:4, Funny)
And let me tell you, using a 300bps modem really was like walking to school in the snow, uphill, both ways...
Re:Let me guess... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Let me guess... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Let me guess... (Score:4, Funny)
I didn't mind. Gave me time to go through them all:)
Oh, and said friend who buried the disks in his garden was also into phreaking, and buried all that stuff too.
Ah, those were the days...
Re:Let me guess... (Score:5, Funny)
I can't wait for the **AA to try that one.
Re:Well.. (Score:4, Interesting)
Paramount pictures recently dinged a bunch of my friends for IP violations - not only were the infringement notices sent to their ISP's electronically ( and PGP signed at that ) - they came with an attached XML document specifying their infringements.
This [unistudios.com] is the schema for anyone interested.
YLFIRe:Well.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Reading this article kinda made me feel sick, as if all these people were so addicted to all these horrible hollywood releases (Hellboy?!) and RIAA crap, they were compelled to share it like tape traders of old.
Seems like a huge waste of time and talent to bust your butt and possibly face jail time for the new Good Charlotte or Linkin Park.
I'm hoping the scene does this "because its there and it can be done" for this 99% or so terrible content. But the piece on the people making a "Netflicks content" server implies otherwise.
Re:Well.. (Score:5, Interesting)
The motivation was the statistics. Seeing that I shared 10 gigs of movies in a day kinda made me feel important. I was almost op'd in one of the channels due to how much I was doing.
I just did a little search, and found out the site I used to do this for is still going. Very supprised at how they keep at it, when I was caught so easily.
Re:Well.. (Score:5, Interesting)
In the warez community, as I understand it, you were probably either an "IRC/P2P Kiddie" or a "Racer" (if you got into sitetrading). Both of these are fairly easy to spot (from the perspective of syndicates like the RIAA & MPAA and the feds) because you are moving a lot of copyrighted data in plain text, with unobscured filenames. Until the very recent past, these "middlemen" were seen as fairly harmless by the FBI & co.
Before the MPAA/RIAA campaigns against end users came into play, you would have been given a slap on the wrist (which, it would seem, is what happened). If you were doing the same stuff today, your personal information might have undergone the subpeona process the RIAA & MPAA have become infamous for, and you might have faced a civil suit and/or criminal charges. Consider yourself lucky to have gotten caught back then!
(Most of my information comes from the article "A Guide to Internet Piracy" in 2600 Magazine, issue 21:2. It looks to be the same information, pretty much, as the Wired article mentioned in the top post, although I admit I have not RTFA. This is slashdot, after all...)
Re:Well.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Think about how they are slanting things; the article gives the impression that the vast majority of new material is being initially provided by these shadow networks.
Back in the day when I was dodging sundevils (a cookie if you get the reference), that was essentially true.
In the current picture, it's a vast overstatement; yes, there are "elite top level" groups, but they are mainly kiddies; the majority of app and game files circulating on the 'net are either done by 1 person who figured out the crack from standard deprotection tools, or from the established cracking houses like paradox, class, etc.
The wording and, um, flavor? of the article is to create a scary thing on the internet that even the relatively well informed have heard of remotely or even been a peripheral member of, much the same way the Bush administration manufactured links between 911 and Iraq, and for essentially the same reason.
It IS obvious right? if you stop and think about it? This is just a step down the path of making us accept fewer online freedoms, as a necessary aspect of the war on cyber-terrorism.
Re:Well.. (Score:4, Informative)
No. The guy who deals with the customers is the dealer. The mule is the guy who smuggles drugs from the growers/chemists to the dealers. They're pack animals. That's why they're called "mules".
Re:Well.. (Score:5, Funny)
"I used to be 1337! No really, I got caught, so I'm really cool, right guys?"
Re:Well.. (Score:5, Interesting)
I remember them well. I wasn't at the very top of their pyramid, but I wasn't at the bottom, either. I was lucky enough to have a DSL connection back then (late '98-early '99) with a nice upload speed, so I was able to become one of the distribution FTPs. Once you established your "legitness", you'd easily be able to get movies 2 weeks or more, sometimes a month even, before they actually came out in theaters. I remember I had "The Matrix" three weeks before it ever came out. I thought I was cool shit, then again I was doing this as a rather naive 12 year old.
As for what got me out the scene. A bunch of people that I regularly traded with were getting nailed, so I bailed. They were good times while they lasted, though. Haven't used a FTP for anything but legimate traffic since.
Re:Well.. (Score:4, Insightful)
From what I'm seeing right now, the time premium you get by getting a direct FTP hookup vs BT is maybe a few hours. The top BT sites will have most everything online ASAP, it's not really worth it to hang out with warez losers just to get stuff a bit earlier anymore.
What's with the very young kids sharing files? (Score:5, Insightful)
It is simply a question of economics.
These young kids have computers, or access to computers, and a whole lot of time.
Unlike adults with paying jobs and disposable income, these kids have the motivation to enter the piracy scene: They want a game, a CD, or a movie, but they don't have the funds.
In time, that motivation become expertise.
Re:What's with the very young kids sharing files? (Score:4, Informative)
Also, if they're under 18, they're very useful because they're more likely to take bigger risks than someone who might end up in federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison. As long as you're just infringing and not outright stealing, you're usually pretty safe if you're under 18.
However, I did know one guy who got caught carding over $10k worth of stuff that he would have sent to his friend's house in a nearby county. His friend's mom found a bunch of stuff they had carded and were going to sell in his closet, and the kid who did the carding went to juvie for a year and a half.
Re:Well.. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Release groups (Score:5, Interesting)
Unfortunately, such torrent files would all have to point to the same tracker; change the tracker, change the signature. Take down the tracker, invalidate all those torrent files.
Of course, you could leave the the tracker address out of the signature - but then the RIAA could simply spread torrent files with honeytrap tracker addresses.
A better solution might be to use Freenet [freenetproject.org] as the distribution method. Sure, it's slow, but:
I thought it was generally known (Score:3, Funny)
God bless them
Re:I thought it was generally known (Score:5, Insightful)
Menace to society, indeed. Maybe they'd do better to pick up programming and write free software rather than cracking someone else's, but I think you've hit the nail on the head; it's not even about the software or movies or music being pirated, in my opinion, when one gets in to the degree these folks have. They get nothing out of what they do but they get nailed harder than spammers or spyware purveyors.
Re:I thought it was generally known (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I thought it was generally known (Score:5, Insightful)
I know a lot of guys who were big in the amiga scene some ten to fifteen years ago, and they all have pretty well-functioning social lives. One of them now works for a major computer game developer, others are completing various educations (and not necessarily comp.sci).
Re:I thought it was generally known (Score:4, Interesting)
It was the thrill of trying to break the copy protection, of finding the "cRaK" to pirate the software.
He even went so far to paint his 1541 disk drive with "War Copy" paint....truely over the edge.
The thrill for these people is like breaking a code somebody else devised, it's an Ego booster. And like drugs that give you pleasure, it's addictive.
The process of getting the latest movie in the best quality on a 700MB CD (with DVD's so cheap..WHY do they continue to want to fit it on 700 MB CD's!) and getting it done first is somewhat similar.
Re:I thought it was generally known (Score:5, Insightful)
The point being, the spammers, the junkmailers, etc., even though they are really just human cockroaches, ultimately make fist fulls of $$$ from their petty little endeavors. $$$ means that one or more of them might have enough sense in their heads to hire competent lawyers.
Competent lawyers means that it is not a trivial effort for the FBI, Dept. of Justice, etc. to try and per...er, prosecute them, because it will cost THEM too much time and energy for very little PR value, and certainly NO support for them (or their political...leash holders) when the next election cycle is around.
So they go after these networks.
Not only do they sound much better than "a spamlord was busted in suburban Detroit yesterday for allegedly sending out 1 beeleeon spam messages per month. Meanwhile, he's out on his own personal recognizance awaiting arraignment" vs "a secret cabal of movie pirates was busted yesterday by a huge interagency, multi-state task force that has worked for over 3 years to crack into, gain and ultimately betray the trust of those involved. Spec. Agent Murphy says, 'well, these activities only lead to bigger and far more nefarious criminal elements acting in our borders, not only against you and me, but other counterfeiting operations, etc. We hope their testimonly will allow us to catch the really big fish.' Meanwhile, bail on the 17 accused has been set from between $500,000 and $1,000,000 each."
Ooo, these must be REALLY BAD BASTARDS if they have bail like that!
No, these nets are just sexier targets than the spammongers, not only because they sound much better in a soundbite, but the perps tend to not have a bunch of money burning a hole in their parents' pockets to hire a good, agressive defense lawyer or to have made prudent past political contributions.
Only and until AOL, Microsoft, and several of the other ISPs in the US decide that the loss of customer good will these simps cause everyone, and the additional work of their corporate customers, and fund these kinds of raids ala the MPAA/RIAA, then it just won't happen.
But we've seen at least what AhOL is doing now, really, just marketing noise. AOL I think still makes too much money for selling subscriber lists to really make an effective "this shit is going to stop NOW" stand.
The other part of it is that some of the people in the neo-money set have also figured out various semi- or quasi-legal schemes that make them lots of money, and combined with whatever other zealous drives or needs they have, makes them a bit more politically connected, compared to your typical working stiff. They protect their own, because if the spamschmucks go down, they could be smoked out too. The only difference between the spammer and the successful timeshare or RV salesman is really the job title (oh, and maybe the house, and car and multiple T1 connections in the house, and...).
I suppose you could fit a lot of small and family-owned businesses in there as well (taking wholesale goods from the store/shop/market for use at home is probably a common one. it's not a big deal if it's a few rolls of bumwad, Sticky-Notes and stuff like that or those cheap-ass Papermate Stic-pens. But using the company, and other peoples' jobs as collateral for personal/family loans probably should be a big deal)...
Also, when a "legitimate" group like the RIAA/MPAA feels it has to stoop to using spyware and other things to help "fight" that which it has deemed the Ultimate Doom and Evil (P2P), well...
WWJD? No, the wristband to have in 2005 is "LWSHTJ - Look What Still Happened To Jesus!"
Re:I thought it was generally known (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I thought it was generally known (Score:3, Funny)
The Rules (Score:5, Funny)
The second rule of the shadow internet is, you DO NOT talk about the shadow internet.
Re:The Rules (Score:3, Insightful)
Usually the time to when the law would catch wind of something like this and act would be like, a couple of months, maybe three. These days... ehhhhhhhh, more like 2-4 weeks, tops!
The ack-acks have the law enforcement groups running their donut-encrusted behinds off on on things like these, so the best way to let others know, is not to be hasty about it.
Swelled egos + big mouths = big trouble down the road.
Re:The Rules (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The Rules (Score:5, Funny)
Curious tone (Score:4, Interesting)
The tone of the Slashdot article summary makes these people sound like rather romantic pirates (in the original sense), having exciting adventures with clandestine societies and having a strict code of secrecy.
The truth of the matter, as the article reveals, is that it's people like these that caused so many problems for our friends at Valve and are responsible for most of the other irritating leaks of software. While I'm for P2P, fair use, BitTorrent et al as much as the next Slashdotter, I don't think these people are really up to any good. They are not much more than Internet criminals.
Valve is not your friend (Score:5, Insightful)
Valve is a business. They're not your pal, they're not your relative, they're not the cool people next door.
They're a business that is out to make money. Never forget that about any company. Even Apple.
Re:Valve is not your friend (Score:4, Insightful)
At least these companies offer something in return for that money. Say what you want about the greedy "rich people," they got to be that way by trade, not theft.
Re:Valve is not your friend (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Valve is not your friend (Score:5, Insightful)
Big fortunes are usually ill-got. (Score:4, Informative)
Most of the large fortunes you can name were reaped through amoral or unethical means.
Warren Delano [mapinc.org] (as in, Delano Roosevelt) got his money through the opium business.
Joseph Kennedy [wikipedia.org] was involved not only in some shady stock deals, but later ballooned his fortune with alcohol during Prohibition.
John Jacob Astor [wikipedia.org] made his initial fortune trading alcohol for furs with native americans.
Bill Gates [microsoft.com] bought QDOS from Tim Paterson for a pittance, only to license it to IBM for millions.
Of course, one could argue that these men weren't actually breaking any laws, they were simply taking advantage of the situations at hand while disregarding moral or ethical constraints that might bind us "normal" (read: unsuccessful) folk.
Re:Valve is not your friend (Score:4, Insightful)
They don't rob people without giving back. Although it would be a stretch to say that they didn't con people into making it worth more than it should be, the value of the product is still fed by the fact that people will actually pay that amount.
You don't like it? Better brush up on your salesmanship skills, and start to talk to people about Linux. Or the Mac. Or whatever system you happen to support. You'll end up helping lower the demand for Microsoft Windows (which, according to economic theory, lowers prices or increases quality), and helping raise the value of computers and operating systems.
You choose your friends (Score:3, Insightful)
Businesses may have a primary aim of making money but they are made of people too and those people do have an effect on how a company behaves, especially in smallish companies. There's no harm in supporting and appreciating a good company. At the very least it gives them some encouragement them to keep being good.
I don't know much about Valve and I've never played one of their games but they look like people trying hard to produce good software. There's no shame in liking that.
Re:Valve is not your friend (Score:5, Insightful)
That's ok. They're in business to make money. By the same token, they don't deserve your loyalty or respect unless they've paid you for it.
My loyalty and respect aren't for sale.
Re:Curious tone (Score:4, Insightful)
In many ways, these people are also responsible for there being a fight against the **AA in the first place. If they hadn't made piracy such an issue, laws would have continued to have been passed behind our backs.
This isn't to say they don't do harm, or that aren't many people fighting the good fight legally.
Re:Curious tone (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Curious tone (Score:5, Informative)
Ago, who reportedly (see http://www.livejournal.com/users/gravito/2197.htm
The FXPer's are actually an echelon higher than botnet herders. The FXPer's have nothing to do with stealing Half-Life 2's source code. They are, indeed, the closest thing we have to romantic pirates. They also purchase the majority of the software they crack and distribute, ironically. They do this as a philosophical movement, and do not believe in copyright law or IP law.
A good deal of the FXPer's also contribute to open source and are active on Slashdot.
Re:Curious tone (Score:5, Insightful)
Whether they know it or not, the vast majority of folks here on Slashdot would not object to copyright if it embodied the original ideals under which it was created, rather than the bastard system we have now that big companies hide behind to line their pockets at the expense of the true innovators.
I don't see that as being hypocritical.
Re:Curious tone (Score:5, Interesting)
Sure, they were not paragons of any society. Dregs, really.
But of all that gold and silver that was flowing back to Europe from Central and South America, who mined it? The natives or slaves.
Could the activities of the classical Pirate be looked at then as slightly, romantically ahead of their time? The long-term actions of the Pirates certainily did slow down the flow of this blood money back to Europe. And was it a big deal, really in the grand scheme of things? How many Spanish Galleons were lost to pirate raiders and privateers vs hurricanes?
Didn't the "inherent" value of gold and silver in Spain essentially lose any level of reasonability, because soooo freaking much of it was available in Spain?
It's like someone gifting you a pound of nice chocolate fudge (yes, that's a LOT of fudge). You eat a piece or two. "Cool, this is some good SHIT!". After about 4 or 6 more pieces, you find it very hard to stop, but you also notice that you're just pounding it down, and not enjoying each piece of it. Next thing you know, it's gone, and you have one hellofa sugar coma waiting for you in 15 minutes...
So you next then go to See's Candy, and order another couple of pounds. "Why did I do that!?!" GRMMFMMMOh...yeah....oink oink oink.
I've got about 300 5.25" floppies of C-64 games in the garage. I paid for about 10 or 15 myself, and really did want those games. I got the rest from others in exchange for them copying the games I bought. After a very short time, it did not matter if I got a cool game or not. Wow, another 10 cool games to check out. Eventually it was a game to see how many I got. After leaving for college, it quickly lost interest. Those stupid Z-19 terminals had much more power, especially getting a "Rita" account!
Same thing with music. I don't buy much music any more, and one of the reasons is that I burned myself out on it. I had so many cassettes that I did not enjoy or look forward to any of them that I had. They were a pain in the ass to move, and, well, after a time, I found I did not care about them much anymore. So I picked out a few that meant the most to me (and mostly have now on CD), and the rest, I don't know where they are. I remember songs occaisionally, but...nothing is going to make me go out and blow $200-300 on a "CD Binge" anymore.
People will eventually get to this point. The RIAA should figure out how to get into the middle of this crack cocaine game, instead of trying to fight it. It might even let them sneak out such glossy turds as "Gigli" on an unsuspecting group of "early adopters" who can give far more useful feedback quicker than can carefully crafted and demographic'd focus groups, and kill them quietly instead of letting $100million die on the screen on opening weekend. Speaking of "Gigli", has it even made it to DVD yet?
Valve Hurt? (Score:5, Insightful)
I also love the quote: Valve stood helplessly by watching its big Christmas blockbuster turn into a lump of coal
Ease up on the melodrama man, Valve is doing JUST FINE.
Re: Robin Hood and copyright violators (Score:4, Insightful)
Robin Hood didn't take from the rich and give to the poor; he took from the tax collectors and gave to the taxed.
Now, it turns out that most of the taxed were poor and most of the tax collectors were rich (or those working for the rich), but Robin Hood did not steal from, say, merchants and traders, who were better-off than average, nor did he give to beggars, who were worse-off than average.
Robin Hood should be romanticized because he fought against unfair taxation, not because of the rich-to-poor myth.
(Also, when he finally (re)gained his earlship, it wouldn't surprise me if his moral outlook changed and he engaged in some taxation himself.)
Note that the actions of these "pirates" and their cheerleaders has actually caused unfair taxation in places like Canada and Germany, in the form of tariffs on CDR media, computers, etc.
They should not be applauded.
Please do not take the above as an endorsement of the RIAA and MPAA and their non-American equivalents, who have engaged in some very scummy, immoral, sleazy, unethical, slimy activities.
Deciding who to root for in this conflict is like trying to decide who to root for in a conflict between the KKK and the Black Panthers in the 1960s and 1970s, or between Iraq and Iran in the 1980s, or between Bush and Gore/Kerry in the 2000s, or between the Israeli Defense Force and the PLO at the current time, etc.
Oh, one final thing: the copyright violators do not "take [steal] from the rich and give to the poor"; they steal from rich (??AA executives and lawyers, movie and record studios, A-list actors and musicians, etc.) and poor (non-A-list actors and musicians, extras, grips, concession stand operators, roadies, grunts who work in your local record store/DVD rental place/movie theater, etc.) alike, and give to all, rich or poor (but not too poor to be able to afford computers), who are willing to compromise their integrities by downloading copyrighted material to which they are not entitled.
Re: Robin Hood and copyright violators (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm always annoyed to read things like this. The only people who caused unfair taxation are the lunkheads who actually passed the taxes into laws. They're the ones who should get 100% of the blame.
yes, ther is nothing like (Score:5, Funny)
yeah, that'll hurt the industry.
yep, good luck in that marriage, guy... (Score:4, Insightful)
And to think, it only took 19 years of marriage for me to learn this.
Excellent overview of the pirate network (Score:5, Interesting)
Back in the day, these sites were run on BBSs whose phone numbers were non-published and which only a few people had access to. These days it's FTP sites, but the principle is the same. And frequently it's not their own FTP sites, but someone else's site which isn't properly secured, but this happens more at the lower levels.
Anyway, the networks run the same as they always have. You're either in or you're out. And most people are out.
this is old news (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Excellent overview of the pirate network (Score:5, Funny)
Thank goodness for these people (Score:5, Insightful)
If economics and history teach us anything, its that producers of any product, whether its widgets or music, or movies, will raise the price as high as they can in the absence of any competition.
Since Government sponsered "Intellectual Property" is a defacto monopoly supported by the government, the only relief we have is to just grab the stuff if they charge too much.
Re:Thank goodness for these people (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Thank goodness for these people (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Thank goodness for these people (Score:5, Insightful)
The people who produce music and movies and whatever do have competition. They're all in the "entertainment industry". Most people have a certain portion of their income which the allot to entertainment. If people feel that one form of entertainment is too expensive, they'll start spending their money elsewhere. Movies, concerts, sporting events, travel, hobbies.... entertainment is a wide field. If the pirate networks were shut down tomorrow, we wouldn't see CD prices move a dime. There's still too much competition for the entertainment dollar.
I'm not saying I never grabbed an MP3 or copied a floppy, but I never tried to justify it with some half-assed argument about fighting an evil tyrannical government conspiracy. I just stole it because I didn't want to pay for it.
Secret society... (Score:3, Funny)
Umm, 'scuse me mr. reporter, its "VPN" .. (Score:5, Insightful)
Virtual Private Network.
The oh-so subtle difference between positions (shadow internet vs. VPN) is that if someone does a google for VPN, they'll realize just how damn easy it is.
"Shadow Internet"-way just sounds comic-book super-hero, and as we all know thats as literary as most peoples thoughts go, it won't be obvious that 'any joe can build their own private and secret Internet on top of the Internet [openswan.org]'.
(Not just 'elite techno-psycho-fascist' types hell-bent on destroying 'systems'. *Anyone*.)
Obscure, eh?
Re:Umm, 'scuse me mr. reporter, its "VPN" .. (Score:4, Insightful)
A VPN involves address encapsulation - the VPN has it's own address space, and when your packets are in transit between nodes that know of the VPN, they're wrapped up inside other packets, that go between publically adressible nodes.
What I saw in this article was basically just a bunch of really covert but publically addressible internet sites (FTP, web, etc).
To put it another way - I could have a webserver on my system that's only accessible after port knocking in a specific pattern, but that doesn't mean you're on "my VPN" when you manage to connect to it.
Re:Umm, 'scuse me mr. reporter, its "VPN" .. (Score:3, Informative)
The fact that you only think of it in terms of copyright infringement says loads about both the purpose and the effectiveness of the article. (Or it says that you are a troll or an astroturfer...I'll assume not.)
I'm not particularly interested in secrecy, but even I know what a VPN is and,
In the day (Score:5, Interesting)
Anyway, I always wondered that is they kept things such a secret, how does *anyone* find out about them, or get access to them, etc. I used to own a local ISP, had dual T1's and dealt with thousands of users and net-friends, spent sleepness nights +O on numerous icr #'s /ctcp & /dcc and fserving what I could get and give back... but nothign worked. And hell, at that time I was merely looking for early release of OS's, prior to buying them so that I could get a techincal jump on questions from customers who were running those OS's. I always bought my software, I merely liked being ahead of the game.
Re:In the day (Score:5, Interesting)
Wannabes (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't make me laugh. Anyone who belives for a moment that geeks racing each other to crack warez are going to defend their 'turf' with contracts against journalists is a fool.
Re:Wannabes (Score:5, Funny)
Hell, if I ever wanted to take out a hit on someone, I'd hire a midget with a knife. Nobody would expect that. Even if the victim gets warned, nobody would take it seriously. "Dude, look out for a midget with a knife!" "Riiiight."
Age old struggle... (Score:5, Insightful)
Every pirate eventually hits puberty, discovers girls, and suddenly has better things to do then rip off "da man". Just like almost all those hippies are now lawyers.
Pissed off people (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Pissed off people (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow. I agree with Jericho4.0. Kids. And fairly stupid kids at that, several steps below your average script kiddie.
For some reason I'm very strongly reminded of this line [bash.org] :-).
Some of the bits from the article were pretty revealing too - one of the group members who was failing a CS degree because he never went to lectures and never studied (too busy "ripping and burning"). I'm guessing he didn't do the exams either :).
And of course, who could forget that very scary and extremely serious and realistic </sarcasm> threat to the author of the article: "You do not need some 350-pound hit man with a Glock at your front door." Someone's been living a bit too much in movie fantasy-land, methinks.
A few forgotten roles (Score:5, Informative)
And what's with the glorification? It's pretty boring stuff, expect when two groups release the same thing just a few minutes apart. You mainly sit in front of IRC all day long. In the Western countries it may be about bragging rights and prestige. In Asia, these releases are big business for a lot of computer stores. You feed your ego, they feed their family. What a waste of time.
Busted! (Score:5, Funny)
So the pirate the feds arrested, interrogated, and impounded in April, but didn't file charges yet against, is the Half-life guy. That narrows it down quite a bit.
except (Score:3, Informative)
Spooks and cracks (Score:5, Interesting)
Don't these posts [slashdot.org] seem to have a real "Reefer Madness" [reefer-madness-movie.com] feel to them?
What the Wired article really demonstrates is how it will continue to be difficult if not impossible to stop electronic piracy.
Even though I don't condone such theft, and would prefer that all media be acquired through legitimate channels, the fact is that the genie is out of the bottle. The folks who like to distribute music, film, and warez will continue to stay one technological step ahead of the RIAA, MPAA, and the police.
Secret? (Score:5, Funny)
That`s why they made Wired.
Reminds me of the Old BBS days... (Score:5, Insightful)
In those days you had to be ElYte! to download at 1200 baud and you had the famous upload/download ratios.
And their system was usually even more secure and secret than what these so-called hackers have now -- usually because you had to know the sysop personally to get on those BBS systems.
However, if you were a decent social engineer, or just a decent chatter, you could usually talk you way into those places.
So really, what is the difference between now and then? The downloads are larger, the bandwidth is higher, the networks are more connected, but that's about it. It's basically the same stuff that been going on since the mid-80's and even before that (when people copied paper tape).
Why does "Wired" have to play it up like it's some cool new thing? Because piracy now is mainstream, and everyone wants to get into the action?
It's only a matter of time before we have a reality-TV show about this kind of lifestyle. But what the real dummies don't understand is that this is the same culture that has existed for decades.
How lame.
Re:Reminds me of the Old BBS days... (Score:5, Informative)
If you had read the Wired article, you would find that the reporter states that the current practice of piracy distribution can be traced back to 100 or so people operating C-64s in the 80s.
Re:Reminds me of the Old BBS days... (Score:3, Informative)
Not at all. In fact, I know that the name "courier" really stuck as a name for the guys trading copies for points, because USR eventually released Courier and Courier HST modems, and only crazy rich warez puppies could invest that kind of money or get their parents to buy them, while the rest of us were still using 9600, 2400 (MNP5 in software, maybe), or even 12
Re:Reminds me of the Old BBS days... (Score:4, Insightful)
the obligatory conspiracy theory (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:the obligatory conspiracy theory (Score:4, Interesting)
Tax fraud? (Score:3, Interesting)
Wouldn't this be tax fraud? I'd think the FBI could pull a Capone on his ass and use him as the link to the topsites. I don't think the IRS would consider copyright violation a legitimate business. I certainly wouldn't shed a tear if he were busted for either copyright violation or tax fraud.
The Shadow Internet (Score:5, Funny)
HL2: "almost a year of reprogramming" (Score:5, Insightful)
Did anyone else's bullshit detector get pegged by this?...
...Specificly, the "almost a year of reprogramming" part.
It seems that when people hear that the HL2 code was "stolen", they interpret that in the literal sense. It was "taken" from Valve so they had to "reprogram" it because they didn't have it anymore. This bogon seems to appear even among people who should know better (like Wired reporters).
I guess Orwell was right: Control language, control thought.
Imagine how productive OSS developers would be if they didn't "give away" all of their source code with every new version.
Re:HL2: "almost a year of reprogramming" (Score:3, Informative)
Re:HL2: "almost a year of reprogramming" (Score:4, Informative)
Thanks for reminding me... Bruce Sterling's "The Hacker Crackdown" [mit.edu], the chapter "$79,499". Though it's not NASA, it might (or might not) also be the incident you're thinking of.
"Pirate," eh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Me too. (Score:4, Interesting)
Back in my callow college years, I was a ripper for EPiC. I only did three or four releases; I was flush with the success of having learned to encode amateur porn using DivX (these were the heady days when DivX 3.11 with all that toolkit crap on top of it was the preferred encoding solution), and I put it to use.
The guys had an ad on one of the XDCC channels---#imp-iso on EFNet, if I recall---asking for encoders. So I joined a chat channel, they helped me get set up, I got a Netflix account, and started encoding.
Then Netflix didn't send me the DVDs, and kept charging me until I notified my card company and they stopped the autopayment. I don't know if it's changed since then, but there was no fucking way to get in touch with Netflix.
But in the meantime, I had ratio access to some great big FTP dump in Europe. I was, at the time, frickin' amazed at how easy it was, and how clearly the feds either (a) didn't care, at that point, or (b) were horribly inept. I leaned towards (a).
But, indeed, I was impressed at how sophisticated the tools (RaidenFTPD, mostly, seeming way, way better than the basic FTP daemons legit sites used) and organizations were, for people who never bothered to spell right or use there real names.
And it wasn't like it was a really big or impressive group like Centropy. (They were, maybe still are, the guys who had telesync releases of every new movie the week it was in the theater. Watchable ones, which was the impressive part.)
Ah, youth.
--grendel drago
Quote of the Article ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Criminal conspiracy ? (Score:4, Insightful)
From the article:
Does Slashdot really need to publish rubbish like this ? The whole article reads like the writer had infiltrated the Mafia (oh, sorry: "criminal conspiracy"), when in reality he simply interviewed some copyright infringers.
For those who can't tell the difference between real criminal conspiracies and copyright infringers:
Please note: I am not protesting the information content of the story. It actually had some interesting parts, like the joyrney of new files into consumers. However, I must protest the writer calling the warez people a "criminal conspiracy" simply to try to give the impression that he was infiltrating a real criminal gang.
Weakest Link (Score:4, Insightful)
Unless the projection operator cares about the entire chain (maybe because they get a reasonable living out of it - there may be other ways, but that seems the easiest option) why not mandate that everyone who has the ability to leak your "crown jewels" is appropriately rewarded for that responsibility.
Otherwise, any leaks are all your own fault.
That doesn't excuse anyone for stealing the stuff, but it is a reason why it happens - get a month's wages for 2h work? Most people would go for that deal. It's human nature.
simple: sftp to OpenSSH servers (Score:5, Interesting)
Or how about just sftp? The original "darknet" paper and articles suggested that filesharing would turn into from large anonymous groups to small groups of people that knew each other and were suspicious of newcomers
I remember discussions of ftp servers used for small sharing "clubs" and I can't figure out why sftp isn't used for this. Knowing how to set up OpenSSH properly is a widely held skill that has value outside "piracy." Use DSA authentication instead of passwords for a start.
It should be nearly impossible for outsiders to gain net access to the server. The mere presence of a secured box shouldn't be enough for court ordered physical accesss. While it's also possible to have encrypted filesystems, if they can get my box out of my house, I fscking give up.
I'm planning to write an sftp "browser" front end in python or maybe just figure out how to use rsync over an ssh tunnel.
Traffic analysis in the absence of IP "bouncing" (whatever that is) could reveal who's in the network, but not what they're trading. A "chatter" app that keeps the channels full of noise (or files- who's to know?) could make traffic analysis more difficult. I'd be willing to sacrifice download time so my real downloads can be hidden in an always-on 16kbps stream. I'm trying to share my 20GB of rock with a friend who has 50GB of jazz. If it takes a couple of weeks to exchange collections, that's OK.
Maybe we should just FedEx hard drives to each other.
Not all that easy... (Score:5, Insightful)
Not to mention the legality of doing something like that. Courts don't issue search warrants for fishing expiditions, and although the government may be able to get into a Maye without a warrant, when two private ISPs meet up, they might not want to let them in.
And you can say Carnivoure all you like, but it looks for specific things and logs them. It examines everything and discards all but a small portion. Thats very different that keeping a small record of everything.
Encrpytion also makes any scrutiny irrelevant. Not to mention that most people want a privacy policy saying that not everything they do on line will be observed by Big Brother.
It's possible, but if it were simple, the Feds would be doing it.
Re:Pathetic (Score:4, Insightful)
It's simply fucked that for sending electrical signals down a wire can be worse then rape. (Refering to IP stuff, not hacking or virus making, which are actual crimes that need to be taken seriously.)
Re:This whole thing sounds bogus (Score:5, Interesting)
Ah yeah, the mythical movie/music pirate pyramid distribution network. If there is one, the RIAA/MPAA or it's employees are the ones feeding the first layer. That's why the author was talking to some supposed "elder statesman" and uses the word "Pirate". Arrrr, me hardies!
The article intentionally ignores lots of things. Fundamental issues [slashdot.org], the fact that you can get out of publication music on P2P, and the whole CD and DVD publishing industry that exists without computer networks. Those out of publication files were not put up by someone who broke into some server someplace, they were put there by someone who had they record. DVDs and CDs from intentional production over runs and other publications are in markets all over the world. It's not just in 3rd world markets either. I know a local store owner who got burnt by his supplier who sent him unlicensed coppies of Windoze. The packages were identical and there was no way he or the supplier could tell the difference. It took him years and nearly all of his money to beat Microsoft in Federal court. All of these little issues ignore the real change that's happened in publishing. The cost of publishing has gone to zero and the encouragement for publication needs to fall in proportion. It's silly that while publication is cheaper than ever, copyright is stricter than ever.