RIAA student attack foiled
p2pnet.net news:- The corporate music cartel has a problem US universities which want to resist the Big 4’s RIAA should be aware of.
The RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) would love to sue 36 University of Nebraska-Lincoln students.
If only it could find them.
Because there’s, “One small problem,” says the Omaha World-Herald, namely, “the computer network was unintentionally designed to protect such music pirates.”
Huh?
Yup. It, “automatically changes a campus computer’s Internet protocol address each time that computer is turned on,” says the story.
So can the RIAA track them down in any other way?
“Probably not,” the story has the university’s cio, Walter Weir, stating, and going on, “If they can’t give us any more information, I don’t know how in the heck anyone can find ‘em.”
“RIAA spokeswoman Jenni Engebretsen (upper right) said the NU problem is ‘unusual and inconsistent’ with what the recording industry had heard from other schools since it announced last month that it would file music piracy lawsuits against 400 students at 13 U.S. universities,” says the World-Herald, going on, “She criticized the university for failing to keep computer records that would have made it easy to track down the UNL offenders.”
“One would think universities would understand the need to retain these records,” she said.
Would one?
Engebretsen is also deeply upset with the University of Wisconsin which had the temerity to tell the RIAA to take a hike, refusing to be cowed by Big 4 threats or to give in to their extortion.
Interestingly, “Several RIAA employees and a local lobbyist met with UNL Chancellor Harvey Perlman last summer, trying to convince him that the university should buy software that blocks peer-to-peer networking, the technology that allows students to pirate music,” says the story, adding:
“Perlman and other university officials have thus far resisted, citing the software’s cost and pointing out that peer-to-peer technology has many legal academic uses.”
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UPDATE: March 21, 2007
The RIAA has sent out another 405 blackmail letters to 23 universities across the US. Click here for more.
Also See:
Omaha World-Herald – UNL proves safe haven for music pirates, March 16, 2007
take a hike – University ignores RIAA blackmail, March 20, 2007
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Tired of being treated like a criminal? They depend on you, not the other way around. Don’t buy their ‘product’. Do bug your local politicians. Use emails, snail-mail, phone calls, faxes, IM, stop them in the street, blog. And if you’re into organizing, organize petitions, organize demonstrations and then turn up on your local political rep’s doorstep, making sure you’ve contacted your local tv/radio station/newspaper in advance. Don’t just complain. Do something!
March 20th, 2007 at 10:43 pm
This is unusual. How would a network be able to detect when a computer is turned off? I suppose it could detect when it stops receiving pings from the specific computer based on its MAC address, and then change the IP address when it detects pings again, but I don’t otherwise see how this would be possible.
March 20th, 2007 at 11:31 pm
Basically you’re right. The uni sounds like it’s using a DHCP server which hands out IP addresses to the pcs when they start up. After a preset period of time with no traffic from that IP, the server puts that IP back in the pool of available IP’s, at the end of the list.
Each time a pc starts the DHCP server assigns it the first free IP address. Since the pc’s are never started and shut down in exactly the same order every day, they’re almost never going to get the same IP 2 days running. Also the list of available IP’s is sorted in time/date order, the first one that was freed up is the first one that gets handed out. It’s not numeric order or anything like that.
The only reason i know this is because it’s how my ISP does it. I’m frankly astounded that unis or American isp’s would use static IP’s at all. It’s bad enough keeping track of what device has what IP with only 200 or so pc’s and some printers to deal with, let alone tens or hundreds of thousands of customers pc’s.
March 21st, 2007 at 10:44 am
This is why once every month I manually change all static IP’s on my companies network. It first protects privacy and second helps me clean up any junk devices on the network.