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	TSR : Web boards : Other Topics : "Hackers retaliate" 1 2 Hackers retaliate (19) This post is on the Other Topics web board. Fri 20 Jan 12, 1:10 PM Glinda UK, 2 yrs Has anyone else been following the news about the Megaupload website being shut down by the US? http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16646023 It should be interesting to see what kind of knock-on effect this will have. 20 Jan 12, 1:52 PM slave_emma US(OK), 6 yrs Y! I've never heard of it until now, but I am going to say hacking government websites and copyright organizations is not the best way to get people on your side. Hacking anything tends to really upset people, especially when you consider that government agencies have access to someone's personal information, tax records, and etc. For the life of me, I cannot understand why someone would want to download music, a movie, or other copyrighted material and feel they shouldn't have to pay for it. When I pay to watch a movie, download a song I like, or read a book it is no different than me paying the tab at a restaurant. I am paying for services which I used. If I cannot afford a certain service then I do not use it. Best wishes, slave emma Master Howard's little girl 20 Jan 12, 11:29 PM Pet_Girl US, 14 mths First of all, the media is getting it wrong, Anonymous didn't "hack" those websites, they did something called a DDOS which is basically flooding the sites with large data packets and requests in such a way that the site simply can't handle the volume and it temporarily collapses on itself. There were some minor websites hacked by people claiming to be in Anonymous but as it's not a structured entity, there's bound to be a few rouge agents that go further than what the group as a whole has set out to do. Secondly, this has been a while in coming. People have been protesting SOPA and PIPA online ever since they were proposed. On Wednesday the 18th there was a mass blackout by many sites in protest of the bills, this protest caused a mass of people to sign petitions, write emails, call, and visit their representatives in opposition of those bills. The day following those peaceful protests, the government arrests (in almost a comical way) 7 high ranking members of Megaupload. The media is casting a shadow on Megaupload as being an "illegal file-sharing site" however, this isn't what it is, it's a file-sharing site. Megaupload is like a paid Youtube because you can upload videos and things, but you don't have to share them anywhere, they can just be for storage as well. The Megaupload team has been doing a lot to keep up with proper copyright laws, but, the sheer volume means that they are overwhelmed and can't catch all of the stuff that's under copyright that their users upload. When the government arrested those higher-ups, they also froze assets, and took control of the domains of megaupload, that last move did something inherently unlawful by seizing the property of those who were using the site legitimately. Those who uploaded personal videos no longer have access to their property. Anonymous, in response to this timed slap in the face (yes, it was absolutely timed because it was brought before a grand jury and once indited you can execute that at any time), waged a NON-INVASIVE attack on many sites of the backers of SOPA and PIPA. Maybe it wasn't the best approach, but sometimes, when the peaceful hasn't worked, you need a more direct approach, otherwise, Americans would be British and all of Europe would speak German (at the very least, or hell, we'd all probably be Egyptian or something like that). The bottom line is, SOPA, the bill that proposed if I posted a video of myself and I held a Pepsi, had on a college shirt, and there was music playing in the background, that my website would be shut down and I'd be at least fined and maybe jailed, has been pulled from Congress. While the anarchist in me personally enjoyed the means, it doesn't matter, because the end justified the means, in my opinion. 20 Jan 12, 11:40 PM 333-528-841 CA, 3 yrs Pet_Girl wrote: First of all, the media is getting it wrong, Anonymous didn't "hack" those websites, they did something called a DDOS which is basically flooding the sites with large data packets and requests in such a way that the site simply can't handle the volume and it temporarily collapses on itself. There were some minor websites hacked by people claiming to be in Anonymous but as it's not a structured entity, there's bound to be a few rouge agents that go further than what the group as a whole has set out to do. Secondly, this has been a while in coming. People have been protesting SOPA and PIPA online ever since they were proposed. On Wednesday the 18th there was a mass blackout by many sites in protest of the bills, this protest caused a mass of people to sign petitions, write emails, call, and visit their representatives in opposition of those bills. The day following those peaceful protests, the government arrests (in almost a comical way) 7 high ranking members of Megaupload. The media is casting a shadow on Megaupload as being an "illegal file-sharing site" however, this isn't what it is, it's a file-sharing site. Megaupload is like a paid Youtube because you can upload videos and things, but you don't have to share them anywhere, they can just be for storage as well. The Megaupload team has been doing a lot to keep up with proper copyright laws, but, the sheer volume means that they are overwhelmed and can't catch all of the stuff that's under copyright that their users upload. When the government arrested those higher-ups, they also froze assets, and took control of the domains of megaupload, that last move did something inherently unlawful by seizing the property of those who were using the site legitimately. Those who uploaded personal videos no longer have access to their property. Anonymous, in response to this timed slap in the face (yes, it was absolutely timed because it was brought before a grand jury and once indited you can execute that at any time), waged a NON-INVASIVE attack on many sites of the backers of SOPA and PIPA. Maybe it wasn't the best approach, but sometimes, when the peaceful hasn't worked, you need a more direct approach, otherwise, Americans would be British and all of Europe would speak German (at the very least, or hell, we'd all probably be Egyptian or something like that). The bottom line is, SOPA, the bill that proposed if I posted a video of myself and I held a Pepsi, had on a college shirt, and there was music playing in the background, that my website would be shut down and I'd be at least fined and maybe jailed, has been pulled from Congress. While the anarchist in me personally enjoyed the means, it doesn't matter, because the end justified the means, in my opinion. The PIPA bill looks like it will head the same way as the SOPA bill. Since the blackouts on Wed., a co-founder of this bill has asked to have his name taken off it and has pulled his support. The timing of the Megaupload arrest may too come to bite the government in the ass once they go forward with the case. Edited to add: This is being watched and discussed around the world as the consequences would be much more far reaching than just in the U.S.A. Disclaimer: My thoughts and writing style may differ from yours. I take no responsibility for your perception. Read at your own risk. 333-528-841 Life shouldn't be measured by the breaths you take; but by the moments that take your breath away - unknown Edited 20 Jan 12, 11:42 PM by 333-528-841 20 Jan 12, 11:51 PM Pet_Girl US, 14 mths 333-528-841 wrote: The PIPA bill looks like it will head the same way as the SOPA bill. Since the blackouts on Wed., a co-founder of this bill has asked to have his name taken off it and has pulled his support. The timing of the Megaupload arrest may too come to bite the government in the ass once they go forward with the case. Edited to add: This is being watched and discussed around the world as the consequences would be much more far reaching than just in the U.S.A. Very much agreed, though, like you said, support for PIPA has waned significantly as well, not just the original writer. I suspect, as you said the timing will bite them, it will (hopefully) especially bite some of them come election time. And I was commenting to my boy today that not only should the American government take notice, that other governments should take notice because if the peoples of one of the free-est nations in the world will take a stand when their freedoms are threatened, then which oppressed group of people will follow suit? If these FREE people will fight back, why not them? A government FOR the people can be established if the people stand up and demand it. 21 Jan 12, 2:33 AM slave_emma US(OK), 6 yrs Y! The Megaupload employees had an indictment on January 5th for violation of existing copyright laws. This was before the internet blackout day was even announced. (The blackout was announced on January 16.) The indictment came because copyright holders lost an estimated $500 million dollars from movies, music, and other material that had been pirated. The reason the US was able to get involved was because the company was leasing servers in Virginia. This held the company accountable for US law. I do not think living in a free country means being able to take someone else's hard work and use it for free. Using pirated material is stealing and these people were using pirated material for monetary gain. Considering the founder made $42 million last year, I think it is safe to say they have the money to pay a few people to make sure pirated material isn't uploaded. However they chose not to do that and there is consequences for that. Considering SOPA and PIPA are pretty much dead bills and are highly unlikely to pass. The peaceful protest seemed to have helped. Hacking government websites and other sites is not going to help anything, except making people angry at the hackers. The fact is a similar bill to SOPA or PIPA will probably pop up again. Hopefully, when it does it will be worded better. There has to be some sort of reasonable action the government can take to stop pirated material from being disturbed. Figuring out what that reasonable action is has yet to be stated by either side in this. Regardless of what solution, they come up with. It is not going to make everyone happy. The approval rating for Congress is something like 11% and not all the Congressional seats are up for grabs this year. A thing like this is why it is important not only to vote in the presidential election, but also for our Congressmen and Senators. The Congress and Senate could overrule the president if they have enough votes. http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/story/2012-01-... Best wishes, slave emma Master Howard's little girl 21 Jan 12, 5:04 AM Pet_Girl US, 14 mths The indictment happened earlier, yes, but with an indictment you have time to coordinate arrests and things like that, that coordination could have, and did happen earlier than the 19th. But people knew (the government had to know, they're just omnipresent like that) something big was coming and they knew that a planned protest would happen long before the 16th when it was officially announced. Many who were in on the ground floor of the protests and speaking out, myself included, knew that there would be another protest right after the first one in November and it wouldn't have been too hard to predict that it would be soon before they were set to vote on them. Again, Anonymous did NOT hack those sites. As the article that @Slave_Emma cited says, they used a DDoS attack which is basically sending a shit ton of requests and data to each website. We've all seen the "I'm sorry this page could not load" banners at one time or another (or the twitter "fail whale" for you twittsters out there) which says to reload it in a minute because there's too many people trying to do the same thing at the same time for the site to handle it. That on a massive scale is all that was. It didn't give away national secrets, or leave our troops open for attack, or anything else, it just made the websites go down for a while. As far as the Megaupload site, how it works is you pay for a premium membership, meaning you can upload whatever you like to the site. They, of course, do monitoring and when copyrighted material is reported, they would take it down. That, of course, depends on the reporting system and on the honesty of the people who signed the terms of service that said "anything I upload is mine." No site is going to be 100% on getting that stuff, if they were, the internet wouldn't exist. The $500 million figure that they came up with assumes that for everything pirated that's a legitimate lost sale, and for songs, they sure as hell don't base it on the iTunes sale of one song, they base it on if you'd bought the whole CD from a store. Now, I don't know about anyone else, but there are soooooo many movies and songs I'd have never seen or listened to if my friends hadn't invited me over to see them. So not every viewing of a pirated movie was really a lost sale. If we're going to do that, every time you've borrowed a book from a friend, or from the library, you have stolen royalties from the author, who is going after all those people? Arresting the owner of Megaupload for making money off of people using his site how he did NOT intend it to be used, would be like arresting Craing Newmark (owner of Craigslist) for murder because of the Craigslist Killer. I am absolutely not advocating piracy, what I am advocating is more honest reporting of numbers (Hollywood and the music biz, I'm looking at you!), holding the correct people responsible for their actions, and the free flowing of information. While SOPA and PIPA might be dead or dying, we do need to be vigilant so that our freedoms are not lost. I will not stand for being censored because I emailed a picture of myself with a Mickey Mouse (copyrighted) toy to my grandmother. I will not stand for being fined because I took a video and shared it with my boyfriend via the internet and it had a song playing in the background. The politicians need to be careful when protecting a nearly obsolete form of media (CDs and the ever-growing more obsolete DVDs) because it doesn't take into account the growth in the industry. (I'm not even going to go into how everyone says "think of the artist" when combating piracy when the artist really gets VERY LITTLE off of each sale and the record companies get most of it.) 21 Jan 12, 5:44 AM isolai AU, 16 mths Pet_Girl wrote: The indictment happened earlier, yes, but with an indictment you have time to coordinate arrests and things like that, that coordination could have, and did happen earlier than the 19th. But people knew (the government had to know, they're just omnipresent like that) something big was coming and they knew that a planned protest would happen long before the 16th when it was officially announced. Many who were in on the ground floor of the protests and speaking out, myself included, knew that there would be another protest right after the first one in November and it wouldn't have been too hard to predict that it would be soon before they were set to vote on them. Again, Anonymous did NOT hack those sites. As the article that @Slave_Emma cited says, they used a DDoS attack which is basically sending a shit ton of requests and data to each website. We've all seen the "I'm sorry this page could not load" banners at one time or another (or the twitter "fail whale" for you twittsters out there) which says to reload it in a minute because there's too many people trying to do the same thing at the same time for the site to handle it. That on a massive scale is all that was. It didn't give away national secrets, or leave our troops open for attack, or anything else, it just made the websites go down for a while. As far as the Megaupload site, how it works is you pay for a premium membership, meaning you can upload whatever you like to the site. They, of course, do monitoring and when copyrighted material is reported, they would take it down. That, of course, depends on the reporting system and on the honesty of the people who signed the terms of service that said "anything I upload is mine." No site is going to be 100% on getting that stuff, if they were, the internet wouldn't exist. The $500 million figure that they came up with assumes that for everything pirated that's a legitimate lost sale, and for songs, they sure as hell don't base it on the iTunes sale of one song, they base it on if you'd bought the whole CD from a store. Now, I don't know about anyone else, but there are soooooo many movies and songs I'd have never seen or listened to if my friends hadn't invited me over to see them. So not every viewing of a pirated movie was really a lost sale. If we're going to do that, every time you've borrowed a book from a friend, or from the library, you have stolen royalties from the author, who is going after all those people? Arresting the owner of Megaupload for making money off of people using his site how he did NOT intend it to be used, would be like arresting Craing Newmark (owner of Craigslist) for murder because of the Craigslist Killer. I am absolutely not advocating piracy, what I am advocating is more honest reporting of numbers (Hollywood and the music biz, I'm looking at you!), holding the correct people responsible for their actions, and the free flowing of information. While SOPA and PIPA might be dead or dying, we do need to be vigilant so that our freedoms are not lost. I will not stand for being censored because I emailed a picture of myself with a Mickey Mouse (copyrighted) toy to my grandmother. I will not stand for being fined because I took a video and shared it with my boyfriend via the internet and it had a song playing in the background. The politicians need to be careful when protecting a nearly obsolete form of media (CDs and the ever-growing more obsolete DVDs) because it doesn't take into account the growth in the industry. (I'm not even going to go into how everyone says "think of the artist" when combating piracy when the artist really gets VERY LITTLE off of each sale and the record companies get most of it.) *applauds Pet Girl* I think you and i have similar views on this sort of subject, thankyou for posting. 21 Jan 12, 6:52 AM 333-528-841 CA, 3 yrs slave_emma wrote: The Megaupload employees had an indictment on January 5th for violation of existing copyright laws. This was before the internet blackout day was even announced. (The blackout was announced on January 16.) The indictment came because copyright holders lost an estimated $500 million dollars from movies, music, and other material that had been pirated. The reason the US was able to get involved was because the company was leasing servers in Virginia. This held the company accountable for US law. I do not think living in a free country means being able to take someone else's hard work and use it for free. Using pirated material is stealing and these people were using pirated material for monetary gain. Considering the founder made $42 million last year, I think it is safe to say they have the money to pay a few people to make sure pirated material isn't uploaded. However they chose not to do that and there is consequences for that. Considering SOPA and PIPA are pretty much dead bills and are highly unlikely to pass. The peaceful protest seemed to have helped. Hacking government websites and other sites is not going to help anything, except making people angry at the hackers. The fact is a similar bill to SOPA or PIPA will probably pop up again. Hopefully, when it does it will be worded better. There has to be some sort of reasonable action the government can take to stop pirated material from being disturbed. Figuring out what that reasonable action is has yet to be stated by either side in this. Regardless of what solution, they come up with. It is not going to make everyone happy. The approval rating for Congress is something like 11% and not all the Congressional seats are up for grabs this year. A thing like this is why it is important not only to vote in the presidential election, but also for our Congressmen and Senators. The Congress and Senate could overrule the president if they have enough votes. http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/story/2012-01-... Best wishes, slave emma I don't believe it is right to pirate anything or violate copyright laws either but the bills as they stand are very vague. As for the indictment, I guess it will be decided in a court of law whether these people were using pirated material for monetary gain, as a grand jury indictment does not prove guilt, by my understanding. I do agree with those, including senators and congressmen/women, who have stated that these bills as they stand, could lead to some frivolous suits. Why try to rush it through without doing the proper background work? Considering these bills would affect not just Americans but those in other countries as well, I would hope they do the due diligence necessary to present well thought out bills that do what they are supposed to as well as prevent misuse or misunderstandings on what the law is for. Have a great evening. Disclaimer: My thoughts and writing style may differ from yours. I take no responsibility for your perception. Read at your own risk. 333-528-841 Life shouldn't be measured by the breaths you take; but by the moments that take your breath away - unknown 21 Jan 12, 9:02 AM SeanT70 9 yrs isolai wrote: Pet_Girl wrote: The indictment happened earlier, yes, but with an indictment you have time to coordinate arrests and things like that, that coordination could have, and did happen earlier than the 19th. But people knew (the government had to know, they're just omnipresent like that) something big was coming and they knew that a planned protest would happen long before the 16th when it was officially announced. Many who were in on the ground floor of the protests and speaking out, myself included, knew that there would be another protest right after the first one in November and it wouldn't have been too hard to predict that it would be soon before they were set to vote on them. Again, Anonymous did NOT hack those sites. As the article that @Slave_Emma cited says, they used a DDoS attack which is basically sending a shit ton of requests and data to each website. We've all seen the "I'm sorry this page could not load" banners at one time or another (or the twitter "fail whale" for you twittsters out there) which says to reload it in a minute because there's too many people trying to do the same thing at the same time for the site to handle it. That on a massive scale is all that was. It didn't give away national secrets, or leave our troops open for attack, or anything else, it just made the websites go down for a while. As far as the Megaupload site, how it works is you pay for a premium membership, meaning you can upload whatever you like to the site. They, of course, do monitoring and when copyrighted material is reported, they would take it down. That, of course, depends on the reporting system and on the honesty of the people who signed the terms of service that said "anything I upload is mine." No site is going to be 100% on getting that stuff, if they were, the internet wouldn't exist. The $500 million figure that they came up with assumes that for everything pirated that's a legitimate lost sale, and for songs, they sure as hell don't base it on the iTunes sale of one song, they base it on if you'd bought the whole CD from a store. Now, I don't know about anyone else, but there are soooooo many movies and songs I'd have never seen or listened to if my friends hadn't invited me over to see them. So not every viewing of a pirated movie was really a lost sale. If we're going to do that, every time you've borrowed a book from a friend, or from the library, you have stolen royalties from the author, who is going after all those people? Arresting the owner of Megaupload for making money off of people using his site how he did NOT intend it to be used, would be like arresting Craing Newmark (owner of Craigslist) for murder because of the Craigslist Killer. I am absolutely not advocating piracy, what I am advocating is more honest reporting of numbers (Hollywood and the music biz, I'm looking at you!), holding the correct people responsible for their actions, and the free flowing of information. While SOPA and PIPA might be dead or dying, we do need to be vigilant so that our freedoms are not lost. I will not stand for being censored because I emailed a picture of myself with a Mickey Mouse (copyrighted) toy to my grandmother. I will not stand for being fined because I took a video and shared it with my boyfriend via the internet and it had a song playing in the background. The politicians need to be careful when protecting a nearly obsolete form of media (CDs and the ever-growing more obsolete DVDs) because it doesn't take into account the growth in the industry. (I'm not even going to go into how everyone says "think of the artist" when combating piracy when the artist really gets VERY LITTLE off of each sale and the record companies get most of it.) *applauds Pet Girl* I think you and i have similar views on this sort of subject, thankyou for posting. I'll second that. Great post pet_girl. A lot of artists, especially minor ones, live very much on a double-edged sword with piracy. I've seen friends of mine suffer with this quite a lot. They make very little money from legitmate sales and have to hope that someone buys their material to get it heard. Or. Someone pirates the material, it gets a wider audience, they become more famous, but makes less money. They hardly ever win until a big break comes. And the big breaks don't come without a fat-cat eating all the profits. Oh wait, no royalties there either. One guy I know of even went to the lengths of giving away free CDs to prevent piracy, get his stuff heard all in the knowledge he'd make nothing from it in the process. He actually made it though, and is doing fairly well. And you're right pet, the politicians really do need to be careful when making such considerations, even more so with technology advancing as it does, rather than older forms becoming obsolete. As an example, we're being currently offered 100Mb Broadband in our area; that would mean less than half a second to download a song from iTunes (3.5-5secs for an Album). Piracy stands every chance to become (even more) rife, but, freedom for legitimate use surely has to be upheld, but quite obviously, right now, the definition of legimiate use seems to be cloudy, especially if you stand to be prosecuted for the things you discussed. Ridiculous. Regards, Sean. 21 Jan 12, 10:43 AM slave_emma US(OK), 6 yrs Y! 333-528-841 wrote: I don't believe it is right to pirate anything or violate copyright laws either but the bills as they stand are very vague. As for the indictment, I guess it will be decided in a court of law whether these people were using pirated material for monetary gain, as a grand jury indictment does not prove guilt, by my understanding. I do agree with those, including senators and congressmen/women, who have stated that these bills as they stand, could lead to some frivolous suits. Why try to rush it through without doing the proper background work? Considering these bills would affect not just Americans but those in other countries as well, I would hope they do the due diligence necessary to present well thought out bills that do what they are supposed to as well as prevent misuse or misunderstandings on what the law is for. Have a great evening. They've supposedly scrapped the bill indefinitely; however, I doubt it is truly going to be indefinitely. I think this will come up again, if not this year then sometime down the road. It was the lobbyists for the movie and music organizations that pushed for stricter legislation. I think eventually, there will so some sort of happy medium compromise but I don't see that happening anytime soon. I think there needs to be a distinction between uploading a picture with a company logo or with a song in the background for personal use and uploading content for non-personal use(which would include sharing with strangers ) or monetary gain. Pet_Girl wrote: Again, Anonymous did NOT hack those sites. As the article that @Slave_Emma cited says, they used a DDoS attack which is basically sending a shit ton of requests and data to each website. We've all seen the "I'm sorry this page could not load" banners at one time or another (or the twitter "fail whale" for you twittsters out there) which says to reload it in a minute because there's too many people trying to do the same thing at the same time for the site to handle it. That on a massive scale is all that was. It didn't give away national secrets, or leave our troops open for attack, or anything else, it just made the websites go down for a while. As far as the Megaupload site, how it works is you pay for a premium membership, meaning you can upload whatever you like to the site. They, of course, do monitoring and when copyrighted material is reported, they would take it down. That, of course, depends on the reporting system and on the honesty of the people who signed the terms of service that said "anything I upload is mine." No site is going to be 100% on getting that stuff, if they were, the internet wouldn't exist. The $500 million figure that they came up with assumes that for everything pirated that's a legitimate lost sale, and for songs, they sure as hell don't base it on the iTunes sale of one song, they base it on if you'd bought the whole CD from a store. Now, I don't know about anyone else, but there are soooooo many movies and songs I'd have never seen or listened to if my friends hadn't invited me over to see them. So not every viewing of a pirated movie was really a lost sale. If we're going to do that, every time you've borrowed a book from a friend, or from the library, you have stolen royalties from the author, who is going after all those people? Arresting the owner of Megaupload for making money off of people using his site how he did NOT intend it to be used, would be like arresting Craing Newmark (owner of Craigslist) for murder because of the Craigslist Killer. I am absolutely not advocating piracy, what I am advocating is more honest reporting of numbers (Hollywood and the music biz, I'm looking at you!), holding the correct people responsible for their actions, and the free flowing of information. While SOPA and PIPA might be dead or dying, we do need to be vigilant so that our freedoms are not lost. I will not stand for being censored because I emailed a picture of myself with a Mickey Mouse (copyrighted) toy to my grandmother. I will not stand for being fined because I took a video and shared it with my boyfriend via the internet and it had a song playing in the background. The politicians need to be careful when protecting a nearly obsolete form of media (CDs and the ever-growing more obsolete DVDs) because it doesn't take into account the growth in the industry. (I'm not even going to go into how everyone says "think of the artist" when combating piracy when the artist really gets VERY LITTLE off of each sale and the record companies get most of it.) You can share the original movie, book, or whatever else you purchased with whomever as long as it is in its original form. It is the copying of that work without permission or paying for it that copyright holders are upset about. If you buy a DVD and give it to your friend to watch that is not the same as uploading the movie to a file sharing website to share with random people you may or may not know on the internet. The reason why it is not the same is because a copy was made of the movie without permission and that is piracy. It is also stealing which is wrong. Interesting story that is relevant to this, when I was in junior high and high school in choir we always sang a pop song during the spring concert. We always had to decide on the song early in the school year so the music teacher could write a letter to the copyright holder asking permission to use their song. We would also sign the letter. There was never an instance where the copyright holder ever said we couldn't sing their song. The most anyone ever wanted was a copy of the tape singing it. I don't know where we went as a society from simply asking permission to use someone else's copyrighted material to feeling entitled to use someone else's copyrighted material without asking. Best wishes, slave emma Master Howard's little girl Next page