FALLOUT from the “Dallas Buyers Club decision” is taking unpredictable and terrifying turns.
The court has ruled that copyright holders can force internet service providers (ISPs) to provide access to their logs, which would allow them to identify who has been illegally downloading their movies.
With this evidence they’ll be able to demand money from the downloaders and potentially sue them.
If you lead a busy life then Netflix and its rivals have such a cornucopia of content that there’s really no reason to download illegally.
But a lot of people are such compulsive downloaders of shows and movies that to them the streaming services are limited and out of date.
An acquaintance who is, shall we say, no stranger to the illegal street-racing community, and thus has an at best tenuous relationship with lawfulness, recently posted on facebook about this.
He was worried about being caught up in future sweeps of ISP data by copyright holders, but wanted an instant access to shows that aren’t legally available in Australia.
His friends’ suggestions were an intriguing mix of different ways to tunnel his internet to a variety of streaming sites around the world in jurisdictions with less care for copyright law.
And then one of this crowd piped up with: “Just fire up a Pineapple Wifi and download as much as you like with your neighbours’ wifi”.
My eyes nearly popped out of my head and after a lot of googling (more exciting watch lists to go on) and chatting with a number of IT security professionals I only feel sicker.
Pineapple Wifi can be ordered online bundled with a fetching rucksack, battery pack, and antennas for a couple of hundred dollars (for legitimate penetration testing, of course, but no questions are asked).
It takes a plethora of software hacking tools and bundles them with a slightly tricked out wifi router and basically allows any non-technical idiot to be a cyber criminal.
It is by no means alone on the market.
The pieces to build such a thing yourself have been around for a while, which is why a company putting them together and selling them has not created the stir it might have.
For example the “Reaver” software, which launches brute-force password attacks to break open your wifi network, offers a “Pro” version for $75.
The terrifying thing is that non-sophisticated illegal downloaders are becoming aware of such things.
With a high-gain antenna in suburban Canberra they can sit in their parents’ bedroom and target hundreds of nearby wifi networks.
You might wonder why you’ve blown out your download allowance, but the first you’ll really know about it is when the speculative invoices from the copyright holders start to flood in.
Worse than that, the police might kick your door down for downloading material that violates more than copyright. Try explaining that to your wife, kids and neighbours.
The security experts I spoke to couldn’t nominate a consumer-grade router they trusted to hold these devices out, but recommend changing your password monthly, which might at least get the parasites latching on to another host.
None of the above is the worst-case scenario. If the illegal downloader on your network gets enterprising they can, with the included software, perform man-in-the-middle attacks and trick you into logging into fake internet banking pages. Then they can steal all your money.
Law enforcement could fight back using honeypots to draw the hackers in and nab them for exemplary prosecution.
It might be time they were prodded to start doing so.
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