4chan launches DDoS against entertainment industry The denizens of 4chan launched a series of distributed denial of service attacks against entertainment industry websites over the weekend, protesting legal actions against torrent tracker website the Pirate Bay. Packet floods knocked websites maintained by the MPAA and RIAA intermittently offline over the weekend. Later …
Aiplex was hired by supposedly law abiding respectable entertainment companies to perform DDoS attacks against tracker sites. This is an illegal activity in most jurisdictions. If such entertainment companies want to stop tracker sites then they *have* to pursue them through the proper legal channels. This protest very effectively highlighted the extremely dubious and hypocritical practices of some of these companies.
LOL, presumably you mean "law abiding respectable entertainment companies" like SONY that illegally installed rootkit software on peoples PC's that could be used by virus writers as well, just because somebody played a "protected CD" on their PC.
Once again the copyright mafia show that they feel they are above the law, a case of don't do as we do, do as we say.
If you read the article, you may notice that Aiplay started doing DDoS attacks against torrent sites. Even the Indian Government gave them their blessing, even when DDoS is pretty much an objectionable activity. So basically, this was a pretty clear message: "We can do it too, we do it better, and we outnumber you!". The RIAA/MPAA attacks may have been so that the MAFIAA dudes get the message as well.
It isn't quite the ethical answer, but it does prove the point that "DDoSing against piracy" is a stupid thing to do.
>>"It isn't quite the ethical answer, but it does prove the point that "DDoSing against piracy" is a stupid thing to do."
That rather depends what your aims are.
If you want to provoke some people to take revenge, including 'retaliation' against people not involved with the original DDOSing, which those people can then use to their advantage 9and possibly yours), it's not that stupid a thing to do.
Was the original DDOS conceivably likely to make people stop running torrent sites?
If not, was it hopelessly naive, or was it possibly calculated to cause a reaction?
As for the 'they did it first' defence, that's hardly going to work for someone not a target of the original attacks.
If a teenager goes and punches someone because he thinks they're friends with someone whose mate slapped one of his internet buddies some time before, at best he's cold-bloodedly escalating stupidity, and isn't likely to get any sympathy.
It's a denial of service attack not some malicious server + format + must destroy hack. When the flood stops or at least subsides, and from what I gather it was fairly weak, then service resumes as normal, all be it a reboot may be necessary. Worst case scenario is that they get charged for the additional bandwidth the flood generated.
and will be wielding enough packets to actually compromise their target. However, the vast majority do not and will be using tools such as the Low Orbit Ion Cannon and BandWidth Raeper in order to realise their 14-year-old l33t h4xx0r aspirations. These kids will be the ones who get their IPs traced and will bear the consequences, despite not actually making a great contribution to the overall intensity of the attack.
Still, next week they'll be back to persecuting some idiot on Youtube...
As the article states, the Indian compay AIPlex was DDoSing sites like the Pirate Bay. They got a taste of their own medicine.
Mischievous 14-year-olds using very basic freeware (LOIC) for the lulz. Most probably using their neighbours' wireless networks.
Obviously, *I* would never engage nor condone such activity. But I don't mind watching. It is funny.
Taking down the MPAA / RIAA website has to be just symbolic - I very much doubt their function was impaired. People not able to access their site for like 48 hours. It was a success in that they got media coverage. Lots of coverage.
I wonder if AIPlex will continue their strategy of possibly illegal DDoS attacks, on torrent websites.
Thumbs up.
I myself can't decide whether this 4Chan action is a good thing or a bad thing. Nevertheless, they're letting some right bastards have it, so what the hell....
My own visitations to 4Chan have been (and always will be) somewhat stealthy.
Bit like a road traffic accident, actually. You know you shouldn't look, really, but somehow you just can't take your eyes off the carnage.
OK, so the movie studios use DDoS against the torrent sites.
If the torrent sites are vaguely legitimate then they can resort to legal action against the perpetrators. The more the RIAA et al are proven to be "the bad guys", the better, but that doesn't justify petty childish actions such as DDoS attacks against the industry.
>>"What actions are left to us in our protest against corporate government ?"
What are you trying to protest about?
What have you actually done so far?
What fraction of the population do you think agrees with you, or could be convinced to agree with you by your future actions, and what evidence do you base your assessment on?
There are all kinds of things that governments do that corporations like, but a corporation liking something doesn't /automatically/ make that thing bad.
Governments make theft illegal, but citizens don't see theft as being great in general.
Governments enforce trademarks, but citizens do like to have confidence that the soap they wash themselves in is actually going to get them clean and not leave them with chemical burns.
etc.
The industry is already doing those retarded attacks. The fact that a company is resorting to using the average script kiddie weapon of choice shows that it is a retarded idea, and deserves an equally retarded response. Hopefully the ISPs will actually find out that this is hurting their networks, and proceed to terminate the APIex's Internet connection. I'm actually amazed that they haven't done so, as I'm pretty sure that "DDoS" is pretty much against most ISP's ToS.
As somebody commented below this group seems to kick up a stink along the lines of "stop trying to stop us stealing your stuff!". The RIAA and MPAA are industry associations, if ultimately they don't represent the views of either the industry or their customers then it is up to these two groups of people to sanction these organisations.
Aiplex Software the firm generating Denial of service attacks from Indian should be banned from the internet, just as hopefully would happen to the 4chan members who get caught by law enforcement agencies.
ebaumsworld is notorious for stealing content, watermarking it and then issuing takedowns against the original creators.
4chan ABSOLUTELY LOATHES Eric Baum and his world, quite rightly. If Baum's taking the credit for this, expect to see ebaumsworld.com battered to pieces with DDoS.
It's a joke, silly. ..... well sort of. People decentralise; it's crucial that they do. Some activity may take place on eBaums. I was passing through one of the early Scientology protests, at Tottenham Court Road, around March 2008. There was a large eBaums contigent there.
They seem to exchange a lot of ideas & information at partyvan.info, too. Also, they hang out at Digg. See the comments section: http://digg.com/news/technology/4chan_users_organize_surgical_ddos_strike_against_mpaa
btw, it would appear 4chan mods are 404'ing DDoS related threads; they do not condone such activity. They def. wouldn't want "credit"!!!
[see for yourself: do a google search for 'mpaa' site:4chan.org and restrict the search to the last week. when you click on the threads, they are 404'd]
Also, I doubt a DDoS on ebaums as many of the users are the same! There's an overlap between E Dramatica, 4chan & Ebaums.
As an aside: don't ever, every do DDoS, ever. It's not worth it! *Especially* if you are over 14 years-old. You know, unless you actually want to go to jail and ruin your life. Just my 2 cents!
This probably includes visiting the website and pressing 'F5' more than once.
Episode: http://twit.tv/266
Panel: Leo Laporte, John C. Dvorak, Baratunde Thurston, Gina Trapani and Nick Bilton
IN this week's episode Leo reads out the URL: 'Partyvan.info' & then stresses that no-one should go there, ever. Then went there anyway, realised it was boring, not like 4chan's /b/. It's just a wiki with organisations/people that they have grievances with.
Don't get me started on Steve Gibson... That guy seems to think the concept of computer security revolves around his arse.
His bloody port scanner doesn't even work properly (it repeatedly told me my IMAP port was closed back when I was still trusting it), yet has the audacity to declare you are UNSAFE if even one port is open...
...some of these 4channers find themselves before the beak? The MAFIAA bending/breaking the law is "Ok" (they can afford to manipulate the democratic process; e.g. ACTA), but when citizens feel they have to take the law into their own hands due to abject failure of their governments, then that is just wrong and you can be sure that the MAFIAA will be pressing their case for prosecutions.
I do not agree with depriving content creators (i.e. "the talent") of their fair wage, but anyone who thinks that the RIAA, MPAA, BPI etc protect the content creators is a blithering idiot. Many creators get little more than a pittance from the studios who hide behind the MAFIAA, to the point where the content creator has to sue in order to be paid. What does the MAFIAA do about this abuse of the content creators? Sod all. They'd much rather fight an impossible battle against geeks with entirely too much time on their hands.
Screwing the public and shafting the content creator is a dead business model when the content creator can (pretty much) go direct to the consumer. At least it would be on an open and free internet, which is why the MAFIAA et al cannot allow that to happen (hence why ACTA is coming).
>>"but when citizens feel they have to take the law into their own hands due to abject failure of their governments, "
Abject failure of their governments to do *what*, exactly?
To do what a fraction of citizens actually want doing?
Seems like a pretty classic own goal.
It makes it *far* easier for the content industry people to portray fans of torrent sites as juvenile and irresponsible.
Some people may cry 'but some Indian company claimed to do it first'.
However, what people might have done somewhere else wouldn't be worth anything as a defence if someone decides to track a few people down and make examples of them.
Personally, if the [alleged 4chan] response really was so predictable, I'd almost wonder if the Indian DDOS thing was just a ploy to get people acting precisely the way they were expected to act.
... I miss read the headline & thought it was Channel 4. I really need my morning coffee before getting my daily reg fix.
I know its childish, but what the hell. Nice to see some one having a go back at the RIAA. How many people have they taken to court & made there lives a misery over the years.
Beer icon, because 4chan deserve one.
"""Trying to suppress somebody's speech doesn't make you look cool, it makes you look intolerant and childish."""
So a DDoS on various corporate websites equals a supression of "somebody's" freedom of speech? So many things wrong with that idea, like the fact that corporations have inalienable rights, or that slowing down a website is some form of supression of any rights. Besides, the RIAA and MPAA are all about supression of actual people's rights, why would anyone stick up for a bunch of thugs and lobbyists like them?
Not that I think a DDoS is a good idea, except to point out that anyone actually affected by one needs to hire a better network security crew. And a DDoS has to be the least entertaining thing to do with someone else's network - anyone with some reasonable knowledge could have probably caused lots more problems than these kiddies did.
Let's see, how about the right to not have a court system used to bully people into paying ransom for an act they didn't even commit? More than one case has been proven that the 'AAs were wrong.
And Fair Use? Oh, that's evil too.
Sorry, if I buy a record/CD/DVD, then I have a license to use the content on ANY PLATFORM I WISH. Lawyers might see it differently, but forcing people to re-buy the same song/movie/book/whatever is like telling you you can't slice THAT carrot with a food processor, because you didn't buy a license to do so.
>>"More than one case has been proven that the 'AAs were wrong."
There is a pretty big difference between incompetence and a deliberate intention to suppress 'rights'.
If someone in the RIAA had been given a choice between suing someone who was
a) guilty
or
b) innocent (and quite possibly able to show it)
even if they were Evil, they'd have to be pretty dumb to choose the latter option, if only for PR reasons.
>>"Sorry, if I buy a record/CD/DVD, then I have a license to use the content on ANY PLATFORM I WISH. Lawyers might see it differently."
So you're claiming a /right/, rather than a legal license?
You can say you /think/ you should be able to use content you've bought on multiple devices, and I'd agree with that opinion, as would most people, but it's not some fundamental *human* right, it's still an opinion.
Even if it's generally seen as a *moral* right, that still depends how much someone is or isn't taking the piss.
If someone who lives alone buys a CD, it doesn't really matter how many devices they have a copy on, since they can only play one copy at a time.
Likewise for a couple, or a small family, it would seem pretty pointless to try and define limits.
However, if someone lived in a massive extended family on a sprawling estate, it would be pushing things a bit far if they could collectively only ever buy one copy of anything and then have lots of copies around the place.
How you'd actually write a law to say what someone had a 'right' to do, I'm not sure.
Do you try and rigidly define limits of sharing (one 'household, or X people, and/or some limit of relatedness? etc), and risk creating both strict rights *and* strict violations that seem unfair, or do you in the end leave it up to people to judge what they think is or isn't likely to provoke action, and what a jury is or isn't likely to see as a meaningfully bad action?
You could try and define an individual's rights, but beyond an individual it could get trickier, and how many individuals actually have action taken against them for having their own copies of their own paid-for content?
All this attention whoring serves a purpose in that it gives us an opportunity to discuss so-called "legitimate" business' use of hired offshore hackers for the DDOSing of torrent tracker sites.
It's a given that brigands will be brigands. But I'm surprised that DDOSing (and other acts of terror) are found to acceptable when the brigands are wearing suits. Or have we abandoned the whole 'rule-of-law' thing?
That sound? It's the world's smallest fiddle, playing "My Heart Bleeds for You" in homage to the "Recording Industry" (I hope that's in the public domain, or I might get dinged for a performance fee.)
- anon (To avoid the performance fee)
Though it is worth discussing the merits of people DDOSing torrent sites (assuming that wasn't done as a calculated provocation), I suspect that the average citizen, while acknowledging it is illegal, might be in two minds about the morailty.
It's not necessarily that people find it *acceptable*, let alone laudable, just that it's something they may well not care enough about the unacceptability of.
It might not be legal to park across the end of someone else's driveway, but if the victim was someone who was *perceived* (rightly or wrongly) to do nothing more than drive round the neighbourhood honking their horn and leering at people, the average citizen might see it as much less of a crime than parking across a regular person's driveway.
Also, the more that some vocal torrent fans take a "Ha ha! We're on the internet! You can't stop us!!!" line, the less people are likely to be concerned about others responding in ways they shouldn't.
The thing about the rule of law is that illegal acts are acts a government *can* prosecute someone for doing.
The law doesn't necessarily require that they *must* prosecute everyone.
Though that might be unfair, it's the way the world works.
The chances of someone being prosecuted for doing something do vary depending on who the person is and on how sympathetically their actions (and victims) are viewed either by people in power, or the wider population.
That holds even when discussing serious things like homicide, never mind things like copyright violation and internet annoyances.
One of the first things an average person would want to know when someone's accused of a crime is what the alleged harm is.
If it was purely a case of a torrent site being inconvenienced and little or no effect on anyone else, many people would file that straight away under 'Don't care'.
There may be a reason that freeloading juvenile retards with the evolutionary development of a Peruvian mudskipper and the personality of a cephalopod struggle with dating girls.
That aside with luck natural selection will eventually take effect. Then again just maybe they will form bubba’s harem in what ever penitentiary they end up. Oh well guess it will be sex but maybe not as we know it, and the big plus either way they are selected out of the gene pool.
Yep 4chan's self promotional hackivism will really stop the copyright rape of another 25 or 50 years after authors death the next time Mikey Mouse is about to go into the public domain and will also repeal the unconstitutional DMCA. Wake up the only thing that will change the injustice of patents, copyrights, biz model protecting laws is if the lawyers can make more money by changing the laws. So in other words fat chance unless the Apocalypse comes and handguns become more important than corrupt lawyers for determing justice.
June 22nd 2010 is the last update for RIAA according to their website and the DDOS left them with a 98.09% uptime according to the link about the attack. Urgent updates could have been delayed by up to an hour or more, those fans of Aiplex were left unable to read the website for 30% of the time.
A pointless DDOS which served no purpose,if they took down a Bank that would be something but a website which used to be hosted on someones home server?
I think a lot of the negative comments on this board (and others) indicate that for many people the issue is simply one of legality - the law is there to protect our interests and the courts are there to decide on who is in the right, so leave it all to them.
This is, to say the least, a rather naive view of how laws emerge and get enforced.
In the case of individual multimedia freetards, stealing a tv show or an album is simply that, stealing. So kicking up a fuss when the company tries to stop you from doing something illegal by using illegal means is a little rich. But there is a much, much bigger picture behind all of this that anyone analysing the role of corporate and special interest power in the functioning of democracy should be awake to.
The media is, by definition, the vector through which communities tell the stories and provide the information that determine what is considered valuable and what is considered not valuable in the political sphere. That is to say, the media is inherently political. (Yes, even crap Hollywood movies - curious about why the foreigners are always the bad guys?) And every generation since Adam has seen some group or other try to monopolise the channels of information - the Church, the State, and now profit seeking mega corporations as well. It's not a conspiracy, its a natural, normal and bloody dangerous process.
So yeah, the freetards might not have a moral leg to stand on. But they're challenging an oligopoly that should be challenged, one that most citizens are too ignorant or apathetic or powerless to challenge, one that most politicians are too ignorant, apathetic or compromised to challenge. I'm not sure we'll ever get a good alternative, but go the freetards in at least trying to pull this ologopoly down. Their selfish sense of entitlement is, in this case, in all of our best interests.
"In the case of individual multimedia freetards, stealing a tv show or an album is simply that, stealing."
For theft to occur, the owner must be deprived of their property. So, no. You're wrong.
Note, I have not implied that using a thing which you are not entitled to use is right; just that it isn't theft.
>>"but go the freetards in at least trying to pull this ologopoly down. Their selfish sense of entitlement is, in this case, in all of our best interests."
*Is* it actually in 'our' interests even if they're unlikely to actually achieve anything, or if they end up makjng it easy for the 'bad' guys to be portrayed as innocent victims of reckless freeloading kids?
Personally, I think the indefinite extension of copyright is wrong, but i understand that that's just an opinion - it doesn't rely on any appeal to mythical 'rights'.
If people just wanted to protest about a particular issue like that, at best they should limit themselves to making copies of should-be-out-of-copyright stuff available, not simply grabbing anything they want and trying to pretend it's really part of a noble protest against The Evil Industry when it's not likely that many other people would believe them.
Also, compared to proper civil disobedience, internet-based stuff does look possibly like a relatively cowardly way of doing something.
If someone was going to make copies of sufficiently old content and stand outside a Disney store on a Saturday giving it away (assuming anyone actually wanted the stuff if given away), I'd have to at least admire their standing up for what they believe in and being prepared to take the consequences, maybe hoping for their day in court to argue their case.
The fact that they were ready for the consequences would tend to demonstrate how important they thought the issue was.
Maybe they'd even inspire other people to copy their actions?
If someone is just going to 'take action' while thinking they have minimal chance of being called to account, even if they actually do have a commitment to their cause, they're not really showing to the world that they care that much.
If someone's 'action' is just taking stuff that they want in the hope no-one will ever know, and maybe doing the odd bit of DDoSing (again in the hope no-one will find them) they're not what I'd really look to as some kind of moral crusader, or as anyone I'd expect to actually change much.
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