XML Encryption

Two words that don't belong together. XML and encryption should be different layers of the protocol stack.

99.99% of the time, any encryption at all will keep your neighbors out.

St_Francis_P: 99.99% of the time, any encryption at all will keep your neighbors out.

I am the 1%.

Weaver95: St_Francis_P: 99.99% of the time, any encryption at all will keep your neighbors out.

I am the 1%.



/Yarrr, matey.

lets just say that comcast's efforts to crack down on file trading are 1. laughable and 2. doomed to failure. there are 7 hotspots I can reach from my living room - 2 are unsecured and the remainder use weak encryption so weak they might as well not have bothered.

yeah...tracking bandwidth is really gonna catch file traders...esp when they can use any wifi hotspot in their damn neighborhood essentially at will...

Wi-Fi theft is wrong and should be illegal. Quick, someone call the police

oh wait.. nevermind

Godscrack: Wi-Fi theft is wrong and should be illegal. Quick, someone call the police

oh wait.. nevermind

Be fair. He was just showing us how easy it would be for a pervert to get child porn.

Weaver95: St_Francis_P: 99.99% of the time, any encryption at all will keep your neighbors out.

I am the 1% .01%.

ftfy

Schadenfreude ist die schoenste Freude

RIAA doesn't have to prove a case beyond a reasonable doubt.

An IP address is good enough to start a case. During pretrial proceedings their lawyers ask you to state, under penalty of perjury, whether you copied the music. They subpoena your computer to have forensics look for evidence. When you say you've never heard of Kazaa and your kids or ex must have done it they send their investigators to check on these things. At trial they show evidence that the files came from your address, you wiped your hard driver before handing it over, you have previously written about Kazaa, and the people you fingered deny involvement. And the jury fines you seven figures for being so blatantly dishonest.

(The preceding paragraph is the Thomas case in a nutshell.)

Here's an interesting story about a guy who was really determined to copy a bunch of files and hid a computer in a closet at MIT to take advantage of MIT's site license: http://tech.mit.edu/V131/N30/swartz.html

ApatheticMonkey: Schadenfreude ist die schoenste Freude: Weaver95: lets just say that comcast's efforts to crack down on file trading are 1. laughable and 2. doomed to failure. there are 7 hotspots I can reach from my living room - 2 are unsecured and the remainder use weak encryption so weak they might as well not have bothered.

yeah...tracking bandwidth is really gonna catch file traders...esp when they can use any wifi hotspot in their damn neighborhood essentially at will...

Not sure how these laws work in the U.S. so out of curiosity, say you go to court being sued by the RIAA. If you have an unsecured Wi-Fi connection, how do they prove you were the one doing the file sharing? Or is the end port where the responsibility sits?

Say you have a protected Wi-Fi connection and the same happens. How do they "prove" it was you? Do they have to find the files on one of your computers or is simply the fact that your Wi-Fi connection has a password enough for "beyond reasonable doubt"?

And lastly, say you went all tinfoil and took a small HTPC or other micro-ATX box, hid it somewhere behind a wall, etc, with no evidence of it lying around. The police serve a search warrant, take your laptop/desktop and don't find any of the shared files on your computers because all storage of torrented content is done on the hidden PC. What case would the RIAA have?

Well, the evidence would be that there's a computer hooked up to your network that they can't find. After all, you have to be able to access that computer somehow. Unless you have USB ports and a display built into your wall (which they'll probably find), they'll see that there's a computer sharing files on the network, and they'll start looking. I wouldn't be surprised if there was a warrant that would allow them to start knocking holes in the wall to find it.

Copyright infringement cases are civil cases, not criminal, so the police cannot serve warrants.

I wouldn't be surprised if there was a warrant that would allow them to start knocking holes in the wall to find it.

With a typical search warrant police can knock holes in anything big enough to hide what they are looking for. Plastic baggies are often used to package drugs. Police doing a drug bust put plastic baggies on the list of items to search for. They can take apart anything, including a wall, that is big enough to hide a plastic baggie and might have one concealed within.

In a civil case the cops rarely come calling. Instead you are served with a court order to turn over your computer(s) for forensic examination. If you turn over the wrong computer, or not all of them, it's up to the other party to notice. If the other party does notice, you probably lose the case and possibly go to jail.

But how will they know if they are even serving the warrant to the correct person?

If it goes that route, they'll start to worry when the computer forensics guy finds a load of porn instead of a load of music. Or if it's a movie suit, when they find a load of pirated music instead of a load of pirated porn.

It is possible to set people up for an offense they didn't commit. It is also possible to be caught setting people up. IIRC, somebody got busted within the past year trying to set up his neighbor for child porn.

Weaver95: lets just say that comcast's efforts to crack down on file trading are 1. laughable and 2. doomed to failure. there are 7 hotspots I can reach from my living room - 2 are unsecured and the remainder use weak encryption so weak they might as well not have bothered.

yeah...tracking bandwidth is really gonna catch file traders...esp when they can use any wifi hotspot in their damn neighborhood essentially at will...

Exactly. If I wanted to, I could easily tap into the nearby Subway. According to a couple of my neighbors, they have an execeptionally strong signal.

Good luck. I'm behind seven proxies.