I found this today... Scary!

Copyright Owners May Soon Have the Power to Destroy File-Traders' Computers With No Investigation By Just Saying It Was in Good Faith -'The DMCA Made Me Do It' - According to InternetMovies.com
PR Newswire - Wednesday June 18, 2003



KAHULUI, Hawaii, June 18 /PRNewswire/ -- The following is being issued by InternetMovies.com:

Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Orrin Hatch (Utah-R) has stated his support of legislation and the development of technologies that will remotely destroy computers suspected of illegally downloading copyrighted files from the Internet. According to The Washington Post, he said, "Damaging someone's computer 'may be the only way you can teach somebody about copyrights.' The senator acknowledged Congress would have to enact an exemption for copyright owners from liability for damaging computers."

According to InternetMovies.com, an exemption to federal anti-hacking laws would give copyright owners the power to destroy instead of creating. First the music industry, then the movie industry, and right behind them: all copyright holders. This is America, soon to be land of the free to hack. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) already allows cease and desist orders to be carried out based upon good faith without proper investigation or proof. Michael Rossi, owner of http://www.InternetMovies.com is suing the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, so that proper investigation be read into the DMCA. The MPAA forced their ISP to shut them down after the MPAA accused InternetMovies.com from distributing movies from the future back in 2001, such as "Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King," a movie that is not scheduled for release until December, 2003. Current federal anti-hacking laws maybe challenged by Senator Hatch, for the purpose of copyright holders to take justice into their own hands.

Who is going to replace all the destroyed public schools' computers from copyright holders' good faith attacks? University P2P networks could collapse and also fall victim to collateral damages based on copyright holders' good faith beliefs, not proof. Recently, some Ohio State University students had their computers seized and their Internet privileges taken away based on a good faith belief, but still no proof of any wrongdoing.

SOURCE InternetMovies.com

/CONTACT: Mike Rossi of InternetMovies.com, +1-808-283-2885/

/Web site: http://www.InternetMovies.com /

1) It'll never happen

2) I would criticise this if not the fact that I believe computer hacking should be legal - for everyone.

At the moment incompetent system administrators are seen as the good guys. If people couldnt defend themselves against hacking by making legal threats, they would be forced to defend themselves by actually securing their systems - which is a good outcome.

Of course the idea that copyright holders should be allowed to hack, yet not anyone else is bullshit. On the other hand, "I urm, suspected in very good will, that the nasa satellite I hacked might have had some of my copyrighted material on it" would work as a defence according to the proposed law.

3) Who cares? I mean how much of a n00b do you have to be to be rooted by an RIAA agent. I mean these guys can't keep their own website up for more than a day without it being taken offline by hacktivists.

4) Remotly *DESTROY* a computer? Don't they mean erase some data? Unless they are talking about some very specific modules with buggy bios chips that can be wiped by software, I don't see anyone coming close to actually destroying a PC remotly. Or do they want to pass a legislation that all PCs are required to have a built in "self destruct" circuit connected to a block of plastic explosives, which of course should be remotly activated by anyone who has a spur of the moment belief based on good will ;)

Yep, I heard about this on the car radio yesterday. It's not the way to go in my opinion. Software companies have every right to fight piracy. I think either product activation or some kind of subscription service is about the best to stop it. People will always find ways to share software, but if they can't use it then what's the point?

I see that Symantec will include activation in their 2004 products. Time will tell if it will be any more effective than what Microsoft is using. I am sure as the technology evolves it will be harder to bypass it. Or they could do like RealNetworks and force you to subscribe to use the software. I know Microsoft tested this is other countries with only limited success, but I don't think we've seen the last of it.

To me, I think within 5-10 years piracy will be a much smaller problem. The big software companies are losing billions and will spend whatever it takes to protect their products. And if I was in their shoes, I suppose I would do the same.

It's funny how people who would never think of walking into a store and shoplifting can rationalize sharing software. Kind of makes me stop and think. And look in the mirror :unsure:

The days of software piracy are numbered. So enjoy the ride while you still can. Seems like movies and music sharing will be harder to stop.

MNKid

I agree with Zone. This will NEVER happen.

You can't destroy someone else's property because they stole from you. It's the law. The RIAA and all these record labels also have computer systems. Wait until they start messing with peoples computers and see what happens to them!

Maybe if they put out some decent product, people will pay money for it. They're not losing money because of piracy, but because their products mostly SUCK! Music is a blend of style and substance, unfortunately lately all we've been seeing is style.

Not being the "ubergeek" I might like to be, this was my question "How could they do it?". As Zone-MR has stated they can't actually destroy a computer.

Of course the free ride will be over one day, the software companies are making it more difficult all the time. Hopefully, Hollywood doesn't figure out a way to stop "cheap night" at the movies anytime soon. But as far as destroying your PC, could this be just another scare tactic to instill fear in the unknowing masses?

the only way I can think of that they could easily destroy a machine is this:

most motherboards made in the last few years, that i've used and seen used at least, including a lot of newer oem machines, are able to flash the mobo's bios from windows with an app called winflash. from what i can tell, i'm almost positive it's the same flash routine for all award bioses, and the same routine all ami bioses. they could use a gui less version of that to write 0's to the eeprom, and reboot the machine so that the motherboard never sees the light of day again.

the only problem with that though is they have to get a user to run an exe, just like a virus, and though there will still be the occasional newbie that would run it and send their motherboard, or at least it's bios chip, to the scrap bin, most people that at least have some experience with pc's have had it hammered into their head so much by virtually every company in the pc security market that you shouldn't run an exe unless you know exactly what it's going to do, that they won't run it.

beyond that, completely "destroying" a computer remotely is nearly impossible. without some sort of physical access or remote connection to a machine, they can't. what are they going to do, force microsoft to redesign window's tcp/ip stack so that any specially crafted data sent to a machine that is signed by the RIAA can run any kind of code on the receving machine that it wants? or are they just going to look through the windows source code and find that bug that i believe it was steve ballimer said that NT's message queuing service had during the anti trust trial that if ever found by hackers, it could put every pc running NT in jeopardy of being rooted? i really don't see either of those happening any time soon

1. I read about the RIAA research on this and yes, they're trying to develope MP3s that will wipe a hard drive. Then they let them loose on P2P systems.

2. "It's funny how people who would never think of walking into a store and shoplifting can rationalize sharing software." No rationalization here! I steal from the net 'cause I can! On the other hand, I *bought* 2 CDs this week that I already downloaded @192KPBs because I wanted better quality. An Old Dr.John and the new Fountains of Wayne! Woot!

}---:)

If you ask me.. Thanks for asking. :)

This is a direct result from people feeling comfortable with technology and encouraged to explore it.

The human body, can be hacked, landscaper hack your gardens so they look beautiful. It is the fear that drives this negative ideal. My brother was saying that there is a developing system w/ Kazaa and Morpheus to dump massive amounts of incomplete files on the network, thus slowing them down.

Re: destroying computers..
If you have local access to a machine, you have FULL access to it, their is no question about that.

Remote is something totally different though, a discussion of ports, services, mediums of communication are brought up.

Seph and Zone, however have much more experience and said it much better than I.. :( Oh well...:)

in order for them to be able to destroy a hard drive through an mp3, all of the following would have to be true

1: the mp3's headers are correct, enough so that a player would recognize the header of the file as mp3, and play it, but also have a malformed header to exploit....

2: the player has to have a flaw to let an mp3 run code

3: zone is hands down the better coder than me, so i may be wrong, but, the only way they could destroy a drive while windows is running on it would be assembly, they would have to directly interact with it through assembly language and wipe it from there, which would cause the machine to reboot, obviously

that said, if there is a flaw in the player you're using, what's to keep other hackers from figuring that flaw that the RIAA's technology is using, and start spreading viruses that way? the flaw would be found in a day or two tops i'm sure, and the hole would have to be patched by whoever's software it was, else every script kiddie in the world is going to exploit it sooner or later

I only think its scary as the whole idea was spoken of.

I did in fact have a virus once that fubar'd my bios - back in the days of windows 98 so I dont know if that can still happen in todays computer world.

And Adam, need I remind you of that nifty little program that actually did erase a hard drive?

I dont believe it will ever happen - but ffs for some hot shot corporate world to even consider/discuss it :blink:

ummmm, you do actually, can't remember which one you're talking about, but, would it run under NT? the reason i said what i said about assembly is because if any compiled program tries to directly access a hard drive under nt / 2k / xp (try the dos version of norton disk doctor as an example), windows will popup a message saying x program is trying to directly access the hard disk, and you can either ignore it and let the program run or terminate it

in order for them to be able to destroy a hard drive through an mp3, all of the following would have to be true

1: the mp3's headers are correct, enough so that a player would recognize the header of the file as mp3, and play it, but also have a malformed header to exploit....

2: the player has to have a flaw to let an mp3 run code

3: zone is hands down the better coder than me, so i may be wrong, but, the only way they could destroy a drive while windows is running on it would be assembly, they would have to directly interact with it through assembly language and wipe it from there, which would cause the machine to reboot, obviously

that said, if there is a flaw in the player you're using, what's to keep other hackers from figuring that flaw that the RIAA's technology is using, and start spreading viruses that way? the flaw would be found in a day or two tops i'm sure, and the hole would have to be patched by whoever's software it was, else every script kiddie in the world is going to exploit it sooner or later [/b][/quote]
Like I said, the RIAA is spending $$$ on NEW technology. I'm sure whatever they come up with will be defeated by a simple filter but the BIG story is, a US senator is considering giving the RIAA permission to release these bugs through P2P systems.

What we have here is the software industry seeking permission to LEGALY spread viruses! I can't wait until some chump noob at the pentagon downs a new Metallica MP3 and wipes out all of our Nuclear Secrets! :D :D :D


}---:)

It's ok people. The senator just got caught with unlicensed copyrighted software on his OWN webpage, and a link to an X-RATED website....

That depends if you mean destroy or erase. Two entirely different things. Any program can delete data providing it is run with administrator privellages. It needs to delete data file-by-file, which takes longer than simply overwriting the first few sectors, but its possible none the less.

What programming language its written in is irrelevant. All compilers first translate your code to assembly language, and then its encoded in a bytecode understandable by your proccessor. The thing is windows intercepts requests to access the hard drive directly. That can be gotten around by installing a custom driver that provides raw disk access functionallity (although not easy to do transparently on new windows versions). Not that its even neccessary to use raw sector access to delete data, the windows API includes functions to delete files etc.

Destroying a hard drive is much more complicated. There may be flaws in individual models, but there is no standard "self-destruct" command present in all harddrives ;). Some viruses attempted to write to the same sector over and over continiously until it got 'worn out', but thats a crude and very unpredictable method, and the hdd activity will get noticed weeks before it causes damage.

And the concept of an MP3 doing this is again ridiculous. There may have been vulnerabilites in MP3 frame parsing on some players, but they tend to get fixed very shortly after they are discovered, and a malicious MP3 probably wont affect more than a tiny fraction of PCs - not to mention as soon as its hyped up, everyone will patch their players or install an AV program, and itll be the end of the threat. Knowing the RIAA's technical skillz, their malicious MP3 is probably a "Really Good!1!1! - New nude pix britney!1!.mp3.EXE".

It will never happen, and I am sure the RIAA is aware of this. The thing is they are winning a different battle - if rumours like this circulate, many computer novices will believe them. Somewhere out there there will be parents stopping their kids from trading MP3's because they read that it will destroy their PC. Somewhere there will be company managments who decide to crack down on sharing, because they are mislead they will lose property. These tactics are entirely psychological. They do not need to actually have any of this malicious capability - they just want people to believe they do.

found on: *http://www.securityfocus.com/columnists/168

:D :D :D

/JD

Ya, those damn kids... :lol:

Their very own mainstream music is going to hell because people have discovered other artists via p2p. And only cheapass pop music is owned by the RIAA.