Newzbin2 pirates prepare to sink BT web block Pirate site Newzbin2 has cooked up a software client that it says will help UK users defeat a block on the site that is due to be enforced in October. Hollywood studios and the Motion Picture Association won a case in the High Court in July that sought to force BT to stop Britons from accessing Newzbin2. It was presumed that …
@AC - The courts didn't make the tool, or create the impetus, the people offering the download of copyright material and the consumers of that material created this whole situation. If they had stopped for a minute to think about the consequences of the tool that they have made, they may not have done so at all. However, I suspect that they are so motivated by the desire to get stuff for free that they are totally blinded to the results of their actions and/or use "this could be used to download child porn, look what you've made us do" as an argument to justify not enforcing the law.
@AC 11:55 - Really? That's how you view it? Seriously?
Personally the way I see it is this, most people accepted that it was reasonable to deploy a censorship technology (Cleanfeed) to help try and prevent access of child porn (effectiveness is a different argument). How many of those would have accepted it if the scope was a bit broader? What they've done is taken a system designed to stop us stumbling across some nasty shite and shoehorned in something completely unrelated and _nowhere_ near as potentially damaging (if you buy the slippery slope theory, that is).
I'm not defending Newzbin, let's face it they know full well what they are doing, but it's the idiot of a judge who thought it appropriate to allow use of a technology aimed at blocking child porn to protect the interests of media companies.
Are Newzbin right to release methods of bypassing Cleanfeed? No, but BT's friggin counsel told the court that this would be the end result. Talk about making a ruling without any thought of the future.
Until this ruling, if I posted "This is how you bypass Cleanfeed" I was either a pedo or helping them. Now that information is going to be more readily available.
Most determined pedo's could probably already bypass Cleanfeed anyway, but now that the cat is out of the bag on how to do it, as a society we get to watch the Government do something 'proactive' which will probably also impact heavily on those who have no interest in seeing that material anyway.
So yeah, Newzbin are wrong, but if the Judge had actually used his brain and his ears, perhaps it could have been avoided.
(AC 11:55 here) I tend to agree, BT said this is what will happen and the judge ruled. This didn't however force the Newzbin guys in any way to develop and release the tools that they knew full well would have rather darker uses than just copyright infringment. They had the option to comply with the law, they didn't accidentally develop the tool.
Newzbin were never in the dock, the court case was the rights holders vs BT.
Newzbin are allowing their paying customers to access a search engine, which points to newsgroup postings held elsewhere.
If they really wanted to stop it they should have asked for deep packet inspection to block access to binary newsgroups, instead of asking BT to use a targeted service in a way it wasn't designed for.
>Are Newzbin right to release methods of bypassing Cleanfeed? No, but BT's friggin counsel told the court that this would be the end result. Talk about making a ruling without any thought of the future.
For the judge to have made that distinction would be for him to admit that the courts are not all powerful, not something a judge is often willing to do.
Oh, surely one would just use the inbuilt PPTP VPN tunnelling available in most devices (at least in my phone, tablet & PC)?
So better close all the shops and businesses that facilitate piracy by selling devices with this functionality built in.
And the manufacturers that allow it to be sold.
And the carriers for carrying the packets.
That makes no sense - if the tool is designed to access Newzbin, they'd have to be hosting said child porn for your scary little scenario to come true. Allowing piracy is not a prerequisite to stopping child abuse.
"Hands of my pirate DVD's, or the kid gets it" is the opposite of a good, logical argument.
If BT wanted to enforce this surely they could just repeat every request to newzbin2 services 50 (or more) times, basically turning their own users into a DDoS tool. Newzbin2 would then have to block BT users from using their service in order to keep running.
Blocking seems a bit stupid as it can be easily circumvented.
I read quite some time ago a quote from a slightly above average cryptologist. The basic statement was once you give someone the media and the keys to decrypt the media any effort you spend on that encryption is just an utter waste of time.
This is the same deal. World+dog has "the media" (Internet access). And a way to decrypt it (everything from simple hosts file to VPN and a thousand other approaches).
Leaving off the sticky moral issues of telling BT to interfere which is itself most similar to suing the car manufacturer for a drink driving crash, we rapidly arrive at simple reality.
Granted "justice" is never simple and any resemblance to reality is purely coincidental. But the fact is that the car manufacturer is ultimately powerless to stop drink driving other than to not build the car. BT is equally powerless to stop piracy (or child porn), their only option being to not plug in the wire.
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