It’s just a pity that taking down the FBI website temporarily is only slightly more effective in foiling their plans than it would be to rip down the FBI bulletin from the classroom noticeboard.
Obligatory XKCD
I don’t know what to make of Anonymous - I’m wondering if I should feel bad that I feel that taking down all those websites is kind of cool? It’s a fascinating world we live in, anyways.
Similarly, DOJ’s website is primarily a tool for communicating with the public, and it plays little to no role in its law-enforcement functions.
Note to copyright holders. These actions made you look bad and paranoid and frankly, embrace streaming. You are missing out on very very large potential revenues.
Oh yes, thank you, I’d forgotten where I borrowed that metaphor from.
I never would have ought any of the stuff I pirated (many years ago, I assure you!), so the revenue lost to my piracy is Zero. I suspect many, maybe most, others would say exactly the same.
Are they missing out? Perhaps there’s a way they could make money off this than by the way they’re currently operating, but I’m seeing it.
You might say that they could sell it online. But then, the media could be redistributed for free. And you can’t outbid free.
So, what other services like megaupload might yet be taken down?
Rapidshare and Filetube are the two other big ones, I think (even if the latter is the most annoying site to use), possibly Fileplanet also, if it still exists.
I’m also not convinced they’re not going to step up and try and do a “once and for all” takedown of Piratebay, Isohunt, even Frostwire if this lawsuit goes through to a success.
Okay, maybe this makes more sense in context but:
… wut? So, you’re making a filesharing site and it’s bad to… optimize it for the types of files people are most likely to be sharing? Okay, most pirated content is probably:
- Executables
- Video Files
- Audio Files
- RAR/ZIP files
Not necessarily in that order. I mean, seriously, what do they want it to be optimized for? Microsoft Word documents? Most other file types are small enough that they can be sent over email, and most can even be on Google Docs if you want it public. Plenty of small bands would share their stuff on Megaupload, hell, my friends and I made a small video game and THAT was hosted on Megaupload. The entire point is to host big files so you don’t have to set up your own FTP server.
Now, maybe the emails explicitly said “look, most people are gonna pirate on our site, we should really account for that and cater to it.” But if that’s the case the article really needed to word it better.
What no due process? No charges, trial or anything before pulling the plug on the owner’s livelihood?
I’ve used this site before and got some legit shareware. It was by no means exclusively a pirate site.
Well, I, for one, haven’t pirated music or computer games in absolute yonks, because iTunes and Steam are just too gosh darned convenient and (mostly) reasonably priced. I’ll happily do the same with movies, books, whatever. The main thing to me is to be able to download a product in the middle of the night, on my computer, without leaving the house. Price is totally secondary.
You’re right. I wonder why it’s worked so well for music and video games but not movies and tv shows.
I bet the first such Itunes/Steam-like service that does TV/movies to really take off will sell porn. Just like VCRs, Internet and Blu-ray.
That can only be a good thing, as far as I’m concerned. Not because I’d be buying porn, but because I want there to be legitimate alternatives to Paypal with less prudish ToS.
It works for those that are available on Netflix. The problem is the lack of content–people have to pirate to get the stuff they want to watch. I know several people that say they only have an ethical problem with downloading illegally IF IT’S AVAILABLE FOR STREAMING ELSEWHERE. For example, even though the ads frustrate her, my sister will go to Hulu to watch a show if it’s available. It just often isn’t.
I think the easiest way to take advantage of it would be to let people make the copies, and then create a paid system where you can share it. But that would likely require a complete overhaul of the rights system so that you didn’t have to go to 500 different people to get the ability to stream it. But the work would be small, and thus you could make pretty decent profits selling things at the cost people want to pay.
Because that’s the other problem: people today often feel that traditional entertainment is overpriced. The Internet is competing with the big companies. The biggest Internet shows make their money solely through advertising–even when half of their audience uses adblock. People in general don’t like to feel like they are cheating the content creators out of money, and are willing to pay for that peace of mind. But only so much, and only if it’s convenient for them. DVDs and Blu-rays are usually overpriced and are not as convenient as just using your computer.
And it’s the simple truth. These huge estimates for “lost revenue” are based on the lie (among other lies) that people who download have infinite amounts of money; some guy who downloads “millions of dollars” worth of music or software isn’t likely to have millions of dollars to buy it legally even if he wanted to and it was available.
The real problem is there are still tons of sites. Russia is #1 and China is #2 for hosting downloads. Wanna guess #3? Iran. It’s especially easy if you use Google Chrome because it will translate the site very well.
Good luck going after those three.
As for the DoJ, I am upset about the take down as it shows how easy it is to do. This is absolutely unacceptable that a group of people can take down a site for even a minute. If a bunch of hackers can do it, what about Iran? Or China? What if we had a war? I mean a major one.
I hope the DoJ uses this as a lesson to tighten up their sites. They should be hiring these hackers to improve security.
I don’t approve of piracy but the world is changing you can’t just legislate things like perpetual copyright and try to sue everyone downloading into oblivion.
Look at iTunes. When you price songs low enough at 99¢ people will pay for them. It’s just that your crappy songs are no longer worth what they were. Get over it. It’s like if the horse and buggy people sued the train people, who sue the car people when the modes of transport changed.
As for the lost 500 million, it probably never existed. They see a number of downloads and assume people downloading would buy the material. They wouldn’t most likely. But maybe if they priced the material low enough, in the iTunes mode, they would.
The world is changing, the days of making one song and living on it forever are over
Anyone who controls a botnet (a group of computers that they’ve overtaken part of with a virus) can DDoS any site in the world. I’m sure there are *many *people who operate botnets and read 4chan. The only solution is perfect security by the masses, and that’s never going to happen. Lots of times when someone who isn’t computer-savvy has issues with slow internet/slow computer, it’s because they have a silent computer virus and are part of a botnet without even realizing it.
And tracking this shit is really hard, too, because thousands or millions of computers that belong to innocent users can be used in a botnet without the computer user being aware of it–all they know is their computer runs a lot slower than it did when they bought it 3 years ago. Just because a certain IP address pings the DoJ website a thousand times in 15 seconds doesn’t mean the person who owns that computer is actively causing it, you know? These attacks aren’t just the work of script kiddies pinging the DoJ over and over from their own computers (although I’m sure there are some who are doing that, too). But a whole hell of a lot of DDoS traffic comes from computers whose owners are none the wiser.
There are ways to mitigate a DDoS once it has begun, but nobody can prevent them from happening altogether. Not on a freely-accessible, google-searchable website.
It seems to me that DDoS attacks are sufficiently different from legitimate access that heuristic methods ought to be possible. Rather than the webmaster having to work quickly, the site should be able to detect that it is under DDoS and automatically utilize the settings that help fix it, while notifying the webmaster so he’ll know to watch it. But waiting on a live human being is never going to be a viable strategy for a machine based attack.
BTW, the tool that Anonymous claims to use, LOIC, supposedly requires consent to use. The point being that it’s not required that the user be unaware. If I had to guess, I’d bet that anyone active in Anonymous, especially if they don’t have much computer skill, has LOIC installed with takeover mode enabled. Now the people with botnets of their own probably use other techniques, maybe even using a security hole to install LOIC on other computers.
I also wish to point out that not every site can be taken down–Amazon and Paypal both survived an Anonymous attack, the former because supposedly not enough people were involved, and the latter at least had intermittent problems. IT seems that one defense is to just be big.
Of course, President Romney would have sent Predator drones to New Zealand. Better than allowing international terrorists a trial in the US.
But more seriously, doesn’t the FBI have real bad guys they can go after?
It’s my understanding that Amazon has huge overcapacity (to deal with the seasonal Christmas upsurge in traffic); so much that DDOS attacks have so far failed to overload it.