Aimless Tech

print ('I\'ve decided to learn Python.')

2010-04-27T17:03:00.005-05:00

I've haven't posted in a bit for two reasons. Reason one is that I have been quite busy and reason two, more importantly, I haven't had an inspiration regarding what I should write about. For lack of a better topic, I'm going to do this post on a recent development.

I've had more than a passing interest in pursuing a degree in computer science. But one very big problem with that is that I have absolutely no experience of any sort when it comes to programming. Considering I would essentially be spending four years getting a degree that revolved around computer programming, I thought it would be a good idea if I remedied the situation.

So after talking to some people, getting some suggestions, and hunting down some material, I picked a programming language and got started.

I chose Python. I read more than once that it was a good one to start on and a friend of mine is developing an online programming class which he offered to let me try out for free. I dug up a few "do it yourself" ebooks and got started. Its complex, but I think I'm managing.

Python's website has a page full of resources for a beginning programmer here, so you can join me if you want.

That's it. As mentioned above, I don't have any ideas for topics and I felt the need to post something.

My idea for a website.

2010-04-05T20:49:00.004-05:00

Occasionally I wonder what sort of websites might become successful if started. Once, I actually think I came up with a decent idea. It's too piracy focused for me to actually pursue, but I'll throw it out here for your benefit and scrutiny.

I previously did a post on torrents. I mentioned that a torrent dies and can no longer be used when it loses enough users. When enough people stop using one, it slows more and more until it isn't even worth trying. Every once and while, you might be interested in a torrent, but unable to get it because it just doesn't have enough users. It always unpleasant to download a torrent you want, fire it up, and then get a download speed of 2 kilobytes.

What if there was a website that would bring back oldies that can't be used anymore? What if there was a website that made rare content easily available again? The basic principle is simple. It could be run like a blog. Each post could give a link to the chosen torrent and followers would all band together and download it. It would be a sort of group effort torrents. You could chose torrents be request or personal desire. If, for some reason, the torrent no longer worked or wasn't available, you could fork over a bit of money to buy whatever it was and redo the torrent.

This plan is, of course, far from foolproof. The real trick would be getting enough followers early on to actually make a difference. They would also have to be dedicated P2P types that would be willing to seed and help things move smoothly. Heck, I don't even know if people would be really interested in something like this.

The biggest problem I can foresee would be staying under the radar. If the site got too successful, it would quickly attract unwanted attention. There's a possibility of lawsuits and you would probably be infiltrated by anti-piracy types that would try to get a nice list of everyone who used the site. You would have to treat lightly and avoid always picking torrents that contain copyrighted software.

This idea is shaky, but it's plausible. You would just have to get in touch with the right people and get a fan base that was dedicated to the supporting of P2P sharing.

Internet Piracy - The Last Part

2010-03-30T19:46:00.004-05:00

My interest and knowledge in this subject is waning. Yours may be as well, so I'll close the series on piracy with this post. I'm just going to mention a few more things and then I'll wash my hands of the matter. This series wasn't exhaustive, just what I knew well enough to write about.

So, as I said, here are a few websites and things that didn't really fit in with any of the other post's topics.

Video Streaming Websites -
I have a weird thing for wanting any data that I'm interested in on my hard drive. I mean I want to be able to access it easily and without internet access. Long story short, this is because I've gotten burned in the past in regards to less common software that is no longer available.

But that really isn't an issue for a lot of people. I like to download it and really have it, but things like streaming videos is a lot easier and usually works just fine.

Due to this, there is a huge number of video streaming websites that illegally host copyrighted movies and TV shows. Many of them get a massive amount of traffic and they're easy to access.

Two big players in this game are Tudou and Youku, Chinese versions of our own Youtube. To be frank, they couldn't care less about our copyright laws, so what's it to them if they get extra traffic from American users? They have gone to the trouble of blocking a few things from American users, but not much more than that.

Another factor is Youtube itself. Anyone can upload anything and the database of videos is huge. You can hardly blame them for having a tough time keeping it under control. But, in addition to the fact that keeping Youtube piracy free is nearly impossible, what's in it for them? People watching pirated material increase their traffic. It makes them money. If they spend a lot of time and effort booting everything that sniffed of piracy, they would only lose money. They do their part. Everyone once and a while they will do something like remove every single episode of the Simpson on their site and any news ones that come up in the near future. Then, when they move on to other things, episodes of the Simpson creep back on again. Its a cycle that keeps them from getting in trouble, but, at the same time, doesn't cut a lot of their users.

Ironically, illegal streaming sites usually get movies before they are available in the theater. Hundreds of copies of any movie are sent to critics before the movie hits the theater. If a single critic leaks (at least one always does), then *poof!*, the movie is all over the internet.

Link Hosting Websites -
Some websites, instead of containing pirated material, simply help you find it. They "only give links" and, therefore it isn't their fault if someone uses those links to find pirated material. It's kind of ridiculous, but I suppose that it exploits some loophole because the sites stick around.

One major one is Watch Movies Links (I can't give an exact name because they keep suspiciously changing it). It compiles links to movies that can be found on video streaming websites and conveniently organizes them. You can hop on, search a movie, and get about half a dozen links to different websites that have the same movie available. If one link doesn't work, you just try another one.

Beemp3. This is another link hosting site, but it's for another purpose. It hosts download links for MP3's. It's number of users has increased a lot recently. You can search nearly any song, by an artist, and get a big list of download links. On a rather interesting side note, Mcafee Site Adviser (a website security program) recently marked Beemp3 as red, saying that it had security issues. They didn't really say why it was dangerous, but the program totally freaks out if you visit the site. To be honest, I used the site quite a bit until recently and I never had any problems with it. Who knows?

In closing, internet piracy is big, very big, and it's not going anywhere. The internet is a mass of interconnected computers and servers that overlaps in complex and confusing feats of programming. Trying to eliminate piracy is like trying to keep people from dealing drugs. You can get people in trouble and make a big deal out of it, but in the end, there isn't much you can do. It just occurs on too large a scale. And its less tangible. You can knock on a known drug dealers front door and handcuff him, but tracking down some phantom's IP address when he's carefully masking it and avoiding detection is another story entirely.

So that's my bit on piracy. I'm probably forgetting something and I may mention other things in the future, but this is a majority of what I know.

Internet Piracy - Part 4

2010-03-25T14:53:00.004-05:00

The next technique of piracy I'm going to cover is, due to some similarities, often included when mentioning torrents (as evidenced by the picture above). I decided to separate them because they are different and there is enough material on each for seperate posts.

Limewire, Frostwire, MP3 Rocket, and others. These are all another strain of P2P file sharing that works a little differently from torrents.

It all began with the rise of Napster, a music sharing program. It was, in some ways, similar to many file hosting sites. Large servers held files that users could upload and any registered user that had Napster on their computer could get at them. Napster was the first of its time and very successful, but it crashed and burned under a hail of lawsuits. It now charges fees for its music and has lost most of its users.

But this was the beginning of client side P2P sharing. The system was tweaked and several principles were changed, making it so that computers connected directly to each other instead of to large servers. The new type of network is called Gnutella and it is one of the largest file sharing networks.

Limewire is a very popular client that anyone can download and install on their computer for free. It communicates with Gnutella and archives files. In a nutshell, it just directs the traffic. It archives who has what files and helps you connect to whoever has it. The computer that has the file acts as a server and you download directly from that other user. This works well for Limewire because they have a huge user base and don't have to run lots of heavy duty servers to keep it all going.

Limewire is similar to torrents in more ways than one. Each runs off of users downloading and uploading together, each is widely known and used, and each has the same security issues. Pirate hunters will set up bait files just like they do with torrents and programs like PeerBlock are used to avoid being caught that way.

Limewire has legitimate uses, but that's essentially just what people say when they are trying to justify its existence. A huge percentage of the files people distribute are copyrighted and viruses are rampant. I'm not entirely sure about this, but I believe Limewire gives you the option of marking a folder in such a way that other users have access to everything in it. That created problems with people marking folders that had personal information and newer versions of Limewire have been altered in an effort to prevent that sort of thing from happening.

I've never used any of these programs before (because I hear its a good way to get your computer wrecked and the police knocking on your door), so I can't give much on how the interface works or what its really like. But I do know that many, many people do. This is why its such a hot spot for pirate hunters. Its easy to use and the amount of traffic is huge. That has also made it a great way to distribute viruses, so if you use it, you'd better keep you guard up.

The IRAA and the MPAA have been cracking down on this sort of file-sharing more and more, but it isn't going anywhere. It has a huge number of users and is a major source of internet piracy.

Internet Piracy - Part 3

2010-03-11T13:58:00.004-06:00

This is getting into unfamiliar territory for me. I have had no previous experience with Usenet so this article is a compilation of on the fly research. I'm going to keep descriptions as simple as possible so that I don't accidentally give you wrong information.

What is Usenet? It's quite hard to define. Even the creators here admit it. I'll give the best summary I can.

Usenet is essentially a massive network of discussion boards that can transfer binary posts. Rather than running off a few main serves, Usenet is a mass of independent servers that are complexly interconnected. Each server runs on its own and has channels for various discussions and posts. In order to connect to a Usenet server, it was necessary to get a newsreader, a piece of software made to read or make posts. One you had the reader, you had to punch in specific information for whichever server you wished to connect to. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of free servers, but some require passwords and monthly subscriptions.

To try to get an idea of what they were like, I connected to one (freenews.netfront.net using Xnews, for those that are interested) and browsed around a bit. It was like a public social network. It seemed like there were channels for just about anything, from discussing politics, to trading cooking recipes, to J. R. R. Tolkien fan sites, to any number of other oddities. There was plenty of spam, but a lot of real people were posting and it was pretty interesting.

But now to the point of this article. What role does Usenet play in internet piracy? Usenet is only used for binary posts, but files of any kind can be formatted so that they register as binary. Usenet has been around since before the World Wide Web, and at one time, it was used for most downloading. But it was difficult and unpractical. This picture of what has to be done to a CD image will give you an idea of why.

Click to to enlarge it. These steps had to done in reverse after the file was downloaded.

There was another issue. The binary posts could not go over a certain size. That meant that the file, after going through the compression process, had to be split into pieces before it could be posted. Each piece had to be posted separately. Then, if you wanted the file, you had to get each separate part and put them together again before you dragged it through the decompression process. Files sometimes had to split into hundreds of pieces and if a single one was missing, all the others were worthless.

Because of all this, the use of Usenet for downloaded greatly decreased when newer and easier ways came along. Torrents and hosting websites were faster and simpler. As the overall amount internet piracy increased, however, the change did not last. Anti-piracy companies began to crack down with force on the newer and easier ways.

People got to work improving Usenet's potential downloading function. Software was created that made compression and decompression much easier. The maximum size of posts was increased, making it so that a file didn't have to be split so many times. With these improvements and the increasing danger of using torrents and the like, people began to use Usenet for piracy again.

Why Usenet? Why not Rapidshare? Are torrents really that dangerous? Usenet has some inherent advantages that also draw pirates. It's more secretive and secure. Usenet states on their main website that they do not, in any way, monitor their user's traffic. Another confidentiality advantage is that Usenet runs off of so many independent servers. The different servers are interconnected. When an illegal file is posted, it echoes across the other servers. Given enough time, the file will be everywhere and nearly impossible to remove. It's almost like cancer. It isn't gone until every single cancer cell is dead. Like Rapidshare, your computer only connects with one specific server. Each server has its own record of use and there are thousands of them. The end result is that it's extremely difficult to pinpoint where the files are coming from and which servers should be monitored to pirated activity.

A little more about the Newsreader clients:
As I mentioned before, if you want to access a server and get at the posts, you have to have software made to do that. Some of it can only read. Some can read and post. Some can only download posts. Some can upload. Some can do a bit of everything. Some of it if free, but a majority it has to be bought. A lot of it, an example being Newsleecher, also unpacks the files for you, saving you the trouble of decompressing the file once you have it.

So Usenet, though it is more complex and, in some cases, expensive, has advantages that draw many people to using it. It is considered very "safe". Lawsuits have only been filed against Usenet itself and I can't turn up much on users being caught for downloading (though uploading files is more risky).

Internet Piracy - Something I need to make clear.

2010-03-10T14:16:00.003-06:00

Somebody has recently pointed something out to me that I need to make clear. So far all of my posts could be considered instructional in a "this is how you do it without being caught" sense. My interest in this sort of thing is, for the most part, purely intellectual. I don't advocate internet piracy and shame on you if that's what you use these posts for.

Internet piracy is the trafficking of copyrighted material for the purpose of getting it without paying the people who did the work to produce it. It is theft, plain and simple. This makes it wrong. Pirating steals money from individuals who devoted time and effort to produce a product for sale.

But the internet is anonymous. You're just taking something from a faceless corporation that couldn't care less if their sales of the product went down by one because of you, right?

Wrong. It's still theft and the effects are cumulative. Sure, you only knock down their sales by one, but what if thousands of people do it?

Just remember that for every pirated piece of software you download, there is someone just like you or me that isn't getting credit and money for hours and hours of work.

I just needed to point out my views on the subject. That aside, the series on piracy will continue.

Internet Piracy - Part 2

2010-03-09T14:16:00.001-06:00

Here's another one of big players in the piracy world.

File Hosting Websites -

Rapidshare, Megaupload, Mediafire, and more. The principle behind these websites is simple. You can upload files onto these websites and they will keep them there for a certain period of time and allow people to download them. The reason these websites haven't already crashed and burned under a hail of copyright lawsuits is simple, they are "private".

This means that no one can access the file you uploaded unless they get a direct link. This gives the websites a handy "we aren't responsible for what our user do" excuse. They know as well as anyone what their sites are used for, but why would they want to stop something that gives them so much traffic, and therefore more money?

You may think now that it isn't too big an issue because people can't get at the files unless the pirate sends them a link. Wrong. Other websites and forums have sprung up for a single purpose, to archive and swap links. If you want to find a pirated game to download from Rapidshare (which is probably to biggest file hosting website), all you have to do is Google a few words, click a few links, and you're there.

Why do sites like Rapidshare do it? Those sites don't just get money from advertisements. Anyone that wants to can upload files, but there's a catch. The files can't go beyond a certain size and the website deletes them from there servers after a certain time. The websites do this so that they can offer Premium Accounts. The premium accounts cost a monthly subscription, but they allow you to upload and download larger files, get fast download speeds, and leave your files up longer. It's a massive money maker because a lot of people are willing to fork over some money every month for those benefits.

Why Rapidshare instead of a torrent? Rapidshare isn't as convenient as a torrent unless you have a premium account, so why still use it? There are several factors in this. First is that torrents die off and can't be used when too many people disconnect from them. That means that if you're trying to get something that is old, there will be too few users to get it from a torrent. Rapidshare is just as fast and reliable from the day the file is uploaded to the day the file expires and is deleted (which is a very long time).

Another reason people use Rapidshare is because it's more straight forward and less complex. You click the link and download it. Torrent speed depends on users and you have to use extra software to connect to them.

Another big reason is that Rapidshare is "safer". Nobody has ever been charged in a court of law for downloading illegal files from Rapidshare. I'm not entirely familiar with the reasons behind it, but you're safe. If someone has a problem with it, they have to go for Rapidshare.com itself, which would be a big and expensive ordeal that might not even get results. People are also much more private about the nature of the files. Files from Rapidshare are always compressed into RAR files, which are similar to zipped folders except that they are more secure. When a website supplies the links, they also supply a password for the file. If someone really wants to figure out what you've been downloading, they have to hunt down the password too. I heard from a friend of mine that a properly encrypted RAR file can take months to crack without the password.

Rapidshare downloads also are safer because only Rapidshare hosts them. Sometimes anti-piracy groups can make bait torrents to get people's IP addresses. They can also connect to a torrent and get a list of all the IP addresses connected. They can do no such thing with Rapidshare. The connection is between you and Rapidshare only.

File hosting is more anonymous and in some cases faster. It's also much more convenient if you have a Premium Account and many people prefer file hosting sites over torrents.

Internet Piracy - Part 1

2010-03-08T21:00:00.000-06:00

I'm just going to do this systematically by covering most of the tactics I know of in separate posts. So I'll begin with a big one.

Bit Torrents -

You can find a much more in -depth explanation of what they are and how they work here, but for the sake of time and effort I'm only going to go over the basics.

A torrent is a form of file sharing used to distribute files over the internet. The overall principle is pretty simple. Your computer downloads and uploads bits and pieces of the file. This means, while getting the file yourself, you are also giving it to other people downloading the same torrent.

Why are they used? Why not just download it from a website like normal things? The reasons are pretty straight forward. It is to save resources. Suppose that you are a software pirate and you want to distribute the movie that you just bought to fellow pirates. Unless you have heavy duty internet servers in your basement, the only way you can get it out there is to have another website do it. Websites like that don't usually do that sort of thing for free so it gets expensive! This is where torrents come in. Everyone chips and helps out. The pirate sends out a different percentage of the file to each person connected to the torrent. Then everyone copies and resends the pieces they get. Give it enough time and everyone will have the complete file with minimal trouble or expense. The part that makes it very easy is that the pirate can even pick up and leave once he sent out a single copy of the file. People join torrents at different times, so nobody finishes at the same time. It's staggered. Some people who get the entire file stick around a while longer, still sending out pieces, to ensure that everyone gets it. It becomes self sufficient and the pirate doesn't worry about it. A torrent runs continuously provided that it has enough users connected. Sooner or later, a torrent becomes old and people stop using it. It dies then, but not before thousands of people got the file.

Where do they come from? Torrent files can be easily obtained through a variety of websites. The Pirate Bay, ISO Hunt, and many other websites openly distribute them.

What do you mean "torrent file"? Torrent files are tiny. They are pretty much just bare bones instructions for you computer so that it knows who to connect to. This files have to be run by torrent software. Utorrent is the most widely used, but there are others like Bit Lord or Bit Comet. In some countries, downloading copyrighted material is fine but uploading it is illegal. Because of that there are programs like Bit Thief, which manipulates the torrent so that you only download and don't share. Downloading only is called "Leeching" and upsets most torrent users because it goes against the spirit of the thing.

Torrents do have some issues when it comes to confidentiality and security. Companies that fight internet piracy, such as the IRAA or MPAA, have been known to connect to torrents in order to pinpoint who is using them by getting your IP address (which is pretty much your internet mailing address). Sometimes they will even make "bait" torrents that are used to catch people. To combat this, programs like Peer Guardian 2 and PeerBlock have been developed. Those programs each have a constantly updated list of known threats. The software prevents you from connecting to the pirate hunters and therefore avoid being caught. Such software is not foolproof, but it really helps.

Millions of people all over the world use torrents. Torrents are used to distribute anything, from games, to movies, to music, to pictures, to books. Anything. They are flexible and cheap to run, making them an excellent tool for any pirate.

I just don't know where to begin.

2010-03-08T20:46:00.000-06:00

I'd love to kick off this blog with some hilarious links or interesting articles, but I can't really think of anything off the top of my head. For lack of a better beginning, I'm going to kick off this blog with a series of posts containing some questionable content.

That is, Internet Piracy. When I really think about it, I know more about it than I ought to. All things considered, I'm not much of an internet pirate myself, but I've spent a lot of time looking into it. I even did a presentation on viruses and piracy for my speech class. So, to cheaply grab people's attention, I'm going to spill the beans about what I know. It won't be exhaustive, but I know plenty.