Racist malware blocks The Pirate Bay by tampering with victims' Windows hosts file Malware laced with racial epithets tries to block Windows-based victims from visiting file-sharing sites associated with copyright infringement, according to new Sophos research. The malicious software amounts to a "goofy process to block people from going to the Pirate Bay," according to Sophos researcher Andrew Brandt, who …
"This racist tirade makes it unlikely (but not impossible) that the malware was made by an aggrieved company angry at cheapskates downloading pirated copies of paid-for software"
While this may be true, it reminds me of the nonsense that Prenda Law used to pull, and I can't help wondering whether someone has decided to do the same sort of thing. The racism could, of course, be there "to foul the trail", as it were. Equally, it could just be some rogue game dev who got laid off, who decided to blame piracy for their woes.
It's quite hard to believe, what with not being obviously true. It's a defensible assertion, certainly, but not a simple statement to unwrap and analyse sufficiently.
I could assert the opposite, and justify it in various ways. Not sure I'd believe that, either.
When the best one can find to say in defence of something is that it 'isn't necessarily' whatever we're talking about, then it's an admission that in practice it usually is. In situations like this, it's a rebuttable presumption that there is some racism involved.
Ok, Mr. Pedantic ...
We are not blocking anything because a third party has asked us to block it, under duress or otherwise. The ONLY things we block are either asked for by our users, or places that allow abuse of the network.
My own ISP, est. 1982[0], has been asked by a couple of state and local agencies (and a couple of Universities) to block specific things over the years. I told 'em to fuck off each time. They stopped asking about 20 years ago. I have never been approached by an agency of the US Government, nor any foreign agency.
All ISPs are in the San Francisco Bay Area, since you mentioned jurisdiction.
[0] A tick over 10,000 active users at the moment, about 7,000 use the system daily, the rest check their email and/or monitor some world and local Usenet groups at least once per week or thereabouts. I provide DNS to those who want it. Around 25,000 inactive users. Users live word-wide. My services are free to them ... the system is a test-bed that is mostly a tax write-off.
In 2012, a number of UK ISPs were ordered to block TPB by the high court. UK ISPs that were not included in that order probably worked out that they would likely end up defending (and losing) an expensive court case and be given their own court order if they did not fall into line.
Yep, this is commonly called SOCKS 5h (i.e some browsers and git take the proxy string as socks5h://localhost:9999).
You can actually access this in the settings page on firefox now. You don't need to configure it using the raw settings. Just go to where you set your proxy host and scroll down to the very bottom where it is kinda hidden.
But there’s surely something wrong with the system if the user feels they need to switch off these protections by default?
If I run an application on Unix or BSD or Linux and it won’t run because it needs root privileges I’d want to be pretty certain exactly what it needs before allowing it. Especially an executable is downloaded from goodness-knows-where.
I certainly wouldn’t just blindly run it as root and if it was a problem I came across often I would question why
Well, most* users don't know what an IP address is let alone a hosts file or UAC. More than that they don't want to know because they think it's a conspiracy to make them look stupid, a computer is just a magic talkie/typey box to them.
* most is of course unspecified but I've never met a non-IT person who knows what UAC is let alone how to set it up properly.
This is why this link is funny ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDbyYGrswtg
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