Posted by db on 10/02/05 23:12

"fred-bloggs" <fred-bloggs@hahahotmail.com> wrote in message
news:43404eb2$0$78704$892e7fe2@authen.white.readfreenews.net...
> "Billy Joe" <see.id.line@invalid.org> wrote in news:dPadnZgogOsyrKLeRVn-
> hw@adelphia.com:
>
>> Somehow I see their people and our people sitting at consoles and
>> typing madly like the schlockiest of TV melodramas with the fastest
>> typist(s) hoisting one for the queens ;-0)
>>
>
> Just read this (mind the wrap)
> http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-piracytwo2oct02,1,6430710.story?
> coll=la-headlines-business
> <quote>
> Overpeer takes advantage of the Internet's inability to tell who's at the
> controls of any computer online. The software lets a single computer
> pretend to be more than 10,000 people, none of which look any different to
> the untrained eye from real users on a peer-to-peer network.
> <unquote>
>
> So, we have several thousand faking secondaries sitting on the same IP?
>
> --
> fred

Across a handful of IP addresses, yeah, that's what they do. A very small
number of addresses really (see blocklists).

Of course some people will find it difficult to believe that they haven't
really actually reverse-engineered the WinMX protocol without proper consent
from the owners. Of course not, they (Macrovision, Netsentry, Overpeer,
etc) probably operate massive banks of computers running thousands of
instances of the official WinMX client software plugged into typical,
consumer grade, DSL lines from the likes of British Telecom, Pacific Bell,
Tiscali, Sympatico, Covad, etc. Yeah right.

I'm no expert on copyright law, licence agreements, etc, but would have
thought the very laws they fought to get passed in the United States (the
DMCA comes to mind) should have prevented them from reverse-engineering
(including breaking encryption) and selling (companies profiting from the
technology) the works of others without proper consent. So what am I
missing here? Are they (Macrovision, Netsentry, Overpeer, etc) really
running custom clients/software in this way? Are they within the law to do
that? Are they guilty of the very same things they accuse others of? If
so, are they so powerful that they're, in effect, above the law?

I should bug out of this conversation as I don't have enough knowledge to
know the truth, but, would be interested to hear the answers someday.

[Back to original message]