[Schadenfreude]

The Pirates Can't Be Stopped

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Portfolio.com', 'A') teenager hacked into the outfit charged with protecting companies like Sony, Universal, and Activision from online piracy—the most daring exploit yet in the escalating war between fans and corporate giants. Guess which side is winning.

The first time Ethan broke into MediaDefender, he had no idea what he had found. It was his Christmas break, and the high schooler was hunkered down in the basement office of his family's suburban home. The place was, as usual, a mess. Papers and electrical cords covered the floor and crowded the desk near his father's Macs and his own five-year-old Hewlett-Packard desktop. While his family slept, Ethan would take over the office, and soon enough he'd start taking over the computer networks of companies around the world. Exploiting a weakness in MediaDefender's firewall, he started poking around on the company's servers. He found folder after folder labeled with the names of some of the largest media companies on the planet.

Since 2000, MediaDefender has served as the online guard dog of the entertainment world, protecting it against internet piracy. When Transformers was about to hit theaters in summer 2007, Paramount turned to the company to stop the film's spread online. Island Records counted on MediaDefender to protect Amy Winehouse's Back to Black album, as did NBC with 30 Rock. Activision asked MediaDefender to safeguard games like Guitar Hero; Sony, its music and films; and World Wrestling Entertainment, its pay-per-view steel-cage championships and pudding-wrestling matches.

MediaDefender's main stalking grounds are the destinations that help people find and download movies and music for free. Sites such as the Pirate Bay and networks like Lime Wire rely on peer-to-peer, or P2P, software, which allows users to connect with one another and easily share files...

[smallpoxgirl]

I'm afraid of RIAA lawsuits. Yeah. I know. I'm a wuss.

[jasonraymondson]

I wonder how the heck he got in. The server I run, I recieve updates and notices everytime somebody is logged in. I wrote a script that alerts me via IM anytime including when I am logged in. This does this all in real time, and the people that work for these companies are smarter and better programmers than I. So I just can't figure that crap out. When you have that much responsibility and that big of contracts, I am pretty sure I would have a large team devoted to preventing wondering idiots from breaking in

[PenultimateManStanding]

You don't even need to get in. I watched the first three episodes of the new season of Jericho before they were even put out on television. It's all on the net.

[jasonraymondson]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('PenultimateManStanding', 'Y')ou don't even need to get in. I watched the first three episodes of the new season of Jericho before they were even put out on television. It's all on the net.

[lawnchair]

Never shared (online) and never downloaded. But, have a bit-version for personal use of almost everything that has ever been in my house, parents' house, girlfriends' house, borrowed from the library, or rented from Netflix. This includes a whole bunch of MP3s from out-of-print vinyl or cassettes, some of which I have handed out as copies to people. That and concert tapes of tape-friendly bands are the only things I share at all. If the label doesn't *want* to make money on something, I'll be damned if the music should just die.

[I_Like_Plants]

The last movie I got was bought for $5 at a local pawn shop. Pawn Palace rules!

[Schadenfreude]

Has anyone ever personally known someone who has gotten busted for freeloading? I've read about the occasional case but I've never heard anyone tell about getting busted in any forum on the net I've ever been to. There's an ocean of people out there doing it now.

Torrentfreak.com is place where people talk about these things. The worst I've ever heard is that some people get a letter in the mail telling them to cease and desist downloading.

[Zardoz]

What!?!? Hello???

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'I')n 2002, a lone programmer working at a table in his dining room invented BitTorrent, a technology that made file sharing even faster and more efficient. Within a few years of its creation, BitTorrent activity accounted for nearly 20 percent of all internet traffic. Between 2002 and 2006, the file-trading audience nearly doubled, with an average of more than 9 million people sharing files at any given time, according to BigChampagne, a company that monitors P2P traffic. The firm estimates that more than 1 billion songs are traded each month, a number that has more or less remained constant as the trading of feature films and TV shows has exploded.

[jboogy]

frostwire and limewire, the wife and daughter burn CD's every weekend.

[smallpoxgirl]

The number of suits that have actually gone to trial is pretty small, but as I understand it several thousand people have settled with RIAA...typically for a couple of thousand dollars and a public apology. I generally try to limit the number of activities in my life that cause lawyers to look at me and start to salivate. Practicing medicine is enough of a lawsuit risk for me. Like I said, I'm a wuss.

[lys3rg0]

p2p will never be stopped. they will eventually change the laws and rethink the concept of intellectual property. until then, people that don't have the time to get into secure private torrent trackers will keep getting busted.

if they could shut down all p2p tomorrow, it would be back up in a matter of days. maybe content would become harder to get for the average joe, for about a week or so. but the people that know how piracy works will always have access to all the goodies.

99% of content doesn't even come from the regular folks on p2p, it just gets distributed that way, but originally it seeps through the cracks from "the scene" which is too secretive even for the cops. infiltrating release groups and busting top sites requires years of undercover work and there are no guarantess of success.

http://www.aboutthescene.com/thescene/index.html

[Prince]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Zardoz', '[')i]Twenty percent of all Internet traffic? Holy shit...

[smallpoxgirl]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Prince', 'L')ike I said, 20% of all byte transfer goes to bitTorrent, but in terms of total internet traffic in terms of number of users, I'm guessing it's about 1-2%.

[Daculling]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('smallpoxgirl', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Prince', 'L')ike I said, 20% of all byte transfer goes to bitTorrent, but in terms of total internet traffic in terms of number of users, I'm guessing it's about 1-2%.

[strider3700]

there are very very few legit reasons to need these new ultra high bandwidth connections that ISP's are pushing these days. The lite version of a cable connection up here would still be more then fast enough for web surfing, email and sharing pictures with relatives.

The X-treme connection is way faster then what I currently have and it has way more up and down each month. frankly without piracy we'd mostly still be on dialup.

Also remember that a huge percentage of that bittorrent data is porn. The internet's first killer app.

[Zardoz]

Look at this:

Electronic Frontier Foundation

Chilling Effects

It's a movement, for God's sake. This is amazing. I had no idea.

[lys3rg0]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Zardoz', 'I')t's a movement, for God's sake. This is amazing. I had no idea.

[Schadenfreude]

A buddy of mine has been trying to scare me about the consequences of torrenting music, movies and software - and I had been taking him seriously until recently.

So I was looking around for ways to cover my tracks somewhat, you can never surf and download 100% anonymously though. Most people use PeerGuardian, which blocks known IP addresses used by MediaSentry and other nabbers. But PeerGuardian seems like a totally half-assed solution - a minor inconvenience at best. I dunno, maybe it's worth using.

A better method of covering your tracks is to use a proxy server. A Swedish proxy called www.relakks.com charges about $12/month for people wanting to hide from RIAA and others. Relakks assures everyone that they will use Swedish laws to prevent dicovery of user identities.

A cheaper proxy is VPNout.com, which is a US based proxy designed for general anonymous websurfing. It can't hide behind Swedish laws however. Proxies limit bandwidth however, so you can't download things as fast. And often the torrrents just slow down to a trickle or just stop. Also, you run into technical transferability problems when you try to use proxies for torrents. It might have something to do with "port forwarding" - I don't quite grok the problem.

But is all that surreptitiousness even necessary if so much damn p2p traffic is right out in the open? I think people just get the willies over their exposed IP address showing up on BitTorrent and they feel scared so they try a proxy. But I don't think it's even necessary. A proxies' best use is to transfer encrypted files which must remain secret and unavailable to prying eyes - like business documents or whatever. They're not really all that good movies and music.

Does anyone know more about all this?

[Dukkha]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Daculling', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('smallpoxgirl', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Prince', 'L')ike I said, 20% of all byte transfer goes to bitTorrent, but in terms of total internet traffic in terms of number of users, I'm guessing it's about 1-2%.