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Download Wars: The Music Industry Strikes Back

Discussion in 'Archive: Big Brother Strikes Back' started by RidingMyCarousel, Jun 16, 2003.

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  1. RidingMyCarousel

    RidingMyCarousel Jedi Master star 6

    Registered:
    Feb 20, 2002
    The recording industry is hiring cyber miscreants to attack its own customers. And we thought you'd never amount to anything, writes George Smith, SecurityFocus columnist.

    Nowhere Man, please listen, the recording industry has a job for you. The pay is good, the work easy and exciting, ripe with opportunity for someone creatively adept at clandestine dirty tricks.

    Nowhere Man was an American virus-writer -- vintage 1992 -- who "invented" the (edit out program name), one of the first widely-distributed programs to automate the production of malicious software. It was full of smirking computer hotfoots, none difficult for the anti-virus industry to counter, but ideal for turning a cyberspatial tenderfoot's afternoon into a hair-pulling good time.

    Conceptually, it was perfect for a recording industry "exploring options," as the New York Times obliquely put it last week, for "overwhelming [music] distribution networks with potentially malicious programs that masquerade as music files."

    Included with the (edited out program name) were the (edited out program name), a set of "tools" to be used in plaguing software pirates, the feeble-minded, people in the wrong place at the wrong time and the avaricious with the electronic equivalent of free poisoned chocolate candies.

    "They were for taking down lamers!" Nowhere Man laughed ten years ago.

    Some were designed to create waste-your-time dummy files called "fakewarez"; Madonna would have certainly liked them. Others took advantage of file compression to create seemingly small archived binaries which expanded to system-crashing Brobdingnagian size when expanded, a stunt that still worked on some electronic file scanners a couple years back.

    Other techniques disguised old viruses or patched code so that the use of a program would corrupt or erase data.

    Taken singly, they were merely annoying. But in the aggregate they were enablers of escalating hostility.

    Using Nowhere Man's software in 1992, I quickly made a virus called Heevahava, the name being a Pennsylvania Dutch pejorative for a simpleton, colloquially -- a farmhand given the job of harvesting sperm from a bull. "A more malicious program, dubbed 'freeze,' locks up a computer system..." wrote the Times of "industry options" to fight piracy. Heevahava locked up the machine, too, and could even be custom-tailored to display an annoying message, perhaps like: "Only Heevahavas steal music. Stop thief or else!"

    New Dog, Old Tricks

    What I learned was that there's no real line between mildly annoying disruption -- the industry's spin on these anti-piracy measures -- and pure overt and aggressive malice. It's too easy, even alluring once you're neck deep in it, to go from jamming up the computer and causing a reset to making the machine impossible to start without a trip to the doctor. Rationalizing such action as justified by circumstance is an even simpler task.

    Imagine something like imposing a "cursed disk" fault. A few years back you could diddle the system sector of a Windows machine so that the PC could not even be started from a bootable diskette without some very specialized knowledge on the nature of the induced error.

    Caught in a sweat, it was easy to persuade the afflicted that the hard disk had failed completely even though everything on it was unharmed. Ha-ha-ha, so funny. You shouldn't ha' ripped that Linkin Park CD, pally. Now you've learned your lesson.

    The industry knows this type of conduct is contemptible. So do the media defender firms hired to develop and deploy the dirty work. One can just imagine the briefings on plans and "plausible deniability" already -- smug but clueless suits buying hogwash about how some allegedly sanitary enforcer technology will thrash the guilty and restore profits through fear and intimidation in a couple quarters.

    Virus-writers never enjoyed any good publicity from working on code that could be used to devil pirates. No certificates of merit were handed out; it w
     
  2. B'omarr

    B'omarr Jedi Master star 6

    Registered:
    Apr 7, 2000
    This is ridiculous. You know, downloading a song doesn't hurt the artist at all, who probably gets about 1% of total record sales. It hurts the corporate label bigwig who has no real talent at all, except for coming in, exploiting a bands' talent and making money off of them. It's a ridiculous concept in the first place, like paying a bank to hold your money.
     
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