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Saturday 28 June 2003

P1r8t3s D00m3d! [slim]

It's headline news (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/talking_point/3022820.stm) the RIAA is going after end users of file sharing applications, if you share music on kazzaa, they're-a-comin to get ya!
But how exactly are they going to do that. According to Reuters report of the story, the RIAA head cheese said 'users have to be aware that they're not anonymous, that sharing files over the internet is about as obvious as setting up a stall in a flea market'. It's statements like this that show these folks up to be a bit fucking clueless. Now, assuming nobodys stupid enough to sign up to a p2p system with a real email address and no personal details exposed, nobodys that daft, right? What are they left with? Potentially your ip. So what are they goign to do with that? Most of us are on some kind of dynamic IP, so they're going to go to the isp, get them to inform them which user had that ip at that particular time? Puleeese!
I suspect its big noise to scare people off the peer to peer networks. Anyone here put off file sharing becuase of it?

13 comments:

  1. the joys of Kazaa lite......however given that Kazaa is the most requested download I'm sure that a lot of people are joe bloggs with no idea of what they're getting themselves into.

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  2. I don't use either, wots the difference? Have to say though, it does make smaller more private groups like DC look a lot more attractive. I'm not mad on the way Bittorrent exposes all the IP's the way it does, although I know it has to really.

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  3. Looking at this country, the laws are increasingly being strengthened to force ISPs to log all kinds of information of which whome an ip address belongs to is the easiest and has been done for some time already. The dynamic ip address issue doesn't change that requirement of ISPs in this country and to be honest, the folks on P2P networks are invariably on broadband with the same IP address for very long periods of time if not static IPs.
    No, that's what's stopping this threat from being the case. Right now if some record body went up to the police and said 'We think this guy is sharing copyright stuff, here's the IP' - they wouldn't be inclined to act upon it. The cyber-crimes units of the police in this country is in it's very infancy and they have bigger fish to fry in the form of paedophilia.
    There lies the problem with the police allocating resources to policing the Net in this country. People want bobbies on the street and for the police to hunt down murderers, rapists and paedophiles. So it must be a tough call justifying spending loads of money on policing these sort of victim-less crimes (ignoring potential lost profits from large record companies).
    Of course now the record companies would be only too happy to fund this sort of work. In this country, our policing isn't for sale at any price. You are free to report a crime but you're not free to go all vigilante. In the US it's different, they see these sort of vigilante representative bodies and lobby groups as a way of funding their crimal justice system by doing much of the hard work.
    That's not to say that it couldn't happen here one day but I think we're a good distance from that. On the other hand, if a record company was to log onto Kazzaa or whatveer and record some nice UK IPs along with a list of what they appear to be sharing - they could compile this into a dossier. Identify the time, the IP address, the ISP, the supposed material (downloaded) and present this evidence to the police. They are obliged, in the face of evidence of a crime being committed, to investigate it. The laws are in place for them to obtain customer details from an ISP with due cause. There's nothing stopping this scenario from being true.
    The only thing stopping it right now are the safety in numbers issue and the low police priority. Does it put me off using P2P networks? Well yes actually, I don't use stuff like Kazaa - I just don't think it's a good idea to permanently advertise your IP address with a list of copyrighted stuff. You're maximizing all the risk parameters by doing that and to be honest, with things like Usenet and Bittorrent, I can reasonably get anything that I should want.

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  4. You're completely wrong on the ISP not providing the IP lookup, Slim. The RIAA successfully won a lawsuit against Verizon, a big US telco, to do just that last week. That's what has brought on this new tactic - they've won the right to demand the lookup info from particular IPs.

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  5. Perhaps some will have this information. But will an ISP like aol be keeping the ips and usernames of everyone who logged in for long enough for it to be useful?

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  6. Lets all hope that if the ISP's are worried that their clients will jump ship its possible that they will simply stop holding ip's? :) Then we'll all be safe

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  7. Presumaby the ISP still knows what articles you've downloaded from NG's? And is your IP attached to any articles you post?

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  8. I was under the impression that legislation recently introduced required UK ISPs to store access information on users (dialup user, phone number, authentication details, IP address) for seven years, though apparently most ISPs are only retaining one or two years worth.
    There was a huge ruckus about this when it went public, but only among the internet aware community, which rarely manages to prevent legislation being passed. I don't know what happened to it eventually...

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  9. The RIP legislation requires the ISPs to hold data and give it up on request to the police and other governmental organisations. It doesn't force them to give it to any Tom, Dick or record company executive that turns up on the door.If they actually want to go after people, the RIAA are going to have to refight the Verizon case in every country containing someone they go after. Some countries (France for one I think) have a very different view of personal privacy to that that seems to currently exist in the US.
    In reality they're going to go after a few token cases in an attempt to scare people into abandoning P2P.
    There is an interesting kink to this - home wireless networks. With ISP logging, the best that can be actually proved (I think) is that the traffic went to your wireless router. After that, it's up to you what gets logged. They have, in fact, no way of proving it was you on the other side of the router. With a wired network you're pretty much caught because the claim that someone plugged a wire in without you seeing is pretty incredulous but with a wireless one couldn't you just claim someone else was using your network without your knowledge? And isn't that actually quite possible? After all, you don't have to prove you didn't do it, they have to prove you did...

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  10. As a rule, as soon as the police are taking a matter seriously enough that they've issued an order to your ISP to get your IP address, the next you can expect to hear from them will be when they turn up to take all your computers away.
    It's not like they say 'I say, we think you've stolen some stuff!' and you sit back, clean your machines and concoct some bullshit about a wireless network.

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  11. Lurks is bang on about police resources. A few years back the computer crime unit for the whole of the country comprised of six people. They have no fupping chance in enforcing anything. I can see more it happening in the US, mind.
    I can't remember where I read it, it might have been Bob Cringley's column on pbs.org a few weeks back and someone had suggested to him a neat-o little wireless solution.
    Get the cheapest network attached storage solution like this: www.snapappliance.co.uk which is £500. Add a wireless basestation to the LAN port and nail it under your floorboards. You keep all your porn/warez/music on it so when the Feds arrive, all the pcs in your house are clean!

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  12. Presuming you haven't left any shortcuts to the stuff on the storage box which clues them in...

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  13. So you end up spending more on the hardware than actually buying the copyrighted material. Is that l33t? ;)

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