31 October 2016

Anti-Piracy Plans Harm the Worldwide Web

 
 
Tech firms urged the US government not to blindly follow the input of the entertainment industry regarding online piracy threats. The representative of Google, Amazon and Verisign warned that it could harm the Internet.
 
0946676cdcf14c1b71f4e6c0ddc878ef.th.png


The US Trade Representative received annual “notorious markets” submissions from a number of copyright holder groups, using them in the Special 301 report, which lists the threats to various copyright industries. The report normally includes well-known piracy websites, but now intermediaries are also increasingly added to the mix. For instance, this year domain name registrars were identified as possible piracy facilitators, along with hosting providers and CDN provider Cloudflare.

However, the Internet Infrastructure Coalition believes that the inclusion of these tech firms is a dangerous development and outlines these concerns to the USTR. The Coalition warned that if the anti-piracy associations had their way, the entire web could have been put at risk. The problem is that the anti-piracy agencies “vilify” specific technologies instead of the marketplaces – for instance, MPAA claims that Cloudflare is a service creating “obstacles to enforcement” by helping pirate websites to “hide”, but the IIC says that this is inappropriate, as technologies themselves cannot be bad actors.

Besides, the tech firms also argue that the submissions reveal a misinterpretation of the domain name registrars’ obligations under the Registrar Accreditation Agreement. The entertainment industry groups would like domain registrars to immediately suspend domain names accused of copyright violation, but most of them refuse to do so without a court order. The Coalition says that the vilification of technology and misconstruing of the Agreement are aimed at forcing the web infrastructure companies to act as intermediaries in IP disputes, although this is not the way to fight copyright infringement and not the purpose of the Special 301 process.

The tech firms emphasize that billions of dollars are at stake if the US Government steers policies in the wrong direction, because creating regulatory hurdles to the industry’s progress will impact the overall economy dependent on the Internet infrastructure industry.

Thanks to TorrentFreak for providing the source of the article.

Posted by:QR

Recent DDoS Attack Was Largest Ever



Recent DDoS Attack Was Largest Ever

Added: Saturday, October 29th, 2016
Category: Recent Headlines Involving File Sharing > Current Events
Tags:ISP, Download, BitTorrent, MPAA, RIAA, copyright-infringement, file-sharing, Torrenting
 
 
The cybersecurity experts said that the recent cyberattack responsible for taking down much of the US Internet was caused by Mirai botnet and was estimated as the largest of its kind in history. The botnet targeted the servers of Dyn, a company controlling much of the DNS infrastructure, which consequently affected largest websites including Twitter, Netflix, Reddit, the Guardian, CNN and others in Europe and the United States.

The outage was caused by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, performed by a network of computers infected with malware, which coordinated into bombarding a server with traffic until it is overwhelmed. The Mirai botnet was detected as the “primary source of malicious attack traffic” and differs from other botnets by its structure: instead of being made up of computers, it consists of the so-called “Internet of Things” (web cameras, printers and other web-connected devices).

Due to a huge number of Internet-connected devices, Mirai attacks were much larger than ordinary DDoS attacks. Its extent was estimated as involving 100,000 malicious endpoints, and the attack strength reached 1.2Tbps. The industry experts estimate the attack roughly twice as powerful as any similar attack on record.

The same botnet was used in the attack against the information security blog Krebs, which topped out at 665 Gbps. Security specialists say there is no real strategy to combat cyber insecurity of Internet-connected devices. Apparently, a non-state group exploited the problem on such a significant scale, and a well-resourced state actor could do much more with the botnet, and the consequences are hard to predict.

Posted by: QR