MPAA College Toolkit Raises Privacy, Security Concerns

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

[Hanners1979]

An MPAA tool that runs on Linux... I can see a few Slashdot heads exploding from that conflict this very minute.

Give kids a break

[jihadist]

They're about to become corporate serfs. Give them a four year break from corporate dominance, so they have that much more psychological trauma when they exit school, which will make them the perfect mentally broken spiritual voids who need to buy our products.

Thanks,
The NWO

Re:Xubuntu

[plover]

Hmm. All of the MPAA tools I can think of ran on liquor and steak (Jack Valenti)

Re:MPAA Chasing the Money?

[Spy der Mann]

These are kids who should know better, and are committing lots of infringement (and worse than that, think it's OK).

You must DEFINITELY be new here!

mpaa urges students to install mpaaBuddy, too

[transporter_ii]

mpaaBuddy is an on-screen "intelligent software agent" created by the MPAA, and based upon Microsoft Agent technology. The goal of the program is to help users enrich their online movie experience as they discover digital movies together with the included "mpaaBuddy," which is an animated, purple Tom Cruise. Users can interact with Tom by asking him questions, get recommendations on new movies released by MPAA members, as well as be politely informed when unapproved websites are loaded.

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

[gilesjuk]

This is why they don't sue anyone at Harvard, they know in the long run that would create lawyers who dislike them.

Re:Open letter to the MAFIAA

[Anonymous Coward]

'Vox populi, vox Dei.'
I hope this applies to paying taxes too.

Re:Open letter to the MAFIAA

[fredklein]

Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.

Utinam coniurati te in foro interficiant.

1984! 1984!

[Anonymous Coward]

Stop oppressing me with words you commie nazi fascist!

Re:Xubuntu

[Anonymous Coward]

Does anyone have a torrent file for these iso's?

Re:Open letter to the MAFIAA

[gooser23]

Romanes eunt domus