How DRM/Copy Protection Do Not Stop Piracy but Hurt Honest Consumers

Sometime ago in a futile attempt to control the content consumers purchased, companies pressured by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and others began including something new with their purchases. They called it Digital Rights Management (DRM). Often this was software that consumers would have to install on their computers with no choice, in order to play the purchased content.

Very often this software is badly written, so bad, in fact that consumers who are not tech savvy are simply unable to use the product they have legally purchased. In some cases, like the famous Sony DRM rootkit debacle, DRM was installed on consumers computers that was essentially malware. It was a a copy protection scheme that could not be seen or removed and made it much harder to play the music people had legally purchased. And because it was a rootkit, it could be exploited quite easily allowing nefarious users the ability to install malware and hide it within the rootkit, creating a security nightmare. If not for the efforts of Mark Russinovich we may have never even known about it.

I remember when Spore came out, I had seen a demo of it and thought it looked like the game I would be most likely to play when I wanted to waste loads of time. So when it came out, I like most people went right to Amazon and reserved my copy of it. When it arrived, I installed it and like most games it had a product key, and I not only expect that but accept it as part of the business of buying games and software now.

These types of anti-piracy tools most people generally accept and have no problem with just entering the code and installing it. So I entered my code, installed the game, signed up for an account and played the game. It was fantastic, to this day, still one of the best games I have ever played. Now for me, I had purchased it for my mac, but immediately I noticed it ran just "ok" on the mac, so I figured screw it I'll install it on my windows machine and see if it plays better. So I entered the code again, installed the game signed in and played.

It played loads better on the windows machine and I was fine with that. But then I realized I wanted to have it on my laptop as well as my desktop so I could use it anytime I really wanted to play, so I decided to install it there too. Now some people will say well you shouldn't be able to install the game on so many computers, and I say why not? I purchased the game legally and I only ever played it on one machine at a time, and no one else ever used my machines so there was no chance anyone else could ever play Spore using my account at the same time I wanted to play it, nor did I even think it was possible, after all they required you to login.

So later when my desktop died I needed to reinstall everything, this of course included my games and so I installed all my games including spore, only when I tried to install Spore this time it complained, saying I had already installed it the maximum number of times. WTF? That made no sense how can you restrict the number of times I can install something I legally paid for, you don't have that right. Well apparently Electronic Arts (EA), the company that distributed Spore, believed they did. Without the knowledge of anyone who purchased the game, EA had created a DRM schemed that prevented a person from installing the product code more than three times.

Well I was pissed off and actually I wasn't the only one, many consumers called, emailed, wrote letters and flooded forums with posts all griping about this draconian scheme of protection that, while designed to protect EA from mass piracy had backfired preventing consumers the legal right to install something they had purchased. After all, hard drives go bad, systems crash, and computers change. Should we be locked into a scheme that makes us spend $50 on software that is only good for three uses and then stops functioning? I mean seriously where in society would that be acceptable?

You purchase a new car, and after three trips to the Starbucks it stops running. Your new TV stops showing you a picture after three days of usage and you are expected to buy a new one? No that kind of shit would never fly in the real world. So needless to say I was able to install Spore on my new windows install. How you may ask or maybe you already know. Like the tens of thousands or more who purchased the game and wanted to actually play it, I checked my favorite bittorrent site for a software crack or some other tool that allowed me to play Spore and found a way to circumvent the technology. Under the law of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) I had just committed a crime. Do I feel bad, absolutely not, well at least not for EA. I feel bad for the millions of consumers who had no clue how to do this and needed to purchase a new copy of Spore or worse just throw the old one in the trash.

Now through the years, I've purchased a lot of games, music and software, and anyone who has seen my living room can attest to the hundreds if not thousands of DVDs and blu-rays I currently own. I would say that at least 95% of the stuff I purchased included some kind of anti-piracy technology whether it be copy protection, product keys, DRM, or some other funky way of sticking it to the consumer. Years ago, way back when, games even came with a very clever way to prevent piracy where by when the game started up a question would be posed to the user.

The question would be something like "What is the first word of the second paragraph on page 14 of the user manual?" and you'd have to grab the manual that came with the game and look up the answer and type it in. Slightly annoying, but generally these games had no other source of anti-piracy technology in them, so answer a question and then play. I can tell you in all the years of legally purchasing games, software, music and movies, not a single anti-piracy measure has ever stopped me from copying, sharing, uploading, editing, playing, or otherwise using my purchased content. Now the companies that make this kind of shitware will say its a testament to how great their technology is that it never caused me any problems. Well I didn't say that, I just said it never stopped me from using the content as I intended not the way they intended it be used. In fact it often caused me problems.

I stopped purchasing music cds because when record labels starting making these enhanced cds it really pissed me off. Anyone who has purchased one of these feels this way, you put the cd in your computer and it won't let you play the cd. It pops up a dialog box instructing you to install some fucking player you don't want or need to play this cd. Since I can remember, computers have always had built in software that allowed music cds to be played without the need of third-party software to be installed.

In the old days before hard drives ballooned to the disks sizes they are now, space was a precious commodity and you didn't waste it installing software you didn't need. So the idea that I would need some kind of software player from this record label to play my legally purchased cd was a joke. So knowing this wasn't a requirement and knowing it used the autorun function of my windows installation, I held down shift everytime I put the cd in the drive and this allowed me to play my cd. Let me tell you this gets old after you do it a few times.

I stopped buying cds before Napster became huge, and my library already had a nice collection of digital music. I ripped the cds I had and tossed them in the trash and from that point on never purchased a cd again. I currently have a library of something like 60GB of music, but I've seen people with libraries that approached the hundreds of GBs of music. I guess it all depends on how you like to listen to your music, me I don't mind mp3s, they are not lossless but I'm losing my hearing anyway so I don't give a shit how they really sound.

I really stopped purchasing computer games after the Spore incident, not that I've stopped playing them. I do purchase games for the xbox and ps3 not because they can't be hacked, but rather because although theses systems do have anti-piracy schemes, they do not annoy the consumer with product keys, or third-party installations or any of the other shitware that these companies try to force on consumers.

When it comes to movies I flat out won't purchase them online, the MPAA has made it so annoying to purchase film and television content online that its just not worth your time and its certainly not worth your money. Do yourself a favor and buy the dvd or blu-ray. You'll always be able to play it in your home dvd or blu-ray player or your computer without restriction. The tools exist to allow you to rip the content from the disk and take it anywhere. The same cannot be said of online content which is often wrapped in a piece of DRM and has some pretty ridiculous restrictions with it.

Very often when you purchase a movie online you must play it using the player provided to you by the content provider and there is a restriction on how often you can play it, the number of times you can play it and where you can play it. And you'd think with these kinds of restrictions these movies would cost something equivalent to a movie rental from your local video store, but you'd be wrong. These guys expect you to pay usually the same amount of money you'd have to pay for the movie on dvd or blu-ray or give you a small discount of only a few dollars. You only have to do the math to know if you intent on playing this movie ever again, you want the hard copy.

As far as software goes, do yourself a favor and look into the open source market, you will find alternatives to everything you currently use or want to purchase at either no cost or very often a donation of as little as a dollar. Many people have been convinced or convince themselves that somehow using open source software opens themselves up to a security nightmare, and thats just pure bullshit. Open source software is almost 100% more secure than its closed source counterpart. Why you may ask? In the open source community that take it upon themselves to insure the software they are releasing is secure, because doing the contrary would hurt the product.

It's open source, that means anyone and everyone can see how this software is written, finding its holes, its flaws and its just badly written code. And the best part is when users come together in projects to work on these problems, together they create solutions that benefit everyone. This kind of action ensures the integrity of the work by adding checks and balances in the form of users who work with the code. In a closed source situation what motivation do the programmers have to ensure this level of security?

They don't, since they are of the opinion that the less people know about how something works the less likely they will be able to find a flaw. There is no incentive to make better software that protects consumers since no one knows of its defects until they have already been exploited. These kinds of attacks are called 0-day because the first anyone knows of the exploit is the day that it is used. I believe strongly that companies that continue to close their source code should be held responsible when a security flaw is exposed that causes a major loss of data. It is because they close their source to the public, that it is incumbent upon them to ensure such flaws should never happen.

It's a fact that piracy exists here, there and everywhere. It's been here since the first person had something someone else wanted. It will be here long after everyone alive right now is dead and long, long after that. There is simply nothing you can do to stop it, you just need to accept it and get on with living. Companies like the MPAA and RIAA assume they lose revenue because of piracy and its flat out not true. People who pirate things do so because they do not want to buy it. It's really not hard to understand.

If I am not going to purchase your movie ever, then you have nothing to lose from me stealing it since you had nothing to gain in the first place. This isn't rocket science, people. Digital media is not tangible. I'm not suggesting you go out and steal a DVD, although doing so wouldn't hurt the movie studio or cost anyone working on that movie to lose their job, the store that sells the DVD would take the loss. There is no difference between one copy of a movie and ten thousand copies of a movie. If the movie studios wanted to assert some kind of loss they could only assert loss for the original since it was the only tangible copy actually lost.

Before I go nuts again on copyright, I'll just say these kinds of DRM and copy protection schemes do not hurt pirates, it does not stop them and it doesn't stop piracy. What it does do is piss of consumers who spend their money on a product and expect it to work. Now the industry is lucky that most consumers are less tech savvy and just eat the shit these companies are feeding them. Thats going to change as the kids of today get older and become those consumers, they won't be forced to use your DRM shitware and will take only so much of it before they look for an alternative.

In effect you are creating the very culture of people you are trying to protect yourself from. You really think its the little old ladies who are pirating your shit? The youth of today are way more tech savvy than previous generations and that will continue to happen. How long do you really think you can force this kind of shit on people before they find ways around it.

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The Collecting Every American's Digital Data For Submission To The Federal Government Without A Warrant Act of 2011

Well apparently Representative Lemar Smith of Texas was dropped several times on his head as a baby, its the only thing that explains the shit he tries to pass through the House of Representatives. You know this guy the one who sponsored the "Stop Online Piracy Act" (SOPA). Well he's at it again with a new bill called and you will love this "Protecting Children from Internet Pornographers Act of 2011" or H.R. 1981. This bill is some serious shit folks, although it purports to help protect children by collecting data on child pornographers, its way more insidious than that. BTW if you think this has anything to do with child pornography you are seriously in what Bill Maher describes as the bubble.

The Protecting Children from Internet Pornographers Act of 2011 (H.R. 1981) is a bill designed to facilitate the enforcement of laws relating to the prosecution of child pornography.

So now we have established that's what they want you to think. What does it really do?



This bill would introduce tougher sentencing for offenders and would make it a crime to financially facilitate the sale, distribution and purchase of child pornography. Section 4 would require providers to retain a log of customer IP addresses, linked to "corresponding customer or subscriber information" listed in subsection (c)(2) of 18 USC 2703, for at least a year. This includes, but is not limited to forcing Internet service providers to keep track of and retain their customers' information -- including their name, address, phone number, credit card numbers and bank account numbers. The bill also protects internet service providers from civil actions resulting from the loss of data stored as a requirement of the bill.


Ok, so at first it sounds like they are sticking to the child porn thing, but then you see they want to save a log of customer information from an isp. This information includes Name, Address, Phone Number, Credit Card Numbers (WTF??????) and Bank Account Numbers (Double WTF!!!!!!!!!!) Not only that but the bill prevents you the consumer from ever suing your ISP because they gave this information away.

So you are probably saying to yourself doesn't your ISP already have this information. Yes. They do, however this bill authorizes them to hand it over to not only federal authorities, but local authorities and even attorneys working on civil cases including for divorce. Well yeah that seems to help stop child porn spread. WTF are they kidding? Anyone with common sense knows what this bill is all about. It's about taking away your civil liberties. It started with SOPA and PIPA and it continues with this piece of shit.

Somewhere along the line Lemar Smith and the other 25 shitheads in Washington he got to co-sponsor this bill forgot what it was like to be an American, forgot what they learned in school about our founding fathers and the tyranny they fought so hard against. This country was founded on Liberty and Justice. There is no Justice in taking away Liberty.

So let's talk about what this bill will actually do. Well for Criminals, nothing. Sorry to tell you Washington nitwits, this won't stop anyone from committing crimes, neither does SOPA or PIPA. Why you may ask? Because criminals who want to commit crimes do it in secret, like they have been doing for thousands of years. Currently criminals on the Internet may take less precaution now but if such a bill actually passes it will simply drive them further into secrecy. How?

Well several technologies exist that hide your data from prying eyes, and they start with something called encryption. You know what encryption is Mr. Lemar Smith don't know? Oh ok, well its a way of taking plain information and transforming it into something unreadable and unusable. While most people think of something like disk encryption or email encryption it can be used to encrypt not only those things but your entire Internet connection through the use of a secure Virtual Private Networking (VPN) tunnel.

VPN is typically used to establish a connection between a user at one end and a computer, usually a company at the other end. Secure tunneling protocols are designed with encryption that prevents interception and packet sniffing, and use sender authentication to prevent someone from spoofing their identity. When a connection is first negotiated, which is encrypted of course, both sides talk to each other establishing a secure connection. If either side is unable to do this it fails. Once this happens all data that flows from your computer's network interface to the other side's network interface is completely unreadable encrypted data. Since the end points are established from your computer to the end computer, there is no point an ISP can snoop this data.

Let me be clear, your credit card information, your email, your web traffic, none of that can be seen. Your ISP already has some information that can certainly be given to the Government but more than that, they will be unable to provide. Also even though they have the IP Address used by your ISP to actually give you a starting point on the Internet, that is changed in the tunnel to something completely different so the traffic routed to your original IP address is different from the traffic routed to your VPN IP address.

So now that we have proven this does not stop criminals from committing crimes what does it actually do? Well it gives the government the right to take away the average American's right to privacy.

This isn't China, this is America we demand our civil liberties. Our founding fathers demanded civil liberties and they fought and won their freedom. And they established this nation so that anyone born here had the same rights they wanted and achieved.


There is a nice video from Demand Progress that explains H.R. 1981, I suggest watching it.

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Corporate Sponsored Censorship of Your Internet

You know since this whole SOPA/PIPA thing came about I started thinking about censorship and how it has started to invade our lives. When those who had settled here freed themselves from the Tyranny of British rule, it was with the belief that a free and open society was better than one where a ruler sought to control the freedom of information and of its people's rights. They believed that whatever they did it would have to be better than what they had left behind. 

There have been a lot of arguments from people that the First Amendment is not absolute that the framers would have never intended that. Let's examine that for a moment. Remember that these people were oppressed from speaking the truth in both written form and speech as well they had no ability to petition their government for grievances. People who are generally oppressed this way want something different, they don't want something a little different but usually they want the very things they believe they have a right to as a living being who thinks. 

So its not far fetched to think that the framers of the constitution believed the only type of government that was one they would live under was one that was exactly the opposite of the one they fled from and fought for independence against. One usually does not fight so vigorously for something they believe so little in. So assuming the framers in fact did intend the First Amendment to be absolute then lets take a look at what it says:

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."


Now remember we are assuming this to be absolute, our congress shall make NO law that abridges the freedom of its people to speak openly or privately in anyway, and the right of the press to print freely said speech. It's pretty easy to read and understand what they wanted and what they wrote down.


We are all taught in school that we live in a democracy, of course this is incorrect as we live in a republic but that matters very little to the point I'm trying to make. Because the reality is we live in a very different country one in which the corporations have slowly over time moved our government from a democracy or republic to what is called corporatocracy. This type of government isn't one in which the people make the rules by which to live, but one in which the corporations do. 

Now this kind of thing has been going on for a while, in fact long before the Internet was even created. Corporations spend millions of dollars paying off the United States Congress to buy legislation that favors them. They do this with powerful lobbying groups who's job it is to convince these congressmen to vote in a way that undermines decency and fairness for cash. Its called corruption but you won't hear anyone in Washington refer to it like that. For them its just called "Business as Usual". 

As if somehow referring to it in that way makes it less nefarious. Basically they are just saying its the way things are done and if I don't do it someone else will. So if I don't take the money they will just buy someone else's vote instead.


Since the beginning of the Internet it has always been at times a shady place where criminals come together to meet and organize criminal activity, but it has also been a place that people from all walks of life came to meet who would have never met otherwise. It has been a place that unleashed innovation through new ideas, spawned a community of freethinkers and allowed most of us to see the possibilities we had never dreamed of before. 

To say that the Internet was one of the greatest inventions of the world is not giving it enough credit, because without the Internet so many technologies we take for granted today would simply not exist. Without the Internet there would be no need for them and we would be as closed off as we once were. The Internet bridges the world like nothing else.


In 1998 your congress created one of the worst piece of legislative documents to ever be forced onto the American people and it was the first step in a line of attempts to censor the Internet for Americans. It was called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). So where did this legislation come from you may ask? Well to understand this lets go back to the fifteenth century and talk about the invention by a man named Johannes Gutenberg, movable type printing. 

With his invention of the printing press, never before had there been such a device that could mass-produce books before. So effective was it that Britain created a law that allowed books to be printed only by one company and only with their permission. The first kind of law prohibiting mass production of goods this way, it was called the Licensing Act. In 1710 Parliament passed a new law which took rights away from one company and the government and gave those rights to the authors of those books.

It was called the Statute of Anne and it gave authors the exclusive right to print a book for 14 years and another 14 years after that if the author was still alive. Now remember copyright law was created and intended to protect the copying of written works not, ideas, photographs, music, movies or anything else you just feel like preventing someone from sharing with someone else. On December 20, 1787, Thomas Jefferson wrote a letter to James Madison concerning the recently-drafted Constitution. In this letter he wrote:


"I do not like... the omission of a bill of rights providing clearly and without the aid of sophisms for freedom of religion, freedom of the press, protection against standing armies, restriction against monopolies, the eternal and unremitting force of the habeas corpus laws, and trials by jury in all matters of fact triable by the laws of the land..."


In this letter Jefferson makes it very clear he does not like the idea of monopolies. He sights further in another letter to Madison August 28, 1789:


"I like the declaration of rights as far as it goes, but I should have been for going further. For instance, the following alterations and additions would have pleased me... Article 9. Monopolies may be allowed to persons for their own productions in literature, and their own inventions in the arts, for a term not exceeding ___ years, but for no longer term, and for no other purpose."


Here he is very clear, he wanted copyright abilities to only be allowed by individuals and not by companies. The term of monopolies allowed by persons specifically means only individuals can claim copyright. In a Jeffersonian world individuals hold all the copyrights and corporations to use them would probably have to get permission or pay the individual to use them. What Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8 of the U.S. Constitution actually says is:


"The Congress shall have Power to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;"


Well this seems pretty straight forward and clear, Congress gives the power of individual Authors and Inventors the right to protect their work for a limited amount of time. Jefferson said specifically in another letter to Madison:


"I sincerely rejoice at the acceptance of our new constitution by nine states. It is a good canvas, on which some strokes only want re-touching. What these are, I think are sufficiently manifested by the general voice from North to South, which calls for a bill of rights. It seems pretty generally understood that this should go to juries, habeas corpus, standing armies, printing, religion and monopolies. I conceive there may be difficulty in finding general modification of these suited to the habits of all the states. But if such cannot be found then it is better to establish trials by jury, the right of Habeas corpus, freedom of the press and freedom of religion in all cases, and to abolish standing armies in time of peace, and monopolies, in all cases, than not to do it in any... The saying there shall be no monopolies lessens the incitements to ingenuity, which is spurred on by the hope of a monopoly for a limited time, as of 14 years; but the benefit even of limited monopolies is too doubtful to be opposed to that of their general suppression."


Here he states clearly that one he doesn't like the idea of monopolies but should they be allowed, they should be limited to no more than 14 years. The most interesting thing about this letter is that it was dated July 31, 1788 before the Constitution was fully ratified. So here we have maybe the most important American to ever live, after all he did write the very document that secures for all of us the very freedoms we do have that others are trying to take from us. 

He is pretty outspoken about the idea of corporate monopolies and the idea that individual protection is ok but should be very limited as to not stifle innovation. After all 14 years is long enough to make plenty of money on your work at which time it should go into the public domain, allowing others the right to change it, improve it, make derivative works. At which point you as the individual have the right to invent something new to which you have exclusivity of 14 years.


Again and I hate to say this but the framers were absolute in their thinking when drafting the bill of rights and the constitution. They wanted to make it clear, sometimes pretty terribly so, that somethings are the way they are. Jefferson believed strongly that intellectual property was a terrible idea but if he had to do it, he wanted it to be very limited. In a letter to Isaac McPherson on August 13, 1813 he wrote:


"If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it."


He clearly says you own something only so long as you keep it to yourself, as soon as you tell someone its public domain. It's how he thought, and what he believed. So let's move forward to 1976. Copyright law sure changed a lot since its inception, The Copyright Act of 1976 would give ownership of the work to the author for a term no less than the life of the author and an additional 50 years beyond that. Corporations who were never intended to even own this kind of monopoly were given an additional 75 years to hold on to their ownership. 

Then in 1998, Sonny Bonehead, oh I mean Sonny Bono having been heavily bribed, I mean lobbied, authors a bill that would allow copyright holders to hold onto their works for an additional 70 years and for corporations 120 years after creation. So now we are back to the DMCA. In the 90's with the invention of the CD player and later the tools to rip the music from the disk, came the ability to store that data in a small format called MP3. 

This is significant because at the time formats that were used to extract music from disks created quite large files making them not very useful for transfer over the Internet. Remember that most people had very slow dial-up connections that allowed a very slow transfer of data over copper phone lines. 


Suddenly mp3s allowed what was once a very large file to become very small without the loss of too much information. Now remember everyone was using dial-up so the transfer of large movies was next to impossible. So the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) had nothing to worry about that time. However, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) began to take notice. Suddenly with pressure from World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and the RIAA the DMCA is born.

Of course the RIAA didn't much have any use for it until the explosion of Napster a year later. Suddenly people all over the world could trade any mp3s they wanted for ones they had and vice-versa. Napster had started a revolution. Teenagers and College kids had created a buzz that would spread all over the world, forever changing the Internet and music, all in the spirit of free trade and an open free society. It wasn't hatred of the music industry but rather a love of it that started this. 

Soon that love would sour, igniting a battle between the youth of the day and one of the most powerful corporations in the world. Though a clear winner has yet to be determined, the battle wages on. So what exactly does the DMCA do? Well first it authorizes a copyright holder to have his work removed from a site by issuing a statement to the effect that he or she owns the copyright. No proof is actually needed, only the statement is good enough. 

Usually a person merely has to write a letter or send an email. This has resulted in lawfully obtained and properly licensed material being removed from the Internet, and the censorship of free speech when corporations are faced with information that contradicts their opinions. Thus you may say hey I really dislike this artists work, and if you make reference to it of any kind, without notice your content provider may be served with a letter that forces the removal of this speech. 

Let me be 100% clear, this whole thing violates due process under the law. Due process which is granted by the Constitution of the United States of America. The foundation by which this government was built and functions and the document that secures your freedoms. The other thing that the DMCA did was stifle innovation, how you may ask? One word: DeCSS. 


In October of 1999, perturbed by the fact that the Linux operating system was unable to play DVDs three programmers created some code called DeCSS (De-Scramble Content-Scrambling System) that allowed the Linux OS to play DVDs by decrypting the CSS copy protection found on all commercial DVDs. Until that point the only way to play a DVD was to buy commercial software that was licensed to play the DVD, software not available for the Linux OS. 

Though not intentionally, the source code for DeCSS was leaked all over the Internet and soon applications began popping up that allowed anyone to extract the movie from a DVD and play it on their computer without the disk. Under the DMCA software that circumvents technology is illegal. This by definition is the censorship of innovation. It is innately human to fiddle with something, to take it apart to see how it works, to destroy it only to rebuild it again. 

Within all of us is the desire to make something better, whether it is something tangible as a product or free flowing as an idea. It is something I believe that makes us very different from the other animals on this planet, the desire to fix what is broken. Here a programmer wanted to play a movie he legally purchased on DVD on the computer he owned and was unable to, so rather than sit by and do nothing he fixed the problem.


In 2001 a programmer by the name of Bram Cohen probably unhappy with the fact that most users were using dialup but desired larger files created a program and protocol called Bittorrent. In an interview later, he stated he was only looking for a solution to a problem. Bittorrent was a Peer-to-Peer protocol which was extremely different than anything before it, because it relied less on single-source servers to distribute these files but used the little bits of bandwidth from each user to distribute all of the data to everyone equally at the sametime in different parts. 

Thus while users one and two were given parts five and six, users three and four were maybe given parts eight and nine. And when someone was given a full piece of that puzzle they helped to distribute it to another while getting a part they don't have from someone who had it. It was an ingenious technology. While it meant waiting a while to get the whole file it meant that in the end it wasn't just you that would have it, maybe twenty others would have it as well. 

This too was a bit of a revolution. The idea that many could work together to make a whole. E Pluribus Unum, you may be familiar with the term, it means "Out of Many, One." It was considered the de facto motto of the United States of America for a long time, even making it on our currency. A Radical idea maybe? Suddenly websites began to spring up all over the Internet hosting links to torrent files made to distribute all kinds of things but mostly movies and music. 

Now the MPAA had it, suddenly pirates had a way to easily mass distribute their movies all over the world. The MPAA and the RIAA began sending out DMCA notices to webhosts trying to get these sites shutdown. Federal authorities under orders from the MPAA and RIAA and with cooperation of some foreign governments, began breaking down the doors of server hosts and confiscating the servers hosting these linking torrent files. That's right, no actual copyrighted material was even hosted on these servers, only links. Government authorities began breaking in, only to grab a few servers hosting a bunch of html and scripting language, text files, what a colossal waste of foreign and domestic tax dollars and the justice system.


They spent many years trying to thwart the pirates only to have one outspoken site called the pirate bay give them the middle finger. You see the pirate bay is in Sweden and the United States have no authority there. In fact several times they have tried to remove the site from the Internet only to have failed horribly. If you head to their site be sure to check out their section of letters from copyright holders and their responses where they poke fun at the fact they are unable to do anything to them. 

So now we fast forward many years, and suddenly people are no longer tethered to the Internet with a dial-up connection but now we have cable, and dsl and fiber. The speeds which seemed impossible to conceive ten years ago are very much a reality today. Suddenly anything you want you can have at the click of a button. You no longer have to wait for it. It's just there. So now comes SOPA and PIPA. 

Unhappy at the fact they have been unable to shut down the pirate bay, the MPAA heavily bribes, oh I mean lobbies a few members of Congress with the idea of a new law. The boneheads in Washington will have you believe they are just thinking of you and I, but actually its primarily greed is all they think about. So a bill completely written by the MPAA and RIAA is handed to Rep. Lamar Smith at which point he begins to get other members of Congress to sign it. What's pretty apparent about Congress is they very often sign things without reading them. 

Suddenly more than half of Congress has signed up in favor of this bill. Has anyone even read it or understand it in Congress? Moreover do they know what would happen to the Internet with such a bill in place? The answer is obviously no.


The RIAA and the MPAA are very large corporations who have built a model of making money that has served them well for more than a half a century. I can see why they do the things they do and I can even understand it. You know this isn't the first time they tried to break things, in the case of the MPAA, Jack Valenti, President of the MPAA at the time described the VCR this way to Congress:


"We are going to bleed and bleed and hemorrhage, unless this Congress at least protects one industry that is able to retrieve a surplus balance of trade and whose total future depends on its protection from the savagery and the ravages of this machine. ... I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone." 


Of course it ended up in a case before the Supreme Court in which they ruled that the VCR was legal for private use by individuals. With no other options the MPAA did something they hadn't thought of, produce a recording of the movie they could sell to the consumer at a reasonable price that allowed the consumer the ability to own it and watch it whenever they wanted. And they made millions of dollars on it. 

And then there was the audio cassette tape, which allowed any person with a radio/tape recorder to pop in one of these cassettes and tape music right off the radio, thus allowing them to save and listen to it whenever they wanted to hear it. And of course the RIAA went ballistic and complained and then they did something they hadn't considered before, they put music on it themselves and sold it to the consumer for a reasonable price and they too made millions. 

Then came along the compact disc and once again the RIAA was up in arms. And once again they made millions. Then came the DVD. The MPAA started to complain but then someone said we can put movies on it and protect them with copy protection and the MPAA loved it and by now they made billions. 

Then came Blu-ray and more copy protection but this copy protection was different, it was unbreakable and so the MPAA loved it and made you guessed it billions. Then blu-ray encryption was broken and the MPAA began a new campaign of lobbying. 


Along the way came the invention of digital files. People didn't think of it as stealing, they just wanted a way to share something they liked with other people so they started sharing music, then movies and now the MPAA and RIAA were faced with something new, an enemy for which they had no defense. How do you make money on something like this? If people are just giving the product away there is no money in that. 

Then this inventive CEO at a company called Apple Computer had an idea. He had already given consumers a way to put all the music they had ripped off their cds on a device he called an Ipod, this allowed anyone to take all their music with them anywhere they went. No longer were you forced to carry around a portable cd player and a binder of cds. He thought of an online store where consumers could purchase individual songs at a nominal fee to put on their purchased Ipod. 

No one in the RIAA thought it would work, after all who would pay for a song when they were able to download it for free. Itunes Music Store launched in April of 2003, within the first week purchased songs had reached a million. By December more than 25 million songs had been purchased, thus proving the RIAA wrong. Netflix has been around since 1997 but it wasn't until 2007 they added streaming to their product line. Suddenly consumers could pay a little more and be able to view movies right from their computers and the MPAA made money licensing all that content to Netflix, soon others followed like Hulu and the MPAA made more money.


So now we've established the RIAA and the MPAA make money, they make a lot of money. Even in the face of piracy they make money. So what we are really talking about is greed. No one needs to make billions of dollars to survive, but greedy corporations believe its all about making more money than you made the previous year. They have built this model where by even if they have made a profit, if they did not make more money than they made the previous year it counts as a loss. 

And corporations like the MPAA and the RIAA thrive on that shit. They spit out huge numbers to Congress arguing losses in the billions, all the while making unbelievable profit, amounts so high its inconceivable. Lets get something straight this is how it works, you make a product, you sell the product, you take the money you made from selling the product and pay the cost of making the product, including the labor if any, involved in making the product. 


What's left over after your overhead is pure profit. Now the way the MPAA and RIAA are complaining you would think they must be losing money every year, guess what not so the MPAA and RIAA made billions last year. In fact they have never lost money, not a single year since the beginning of their industries. These corporations are designed on a model of steal and whine. You heard me they whine about piracy all the time stealing themselves. 

So let me give you an example. A report of Record label accouting shows that 63% of money made on the sale of music goes to the record label, 24% goes to the distributors and only 13% goes to the musicians. From that 13% they must pay the band, the producers, the lawyers, the managers, and they get whats left over. So the math comes out to something like a musician makes $23.40 for every $1000 that is sold. Oh I forgot one major thing, of that $23.40 that goes to the musician it doesn't cover the costs that record label need to recoup for advancing money to sell the music in the first place. So sometimes, the musician can sell millions of dollars in music and make $0.00 out of it. And sometimes they actually still owe the record labels money. This makes me think of the times I hear the RIAA saying things like we need to protect the artists, fuck you douche bags you need to protect yourselves. So there is one reason no one wants to support the RIAA.


So now we see that the RIAA and MPAA make tons of money and yet they try to pass off this piece of shit legislation to censor the Internet. How does protecting intellectual property censor the Internet you ask? Well imagine a world where you buy something or borrow something, a widget and you decide you dislike it and you want people to know about it so you go on to a site that has a forum for people to complain about things they don't like and you create a post about this widget. Suddenly someone comes along maybe the inventor of the widget maybe someone who sells them, maybe just someone who doesn't like people who complain about things. 

And they complain to the government, hey this guy is talking about widgets and I own the rights to that widget. I want you to block that site. And the government blocks the site. And now no one can complain about anything because the site is gone, or is it? Well when I type in the sites domain name I get a message saying that the site violated copyright and was removed. But then I remember the site has an IP address so I try it and it works. 

So now we've seen a couple of things happen government censorship of something they have no business censoring and the fact it doesn't work. SOPA and PIPA were designed with the intention of blocking access to foreign websites deemed as infringers by the corporations who's interests are supposedly being violated. The problem with this is one it breaks DNS by allowing deliberate DNS spoofing, government sanctioned yes, but still DNS spoofing. And at the sametime it doesn't actually stop piracy since the website is still there and can be reached simply by its IP address.


The MPAA and RIAA have convinced themselves even though they have made money on every technology in the past this is one they cannot beat and even though they make record profits every year they will soon be out of business. The worst part about it is beyond convincing themselves they have convinced our legislators, the people we hire to protect us from big bad evil things....like the corporations, sigh.


Piracy has been around a long time even before the Internet and we invented cars, computers, televisions, radios, rockets, toasters, engines, electricity, the telephone, music, movies, ipods, pornography, etc. and someone somewhere made money on it. The Internet runs fine just the way it is, no one is losing money on piracy in fact reports show that pirates spend more money on music, movies and software than most consumers do. 

Companies like Netflix and Apple who take advantage of the Internet consumers, are certainly making money. Maybe the only people losing money are the musicians, of course its not from piracy, its from corporate greed.


"If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy." -James Madison

You were right Mr. Madison, for if we are to believe the propaganda spewed forth by our government and its puppeteers the RIAA, MPAA, MLB, NFL, Nintendo, Sony, Disney, Viacom, NBC Universal, ESPN, News Corporation, Random House, and the Copyright Alliance just to name a few, our enemies are not domestic but include the pirates of China, Russia, Thailand, Hungary, Poland, Mexico, Taiwan, Spain, India, and Italy. 

And of course we must include those dastardly evil Swedish pirates at the most nastiest of all places The Pirate Bay, who consistently flaunt their opposition to copyright and include in a legal section of their site, responses to legal demands with such quips as: 

"the DMCA is a US-specific legislation,

and TPB is hosted in the land of vikings, reindeers, Aurora Borealis and
cute blonde girls."

In closing maybe the best quote of all comes from Thomas Jefferson who said:

“I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.”

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Software Every PC Technician Needs

This post will discuss software that I have found essential as a PC technician. This article is not intended as a step-by-step guide nor is it intended as a list of every app that technicians will ever need. It is simply an overview of software that I find fundamental to the PC technician.

Malware Removal

We already discussed my process for Malware Removal in a previous post. Here's a recap of the software that I use:

MalwareBytes Anti-Malware is one of the best malicious software removal tools available.

SUPERAntiSpyware is another excellent malicious software removal tool. Plus, it comes in a portable version.

ComboFix is great at root kit removal.

While CCleaner is not a malware removal tool, it is great at cleaning up junk before purging a system of malicious software. It also has an excellent portable version.

Live CDs

One of my favorite tools is Ultimate Boot CD for Windows. It is a boot CD based on Bart PE. The entire list of tools included with UBCD4Win is far too long to go into here. But, it includes anti-virus, backup, diagnostic, recovery, password, registry, and benchmarking tools. It is well worth your time to build a CD(or USB drive).

Another Live CD to add to your collection is Ubuntu. This user friendly Linux distribution includes a long list of tools as well. Plus, you can install additional software as needed.

Remote Software

I have found three way of supporting users remotely that I like.

First is Remote Assistant. It is built into Windows and works great. Also good are LogMeIn and DameWare. Try them out and see what works for you. 

Misc.

When users have their email applications remember their password for them, they often forget the password when the time comes to migrate to new hardware. Mail Pass View solves this. It can recover lost passwords for many different email apps.

Another thing that users can forget or misplace is product keys. ProduKey has this covered. It can recover product keys for both Windows and Office.

No matter how hard Microsoft tries, Windows XP just won't die. Technicians still spend a lot of time supporting it. I have found that nLite is essential for keeping my XP install CDs up-to-date with the latest Service Packs and patches. Not only that, you can customize the install disk in innumerable ways. It does take a while to download all the updates and set up the CD. But, in the long run, it saves countless hours of downloading updates for each individPC that you service.

A great companion to nLite is DriverPacks. With DriverPacks you can slipstream drivers for practically every hardware device under the sun. You can also create a stand alone disk for updating drivers.

Best for last...

Google. Okay, not really software, but it is vital for every PC technician. It is impossible to know or remember everything about all of the different versions of Windows, much less every application that one may encounter. I use Google all the time to research everything from error messages to how to install a low voltage power supply on a particular HP Laserjet model. Again, Google is indispensable.

Do you have any favorites that are not listed? Let's hear about them. Leave a comment.

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Backup Windows Part 3 -- xcopy

Let's briefly discuss a quick way to backup Windows. I use a batch file that I wrote to quickly backup clients' PCs.

Here it is:

xcopy /c /d /e /h /i /r /y "%USERPROFILE%\Favorites" "%COMPUTERNAME%\%USERNAME%\Favorites"
xcopy /c /d /e /h /i /r /y "%USERPROFILE%\Desktop" "%COMPUTERNAME%\%USERNAME%\Desktop"
xcopy /c /d /e /h /i /r /y "%USERPROFILE%\My Documents" "%COMPUTERNAME%\%USERNAME%\My Documents"
xcopy /c /d /e /h /i /r /y "%USERPROFILE%\Documents" "%COMPUTERNAME%\%USERNAME%\Documents"
xcopy /c /d /e /h /i /r /y "%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Outlook\*.pst"
xcopy /c /d /e /h /i /r /y "%USERPROFILE%\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook\*.pst"

echo Backup Complete!
@pause


This quick script copies the user's Favorites, Desktop, My Documents(Documents in the case of Vista and Windows 7) and the Outlook .pst file.

This script will work for either XP or Vista/Windows 7. The /c switch tells xcopy to continue even if it confronts an error. Therefore, when running this script on Windows 7, xcopy simply moves on when it does not find the My Documents folder. Of course, the inverse is true when running the script on XP.

This can be used for migrations or as a regular backup. The /d switch tells xcopy to only copy files that have changed since a certain date. If no date is given, as above, only the files that have a newer source time than the destination will be copied.

Obviously, changes can be made to customize the script as needed. For instance, the entire user profile can be backed up. Also, additional folders, such as the Firefox profile, can be added.

I run this script from an external USB drive and all of the data is copied to that drive. Again, customize the script to copy files to a different location.

Be sure to type xcopy /? at a command prompt to learn what each switch does and also to learn about the switches not included in the above.

If you want to use the above backup script, copy and paste it into notepad and save it as backup.bat. Double-click the file and you're backing up.

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Backup Windows Part 2 -- Clonezilla

Clonezilla Live is the software that we are to discuss in this part of the Backup Windows series. Regardless of my title, one can use Clonezilla to clone any hard drive--not just hard drives with Windows installed. Clonezilla Live is free, Linux based software that allows one to clone (i.e. make an exact copy) of a hard drive. Simply clone your system and if your hard drive catastrophically fails, pop in the clone and boot up.

As always, click on any pictures that are too small to see.

Download Clonezilla Live and burn it to a CD or DVD. Boot to your newly created Clonezilla Live disk. On the opening menu, choose Clonezilla live.

You'll see a lot of scrolling text and finally a menu to choose your language. Since you are reading this blog, we'll assume that your choice is English. On the next menu, unless you have a good reason, choose Don't touch keymap.

Next, choose Start Clonezilla.

Clonezilla can also be used to create an image. In this post, we are discussing cloning. So, on the next menu, select device-device.

On the next menu, select Beginner Mode.

After that, your selection depends on what you want to do. There are four options presented. Select disk_to_local_disk to clone an entire hard drive to another hard drive on the same PC. Choose disk_to_remote_disk to clone an entire hard drive to a hard drive on your network. Select part_to_local_part to clone a particular partition to another partition on the same PC. Choose part_to_remote_part to clone a particular partition to another partition on your network. In this example, we are choosing disk_to_local_disk. This is probably what you want to do as well.

Next select your source. This is the disk that we are copying. Make sure that you select the right one. If you are not 100% sure. Stop. Find out for sure before you proceed. If you do this backwards, you will wipe out your original hard drive.

Next, select your destination. This is where the exact copy of your source is to be located. Again, be sure that you have chosen correctly. The destination disk will be wiped out. So, only select a destination with no data or one that has data that you don't mind losing.

One limitation to Clonezilla is that the destination hard drive or partition must be at least the same size as the source. It doesn't matter if you have a lot of free, unused space on your source disk. Again, the destination must be at least as big as the source.

Next, press enter to continue. You will have to confirm that you want to proceed twice.

Clonezilla then asks if you want to clone your boot loader. If you plan on using this as a backup in case of a failure of the original hard drive, the answer is yes. Confirm one more time and you're cloning.

Depending on how big your drive is, this can take hours. This is something I try to schedule to do overnight.

After it is finished, you should test your copy to make sure that it boots.

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Backup Windows Part 1 -- Backup and Restore

A couple of days ago was National Backup Day. Okay, we are a little late. Plus, a quick Google search will reveal several National Backup Days. Nevertheless, I was inspired to post a multi-part post on different methods for backing up Windows.

In Part 1, we will discuss using Backup and Restore. Backup and Restore is available in both Vista and Windows 7.

Creating The Backup

Backup and Restore is located here: Start>All Programs>Maintenance>Backup and Restore. Or simply type, "Backup and Restore" in the Search programs and files dialog box at the bottom of the start menu.

The first time that Backup and Restore is run, the backup must be set. Click the Set up backup button.

When the Set Backup Window pops up, select the drive that will serve as the backup drive. This must be a different physical drive from the one that is being backed up. Backing up to a different partition on the same physical disk does not make any sense. If the drive fails, all of the partitions fail and your backup is lost. You may choose a different physical disk in the same computer, a drive on the network, an optical drive, a virtual hard drive(VHD), or a USB drive. This can be changed in the future, if needed.

You will then be given a choice of weather to let Windows choose what to back up or choose yourself.

Explore the options and decide for yourself what best suites your needs.

Once the backup is set, press the Backup now button or schedule a time for backups. The time chosen for backup must be a time when the backup drive is available. Otherwise the backup will fail.

The amount of time that is taken for the backup will depend on how much data you are backing up. If this is the first backup and there is a lot of data, it can take well over an hour.

That's all that needs to be done. Just let it complete.

Restoring From The Backup

To restore a file or folder, open up Backup and Restore and click the Restore my Files button.

A window will popup that allows you to browse or search your backup for files or folders that you need. You can choose a different date to restore from as well.

Once the file(s) are selected, click Next. A new window pops up allowing you to choose weather to restore the file in it's original location or to another location.

That's it. Let it restore the files.

Backup and Restore can also create a system image. More on that in a future post.

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