Category: FileSharing
A piece of internet history has been lost but not forgotten. IO.COM has been sold to an undisclosed third party and all of its shell,email and hosted ftp and webserv services have been transferred. To those of you scratching your head trying to figure out what this means, well let me tell you, it is a big deal. You see, before we had the internet we had BBSs or bulletin board systems. BBSs were computers that ran special software that allowed users to dial in and connect to the computer via a hard telephone line. Once connected to the BBS, users had access to a host of services we are familiar with today like email, news feeds(Usenet), webspace for websites. The BBS also allowed other users dialing in to communicate with each other. BBSs were the cornerstone of the internet as they gave birth the first online communities. IO.COM was a domain name that was owned by Steve Jackson Games and it hosted services for the Illuminati Online BBS. Steve Jackson Games was a company that created tabletop games and offered customer support through their Illuminati Online BBS. After it went online in the mid 1980′s, it soon became a flourishing online community where users would chat about all kinds of things – Illuminati Online was a staple in the early internet. But the story and the intrigue does not end there for the IO.COM BBS. The Illuminati Online BBS earned international fame among the computer underground after Steve Jackson Games was raided by the U.S. Secret Service. As it was in those days, people who did not understand technology feared those that did, giving way to the non-tech-savey computer users vs. the hacker elite. The Secret Service was after one so called hacker elite, a member of the Legion of Doom, known as Loyd Blackenship, an employ who worked for Steve Jackson games. The Secret Service had targeted Blackenship after he published a Bell article about the emergency 911 phone system in the hacker magazine Phrack and because he ran a legal BBS from his house where members discussed the hacker underground. That alone put him on the Secret Service’s watch list. During the raid agents discovered GURPS Cyberpunk that Blackenship had been working on at SJG. GURPS Cyberpunk was actually a genre toolkit for cyber themed role playing games – table top ones. After the raid the Secret Service confiscated several computers including the one running the Illuminati BBS taking it offline. They also raided Blackenship’s home. History tells us now that the Secret Service was really on a phishing expedition and did not have anything solid on Blackenship. They siezed the SJG computers because of Cyberpunk that he had been working for the company, but Cyberpunk had nothing to do with the hacker BBS Blackenship was running from his home, that was what the Secret Service was really after. SJG and the Illuminati Online BBS just got caught in the crossfire. In fact, as fate would have it Steve Jackson Games was awarded damages from the Secret Service in the 1990s for the use of what the judge called sloppy police work. The decision in the case led to some of the electronic information protections we now enjoy under the law today – it gave email and electric content the same protections under the law as mail – SJG was represented by the then new Electronic Frontier Foundation and SJG’s case proved to be a landmark case in the establishment of some of the online freedoms we enjoy today. Bye Bye IO.COM…oh how you will be missed. Hackers and non-geeks alike salute you Illuminati Online BBS!
BREIN head Tim Kuik claims that FTD supporters are behind the DDOS attack on the BREIN website. He claims that the timing between the FTD takedown and the attack make the culprits obvious. Does it really? Certainly the timing is close but suspicions and conjecture do not equate to facts and BREIN hasn’t been all that good at making friends lately. Not only have they gone after FTD, but also the Swan website and a number of other Usenet sites recently.
DDOS attacks are not the answer however. Arnoud Engelfriet the legal council of FTD in the recent BREIN case states that “Executing DDoS attacks only strengthens the image that filesharing or downloading is a criminal activity, which does not help the cause.” He is right of course. Mixing a legitimate debate of intellectual property laws and an illegitimate attack on a website can easily and quite quickly taint the worthy topic at hand.
There is another possibility for the source of the DDOS of course, BREIN itself. With the history of their heavy handed tactics in the past would it be out of the realm of possibility that they have done this to themselves to continue to muddy the waters between reasonable debate and illegal activity? I would argue that it is not only within the realm of possibility but within the style of their playbook. To look back and find their most recent illegal activity on shutting down a service one only needs to go back to an incident in January. Where they took down sites who’s legitimacy and legality were beyond reproach even by BREIN’s standards. Either way it’s high time BREIN begins acting like the legitimate organization it claims to be.
TorrentFreak is reporting that our favorite Netherlands anti-piracy group, BREIN, is forcing the shutdown of numerous Usenet and NZB sites. This list includes: nzbkingdom.net, Twilightnzb.com, Furiousnzb.net, Shreknzb.com, Team-Casanova.com, Crosspost.nl, Cobra-team.nl and FTAClub.net. They of course managed to get some leverage with the court win over FTD (all this despite the fact that only 13 of the more then 1/2 million FTD users reported and uploaded infringing content, and even then who’s to say these anonymous persons didn’t actually work for BREIN). According to lawyer Arnoud Engelfriet
“BREIN is using the FTD verdict to threaten other sites into closing. Even though the verdict clearly said downloading is legal and ‘facilitating’ downloading is legal as well, BREIN is now saying that sites that provide NZB files are facilitating illegal downloading.”
It seems to me that BREIN is overstepping its bounds, something it is quite fond of doing. In an separate article TorrentFreak is reporting that BREIN has gone ahead and taken down the site known as Swan. Interestingly, neither the recent FTD ruling nor any other recent event has given them the legal authority to do so and the fine people that run Swan not only managed to seize back their servers but are also looking at suing BREIN. It’s about time someone hit them back. While there is certainly a debatable to be had over intellectual property a few things are painfully clear:
- Current intellectual property laws do not work in an environment where a single work can appear in multiple formats all of which can easily be shared across the globe in any number of ways.
- Being a rights holder or representative of the rights holders does not give you a free pass to do whatever you want wherever you want.
- Rights holders need to re-evaluate their monitization of the work product and investigate alternate means of making money.
- You can make money on free and can compete against free.
Perhaps it’s time the companies that supposedly represent the result these creative industries themselves get creative.
Seems FTD, the Dutch usenet forum, under threat of 15,000 euro per day fines, will close shop on March 1. http://tinyurl.com/69t8jrm link to the English version of the news article I read.
While not the end of the world, (FTD is only one client – there are lots of alternatives out there) the Dutch sure have things upside down. One of the reasons FTD is closing is because the judge says it’s illegal to upload but not download. Huh?
In a country where you can buy any sex act from a person in a window right after coming from eating magic mushrooms in a bar, you’d think they’d have bigger fish to fry. Guess not.
Found this little article rec.arts.movies.current-films.
Level 3 Communications, a central partner in the Netflix online movie service, accused Comcast on Monday of charging a new fee that puts Internet video companies at a competitive disadvantage.
Level 3, which helps to deliver Netflix’s streaming movies, said Comcast had effectively erected a tollbooth that “threatens the open Internet,” and indicated that it would seek government intervention. Comcast quickly denied that the clash had anything to do with network neutrality, instead calling it “a simple commercial dispute.”
The dispute highlighted the growing importance of Internet video delivery — an area that some people say needs to be monitored more closely by regulators. Net neutrality, which posits that Internet traffic should be free of any interference from network operators like Comcast, is thought to be on the December agenda of the Federal Communications Commission.
“With this action, Comcast demonstrates the risk of a ‘closed’ Internet, where a retail broadband Internet access provider decides whether and how their subscribers interact with content,” Thomas C. Stortz, the chief legal officer for Level 3, said in a statement Monday.
Read the full article.
If you’re a fan of URL shorteners that use the .ly domain keep your eyes open. The vb.ly site has been taken down and the domain registration revoked by NIC.ly the registrar of all .ly domains. It seems that because the .ly domains are controlled by the Libyan government and that government follows Islamic/Sharia Law that any site they deem to have content that falls outside of the allowed morality of these laws is subject to be smacked down. This of course is a problem given that many of these URL shorteners link to adult content certainly beyond what Sharia Law would find palatable. Even popular sites like bit.ly are at risk despite their terms of use that don’t allow for infringing or pornographic content.
This of course can be an issue when you let a government determine for you what is and what isn’t appropriate. For now it looks like people may need to think about using a shortener that doesn’t have a .ly domain.
Have you heard about S. 3804: Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA)? No? Well, if you’re a fan of the great firewall of China and censorship in general you’ll love this one. It comes in the guise of preventing infringing activities but what it will really do is make it possible for sites to be blocked from US access. What kind of sites could be blocked if it passes? How about YouTube? Yes, the Google owned site that has given many of us lols would be fair game if this passes. Under current law because they follow the DMCA takedown procedure YouTube is not liable for any infringing content that its visitors may provide. If COICA passes all that has to happen is that interested parties convince a court that the site is being used for infringing activity (despite the fact that it would likely be taken down by YouTube under DMCA) and block the entire site in the US.
But that’s through a court system where sites at least have a fighting chance to protect themselves you may say, but wait. All it takes is an order from the attorney general to get a site added to the blacklist. ISPs will be required to block all sites on the list made by court order and be given immunity for blocking all sites on the list made by the attorney general. Given the immunity I would expect the number of ISPs blocking those on the second list to be hovering somewhere around 99.99%-100%.
But won’t there be ways that users could still get to these sites? Of course there will always be ways around things like this, but at what cost to the US? Currently the US is the hub for most of the internet. A lot of traffic flows through our tubes and many domain names are registered in the US. If this passes it won’t be long till the traffic slows down and people and companies begin hosting their sites outside of the US costing thousands of jobs in the process.
If you’re interested in learning more check out the EFF, Demand Progress, Tech Dirt, and sign the Demand Progress petition as well.
It appears as if the French anti-piracy body Hadopi has begun sending notices to French ISPs to the tune of 10,000 IPs a day. It will then ramp up to 150,000 per day. This number is mind boggling when you compare it to the 28 IPs that Time Warner has to give up per month. Don’t worry though given that France has a population of just over 65 million it will take a whole 437 days to get everyone their first notice and in about 3 1/2 yrs everyone in France should have their third notice. After that nobody in France will be able to use the internet.
Per the law the providers need to identify the alleged infringers’ names, addresses, emails and phone numbers. If they’re unable or unwilling to do so within 8 days they risk a fine of 1,500 euros per day for each and every unidentified IP-address. The 3 Strikes law that is in place in France is quite extreme in that unlike most 3 strike laws you don’t need to be convinced of file sharing you only need to be accused so while the idea of an entire country being offline is obviously absurd its the end result if the current law stays as is without any pushback from the ISPs or public on their elected officials. It is unlikely that Hadopi will actually decrease piracy… that is until the entire nation is offline.
So it seems the fine fellows over at 4chan are at it again and took down the MPAA site over the weekend. While I sympathize with anon (and do much enjoy the Guy Fawkes masks) I’m not sure that this is the best approach to take. Poking the hornet’s nest is often a really good way to get them angry and yourself stung. The problem here is that while those that make up anonymous may not feel the sting themselves it might rile the MPAA enough to keep up the current lawsuit and technology DRM vector they’re on. Certainly the Betamax fair use decision continues to be whittled down and the MPAA should let people use their purchased films however they see fit, but legal maneuvers need to be taken. If you share this perspective it’s likely more effective to support the EFF instead of trying to take down the MPAA site, amusing though it may be. There’s also a small discussion about this going on in rec.arts.movies.current-films, feel free to jump in and continue the conversation.
Are you like me and don’t like it when apple app developers try to be funny or cute and try to change things that are standardized and working fantastically well in the first place? If so then try this little gem to correct the discombobulated minimize, maximize and close window buttons in iTunes10 – Guys if it works let it alone…Cheers!
—–Begin post—–
This is from Mac OS X Hints:
iTunes 10 provides a different layout for the Close, Minimize and Maximize
buttons. Instead of being ordered horizontally, in iTunes 10 they’re
arranged vertically, like a traffic light.
Reverting the buttons to a horizontal layout can easily be done. With
iTunes not running, open Terminal and enter the following code:
defaults write com.apple.iTunes full-window -1
To restore the vertical layout, simply use this command:
defaults write com.apple.iTunes full-window -0
–
