Solve : Report proposes using malware to combat piracy?

1.	Solve : Report proposes using malware to combat piracy?
Answer» Was there no lesson learned from the Sony rootkit? Quote from: Emsisoft blog Just a few days ago the “Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property” released their 84-page report. Amidst a large amount of rather naive ideas there is one idea that strikes us as particularly insane: The report proposes to use malware to figure out whether or not you are pirating intellectual property and in case you do, lock your computer and take all your files hostage until you call the police and confess your crime. Full story: Seriously? USA to legalize rootkits, spyware, ransomware and trojans to combat piracy?Absolutely ridiculous! I don't pirate anything and I don't support piracy but why should I allow unauthorised code to run on my machine for whatever reason? Quote from: camerongray on May 30, 2013, 08:08:04 AM Absolutely ridiculous! I don't pirate anything and I don't support piracy but why should I allow unauthorised code to run on my machine for whatever reason? It's for your own protection! They're LOOKING out for Your best interests, of course! As to the report: That is downright hilarious. I love how they don't even know what entrapment is, nor do they seem to realize that just because their malware is designed for a purpose they think is good doesn't magically make it legal or tip the moral scale somehow into their favour. Particularly since that malware is exactly the same in concept to the Sony rootkit EF mentioned. Before:"Hmm, let's use malware to try to protect our intellectual property" "Well that didn't go well, people are pretty pissed... OK let's not do that" Now: "Hmm, let's use malware to try to protect our intellectual property" Needless to say, the rest of that story writes itself.Hard to believe. "It takes a thief to catch a thief ." Using that kind of thinking, expect that police academy candidates must first- ... have a criminal record. The good thing here is that antivirus vendors don't have a separate category for "good" or "bad" malware. If it's malicious it's malicious. Period. If this anti-piracy SOFTWARE goes LIVE then it shouldn't be long before your antivirus finds it.And here I thought it was bad enough that some music CD's use to disable your CD ROM back in the day so you couldnt play the music CD through a computer, but also had to reboot the darn system to get your CD ROM drive back. This is the first time I ever experienced an antipiracy tool embedded in a CD that would take your system hostage to disable the optical drive. In fact it disabled the drive so well that you couldnt even eject the tray to remove the CD until the system was rebooted and you popped the tray out before the OS loaded so that it wouldnt read this music CD again and disable the drive! I thought it was my system until i tried it on another computer and it too disabled the CD ROM of the computer!!! The worst part about this antipiracy feature was that, I was not pirating it, I bought this music CD on my lunch break and just wanted to listen to this music CD at work. It was truely intended to only be played in CD Players and not on a computer! It played fine in my car so the CD wasnt corrupt and it didnt have any videos included like some CD's use to INCLUDE web/video content.Come to think of it, you could almost argue that things like SecuROM and SafeDisc are forms of malware in this way too.Thinking of it like that then I guess there are actually two categories of malware. "bad" and "acceptable" But the acceptable category only survives without detection because the users know what they are running and it isn't actually hijacking anything, it's just blocking features. The bad category is just the opposite. That's a pretty bad example I'm sure but it's what I'm going with as of now. In the case of things like SecuROM and SafeDisc, while it's not really something a person would willingly install, it sort of comes with the game, so you either have that extra bit, or you don't play the game. And it's not actively Malicious, since all it does is make sure the game executable is valid and the CD/DVD is in the drive, and that it's not running through an ISO emulator or somesuch. This report proposal, however, basically WANTS to set malware loose, designed explicitly to lock down people's PCs. I think I have to agree that is a completely different league. SafeDisc and SecuROM are very slight douchebaggery (but they have a reasonable purpose); having malware loose designed for the sole purpose of trying to screw people around has to be at an Admiral in the douchebag fleet.We don't classify websites that block certain things like right-click and copy/paste as browser hijackers. They just have "security" features to protect their content much like SafeDisc and SecuROM use features to protect their content. But if a website or software installs code on the computer or takes control of your browser without your consent then it is just the opposite of security features and is malware. I don't think it takes an expert to figure out the difference and I'm sure the 'Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property' are considered experts. They should know better.

Answer»

Was there no lesson learned from the Sony rootkit?

Quote from: Emsisoft blog

Just a few days ago the “Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property” released their 84-page report. Amidst a large amount of rather naive ideas there is one idea that strikes us as particularly insane: The report proposes to use malware to figure out whether or not you are pirating intellectual property and in case you do, lock your computer and take all your files hostage until you call the police and confess your crime.

Full story: Seriously? USA to legalize rootkits, spyware, ransomware and trojans to combat piracy?Absolutely ridiculous! I don't pirate anything and I don't support piracy but why should I allow unauthorised code to run on my machine for whatever reason? Quote from: camerongray on May 30, 2013, 08:08:04 AM

Absolutely ridiculous! I don't pirate anything and I don't support piracy but why should I allow unauthorised code to run on my machine for whatever reason?

It's for your own protection! They're LOOKING out for Your best interests, of course!

As to the report: That is downright hilarious. I love how they don't even know what entrapment is, nor do they seem to realize that just because their malware is designed for a purpose they think is good doesn't magically make it legal or tip the moral scale somehow into their favour. Particularly since that malware is exactly the same in concept to the Sony rootkit EF mentioned.

Before:"Hmm, let's use malware to try to protect our intellectual property" "Well that didn't go well, people are pretty pissed... OK let's not do that"
Now: "Hmm, let's use malware to try to protect our intellectual property"

Needless to say, the rest of that story writes itself.Hard to believe. "It takes a thief to catch a thief ."
Using that kind of thinking, expect that police academy candidates must first-
... have a criminal record.
The good thing here is that antivirus vendors don't have a separate category for "good" or "bad" malware. If it's malicious it's malicious. Period. If this anti-piracy SOFTWARE goes LIVE then it shouldn't be long before your antivirus finds it.And here I thought it was bad enough that some music CD's use to disable your CD ROM back in the day so you couldnt play the music CD through a computer, but also had to reboot the darn system to get your CD ROM drive back. This is the first time I ever experienced an antipiracy tool embedded in a CD that would take your system hostage to disable the optical drive. In fact it disabled the drive so well that you couldnt even eject the tray to remove the CD until the system was rebooted and you popped the tray out before the OS loaded so that it wouldnt read this music CD again and disable the drive!

I thought it was my system until i tried it on another computer and it too disabled the CD ROM of the computer!!!

The worst part about this antipiracy feature was that, I was not pirating it, I bought this music CD on my lunch break and just wanted to listen to this music CD at work. It was truely intended to only be played in CD Players and not on a computer! It played fine in my car so the CD wasnt corrupt and it didnt have any videos included like some CD's use to INCLUDE web/video content.Come to think of it, you could almost argue that things like SecuROM and SafeDisc are forms of malware in this way too.Thinking of it like that then I guess there are actually two categories of malware. "bad" and "acceptable"

But the acceptable category only survives without detection because the users know what they are running and it isn't actually hijacking anything, it's just blocking features. The bad category is just the opposite.

That's a pretty bad example I'm sure but it's what I'm going with as of now. In the case of things like SecuROM and SafeDisc, while it's not really something a person would willingly install, it sort of comes with the game, so you either have that extra bit, or you don't play the game. And it's not actively Malicious, since all it does is make sure the game executable is valid and the CD/DVD is in the drive, and that it's not running through an ISO emulator or somesuch.

This report proposal, however, basically WANTS to set malware loose, designed explicitly to lock down people's PCs. I think I have to agree that is a completely different league. SafeDisc and SecuROM are very slight douchebaggery (but they have a reasonable purpose); having malware loose designed for the sole purpose of trying to screw people around has to be at an Admiral in the douchebag fleet.We don't classify websites that block certain things like right-click and copy/paste as browser hijackers. They just have "security" features to protect their content much like SafeDisc and SecuROM use features to protect their content. But if a website or software installs code on the computer or takes control of your browser without your consent then it is just the opposite of security features and is malware.

I don't think it takes an expert to figure out the difference and I'm sure the 'Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property' are considered experts. They should know better.

Solve : Report proposes using malware to combat piracy?

Discussion

No Comment Found

Related InterviewSolutions

Reply to Comment