Operation Payback Shuts Down IFPI Site 376
newtley writes "Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony Music's main IFPI (International Federation of Phonographic Industry) website is down. Not coincidentally, there's an Operation Payback post addressing the Pirate Bay crew's lost sentencing appeal: 'Dear IFPI, MAFIAA and other parasites, The recent verdict in the Swedish Appeal Court (ThePirateBay spectrial) provoked this statement from Operation: Payback. We emphasize our statement with a Distributed Denial-of-Service attack aimed at the IFPI's website.'"
Doing RIAA's bidding! (Score:3, Interesting)
then there is the 'noncriminal', legal ways of doing that eh ? like, battling them in courts, where they have multiples of money to win over you ? excuse me but what you speak of can only work in an ideal world.
I suspect that just like there are provocateurs sent by the police in peaceful anti-globalizing demonstrations, there are provocateurs at the source of these kinds of vengeful, reactive actions. And there is no way to insure that there isn't. These actions are in now way controllable under a sensible strategy. The goal of this is pretty simple: present any protest against corporate abuse as the doing of unlawful elements, and not as the expression of public opinion.
This goes exactly against of what you are pretending here: you say that there is no legal way to advance the views of public ownership of its culture, yet public opinion HAS an effect, since so much effort is put into skewing and misrepresenting it, and stupid actions such as this Operations Payback go a long way to do RIAA and MPAA's bidding to discredit it.
Stupid stupid stupid! And fucking naive.
Re:Well, somebody's showing... (Score:3, Interesting)
The pretense of accountability that is common in western nations is not adequate for me to believe there is a difference between the two. In practice there is zero accountability.
I'd say all parties involved are being assholes. But I am much more afraid of being on the wrong side of the government than anonymous. That tells me the government makes a better use of fear and intimidation and is therefore the bigger bully. Maybe anonymous would do the same if they could, but they can't.
As far as what is right, it's not right for people to be imprisoned for sharing copyrighted works. It's not right to DDOS someone's server. But I don't really wish to argue about which is less right.
Re:Rebels leading the charge! Freedom fighters uni (Score:5, Interesting)
The pie is growing, but the wealthy are taking [talkingpointsmemo.com] the vast majority of the increase:
The wealth disparity itself is a problem, but worse is the corrosive effect this wealth has on our political structure: those with money and influence are increasingly able to purchase government policies that further increase their share of the pie even at the expense of the total size of the pie [wikipedia.org]. It's a positive feedback loop: more wealth leads to more power, and more power leads to greater wealth. This feedback is why I'm so dour about our prospects: the cycle seems impossible to break.
The little things we agitate about today: censorship, abuse of copyright, overzealous airport security, our foreign wars, the loss of our manufacturing jobs, are all caused by the increasing ability of the wealthy to pervert government to work in their favor. When power is concentrated in a few hands, the result is inevitably selfish exercise of that power and poor outcomes.
Re:Rebels leading the charge! Freedom fighters uni (Score:2, Interesting)
It's also a myth that income is proportional to productivity. The market, via the participants, does not work rationally, nor appropriately in a ton of situations. The invisible hand is no match for irrational behavior of the masses, especially behavior instigated though advertising.
You may have been able to argue better for the market in the past, but when you have one group, producers, actively manipulating consumers, through the application of psychology and focus groups, you're going to end up with insane wealth inequalities.
The simple fact is that no person, regardless of any factor, should be able to and/or need to make more than, say, a million per year. it's DESPICABLE that one person could want and justify having so much wealth at the DIRECT expense of others, regardless of whether those others "deserve" it or not.
Simply put your an idiot for believing that more than a small group of people choose to be poor. For every millionaire there are 10 people who work twice as hard and yet live in poverty.
Re:yeah (Score:1, Interesting)
ddos is not vengeful, its protesting, just like hundreds of people holding signs stop people from going inside, and media attention
please (Score:4, Interesting)
standard of living and distribution of income are two irrelevant concepts.
standard of living changes with technology and times, and is not dependent on distribution of income.
currently, average american lives in far better standards than a medieval serf. but, s/he gets FAR less than the economy, than a mere medieval serf got in middle ages :
http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html [ucsc.edu]
therefore, a medieval serf's standard of living, COMPARED to the max standard of living in middle ages, comes much higher than the standard of living of an average american, compared to the max standard of living currently.
you need to brush up on your statistics knowledge. the one which does not exist, that is.
Re:Well, somebody's showing... (Score:3, Interesting)
Y'know what? It may be called "out of line" by someone, but I'd say the O:P operations are the modern-day equivalent of a lunch counter sit-in, or Rosa Parks refusing to give up her seat.
We need more people doing this, not less.
Re:yeah (Score:2, Interesting)
Ok, fine. Let’s take your business analogy.
Your store is giving away free samples. A bunch of griefers come into your store, take a free sample, and leave. To add insult to injury, they just deposit the samples in your waste bin on their way out. There are so many of them that you can’t give samples to your customers, not to mention your waste bins are full. What’s more, you don’t really have any good way of determining who’s a customer and who’s not until it’s already too late. As a result, you are actually forced to close your doors, costing you a lot of money both in lost samples and in loss of customers while your doors are closed.
I fail to see any violence. In fact, I fail to see anything the griefers did that you can legitimately call wrong. They played within the rules you set forth. Your rules just sucked.
Re:Rebels leading the charge! Freedom fighters uni (Score:5, Interesting)
This is a very dangerous kettle of fish that is being passed around here. I really don't want to reach my hand in, but here it goes anyway.
The previous poster about FDR (being a crook) is absolutely correct. Even a cursory examination of the impacts of his political policies during the depression reveals that unemployment skyrocketed after the formation of the new deal, and that living conditions took serious turns for the worse. Further, he enacted the atrocity that is the federal reserve bank, against the bitter pleas of more sensible men at the time, due to strong influences from foreign powers. (The run-away inflationary cycle of which is what is at least partially responsible for the banking failures of the past few years.) In addition, he created an executive order that seized all privately held gold, and transferred it to government coffers to back the new deal.
The multitudes of destitute people made for a very willing public, eager to be saved from the outcome of their own panic. (the 1930s bank crash resulted from panicked crowds making runs on banks. The natural way that banks make money is by lending more than they have in the vault, and depending upon interest payments for the returns on investment. If everyone makes a run on the bank, the bank will be caught with its britches down, and default on its extended credit. At the time there was no protecting agencies like the FDIC, since there was no national reserve bank. [yes, I called it an atrocity, I'll get to that later.] Because of this the banks of the era HAD to be more sensible in their loaning practices. Despite this, the bank scare caught them at a disadvantage, So, as a matter of consequence, the bank and loan industry crumbled under its own debts, resulting in a massive deflationary spiral, leaving millions unemployed, and many more homeless as people with mortgages got foreclosed on by banks desperate to pay off their debts to remain solvent. Essentially, a substantial amount of the currency that was PREVIOUSLY in circulation, was now stuffed into wealthy people's mattresses. As such, there was a dramatic currency shortage. (Deflation.)
These people were desperate, and would have eagerly accepted a deal from the devil himself. They got pretty much that with FDR and his new deal.
The federal reserve bank.
This new agency had been tried before. It was successfully eliminated by Andrew Jackson, under the incarnation of the "Central Bank". Andrew Jackson is the ONLY president in the history of the united states to pay off the national debt, by halting all deficit spending, paying off it's debts, and dissolving the bank's charter to make more loans. This prior president had some rather choice words to say about it in fact.
** ... are but premonitions of the fate that await the American people should they be deluded into a perpetuation of this institution or the establishment of another like it."
"The bold effort the present (central) bank had made to control the government
**
"Gentlemen, I have had men watching you for a long time and I am convinced that you have used the funds of the bank to speculate in the breadstuffs of the country. When you won, you divided the profits amongst you, and when you lost, you charged it to the bank. You tell me that if I take the deposits from the bank and annul its charter, I shall ruin ten thousand families. That may be true, gentlemen, but that is your sin! Should I let you go on, you will ruin fifty thousand families, and that would be my sin! You are a den of vipers and thieves."
**
"I am one of those who do not believe that a national debt is a national blessing, but rather a curse to a republic; inasmuch as it is calculated to raise around the administration a moneyed aristocracy dangerous to the liberties of the country."
-- amongst others.
So then-- What is the federal reserve bank, and what does it do?
The federal reserve bank codifies lending practices (in general a good thing), but by design creates exponential inflati
Re:yeah (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Well, somebody's showing... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:yeah (Score:3, Interesting)
Would that it were that simple. But people are different.
Some people would make one mistake, and never repeat it. Others would decide that the chance of a positive personal payoff was sufficient to justify the risk, and to hell with "social good" or anyone else.
Unfortunately, in current society the people who say "...and to hell with "social good"... " are just divided into three classes: The stupid, the powerful, and the sly. The stupid spend a lot of time in prison. The powerful escape punishment. The sly aren't technically guilty of actually breaking a law, or at least you can't prove it. (Yes, the groups merge around the edges, but you know the kinds of people I'm talking about.) I'm not convinced that the folk that end up in prison are actually the ones that do the most damage. But among those who do, there probably *isn't* a better "solution". Unfortunately lots of other people also end up in prison. People whose main "crime" is not being powerful. Others end up there because they technically broke the law, but it was a law that shouldn't have existed. Etc.
My favorite answer is to use REAL solitary in prison. No guards, no cellmates, no communication. And to shorten the sentences a LOT!! Say, to start off with, shorten the sentences to 1/10th of what they are. Put each prisoner into a comfortable sound-proof room, with a slot for meals. Weld it shut. When the sentence is open, cut it open with a torch, and let him go. He's never seen or talked to another inmate or to a guard. No external communications at all while he's in. (Books are allowed. He's provided with a standard library plus any 50 books he specifies. If they're copyrighted, he has to pay for them, otherwise they're free. This includes books of blank pages. And a supply of pens. But he can't take anything with him when he leaves. And anything produced will be burned without being read as S.O.P. This is a place where communication lines are cut.)
Possibly 1/10th of the current length is too harsh a sentence. !/20th might be more reasonable.
If nothing else, my proposal would instantly kill the prison gangs, and would drastically reduce the number of prison guards needed.
Sure but DDOS isn't the correct protest, TAX is. (Score:4, Interesting)
Rather than trying to crash the server, Anonymous should be building a targeted spider of all the sites related to the offender. These sites should be carefully and constantly farmed of their content with due care to make sure the site isn't ever actually brought down.
So instead of a DOS, you levy a TAX. Yes, tax the site, as in "that was a very taxing experience".
There are several important results of TAXing a site.
(1) bandwidth charges go up, so there is TAXing and taxing both.
(2) You are never really stepping over the line legally because you didn't "interfere" with their business.
(3) You have an affront-in-depth because you can TAX the core site, and all the accomplice sites. So not just IPFI but Sony Music, and all thier ilk.
(4) The each TAX collector gets the best use of their action.
(5) you are likely wearing out the gear a little too.
So, to use the physical analogy, take all your sit-in participants and, instead of "blocking the door" you make a velvet rope maze of sitters that complicit actors would have to navigate.
Think of it this way... If you block the door to a bank you will get rousted by the man. If you get 1000 people to go to the bank, stand quietly in line, and when they reach the teller have them perform a cash-only or information-only transaction (e.g. "can I get change for a ten?" "I need to check my balance.") Go get a brochure, read it, then go ask a question in person or on the toll-free number like "This says the interest rate is good for six months. Does that start on the day I open an account, the end of the month I open the account, or the start of the month I open the account?", get the answer, thank the support guy and hang up.
So sure, fill out forms; File polite inquiries, visit their sponsors and members; fill out forms and file polite inquiries.
If brochures are available, ask for one. Recommend they contact a friend. Recommend they contact an enemy. Ask for more information by every possible venue to every reasonable destination.
Get their site to _vomit_ _up_ as much bandwidth and postage. Buy one share. Get the actual share certificate printed up and mailed to you. Then sell the share to your friend for a loss. Make sure he gets his share certificate as well. Buy his share for a loss on the same day and get your new certificate. (best done in a bg circle not just two guys. 8-)
A reject connect attempt is cheap compared to actually fetching a web page or sending out an email that was composed by a support-desk guy, or even a support desk automation.
Find business reply coupons and _use_ them.
At first it isn't as splashy, but you know what, when they run to their government buddies and whine "but they are using our free services exactly as offered" their buddies will probably laugh.