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Anti-piracy vigilantes track file sharers
Kevin Poulsen, SecurityFocus 2004-03-18

A pair of coders nurturing a deep antipathy for software pirates set off a controversy Thursday when they went public with a months-old experiment to trick file sharers into running a Trojan horse program that chastises users and reports back to a central server.

Comments Mode:
Good for them 2004-03-19
nosebreaker.com (1 replies)
Good for them? - Questionable Ethics 2004-03-20
Anonymous (4 replies)
Good for them? - Questionable Ethics 2004-03-20
Anonymous (1 replies)
Questionable Ethics? it's everywhere 2004-03-20
Anonymous (1 replies)
Questionable Ethics? it's everywhere 2004-03-21
Anonymous (1 replies)
Anti-piracy vigilantes track file sharers 2004-03-19
Zach (1 replies)
This is a two-sided case. Should people pirate software? No. Should your private information (IP address and the like) be recorded and on public display? No. I think this project would have served its purpose if they only posted how many times it was executed and the time spent open after said execution.

As far as laws being broken, who really cares? They aren't causing any harm, except in the way of posting the IP information for each user. If they only gathered anonymous statistics about the programs usage, this would be OK in my book.

I don't think anyone really pays attention to those EUA, so even if one was included, I don't think that would really make a difference. Personally, anything downloaded off of a file sharing network should be examined for virii and your firewall should be up to prevent information from being sent over your network connection. If the file was clean, which only means it is not a wide-spread virus, then you could still run the program with minimal risk while keeping your privacy since your firewall would have detected its attempts to communicate to the outside world.

The bigger question here is, "Why weren't the users running a firewall that monitored both incoming and outgoing traffic?"

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Link to this comment: http://www.securityfocus.com/comments/articles/8279/25437#25437
ROTFLMAO! 2004-03-19
Penguinisto
Breaking the law 2004-03-19
Anonymous (1 replies)
Breaking the law 2004-03-23
Anonymous
Anti-piracy vigilantes track file sharers 2004-03-19
Anonymous (1 replies)
Anti-piracy vigilantes track file sharers 2004-03-19
Anonymous (1 replies)
Anti-piracy vigilantes track file sharers 2004-03-19
Anonymous (1 replies)
This is stupid, here is why. 2004-03-19
Anonymous (1 replies)
This is stupid, here is why. 2004-03-20
Anonymous
Anti-piracy vigilantes track file sharers 2004-03-19
Jim Reading tomshardware
Anti-piracy vigilantes track file sharers 2004-03-20
Anonymous (1 replies)
Definatly illegal, definatly a virus 2004-03-21
Legal software user (1 replies)
McAfee agrees 2004-03-23
Anonymous
Why ? 2004-03-23
(hidden)
Downloader beware. 2004-03-24
Anonymous
Anti-piracy vigilantes track file sharers 2004-03-25
Darkness(TrustyFiles user)
Anti-piracy vigilantes track file sharers 2006-08-23
Buddha in Cayman







 

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