Uh OH...
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/11/technology/11CND-PIRACY.html"; target="_blank">http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/11/technology/11CND-PIRACY.html</a>;
Carracho geeks and people with sticky fingers beware. One question I have: can your IP be tracked down by the Carracho server administrator (whichever one you happen to be downloading from)?
Are there Do's and Dont's as far as the protocols and making yourself anonymous? Obviously no real info in your profile, etc...but should you use Carracho from a computer other than your own, for example?
Carracho geeks and people with sticky fingers beware. One question I have: can your IP be tracked down by the Carracho server administrator (whichever one you happen to be downloading from)?
Are there Do's and Dont's as far as the protocols and making yourself anonymous? Obviously no real info in your profile, etc...but should you use Carracho from a computer other than your own, for example?
Comments
I liked Scour too. It's dead.
As for anonyimity, I have no idea. Not computer literate enough.
<strong>Could someone post the article (or relevant parts) here. NY Times requires registration and I'm tired of spam email. TIA.</strong><hr></blockquote>
I've been registered with NYT online paper for years. They have never bothered me.
And the free registration is great! You have to read the news fairly wuickly though. They charge you for articles more than a few days old.
By DAVID STOUT
ASHINGTON, Dec. 11 ? Federal agents carried out dozens of raids today against a far-flung network suspected of pirating billions of dollars worth of computer software ? ranging from operating systems to the latest music videos and movies ? over the Internet.
Agents seized computers and hard drives in at least 27 cities in 21 states in raids on businesses, university computer centers, Internet service providers and many residences. Foreign law enforcement people staged about 20 similar raids in Australia, Britain, Finland and Norway.
Treasury and Commerce department officials said more raids will be conducted in the weeks ahead. No arrests were made in the United States, partly because today's operations were aimed at gathering evidence. Some of the people implicated, aware that they could face charges of conspiracy or theft of intellectual property, are already cooperating with the authorities, department officials said.
The operation that culminated in today's raids, after a 15-month inquiry, is part of "the largest and most extensive investigation of its kind," Customs Commissioner Robert C. Bonner said.
The kind of goods stolen has included costly business programs, computer-security software, copyrighted games, music and digital videos ? "everything from the movie `Harry Potter' to the Windows operating systems," in the words of John C. Varrone, assistant commissioner in the Customs Service's Office of Investigations.
"This is a new frontier for crime," Kenneth W. Dam, deputy secretary of the Treasury, said at a news briefing. "The costs are enormous to both industry and consumers."
Philip Bond, the Commerce Department's under secretary for technological policy, said cyber-pirates steal an estimated $12 billion worth of technology and goods a year, according to the Business Software Alliance. American leadership in computers and software is "very much at stake" because of piracy, he said.
Officials said pirates of the ilk who were the targets of today's operation are not teen-age hackers but rather highly skilled computer professionals motivated more by challenge than greed.
"The money is made farther down the food chain," Mr. Varrone said. The pirated software soon reaches distributors who find a ready market, the officials said.
Officials said offenders could face up to three years in prison, upon conviction, and depending on their willingness to cooperate. By midday, the authorities said, more than 60 people in the United States had been identified as being involved in the pirating operation. Several suspects have already been charged overseas.
The target of the raids was the "Warez" group, a loosely affiliated network of software-piracy gangs that duplicate and reproduce copyrighted software over the Internet. Of special interest today was a Warez unit known as "DrinkOrDie," probably the oldest and best known in the Warez network, officials said, adding that DrinkOrDie members take special pride in having cracked and pirated the Windows 95 operating system three days before its release to the public.
Members of Warez includes corporate executives, computer-network administrators and students at major universities, government workers and employees of technology and computer firms, the Customs Service said today. The agency said the piracy ring is aided by insiders in stealing the software and that the ring relies on elaborate computer-security devices to minimize risk of detection.
Raids were carried out today at the University of California at Los Angeles, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Purdue University, Duke University and the University of Oregon, officials said. They said the universities themselves, like the various companies raided today, were not involved in the wrongdoing by their employees and were cooperating in the inquiry.
Cities where raids were staged included New York, Washington, Houston, Indianapolis, San Francisco, Boston, Philadelphia, Miami, Atlanta and Chicago, the government said.
Officials said some pirates have been remarkably brazen, some even boasting of their feats on their own Web sites. "They also view themselves as Robin Hood figures," the Customs agency said. "They seek an Internet devoid of rules or law."
This afternoon, government officials said they hope to change that perception. "This is not a sport, this is a crime," Mr. Bond said, adding that punishment could be "serious hard time" in prison.
I know several people over at Duke... I guess I'd better send some e-mails to make sure they're still there.
How foolish they truely are:
The person entering HAS TO AGREE to the terms in order to enter YOUR COMPUTER.
I know it sounds naive... but we have to press "Agree" every damn time we install something on our computers that bascially makes the software makers not responsible for anything that might happen.
<strong>The lowest levels of the IP protocol use the hardware MAC address,
</strong><hr></blockquote>
Nope, the MAC address is part of Ethernet, but completely unrelated to the IP protocol. In a LAN, Ethernet frames (which IP packets are "embedded" into) carry a source and destination MAC address, but this never leaves your local Ethernet. Once you cross a router / gateway, only the IP packet gets transmitted to the outside world, the "surrounding" Ethernet frame is discarded. including the MAC addresses.
[quote]<strong>which is UNIQUE to the ethernet interface card in your machine (including Airport cards).
</strong><hr></blockquote>
Actually, you'd probably have to say it *should be* unique. Each ethernet NIC manufacturer gets assigned a range of MAC adresses they can use, and for each manufactured card, they usually just pick a random number inside their assigned range. While this would not really guarantee unique numbers for each and every card, the huge range of numbers they pick from more or less ensures that duplicates are *very* rare occurances, and chances are even smaller that two such duplicates happen to be sold to the same people and used in the same LAN. Besides, most modern cards don't have their MAC hard-coded onto the card, but rather have it stored in some EEPROM, so users can change it (given the right tool). I think ifconfig under Linux can do this.
[quote]<strong>
It [b]can[\\b] be traced even if the physical location changes unless you have a router in between that completely strips all IP layer info and reconstructs a new outbound packet.
</strong><hr></blockquote>
As stated above, the MAC is not part of an IP packet, but only contained in Ethernet frames *alongside* the IP packet. It is only used inside LANs, and gets stripped once you leave your local subnet (at any router or gateway, e.g.).
[quote]<strong>But then it is a sitting duck to be exploited and have it's incoming traffic monitored. It is a lot more difficult to mask or spoof the final MAC addresses than IP addresses.
</strong><hr></blockquote>
While this is true, it is only relevant as long as the guys tracking you share the same ethernet segment with you.
[quote]<strong>How do you think they track hackers working over phreaked cell phone connections? Find the MAC address and work it backwards until you have localized the phone number, then determine which tower is currently servicing that number, then scan for the location of the phone itself.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Nope, back-tracing phone calls works by querying the relay stations in between. A Modem doesn't even have a MAC address.
[quote]<strong>None of this is hard if you have pissed the wrong folks off and find yourself on the wrong end of a court order. As software is much more expensive than music and fewer folks run Carracho than did Napster, it's only a matter of time before the knock comes on the door.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Unless you run a real big warez server, I kinda doubt it would be worth the effort. This whole back-tracing thing costs tons of time and money.
Bye,
RazzFazz