Peer-To-Peer News – The Week In Review - Ending Nov. 30

[JackSpratts]

U.S. Court To Decide If Offshore KaZaA Can Be Sued In The States
John Borland

A Los Angeles federal judge will hear arguments Monday as to whether record companies and movie studios can sue the parent company of Kazaa, the most popular online file-swapping service, in the United States.

Much of Kazaa's future, from a business and legal perspective, hangs on the judge's decision. The parent company, Sharman Networks, is headquartered in Australia and incorporated in the Pacific Island nation of Vanuatu, and has tried to keep business contact with the United States to a minimum in order to decrease its legal risk.

If a judge says Sharman can be sued in the United States, Kazaa will get sucked into the same legal maelstrom that has grabbed Napster, Aimster, Audio Galaxy, Grokster and Morpheus, closing some of the popular services and threatening the existence of the others. The Kazaa case is the biggest yet in the recent copyright wars that have been testing the international reach of U.S. courts.

"There are obviously a lot of companies that hope being offshore will give them some immunity from the incredible litigation machine," said Fred von Lohmann, senior intellectual-property attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is representing Sharman rival Streamcast Networks in an associated case. The judge's decision, von Lohmann said, "will send an important message." http://news.com.com/2100-1023-971086.html

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Student’s Computers Seized

Nearly one hundred students at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, have had their computers seized by the administration there, according to The Capital.

The midshipmens' rooms were raided during classes at the Academy on Thursday in a search for computers which allegedly contained illegal copies of music and movies. The media were most likely downloaded from peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing services.

We previously reported that University of Georgia freshman Ben Albert was the subject of disciplinary action after downloading Austin Powers to his dorm room. That action revealed an unfortunate new anti-P2P intimidation tactic, aimed at the most innocent level of the file sharing phenomenon, and taken at the behest of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA).

The MPAA in October sent a letter to schools across the nation, urging them to intervene in the file sharing phenomenon. An MPAA spokeswoman confirmed that the Naval
Academy was a recipient of the letter, but at press time, the Academy has made no official statement surrounding the raid, other than that an investigation is in progress.

The Naval Academy's action mirrors what occured in Georgia on a grander scale. Nearly one hundred young students - with previously bright futures - are now without their computers and may face court-martial or other discipline - for simply downloading media which they could hardly afford to purchase otherwise. A court- martial can destroy a student's chances of having a successful military career.
http://www.2600.com/news/display.shtml?id=1428

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Dartmoth Student Creates Local “Napster2” Using Direct Connect
Zachary Goldstein

Countless suitors have tried and failed to fill the void left after recording industry lawsuits killed popular file-sharing program Napster, but a new entry on the Dartmouth campus may be the best substitute yet.

Billed by some as "Napster 2," a program called Direct Connect is facilitating a boom in peer-to-peer file sharing on campus.

Unlike Napster, however, Dartmouth students are using Direct Connect's file-sharing capabilities on a Dartmouth-only peer-to-peer network, which was set up by Joseph Morales '03.

Morales runs the entire network from his computer, which acts as a hub to facilitate sharing between other people's computers.

"I got the idea from my friends at Rutgers who set a similar system up and found it very successful," Morales said. "It took me five minutes to set it up here on my computer and get it working."

The email making its way around campus that informs students of the new peer-to-peer program is titled "Napster 2" and explains in detail how to download Direct Connect. Morales claims that he originally sent the letter to "like four friends in my house," and it spread from there.
http://www.thedartmouth.com/article....d=200211250103

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Copyright Cops Send Big Bill$ To P2P Users
Kasper Larsen

The Danish Anti Pirat Gruppen (Anti Piracy Group) has issued invoices of up to $14,000 apiece to approximately 150 users of KaZaA and eDonkey for illegally downloading copyright material.

APG monitored the file sharing networks for available files with Danish IP addresses - and went to court to get the users' personal details from their ISPs, armed with screen shots of, for example, the KaZaA window showing the files on the user's hard-drive. The courts obliged and ordered the ISPs to deliver the personal details of the incriminated users. Then the bills were in the post ... landing on the mats of the unfortunate downloaders over the last few days.

The users are charged about $16 per CD and about $60 per full length movie. If they pay now - and delete the illegal content from their hard drives - then the amount is cut in half and they avoid going to court. Those who don't pay up are to be sued.

Question is: if the APG has only the file names from KaZaA or eDonkey - how can it make sure that they really are illegal files and not only "similar named files" or hoax files? Can APG prove that is the work of a certain user in a household - or will it go for the entire family?

We'll keep you posted ...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/28286.html

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New Tool Battles Spyware
Gregg Keizer

As if IT managers don't have enough Internet headaches, now they have to add spyware to their list. Spyware -- sneaky, parasitic software that latches onto other programs and is often downloaded and installed without the user's knowledge -- collects Web surfing patterns, keystrokes, and other information from employee computers, then delivers them to off- site servers, where the data's usually used for Web tracking and advertising purposes.

WebSense, which develops content filtering solutions to the enterprise, is mounting a defense against spyware -- and its unauthorized back-channel communications -- with the addition of a new database category that blocks spyware programs from sending potentially sensitive data back to marketer servers.

“Firewalls are primarily a defense against information from the outside getting into the network,” said Harold Kester, WebSense's chief technology officer. “They're no real protection against information leaving the network.”

Spyware such as Gator, BonziBUDDY, and Comet Cursor is often surreptitiously bundled with freeware and shareware software that users download from the Internet, and is commonly found in popular peer-to-peer programs, such as KaZaa, BearShare, AudioGalaxy, and others. In the most malicious cases, spyware can perform non-marketing operations, all hidden to the user, including data collection for industrial espionage purposes.
http://www.internetwk.com/breakingNews/INW20021125S0004

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ISP Download Caps To Slow Swapping?
John Borland

High-speed Internet service providers are considering adopting new pricing plans that if widely adopted could take a bite out of file swapping.

For the past few years, many broadband ISPs have been frank in saying that file-swapping services such as Napster and Kazaa have been among the most popular activities on their networks. This has led to a small proportion of dedicated file swappers, known as "bandwidth hogs" within the industry, who account for a hugely disproportionate amount of network traffic.

Now many of the biggest high-speed ISPs are considering capping the amount of bandwidth that their subscribers can use per month, a move that could undermine subscribers' free swapping ways--something that many lawsuits have not yet been able to achieve. If people know they have a limited amount of bandwidth available, the thinking goes, they'll be less likely to download voraciously or allow people to upload songs and music from their computers.

According to Michael Harris, president of Kinetic Strategies, a research company that follows the broadband marketplace closely, the ISPs can't help themselves. "Every major broadband provider is seriously weighing pros and cons of bandwidth consumption caps," he said.

The high-speed Internet industry as a whole is in the midst of its first major pricing shift. Many companies recently began offering low-priced, slower connections in hopes of attracting dial-up subscribers who are reluctant to sign up for more expensive services. They're also offering faster connection at higher prices and encouraging people who use large amounts of bandwidth to upgrade to this new level.

Capping the amount of data that a customer downloads and uploads, however, is a new wrinkle that could irk many people.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-975320.html

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No Uploads With This ISP
Steve Lastra

The fight of record companies against the Internet websites that offer peer-to-peer downloading/uploading services appeared recently to have a new ally in its battle which affect us, the little guy. Local Internet providers are getting into the fray by notifying their users of possible violations of their company policies by those who download/upload music, movies and games.

In an e-mail sent to all ProLog Express customers, a division of PenTelData, which is one of the largest Internet providers in the area, it stated "a critical systems announcement" went out to all subscribers recently. It applied only to customers who use such peer-to-peer file sharing applications such as Kazaa, Gnutella, Morpheus and others.

The announcement claims, "In an effort to improve overall network performance" and increase the quality of service "PenTelData will not support and strongly discourages Internet customers from using peer-to- peer file sharing programs." It goes on to say that those customers using those kinds of applications are being asked to disable uploads immediately and "change their software configuration now." It further states "it is asking customers to disable uploads immediately" and that they may soon implement filters to prevent customers from uploading files.

The Orwellian flavor of the e-mail had an ominous tone that Big Brother was watching and keeping track of one's every move. Was it true that I could be disconnected from my local service because of my private use of the Internet as was indicated in the e-mail?

Who were these people and better yet how were these people making the determination of the appropriate use of my computer and the service I am paying for? I needed clarification.
http://www.epcommunitynews.com/archi...2/sl112902.htm

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Wireless Data Adopts the P2P Model
Matthew Maier

Most wireless technologies operate on a standard principle: Data is transmitted back and forth between a central base station and a receiver nearby. In essence, that's how the third-generation (3G) wide area networks offered by Nextel (NXTL) and Verizon (VZ) work, along with Bluetooth and the short-range 802.11b (Wi-Fi) local networks run by Starbucks (SBUX) or the friendly neighborhood geek in your apartment building. The problem with that model -- and one reason the technology has not become more widely available -- is that it requires a lot of base stations. Those are points where the "wired" Internet jumps to wireless, and you usually have to have a direct line-of-sight to them for your wireless device to work; that's why they tend to end up as bottlenecks in the process.

A new model called mesh networking could change things. Similar in theory to the file-swapping systems that people use to download music, mesh networking utilizes a decentralized peer-to-peer model. It does this by turning end users into relay stations -- data not only arrives on your laptop but also gets transmitted along to the laptop of another person without interrupting your access. The advantage is that mesh networking requires fewer centralized base stations, so it's cheaper to set up and offers users greater range.
http://www.business2.co.uk/articles/...,45623,FF.html

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Kazaa Ruling Due Within Weeks
Ryan Naraine

A federal judge in Los Angeles has given strong hints he intends to rule that rogue peer-to-peer network Kazaa can be sued in the U.S., a key issue in the ongoing litigation between the music industry and the file- swapping services.

District Court Judge Stephen Wilson heard oral arguments from both sides on the extent of Kazaa's contact with the United States to determine if it can be subject to U.S. laws and is due to issue a written ruling within the next few weeks.

Because Kazaa's parent company, Sharman Networks, maintains headquarters in Australia and incorporation in the island of Vanuatu, lawyers argued it should not be subject to a lawsuit in the U.S. but, if Judge Wilson's statements in court provide any hints, he is leaning towards the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).

"It is a difficult question, but it has to be resolved...The court will do its best to resolve it promptly," Judge Wilson said in open court, adding he "would be inclined to find there's jurisdiction against Sharman."
http://siliconvalley.internet.com/ne...le.php/1548811

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Sony Pictures Forms Lobby Group
Evan Hansen

Sony Pictures Entertainment on Tuesday said it has formed a new lobbying organization as the company moves to adopt secure digital formats to distribute its stable of movies and entertainment products. The Digital Policy Group will be headed by Beth Berke, executive vice president of Sony Pictures. The lobbying group will represent the company in negotiations with legislators and regulators, review new technologies, and coordinate Sony Pictures' approach to digital technologies, both internally and with partners.

"The goal of the Digital Policy Group is to move forward with a triple win--for content, for hardware, and for viewers," Berke said in a statement.

Digital technology has raised vexing strategy issues for Sony Pictures parent Sony, which straddles both consumer electronics and media, two industries that have increasingly clashed with the arrival of potent new consumer devices that threaten copyrights.

Electronics manufacturers have embraced digital media as an opportunity to increase the value of their products and create whole new categories such as MP3 players, CD burners and PVRs (personal video recorders). Movie studios and record labels, meanwhile, have recoiled at the thought that large numbers of consumers may never have to pay for their products again.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-975346.html

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Amazon Takes Over Bertelsmann Unit CDNow
Jim Hu

German media giant Bertelsmann has struck an agreement that calls for Amazon.com to run the Web operations of its CDNow retail site, according to a source familiar with the expected announcement.

The agreement comes amid changes at CDNow and its parent company, Bertelsmann. As previously reported, CDNow has discontinued its affiliate program and directed its members to sign up for Amazon's program instead. Affiliate programs pay people to host e-commerce links on their personal home pages. When visitors click on the link or buy merchandise through the link, affiliates get paid a percentage of the sale.

The deal with Amazon underscores Bertelsmann's retreat from online retailing. For the past few years, Bertelsmann has invested in or acquired a handful of Internet companies in hopes of becoming a significant player in online retailing. The company invested in file-sharing service Napster, acquired music storage site Myplay and launched its own Amazon rival BOL.com.

All of these initiatives, however, have folded or have been earmarked for dismantling. Thomas Middelhoff, the architect of Bertelsmann's digital plans, was ousted as CEO in July.

What's left of Bertelsmann's online ambitions can be found in its BeMusic division. BeMusic oversees the company's direct retail operations, namely its BMG record club and CDNow.

A BeMusic representative declined to comment. However, a representative last week said that BeMusic has no intention of selling CDNow to Amazon.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-975332.html

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Roxio Closes Napster Deal
John Borland

Roxio, a company best known for creating CD-burning technology, said Wednesday that it had completed its purchase of assets from bankrupt file-swapping company Napster.

Napster's technology and brand name have been on the auction block for months, after the company declared bankruptcy in June.

German media giant Bertelsmann had initially agreed to purchase the company for $9 million, but the agreement fell apart after a bankruptcy court blocked the purchase.

Roxio offers a music subscription service through Pressplay, a service owned by several major music labels. The company has made recent moves toward creating its own independent service, striking a music licensing deal with record label EMI. It's not yet clear how Roxio plans to use Napster's technology, however.

"The company will be announcing its plan for the development of Napster in the coming months," Roxio said in a statement Wednesday.

Roxio agreed to pay $5 million for Napster's patent portfolio and other intellectual property several weeks ago. Yet Roxio isn't taking on Napster's legal liabilities, including any that stem from the record companies' pending copyright lawsuit against the former file-swapping giant.

Record companies have only recently begun to give technology companies licenses to let subscribers burn their own CDs from downloaded music. This new development could help give Roxio a more solid foothold in the music distribution business, as it creates one of the most widely distributed CD software packages.

Napster's peer-to-peer software, for example, could help form a distribution mechanism for the company's own service.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-975627.html

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Napster Brand Name, Technology Sold Despite Challenge

THE brand name, website and technology of pioneer file-swapping service Napster Inc were sold to Silicon Valley software company Roxio Inc on Wednesday after a bankruptcy judge dismissed an unorthodox last-minute objection by Napster's first boss.

Record labels and other creditors will no doubt fight over the sale proceeds and may pursue legal fights to collect more money, but the sale essentially ends the brief, dramatic life of Napster Inc. Napster's system, the first to popularise technology known as peer-to-peer, connected millions of computer users who swapped digital song files for free.

Roxio made minor changes to the purchase arrangement to overcome objections by Napster creditors during a daylong hearing and then closed the sale for US$5 million in cash and warrants to buy 100,000 Roxio shares. It will put something on the Napster.com site soon, with details about its plans due in the next few months.

'We're very, very happy about this,' said Roxio general counsel Bill Growney.

Shares in Roxio, which makes software for recording compact discs from music stored on computers, rose 9 US cents to US$5.37 on Nasdaq before the ruling, which came after the close of regular trading.

The record labels won several court rulings against Napster, and the company was not able to release a system that allowed for payments to copyright holders before it filed for bankruptcy in June. Successor networks are less centralised and have been harder to attack legally.
http://business-times.asia1.com.sg/n...,65346,00.html

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Students Learning to Evade Moves to Protect Media Files
Amy Harmon

As colleges across the country seek to stem the torrent of unauthorized digital media files flowing across their campus computer networks, students are devising increasingly sophisticated countermeasures to protect their free supply of copyrighted entertainment.

Most colleges have no plans to emulate the Naval Academy, which last week confiscated computers from about 100 students who are suspected of having downloaded unauthorized copies of music and movie files. But many are imposing a combination of new technologies and new policies in an effort to rein in the rampant copying.

"For our institutions this is a teachable moment," said Sheldon Steinbach, general counsel of the American Council on Education. "This is the time for them to step forward and demonstrate the value of intellectual property."

Some students may well emerge from educational sessions on copyright laws and electronic etiquette with a higher regard for intellectual property rights. But many of them are honing other skills as well, like how to burrow through network firewalls and spread their downloading activities across multiple computers to avoid detection.

"If you don't know how to do it, other people will just tell you," said Lelahni Potgieter, 23, who learned her file-trading techniques from an art student at her community college in Des Moines. "There's not much they can do to stop you."

Nevertheless, university administrators are trying, spurred on in part by a barrage of letters from entertainment companies notifying them of student abuses. Many entertainment concerns have hired companies to search popular file-trading networks for unauthorized files and track them to their source.

More pragmatic motivations, like the expense of large amounts of university's network bandwidth being absorbed by students' proclivity for online entertainment, are also driving the renewed university efforts.

Schools have closed off the portals used by file-trading services, installed software to limit how much bandwidth each student can use, and disciplined students who share media files. But nothing, so far, has proved entirely effective.

"It's an ongoing battle," said Ron Robinson, a network architect at Bradley University in Peoria, Ill. "It's an administrative nightmare trying to keep up."

In a typical game of digital cat-and-mouse, Mr. Robinson said one of his first moves was to block the points of entry, or ports, into the network used by popular file- trading software like KaZaA.

But the newest version of the KaZaA software automatically searches for open ports and even insinuates itself through the port most commonly used for normal Web traffic, which must be kept open to allow some e-mail reading and other widely used applications to take place uninterrupted.

Even without KaZaA's help, students say they can easily use so-called port-hopping software to find a way past the university's blockades. So Mr. Robinson has rationed the amount of bandwidth that each student can use for file-trading activities.

Software with names like PacketHound, from Palisade Systems, or Packet Shaper, from Packeteer, enable network administrators to distinguish data that comes from the file-trading services and sequester it from the rest of the Internet traffic.

But there are ways around that, too.

To limit the amount of data each student can download, administrators typically link a student ID to the computer in a dormitory room. To exceed those limits, some students find computers registered to others and use them to conduct their activities.

That practice has surfaced recently at Cornell University, where the number of complaints from copyright holders about unauthorized downloading in recent months has stayed at the same level as last year, but the number of students who were found to have been unwittingly downloading for others has risen, according to university officials.

About 50 students at Cornell were disciplined last year for unauthorized downloading, said Mary Beth Grant, the university's judicial administrator. All of those cases resulted from letters from copyright holders, because the university does not monitor what students do with their Internet access.

Nor does Cornell consider the trading of copyrighted music files to be among the more serious infractions. Students are typically required to perform a few hours of community service.

"It's theft and you're not supposed to steal, but this is different from someone engaging in credit card scams or breaking into a building to steal a computer," Ms. Grant said. "We're not in the business of trying to punish a student; we want them to learn from their mistake."

Indeed, the push from copyright holders for universities to police their networks has raised questions in the academic world about how to instill students with a sense of morality — and a knowledge of the law — about copyrights without intruding on their privacy and free speech rights.

"The biggest problem that universities are having is they have not openly decided whether their primary responsibility in this regard is law enforcement or education," said Virginia Rezmierski, who teaches in the University of Michigan's School of Information and recently surveyed universities on their monitoring practices. "Right now they're doing more monitoring than education."
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/27/te...gy/27SWAP.html

- js.




Current Week In Review

[theknife]

Students Learning to Evade Moves to Protect Media Files

Crazy kids

God bless 'em, every one

[assorted]

nice work mr. spratts

[JackSpratts]

my pleasure.

- js.

[TankGirl]

A great weekly digest, Jack - keep them coming!

- tg

[multi]

found in WT's newspaper shop

from
'Eightball' Smacking KaZaA Users
Purported 'skin' is actually a trojan that wipes out music files.
Download the latest skin from KaZaA and you won't get a slick-looking piece of software. Instead, you'll install a virus that wipes out your music files. See what happened to our files when we tried installing the skin, tonight on "Tech Live."

Two viewers tipped us to the file, called the Magic Eightball skin. It comes as a Zip file named eightball2.zip. Once opened, the program executes on some systems, erasing music files and causing system crashes, the viewers said.

We found the skin by searching the term "eightball skin" on KaZaA. The Zip file did not execute on a Windows 98 SE machine, saying it was missing a required DLL file. But on a Windows XP machine, the file executed and popped up a dialog box asking if we wanted to "see some magic."

We clicked on Yes and five more dialog boxes popped up, each one counting down: five, four, three, two, and then one.

When we finished, all of the MP3 files stored on our system were gone. The system began popping up error messages, and we had to reboot the machine.

Steve Trilling from Symantec's Antivirus Research Center says he's seeing more cases of malicious code designed to exploit peer-to-peer networks.

"What differentiates the impact of the code is how successfully they replicate," he says. "In other words, if a program reinstalls itself in a victim's shared drive, it is a better replicator than one that just executes a damaging payload, then expects the victim to manually put the file in their shared file."

The Eightball code doesn't seem to have a very sophisticated distribution mechanism.

So far the major antivirus companies have not addressed this particular trojan. For now, don't search for or download any KaZaA skins named Eightball.

Posted November 26, 2002

[SA_Dave]

This is good stuff Jack! Some sites provide too much similar news, but you've managed to achieve the right balance. When's the newsletter due to begin syndication?

Spyware such as Gator, BonziBUDDY, and Comet Cursor is often surreptitiously bundled with freeware and shareware software that users download from the Internet, and is commonly found in popular peer-to-peer programs, such as KaZaa, BearShare, AudioGalaxy, and others. In the most malicious cases, spyware can perform non-marketing operations, all hidden to the user, including data collection for industrial espionage purposes.

Another reason I can't wait for my Mandrake CDs. Linux is practically immune to virii and trojans if you set it up correctly and aren't constantly logged in as root. No spyware either.

[TankGirl]

Originally posted by JackSpratts
Roxio Closes Napster Deal

Meanwhile, in the Land of the Living Dead....