MPAA College Toolkit Raises Privacy, Security Concerns 188
An anonymous reader writes "The Motion Picture Association of America last month sent letters to the presidents of 25 major universities (pdf), urging them to download and install a 'university toolkit' to help identify students who were downloading/sharing movie files. The Washington Post's Security Fix blog reports that any university that installs the software could be placing a virtual wiretap on their networks for the MPAA (and the rest of the world) to listen in on all of the school's traffic. From the story: 'The MPAA also claims that using the tool on a university network presents "no privacy issues — the content of traffic is never examined or displayed.' That statement, however, is misleading. Here's why: The toolkit sets up an Apache Web server on the user's machine. It also automatically configures all of the data and graphs gathered about activity on the local network to be displayed on a Web page, complete with ntop-generated graphics showing not only bandwidth usage generated by each user on the network, but also the Internet address of every Web site each user has visited. Unless a school using the tool has firewalls on the borders of its network designed to block unsolicited Internet traffic — and a great many universities do not — that Web server is going to be visible and accessible by anyone with a Web browser."
Re:Xubuntu (Score:5, Funny)
Give kids a break (Score:4, Funny)
Thanks,
The NWO
Re:Xubuntu (Score:5, Funny)
Re:MPAA Chasing the Money? (Score:5, Funny)
You must DEFINITELY be new here!
mpaa urges students to install mpaaBuddy, too (Score:5, Funny)
Other features include, an integrated download tracker, movie-related themes, desktops, screen savers, and cute, animated emoticons, bearing a resemblance to top-selling actors. Also included is a desktop search utility that indexes a hard drive's contents in order to allow the user to easily perform searches.
While initial response to the program has been positive, a few early users complain that the program is buggy. "The program keeps changing my home page to a crappy MPAA home page," said one teenager who wished to remain anonymous out of fear of a MPAA-sponsored lawsuit. There have also been complaints of an increase in pop-up advertising.
Harvard (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Open letter to the MAFIAA (Score:1, Funny)
I hope this applies to paying taxes too.
Re:Open letter to the MAFIAA (Score:4, Funny)
Utinam coniurati te in foro interficiant.
1984! 1984! (Score:1, Funny)
Re:Xubuntu (Score:1, Funny)
Re:Open letter to the MAFIAA (Score:2, Funny)