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US entertainment industry to Congress: make it legal for us to deploy rootkits

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Re: US entertainment industry to Congress: make it legal for us to deploy rootkits

#121

Post by spindritf »

beloch wrote: post #99

What qualities do people look for when buying movies and music? 1. The content they want. 2. Quality (i.e. resolution, bitrate, etc.) 3. Reliability (it actually plays) 4. Low annoyance (no ads, warnings, etc.) 5. Safety (guaranteed freedom from malware, etc.) The movie and music industries haven't done a perfect job of delivering #1-4. Region coding means the content users want is frequently only available through p…

> It is tempting to give RIAA and MPAA the rope to hang themselves with, sit back, and laugh. However, let's not forget that every piece of code they write and every root-kit they successfully deploy will soon be taken advantage of by black-hats

Wouldn't it be the opposite? Like a free pentest? Malware they come up with would be widely available (included in the price of any movie) for dissection.

BTW Next release of Qubes[1] will need an "entertainment" AppVM.

[1] http://qubes-os.org/trac/wiki/QubesArchitecture

Re: US entertainment industry to Congress: make it legal for us to deploy rootkits

#122

Post by lightknight »

vidarh wrote: post #86
waterlesscloud wrote: post #17

This is not going to go where they think it will go. Right now their enemies are just pirates wanting to watch Game Of Thrones for free. A business threat, certainly, but one they're generally handling well. But start infecting people's computers, and a portion of them are going to fight back. Then the entertainment industry has enemies actively trying to destroy their systems. A whole different level of conflict, an…

If I ever find a rootkit on my system stemming from a company that thinks they can do stuff like this, and it is legal, it is to a demonstration that the law is not worthy of any respect any more, and that it is time for war. And given the resource discrepancy, the only way of fighting back against companies like this would be to cause vastly disproportionate amounts of damage. I'm sure getting rootkits into their ne…

If I ever find a rootkit on my system, that OS gets binned permanently, no questions asked. I have a zero tolerance policy for who's system my computer is: it's mine. Not the US's, not Law Enforcement's, not the MPAA's, not MS's. If it achieves sentience, fine, it can be it's own; until then, any OS which fails to understand this arrangement (that a secure OS means that only I and system services (Windows Update, various package managers and their delegates) install software...third parties are not allowed), will be binned. If I can't trust my machine to have my singular best interests at heart, I cannot work with it; multiple tethers, trojan rootkits, superseding accounts with permissions higher than my own...these run contrary to my designs, and make it difficult, in the very least, to know when a problem is being caused by them, or by me. Plus I despise being spied on; if I'm going to put on a show, I'm going to get paid for it (no freebies).

I am more and more disturbed with the way OSs are going in general. They are...slowly removing usefulness from themselves, making it hard for admins to work with them, and adding on crap, like Windows Store...which is not needed. It's starting to feel like the computers I work with are...owned by someone else...which means I will start caring for them a lot less. The least of things which currently bothers me are the cross-threading errors which seem to appear in Windows 7...why have these not been fixed?

Re: US entertainment industry to Congress: make it legal for us to deploy rootkits

#123

Post by visarga »

cognivore wrote: post #76

>> But start infecting people's computers, and a portion of them are going to fight back. I already fought back. I don't watch movies, nor TV. No cable, no Netflix, no movie theaters, no nothing. Fsck 'em. You want to do the same? Stop watching their lowest common denominator tripe and read a book or make something up for yourself. When they have no money they'll go away. And what will we have lost? Wasted hours sitt…

I am much better entertained reading and writing on reddit and here. I don't open TV any more. Rarely go to movies. I probably only watch 5 or 10 Hollywood productions per year any more.

Fuck'em. They don't deserve our attention. I prefer a free culture of exchange to a centralized culture of consumption.

Re: US entertainment industry to Congress: make it legal for us to deploy rootkits

#124

Post by onemorepassword »

TheBiv wrote: post #9

I tried to be rational and then I got to the second paragraph of their own brief: "The second and even more pernicious effect is that illegal theft of intellectual property is undermining both the means and the incentive for entrepreneurs to innovate, which will slow the development of new inventions and industries that can further expand the world economy and continue to raise the prosperity and quality of life for…

> "illegal theft of intellectual property"

Say what?

Such bizarre phrases make me seriously doubt the intelligence and education of the people who wrote this.

Re: US entertainment industry to Congress: make it legal for us to deploy rootkits

#125

Post by venomsnake »

oakwhiz wrote: post #34
greenyoda wrote: post #3

Are they also going to push for laws that mandate that all anti-virus software must ignore their rootkits? And with secure boot in Windows 8, it will be harder for rootkits to remain undetected by hiding in the boot loader. Will the entertainment industry push for laws that force operating system vendors to provide back-doors for the official malware?

Unless Microsoft signs the rootkits purposefully.

No way ... MS can buy Hollywood with pocket change. Also the moment they sign something like that - no more business with enterprises and national governments. The integrity of windows and office is imperative for them.

Re: US entertainment industry to Congress: make it legal for us to deploy rootkits

#126

Post by jacquesm »

pyvek wrote: post #108

From the paper - "Recommend that Congress and the administration impose a tariff on all Chinese-origin imports, designed to raise 150% of all U.S. losses from Chinese IP theft in the previous year, as estimated by the secretary of commerce." So... they want their people to pay for the crimes of others?

Given some of the rest of the logic behind this whole thing that one did not stand out as particularly idiotic.

Re: US entertainment industry to Congress: make it legal for us to deploy rootkits

#128

Post by Semaphor »

And still people buy stuff from RIAA labels and similar organisations. I buy more music than all of my friends but I always check label and parent label affiliations with any of those anti-consumer organisations. But as long as people are usually buying everything without caring, they can do whatever they want.

Re: US entertainment industry to Congress: make it legal for us to deploy rootkits

#129

Post by jacquesm »

obviouslygreen wrote: post #21
kunai wrote: post #11

I'm sick and tired of being in such a lazy-ass, apathetic society that possesses zero regard to freedom. Stallman may be a nut, but when you think long and hard about what he says, and think about SOPA, PIPA, and this lobby, in horror, your face twists in fear and you watch, helplessly, as your fellow citizens bend over backwards and let the government have their way. I don't even know what to do anymore. Nobody will…

And your answer is Stallman ? Yes, he is a nut. In the sense of "no one will ever take him seriously, especially anyone involved in mainstream decision-making, who has ever read anything he has written," which is in this case the most relevant metric. Stallman is never going to be any help here, nor is anyone like him, because any "normal" person -- that is, one that other people won't ignore out of hand -- will igno…

Stallman is not a nut. Try finding one other nut that has so consistently foretold the future.

Re: US entertainment industry to Congress: make it legal for us to deploy rootkits

#130

Post by keithpeter »

DigitalSea wrote: post #104

There is no way this will ever pass, this is the most ridiculous sounding proposed legislation I have ever heard. You think SOPA is bad if something like this were to ever be passed theoretically of course, you can bet the world would be a sad, dark place to live in. There are consequences to this kind of thing and many things to consider. I mean imagine if hackers somehow managed to find a security exploit in the ma…

"...you can bet the world would be a sad, dark place to live in."

I suspect $world = USA here. The chances of anything as daft as this happening in Europe are small. Some European countries already have taxes on blank media/contributions to copyright organisations. Australia and Canada had court action against Sony last time this was tried.

UK politicians do persist in trying to pass legislation allowing monitoring all communications in UK, but we all know how effective that will be.

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