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."

Xubuntu

[pipatron]

Nice. For those of you that didn't read TFA, the toolkit is basically Xubuntu, with some tools like Snort preinstalled.

Re:MPAA Chasing the Money?

[rolfc]

"Scarcity is a necessary economic principle even for intellectual items, and without it, you won't see anyone interested in producing intellectual works."

Since Copyright is relatively new, you are actually saying that no intellectual works were produced before somone invented the Copyright law?

The scarcity is produced by the state, with help of Copyright law, to help producers of intellectual works recieving monoy for their work. What is actually happening is that the Copyright law has been kidnapped by the media industry and is used against the most part of intellectual producers to the benefit of a few ant to the benefit of media industry. Less than 10 % of what you pay for a song, end up in the hands of the producer of the Work.

Copyright law is flawed and should be reviewed in the interest of the society instead, as now happens, in the interest of media industry.