Proposed Anti-piracy Strategy

[bangbuathong]

Wow, this is some sad, shocking, and vile news. Recent leaked information points the Canadian Conservative Government a participating member in international talks (aka G8 neocon agenda meetings) to develop a new international anti-piracy agreement under the guise of an anti-counterfeiting shroud. The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement would see Canada join the U.S. and the European Union in a coalition against copyright infringement. The leaked anti-counterfeiting strategy purportedly originated from the U.S. government. The talks, taken behind closed doors so that regular people don’t get to know about until it’s too late, will grant almost unlimited powers for the police and government to monitor any and all activities of Canadian file-sharers.

The legislation will encourage ISPs to monitor the online activities of their customers, and report any and all activity that may infringe copyright law. The agreement covers the copying of information or ideas in a wide variety of contexts. For example page three, paragraph one is a “Pirate Bay killer” clause designed to criminalize the non-profit facilitation of unauthorized information exchange on the internet. Border guards and other public security personnel could become copyright police under the deal. They would be charged with checking laptops, iPods and even cellphones for content that “infringes” on copyright laws, such as ripped-off CDs and movies. The guards would determine what infringes copyright. The agreement says any copied content would be open for scrutiny — even if it was copied legally. This new agreement goes way beyond the bound of reasonable, it’s Orwellian, unethical, police-state and Nazi-ideologist. I will do everything in my power to educate the public about this horrible modern atrocity that could come to realization if we do not take a stand immediately. This effects everyone, not just Canadians, this agreement is international covering Japan, Switzerland and the European Commision. Sources 1, 2, 3, 4.

[Crushdepth]

Don't worry about it, its doomed to fail. If you are concerned about privacy just learn to make use of some of the excellent and free industrial-strength encryption technologies that are available, eg:

* Encrypt your whole hard drive or selected files with Truecrypt.

* Set up an encrypted virtual private network in 5 minutes with Hamachi.

* Use password safe to generate and encrypt horrendous random passwords.

* Get a bit torrent client that permits encrypted connections (I think uTorrent does but I'm not sure - I'm not a torrent freak).

[nikster]

It's amazing to see how much influence some interest groups can exert over governments world-wide. Sorry to hear the Canadian government has now sold out as well. The U.S. government of course has been bought a very long time ago...

I mean protecting copyright law is obviously a shell argument - what they really mean is protect the interests of a few media monopolies. Which happen to pay a lot of money to see it get done.

[quiksilva]

If you must use p2p or bit torrent Peer Guardian is a very hand app, it can protect you against people who are known to distribute viruses, and other unwanted connections...

[bangbuathong]

Thanks Crushdepth for the links, as I travel a lot I might consider encrypting. Nothing worse than to surrender my collection of movies to a Border Guard

[Shah Jahan]

the future of anti-piracy will take a two fold approach

music-

to know what is coming- we just have to look at the Zune

the Zune only allows users to listen to copyrighted music

the recording industry will introduce legislation that will forbid the current iPod model - making it illegal to sell a personal music player that will play copyrighted music -

software- with the internet nowdays - there is no excuse to not have connectivity - in order to run an application it will check its 'subscription' versus a server. no check - no can use.

there of course will be cracks and workarounds- but this is only for the %2 who will then be actively hunted

this all coming of course if they can get anybody to care enough which they dont at this point.

[Veazer]

Thanks Crushdepth for the links, as I travel a lot I might consider encrypting. Nothing worse than to surrender my collection of movies to a Border Guard

I was required to surrender the passwords for my encrypted drives when entering the US. Legally i could have refused but i would have been detained and questioned. US customs agents are some of the most arrogant pricks i have ever encountered.

Entering the UK is a different matter, you are legally required to surrender passwords for encrypted drives. Failure to comply could mean a prison sentence of up to two years for cases not involving national security or five years for those that do.

[Crushdepth]

Hmmm...so much for 'land of the free' and all that.

Truecrypt has an interesting 'plausible denyability' [sorry bout the spelling] function you can use to get around that though - it allows you to create an encyrypted partition to store things, which of course appears on the disk and requires a password, and then you can create a second *hidden* encrypted space within that, which is not visible and has a different password. When you mount the partition it asks for 'the password' and then depending on which one you enter, it will either let you into the 'visible' partition or the hidden space inside it.

So, when some self-righteous customs guy demands access to your encrypted files its no problem. You dutifully give him the keys to the outer encrypted partition and he can poke around all he likes, oblivous to the existance of the second 'real' encrypted container. Even if they know Truecrypt and are aware of this function, there is no way to detect the second container based on a one-off inspection of your laptop because the whole container is filled with apparently random junk.

This business about locking people up for not handing over their keys kinds of bothers me though. I use my passwords like physical keys, they aren't things I can remember and if I'm not carrying them with me, well what to do? Anyway, illegal or not, I doubt a jury is going to convict anyone for forgetting a password.