back to article RIAA chief calls for copyright filters on PCs

When is a virus not a virus? When it's sending your personal data to the Recording Industry Association of America, silly. Internet advocacy website Public Knowledge has posted a highlight reel from the State of the Net Conference, where RIAA boss Cary Sherman suggests that internet filtering sorely lacks the personal touch of …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Happy

    easy solution

    download the encrypted files on one computer connected to the internet, then burn the encrypted files to dvd or whatever other media of your choice, then open them on another computer never connected to the internet and thats it, the RIAA cant monitor what your doing

  2. Law
    Paris Hilton

    To the nay sayers - a quick sequence of events to silence your protests

    Before they even try to install it (and risk the immediate backlash from "average" consumers) it will go down like this:

    1 - there will be a law passed by some dirty politician that essentially says its illegal to bypass copyight filtering

    2 - RIAA will claim its voluntary only - no spyware involved

    3 - A few months later it will be installed silently with "Essential ISP Software" or "Essential iPod software", ofcourse it will be hidden miles into the smallprint that it is there and installed for your own good.

    4 - Simple folk like programmers that offer toolkits to remove or bypass this software will be slapped with lawsuits, and be forced to hand over the details of everybody who connected to their servers to download this kit.

    5 - All people who connected will be sued and jailed if they complain!!

    6 - Eventual acceptance of our new overlords.

    To be honest, the first 3 steps sound like ID Cards too - laws passed, "optional signup", silently force people to have them by making them compulsory for services such as banks and passports!

    All this scares the crap out of, I want to move to a fairer nicer country, like China.... or Iran.....

  3. Ed
    Joke

    @brym

    "If it's not illegal to copy to your mp3 player, or to burn to disc an extra copy for your own personal use, why kick up so much over downloading in the first place? I'd bet that the majority of downloaders do so for personal use."

    Yeah, that's right. The vast majority of music downloaders are downloading music that they already own. They just want to get their electronic copy from some random stranger on the Intertubes instead of ripping their own.

  4. heystoopid
    Happy

    @ac

    @ac you just have not read the standard recording contract from all the major labels and then come back again !

    Further the companies keep their grubby hands on the money earned from the albums sold for well in excess of two years to allow them to deduct all sorts of goodies like advertising and promotion costs , bribes paid to DJ's and radio companies for needle time ! Although in the case of SONY-BMG head office in New Yory for a while they refuse to pay some $160 million dollars to noted artists such as Madonna(she moved to the UK no US forwarding address held was that excuse to with hold some $25 million dollars until Eliot kicked their ass into surrendering this ungodly amount of booty with his big legal baseball stick)

    Now as for the high street prices due to competition from Woollies and the big chain stores using volume sales most stores at best would barely net a profit of more than fifty pee per sale after all costs(me thinks you have confused retail as sold with recommended retail price (RRP) which is about double what you quote the last time in Oz I checked RRP was approximately $49.95 for a CD that the major chains were selling around $22.95 as the punters are extremely reluctant to buy any CD above $28-95 as it just gathers dust ! )

    But sadly the industry has been infested with mostly pirates , sharks and parasitic vampires since the age of mass production of recorded music in all formats. So now in the computer age , we send in a few small barracuda to fight for the very few crumbs left over with the current mix !

    Or as they say "Remember, in a pirate ship, in pirate waters, in a pirate world, ask no questions. Believe only what you see. No, believe half of what you see. "

    Or is it only fools and idiots continue to believe the myth that all rock bands make money from CD sales when 98% of the income comes from live venues !

    Finally as Nelson would say Ha! Ha!

    Oh please have a nice day too !

  5. meredith
    Stop

    simple really

    use an OS which isn't subject to the whims of corrupt profiteers.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Alert

    Down the drain

    As the internets come up the drain, the RIAAss. business goes down the same.

    When will they understand that nobody will pay LP prices for bits and bytes? And nobody will pay them all over again for the same old shite?

    KM Ass.

  7. night troll
    Pirate

    Just a few points

    1. This RIAA guy is so far up his own arse he can smell fresh air.

    2. Why do they let tecnophobic morons pronounce on matters that need a small amount of technical knowledge to get the facts and possabilities right?

    3. If it's software based then someone somewere WILL crack it. If it's hardware based what makes them think we will let it anywere near our machines.

    Don't they realise there are a lot of people who build their own computers, or build and maintain them for friends and relatives. Hell, it keeps me in beer for most of the year!! So what makes them think a rogue bit of hardware will stay on a bought computer even if it gets on it in the first place.

    As for educating our MPs of the threat to our freedom, most of them are so technically incompitent they couldn't find the on switch of their mobile phones without an expensive researcher (relative) to show them.

    If it becomes part of the operating system, microshit, rotten apple or whatever then sales of that system will drop through the floor a' la vista. If it comes as part of an update then it would not be installed or someone will come up with a crack to rip it out.

    How many companies and multi-nationals do you think would let a rouge bit of monitoring soft/hardware, that they could not control near their systems?

    So, basically it ain't gonna happen!

  8. Paul Stimpson
    Pirate

    It will all happen by stealth

    Our governments will love this one... ISPs required to only pass signed packets so only signed "legitimate" apps can communicate over the Internet. It's perfect: No more terrorists or kiddiefiddlers using encryption or darknets. People can write whatever software they like but unless they're "legitimate" (that word again) corporations they won't be able to afford to pay for their code to be examined by a trusted (by the government) testing lab to get it signed so it won't be able to communicate anyway. Just think of all the commercial secrets MS could learn if they ran a signing service and smaller companies and individuals had to submit their code to be audited. If they didn't go that far it would make the spooks' jobs easier as they would know what app generated every packed and which ones need to be deep scanned.

    Go ahead, write "Son of Bittorrent." You won't be able to use it to transfer information outside of your house unless you get it signed. I'm sure that any such signing mechanism would also allow keys to be revoked so the threat of "turning off" an application could be used against any developer in order to make them self-censor/include code to ensure "children are protected" or "copyrights are respected" (insert excuse of the week here.)

    MIcrosoft and Apple will love this one too. It will effectively be impossible to have a piece of open source software communicate oner the net (or to ensure that any such software has its output examined) as it's not signed. Since the signing will cost money the distribution of software for no cost will be severely hampered (of course MS and Apple will have the right to self-sign so they're going to be OK.) Further more the code behind this will be covered by NDAs so publishing the source will be forbidden.

    MS and Apple also get protection from antitrust lawsuits over this. "It was a legal requirement. You can't sue us for implementing it."

    ISPs will love it. Let signed traffic through. Anything unsigned either gets blocked or throttled. No need to play cat and mouse with P2P developers who try to hide their traffic to prevent "management." You can tell that no web browser generated that fake SSL data. It's "future-proof" as new things that will eat bandwidth doing "illegal" things just never get signed or will get identified and turned off when the music/movie industry persuade the government that they're bad. The application that generated a packet can be immediately identified from the signature so prioritising traffic from people you like / throttling things you don't becomes easy with no need to decrypt data. The whole process becomes "noddy" when Cisco implement it in their routers.

    Far more likely, this will all be introduced by stealth. There will be no big switch thrown that will lead to howls of protest from Linux users or anyone else. It will all begin innocently enough. iTunes suddenly starts working faster than it used to, nobody complains. Applications from big companies enjoy the benefits of prioritisation. Nothing gets blocked but the bandwidth pool available to unsigned apps gets smaller and smaller (or at least doesn't grow with demand) until transferring a file with an unsigned program becomes so slow that people stop and buy "all new FileFlash MegaPro" (which in reality is just an FTP or Bittorrent client that checks the files aren't "bad" and signs its packets so it gets to play in the fast lane).

    Then there's some terrible crime committed and some politician starts banging on about kiddiefiddlers and terrorists using these unsigned apps and a law (sorry "voluntary agreement") gets passed requiring ISPs to block them in return for immunity from prosecution/lawsuits. This one may not happen but if the transfer rates on unsigned apps suck so bad that they're unusable people will use what works. In fact I'm surprised the R.I.Ass.A. hasn't already mounted a publicity offensive or leak alleging that Al Qaida are hiding coded messages from Osama bin Laden to terror cells (Yes, OMG, there may be one in YOUR town! Ban it quick!) in music/movie torrents in order to make banning them more wholesome and urgent. "When you use Bittorrent you are helping terrorists kill children!"

    The spooks also love it because everything that's not "kosher" (in their eyes) gets blocked, flagged or throttled so the volume of data they need to examine is kept to a minimum.

    Go on, You know it makes sense...

    @Missing the point - You're bang on the money my friend.

  9. Wayland Sothcott
    Black Helicopters

    It's not about music theft

    We know that this will not really prevent copyright theft but the record industry is prepared to push for this because they can believe it will. It serves another purpose. It gets legally required government spyware onto your computer. It will be illegal to remove it and difficult to get online if the ISP requires it. Government plans require them to gain more control of the average person. People who resist this and don't believe the hype are in a minority and easily identified. We are all breaking the law somewhere along the line and can have pressure put on us due to this. It's not about music copyrigh, that's a pretext, it's about control of free speech and freedom by the government. The music industries fears are just being used to push some laws through.

    The poster who quoted Train Spotting gets it. Think of the Matrix where Neo should keep his head down and be a good little office worker. If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear.

  10. The Other Steve
    Alert

    @AC w/r/t "Fritz Chip"

    A name I hadn't heard, but which turns out refer to the Trusted Platform Module (TPM). It seems to me that this makes some of your assertions questionable (IMHO)

    Quick whistlestop, the TPM provides three (count them) sets of functionality : Public key crypto functions (RSA, SHA-1, HMAC) , trusted boot, and initialisation and management.

    Since the user (and there are GPL'd linux drivers available for the module) may define exactly what configuration is to be 'trusted', there is nothing on the 'Fritz' * chip to prevent me from booting linux, starting a VM, attaching a debugger and using this environment to host another OS.

    Additionally, I can provide my VM with a virtual TPM (e.g. one in software) http://www.usenix.org/events/sec06/tech/full_papers/berger/berger_html/vtpm06.html

    The utility of this is debatable, but the point is that I can set up an environment with a TPM enabled OS running in an environment that I control completely, including the internals of the TPM. (Whats that ? Newer OSs detect when they're virtualised ? That's an old, old arms race.)

    There is NO way for the TPM to reject an OS, a system configuration, or a piece of hardware because it isn't certified by a third party, none, zip, zilch, nada, bugger all.

    From the horses mouth :

    https://www.trustedcomputinggroup.org/faq/TPMFAQ/

    "Can the Trusted Platform Module control what software runs?

    No. There is no ability to do this."

    "Does TCG require that software be certified to run on a TCG-enabled platform?

    The TCG design does not have any requirement that software be “certified” in order to use it."

    Really, it just doesn't work like that. (Cue hysterical freetards shouting that TPM, and trusted computing in general are evil and that the sky is falling, t'aint so, increase Ritalin and drink less coffee)

    Is it possible that you are getting the TPM mixed up with Microsoft's NGSCB (Next Generation Secured Computing Base), formerly known as Palladium, and which relies on a superset of the TPM hardware functionality, including things like Memory Curtaining, and which is indeed far more genuinely sinister ? Or maybe Intel TXT ? Or just possibly something else entirely ?

    * Apparently, after US Senator Ernest Frederick "Fritz" Hollings, a sock puppet for the RIAA/MPAA and their pigopolist friends who lobbied, unsuccessfully, for a number of draconian anti copying measures which, had they been passed, would have made US consumer electronics manufacturers even less competitive with their Chinese, Malaysian, &c brethren than they are already. One of which was to include the TPM chip in all media devices. Presumably either he, or indeed the MPAA/RIAA had either misinterpreted the functions of the TPM, or had bought into MSFTs much more Machiavellian Palladium vision.

  11. Svein Skogen
    Happy

    I so look forward to them trying this

    If any of this is tried, and it passes my gateway in any means, I will personally log this as "computer crimes" with the local police, and name each and every person on their board of directors. Since unlawful computer trespass is considered a serious crime in Europe, this is likely to mean an interpol-report + international warrant for arrest.

    Even if some uncivilized countries regularly ignore international laws and international warrants for arrest, this means that when/if they visit a civilized country, they can be extradited, tried, and jailed.

    Simple as that.

    An American corporistic power trying to hack/penetrate the lot of computers in Europe will generally mean a LOT of those logs-at-police... I wonder how "1 million cases of computer trespass" would look on their CV?

    //Svein

  12. Anonymous Coward
    Flame

    No point arguing..

    It's not the RIAA bosses fault - from the stuff they come out with they are obviously complete techno-morons.

    The real culprits are the yes-men lawyers behind them.

    The last thing they want is a quick and reasonable solution, they need the arguments to go on as long as possible so they can keep raking in the fees!

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