The Pirate Bay Situation

It’s big (and by now fairly vintage) news in the torrenting and general technology community that a verdict has been reached for the lawsuit against The Pirate Bay’s four founders. I won’t say much about the gory details of the trials – there are plenty of articles on good websites that will give you all sorts of facts; I’m just going to state some of my opinions on the matter. In case you don’t already know, the verdict was a jail sentence and a $3.6M fine.

Firstly my thoughts on file sharing in general. BitTorrent is used for a whole host of good things – I’ve used it on multiple occasions to grab up-to-date linux distributions and it’s a fantastic way to download without limitations on server upload speeds (private trackers have exceptionally high ratios and speeds but linux and other open source stuff tends to download fast as well even on public trackers). There’s also the whole debate about whether or not piracy really does harm the economy as much as Sony would like us to think. But personally I think there’s no hope for companies trying to shut down piracy because it stems directly from the entire point of the internet: sharing information. If torrenting somehow gets shut down (an incredibly unlikely scenario), an alternative P2P system will immediately spring up to replace it, and there are a great many out there waiting to be exploited. But basically what I’m saying is that an attempt to target the infrastructure of filesharing is just a pathetic way for companies to seek some sort of revenge for probably mostly imagined and definitely largely over-hyped and bloated losses.

It is transparently obvious that the trial is much bigger than just The Pirate Bay – the verdict poses a threat to the entire community of file sharing. The Pirate Bay may have had certain special circumstances that made this verdict even vaguely plausible: something to do with Sweden possibly. But the verdict has set an incredibly dangerous precedent – if the team really end up facing significant jail time and massive fines, it would serve as a massive deterrant to anyone even considering starting up a novel platform for sharing, be it open-source software, ideas or whatever. My opinion is that the entire spirit of a collaborative internet is being broken apart piece by piece, while the pirates will still always find a method of sharing illegally obtained and distributed material. The supposedly illegal side always tends to be far more determined to keep sharing than the average supposedly law-abiding person who is probably fairly ambivalent anyway about whether or not to share those photos on Flickr.

There’s also a huge amount of wastage. I noticed Isohunt have put a notice on their front page linking to some legal material. I wouldn’t be surprised if other trackers are calling their lawyers right now, preparing for a legal assault on their communities. I’m not saying lawyers’ pay is waste, but the sheer amount of effort and time going into nit-picking against a multi-corporate legal mob in front of an unconvinced and generally non-tech-savvy jury seems to me at least a somewhat inefficient use of resources.

And to keep everything in perspective, the recording industry are fighting against a phenomenon they themselves are helping to create. The measures being adopted to prevent piracy such as music DRM make life a misery for law-abiding citizens who pay for their music; for example iTunes forced all its customers to re-download and thus re-buy all their music just to (supposedly) remove one layer of DRM from audio files. All this hassle actually makes pirated music of higher quality than purchased music, a ridiculous situation created by companies like Apple. How can anyone blame me if I decide to download a torrent of a few songs (which I’ve already paid for) just to be able to play them in something other than iTunes?

In my opinion, it will become increasingly difficult in the future to download plain DRM-free music and films, and indeed the risk of being caught doing so will probably increase, as will the penalty. The current trend is that more and more companies are getting involved – once it was just bodies such as the MPAA and RIAA who were targeting file sharers. Then more private companies joined in for the money such as MediaDefender, and now even ISPs and governments have joined the witch-hunt. If you want my take on this, I suggest that if you already download and share pirated material, do so while you can and max out on it; the window of opportunity to get hold of clean untrackable media may well be closing.

Good hunting

๏̯͡๏﴿

Copyright Infringement

This is in fact my Economics essay for the Barnett Prize. The person who marked it thought it was a terrible essay (fair enough), but I still think it’s interesting to discuss. So here it is, however horrific an essay, after being cut down to exactly 1500 words, and with a less bellicose attitude towards the RIAA than normal (for the sake of being PC). It’s entitled “Steal this Essay”. This is also an experiment to see how well WordPress’ ‘import from Word’ feature works. I have to say, I’m impressed by how it deals with footnotes and citations/bibliographies.

Using a specific microeconomic case study from either the UK or abroad, assess how governments can deal with market failure.

Copyright infringement is a growing concern in the music and film industry. Despite the best efforts of governments, private firms, law-enforcement agencies and cyber-police, the amount of music and film in illegal circulation over the internet has grown at an exponential rate since the conception of Napster, the first peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing service to hit the internet. According to Ars Technica (1), usage of Bittorrent, a popular tool used by file sharers, grew 24% in five months, and Bittorrent is apparently responsible for 80% of the world’s traffic. Global music sales dropped from $38bn in 1999 to $32bn in 2003 and American studios reported $2.3bn in losses to film piracy in 2005 alone (2). Free market forces are failing: talent starved of adequate funding will fail to flourish and music, entertainment and culture may be eroded as a result. Without consumers willing to pay for goods produced by talented artists, such artists will be unable to invest profits in creating more music (they may opt to record fewer CDs), and supply of the product decreases, increasing its cost which in this case further exacerbates losses leading to a vicious cycle. With revenue from their music falling, artists may choose to switch careers, discontinuing their contributions to music: the labour supply decreases, as does the pool of musical talent. Culturally, the negative externalities of this are highly significant, resulting in a shallower music culture.

In my opinion, the primary reason for file sharing is simply convenience. The internet allows even very large amounts of data to be transferred at zero cost and supersonic speeds; the temptation to cheat the system becomes irresistible: the opportunity cost of buying a CD from a local store, which involves both monetary as well as time sacrifices, is far greater than the single mouse click it takes to download the entire album. Pirated media can be seen as a substitute good for which consumers pay with risk of getting caught rather than with conventional currency; industry is losing out to this illegal competition.

Existent government measures have proven ineffectual at best. For a while law enforcement worked: the RIAA[1] and MPAA[2] succeeded in intimidating file sharers into accepting monetary settlements out of court, thereby recouping losses and deterring potential copyright criminals. However when exonerated file sharers began to sue the RIAA back (3), subsequent copyright lawsuits became somewhat anathematised and digital rights organisations procured an increasingly unpopular and disrespected reputation for aggressive methods (as illustrated). One of the primary difficulties is the issue of evidence: piracy is exceedingly difficult to detect with ever-advancing encryption technology. Taking the current trial of The Pirate Bay[3] as an example of ineffectuality, on the second day of the trial half the charges have already been dropped (4) (at the time of writing this). To make things worse, the music industry’s attempts to cover itself from piracy only punish the law-abiding: employment of digital rights management on music by online retailers such as Apple renders the files unusable with anything but iTunes and iPods, causing frustration, heavily discouraging the buying of music.

The government has attempted to enforce the law through Internet Service Providers (ISPs): since they provide the means to perform illegal activities, perhaps it should be their responsibility to police their networks. In 2008, the UK’s largest six[4] ISPs[5] agreed (5) to a code laid out by the government: if an ISP has reasonable evidence upon which to suspect a customer of illegally downloading music, it will throttle his download speeds significantly. This appears promising: a large proportion of the country is now under surveillance by ISPs and users have an incentive to stop file sharing; Virgin Media even sent out warning letters to several hundred of its file sharing customers. However the government is pitting itself directly against the free market forces: as pointed out by the Wired article (5), it is far more probable that they were merely taking measures against losing customers: firms appreciate the revenue from them. In addition, ISPs abiding by this code are likely to lose business owing to a pervasive sense of intrusion from being constantly monitored. Besides, imposing regulations on businesses raises supply costs (employing a monitoring team for example), shifting the supply curve leftwards, resulting in a more expensive, and less abundant, good or service:

[Insert bog standard Economics AS/AD diagram]

One suggestion was for the government to accept the fact that internet users will share files, and rather than fight this unwinnable war, to tax broadband usage and return tax revenue to industry, thus compensating for the market failure. Unsurprisingly this has been met with much fury: not only does this demonstrate great cynicism and mistrust on the government’s part, but it may actually exacerbate the problem: consumers might decide that since they have paid for their illegal downloads they are entitled to download copyrighted material.

Alternatively, similarly to using disturbing television advertisements about lacking TV licences, the government could attempt to threaten the population into submission. There is good evidence that advertising works with anti-smoking campaigns, so there appears to be a high probability of success with this measure. Again the government is no longer working against the free market: it is rather injecting information into the market and allowing consumers to make a better-informed decision. Unlike regulation, such measures preserve human rights and can be highly effective in combination with other measures. Unfortunately, unlike the case of smoking and even TV licences, a savvy file sharer knows he can hide his activities indefinitely: threatening advertisements do not work for such people (who also tend to be the heaviest sharers). Education may eventually curb the problem through generations of law-abiding citizens, but such slow-acting measures may not be sufficiently effective in the short run to avert cultural erosion.

In September 2007, it was discovered that a large (needless to say illegal) cyber-offensive was being planned (6) against The Pirate Bay by MediaDefender[6] in an attempt to halt file sharing activity. Although it was discovered and averted, perhaps such measures are the only ones that will work: aggressive attacks on the central hive of activity; this is after all what governments are accustomed to doing when dealing with terrorists and criminals. However, despite a worldwide offensive on terrorism, ever since September 2001, little, if not negative, progress has been made against it; what guarantees the success of an offensive against a worldwide network of highly intelligent anonymous criminals?

Perhaps to understand fully the nature of this market failure, one should reconsider the extent and type of damage done by file sharing, and also take into account its positive aspects. According to US District Judge James P. Jones (7), ‘17,000 illegal downloads don’t equal 17,000 lost sales’. If a customer wants some music but is not prepared to pay the price quoted on Amazon (indicating he is not willing and able to pay for it), he would not be in the market in the first place, so the music industry should be indifferent to whether he downloads that music illegally in the end. Of course this line of reasoning cannot be extended too far, but the point is that not every illegal download harms industry. In fact there was a study (8) (English synopsis (9)) commissioned by the Dutch government which concluded that in fact file sharing contributes €100m per year to the Dutch economy. Apparently much downloaded content becomes treated as sample content to be bought later, and downloaders tend to buy more games than non-downloaders (possibly an effect of exposure to online marketing). In addition, the positive externalities of file sharing include broader cultural wealth. By annihilating file sharing, the government would lose out on positive externalities as well as negative ones. The report concludes that most losses can be attributed to things other than piracy, including competition with other forms of entertainment. Notably in The Netherlands, downloading media for personal use is legal. Perhaps an unconventional solution to the market failure is to legalise file sharing, thus maximising the social benefits and accepting the (minimal) social costs. Besides, surveys show that 80% of British people would be in favour of this measure (10).

In conclusion, business has taken a radical new direction since the concept of ‘free goods’ first appeared. Google provides millions with enormously powerful search facilities for free and receives its revenue largely from advertising. According to Wikinomics (11), ‘free and collaborative’ (complete with externalities) is the future, whether we like it or not. I believe governments should embrace this future and work with the market, rather than fight it. Whatever the solution to the problem of copyright infringement eventually turns out to be, I suspect, and hope, that the RIAA and MPAA will not be closely involved, that free market tools will be capitalised upon, and that the positive externalities of change will be fully appreciated.

Bibliography

1. Bangeman, Eric. BitTorrent use soars as MPAA fights on against P2P sites. ars technica. [Online] 17 04 2008. http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2008/04/bittorrent-use-soars-as-mpaa-fights-on-against-p2p-sites.ars.

2. File sharing. Wikipedia. [Online] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_sharing.

3. Oregon RIAA Victim Fights Back. Recording Industry vs The People. [Online] http://recordingindustryvspeople.blogspot.com/2005/10/oregon-riaa-victim-fights-back-sues.html.

4. enigmax. 50% of Charges Against Pirate Bay Dropped. TorrentFreak. [Online] 17 02 2009. http://torrentfreak.com/50-of-charges-against-pirate-bay-dropped-090217/.

5. Buskirk, Eliot Van. British ISPs Agree To Curb File Sharers’ Internet Access. Wired. [Online] 23 07 2008. http://blog.wired.com/music/2008/07/uk-could-announ.html.

6. Leyden, John. Pirate Bay sues media giants for ’sabotage’. The Register. [Online] 24 09 2007. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/09/24/pirate_bay_counterstrike/.

7. Cheng, Jacqui. Judge: 17,000 illegal downloads don’t equal 17,000 lost sales. ars technica. [Online] 19 01 2009. http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/01/judge-17000-illegal-downloads-dont-equal-17000-lost-sales.ars.

8. Ups and downs – Economische en culturele gevolgen van file sharing voor muziek, film en games. TNO. [Online] 2009. http://tno.nl/content.cfm?context=markten&content=publicatie&laag1=182&laag2=1&item_id=473.

9. Ernesto. Economy Profits From File-Sharing, Report Concludes. TorrentFreak. [Online] 19 01 2009. http://torrentfreak.com/economy-profits-from-file-sharing-report-concludes-090119/.

10. Orlowski, Andrew. 80% want legal P2P – survey. The Register. [Online] 16 06 2008. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/06/16/bmr_music_survey/.

11. Tapscott, Don and Williams, Anthony D. Wikinomics. London : Atlantic Books, 2007. ISBN 978-1-84354-637-5.

12. P2P Survey Results. In HIIT. [Online] 2007. http://inhiit.blogspot.com/2007/09/p2p-survey-results.html.

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[1] Recording Industry Association of America

[2] Moving Pictures Association of America

[3] A large Bittorrent tracker and hub of illegal piracy

[4] Virgin Media, Sky, Carphone Warehouse, BT, Orange and Tiscali

[5] Internet Service Providers

[6] Anti-piracy company

Memory Sticks and Theft

On Thursday I was quite definitively an idiot: the inevitable happened and I managed to leave my memory stick stuck into a computer. Fortunately my school work and I were not parted for long; a brief trip back to the Physics computer room at 4:15 was sufficient to recover it from the floor (of all places). I gratefully grabbed it and made for home. Inserting it into my computer I was greeted with a shock which immediately made me lose almost all confidence I ever had in human (well, Pauline) nature. Opening my school work folder, I discovered someone had deleted all my school work presumably having decided it would be utterly hilarious: the main folder within ‘0-School’ – the one containing the entirety of this year’s work, conveniently named ‘0-Work’.

Here’s the folder structure of my USB stick:

The reason for the ‘0-’ prefix to folder names is to keep them at the top of the list when arranged alphabetically. The main folder in ‘0-School’ is ‘0-Work’ which actually contains a copy of all my school work, the main and most current version residing on my 500GB external hard drive permanently attached to my desktop at home which gets backed up weekly onto a Serpent encrypted 1TB external. In other words, fortunately for me, I lost no data whatsoever. Even when taking new notes in class I copy files from ‘0-Work’ to ‘0-Unc’ (it was supposed to stand for ‘unsynchronised’ but somehow got shortened to that). Rather than depending on synchronising software and risking losing everything from a bug in a program, I drop updated files into that folder and sync them manually when I get home. It is therefore hugely fortunate the folder ‘0-Unc’ must have had a sufficiently innocuous and unimportant sounding name to consider deleting.

What I really don’t get is why people do this. Some students rely entirely on their memory sticks to store all their electronic documents, including homeworks, courseworks and even sensitive information. Loss of a memory stick or any data within may therefore seriously jeopardise their chances of attaining those all-important A*s or As at GCSE and/or A levels. I think people do realise this, and also that it isn’t really all that funny, in which case they are very deliberately (though perhaps without properly considering the consequences) sabotaging others’ chances of success. I’m all for competition and fun (and even some pranks) etc. Just not at this level.

Other than ranting into general cyberspace I guess all I can do is offer some advice to those who wish to protect themselves from being on the receiving end of USB stick crime (a occurrence which I have been led to believe to be ridiculously ubiquitous). These are all obvious solutions but laziness tends to result in a completely unprotected USB stick.

Put your name on the memory stick

This may seem obvious but I have far too often seen memory sticks left in computers which have no markings to identify their owner, and the contents of which contain unhelpful information as to the authors of the documents (another reason to stick a name on your work). Mine for example has a text file within called “This USB stick belongs to Bryant Tan.txt” with the following within:

If found please return to:

Bryant Tan, L8
Tutor: AG
St Paul's School, Barnes, London

Please don't be a bastard and steal it. Stealing is a bad thing; don't do it.

(Cash reward on return - $$$)

For heaven’s sake BACKUP

Backing up is like paying insurance. The differences however are multifarious: you’re entirely in control of what measures are taken against losing data, it’s free (if you have enough storage at home), you don’t end up in court if it doesn’t work, premiums don’t increase with increasing importance of the data etc.

Fasten it to something

There was a time (before the clip broke) when my memory stick was permanently affixed to an elastic keychain stringy thing which is always attached to my belt. That way, if I were to run off and forget about the stick, I wouldn’t get very far.

Encrypt

Depending on the importance / sensitivity of the data, it may be worth thinking of encrypting it. A fantastic program that does the job is Truecrypt. It is capable of 256 bit block encryption using all three of the Advanced Encryption finalist algorithms: Twofish, Rijndael and Serpent, and even supports a quite effective (and, in my opinion, quite a genius) form of steganography. Unfortunately it requires admin rights to run since it mounts decrypted volumes to drive letters so it’s useless for school computers.

Use a cheap USB stick

… because it’s so not worth bringing in a gold-encrusted 64GB memory stick only to lose it.

๏̯͡๏﴿

Why File Sharing Isn’t Bad for the Economy

I notice from my Slashdot feed that the RIAA have been giving up on a lot of cases recently. For one they failed to extract $222K from someone who shared 24 files on Kazaa. There was also a case (the same one maybe?) in which the defendant subsequently turned on the RIAA following his success in court and sued. There have been two cases that I know of since the beginning of the Christmas holidays in which lawsuits have been dropped by copyright firms. Fairly recently a Dutch study (thank you Slashdot) found that actually file sharing is good for the Dutch economy. Then someone wrote a book/blog post/ebook/news article about the concept of free stuff in an economy and how it works really quite well. It appears that the whole DRM thing is rapidly turning on its head, against law firms and in favour of open source and freebies. Here’s a concise exposition of all I’ve gathered that seems to make sense regarding this phenomenon.

17,000 illegal downloads don’t equal 17,000 lost sales

- US District Judge James P. Jones

Mike Henley, a former member of CompSoc, pointed out something that I think makes a lot of sense. If music downloaders suddenly no longer could download it for free, I suspect many of them would just stop downloading full stop. The reason they download is more because it’s convenient than any reason concerning the price: there are simply so many good deals out there that good music is already available for decent prices. Therefore it can be deduced that they are actually not harming the industry – they aren’t reducing demand and removing themselves from the market by downloading for free since the market wouldn’t contain them in the first place.

- Me

I think everyone who’s outraged about people downloading and enjoying stuff that they should be paying for and blaming them (amongst Maths, public schools and gnomes) for the economic downturn should really consider the fact that, As Michael observantly pointed out in a comment, most people who currently download for free just wouldn’t buy music in the first place if the download option didn’t exist. If you don’t know you’ll definitely like a product, why risk £12.99 buying it? This judge has definitely got it right.

The way I see it (not why it’s right/wrong but why it’s taking place) is that a new market for music is being created involving mostly bittorrent and uploaders. The ‘product’ is really a few megabytes of data – an mp3 file. The cost to the producer (warez-bb.org uploader for example) of sharing this product is approx. zero. (compare £10 with the millions recording companies must spend on equipment, overheads, disks, labour etc) Chances are they downloaded it themselves in the first place. Every time someone downloads the share, nobody has to pay to get it copied. So there are no production costs, and ‘competition’ (kudos is the new dollar – believe me it’s true – warez-bb forum uploaders survive on the number of thanking replies they get) results in a price of zero and a well-archived and user-friendly method of obtaining free music.

Dutch Study Says Filesharing Has Positive Economic Effects

- Slashdot

Interesting as the economics of this may be, I’m not prepared to learn Dutch. However from what I can deduce: those who opt to download are probably more exposed to online marketing and are thus more likely to buy products that can’t simply be downloaded for free – concert tickets, firefox.com gadgets… To make things better, the actual act of transferring data via downloading costs both parties virtually nothing. A CD on the other hand would involve paying for the media, case, P&P, etc.

I’m reading a book (yes, another one – still haven’t finished the other[s]) called ‘Wikinomics’. It’s about open source and collaboration. I think it’s fairly clear that the internet is bringing a whole new business model to the world (there was an article in the FT on this but I didn’t bookmark it) which revolves around goods and services which the consumer doesn’t actually pay for. Google deliver unbelievably powerful search power to millions (billions?) of users around the world, for free. How nice of them. In fact, our young enterprise idea was (still is come to think of it) based on this system of providing free stuff and using advertising/sponsorship to earn the actual income.

Finally, it’s probably a safe bet that the RIAA and MPAA are fighting a losing battle. Digital music and films are just so easy to copy and distribute that whatever crazy measures ISPs, Microsoft, Sony, the RIAA, the MPAA and Apple dare put into place, a workaround will be found, probably within minutes, and probably in a secret underground hacker convention in Germany or China. Besides, lawyers aren’t exactly popular, especially if employed en masse and paid an unreasonable fee to crucify people like you and me.

I think I’ll leave you with a thought from xkcd.com:

Shanghai: First Impressions

I’ve only been in Shanghai for a bit and have just about got over jet lag. I ended up doing an all-nighter last night, taking some night shots of the cityscape from my (highly elevated) bedroom window and watching the smoggy sunrise in awe, just to get my sleep-cycle right and ended up snoring through a Chinese music concert in the evening – oops… So, first impressions.

Immediately after touchdown, the first thing to greet my sleep-deprived eyes was a colourful and gleeful rendering of the cheerful glory of an olympic host, painted onto the side of a member of the China Airlines fleet. Up till now, that remains the only apparent relic I’ve seen of last Summer’s excitement.

Beijing 2008 Advert

As I expected, apart from the airport which was magnificent and unbelievably (to a Londoner) efficient (somewhat different from dear old Heathrow), there are aspects of this place which are somewhat … different. The most striking part is probably the population density. Officially Shanghai has a population of about 20 million, although I suspect that figure is a gross underestimate owing to the number of homeless and unregistered civilians living in this district. With such a population squashed into only 6500 square Km, the city has over 3000 people per square kilometre. Not bad one might think, but the crowds are multitudinous and dense. It is a result of this crowd culture that Chinese people get their (deserved) loud reputation. Even in the most serene places, people will communicate at top volume, choosing to shout rather than to talk normally so as to be heard. Walking around just about anywhere constitutes shoving your way through a throng of people – which itself wouldn’t be so bad if they were normal people. The sad fact is that every person here, without exception, appears to be dying of some disease or other and every line of sight seems to end in someone spluttering, coughing and/or blowing his nose into the air. Hygiene awareness when coughing and sneezing (often while cooking) is approximately zero – bodily fluids/gases exit bodily orifices liberally into the open air without thought or care for anyone unfortunate enough to be nearby. Combined with such a high person to square kilometre ratio and you end up with a fantastic disease spread rate. The smoking situation is also quite chronic. The taxi from the airport reeked blatantly of cigarette smoke. Crowds emit smoke puffs as you push your way through and buildings stink of nicotine. Oh, did I mention the pollution? Don’t get me started on the smog.

typical crowded street

my photo of the iconic view of Shangai showing smog

me cynically photographing more smog

Meanwhile, the traffic is absolutely manic. Shanghai is very much a biking city (electric scooters and bicycles are much cheaper than cars), and such vehicles, when combined with a cavalier disregard for pedestrians, traffic lights and other road users, make for quite deadly weapons. Crossing the road is like waging a war. Seas of pedestrians from both sides of the road meet in the middle in a cacophony of shouting, bustling, coughing and spitting while being constantly punched through by honking road bikes and the occasional impatient taxi. Sometimes there’s a policeman in the middle of it all pretending to direct traffic (both pedestrian and vehicular). There are effectively no real rules for the road. Cars cut lanes and cross junctions at full speed without warning or looking around, and diesel motorbikes frequently mount pavements, pushing aside pedestrians. My dad while he was here personally bore witness to an accident in which an infelicitous pedestrian was hit by a car whose driver just drove off, without care for whatever mess he had left behind. You’d think people would at least take out some sort of physical insurance against such a dangerous road situation, but it seems that taxis deliberately disable seatbelts (the ones I’ve been in have had them ripped out and covered over with cloth).

My camera can only do max 4 second exposure. This is the result

no seatbelt

When most people think of the police, the first two words that jump to mind tend to be ‘law’ and ‘bastards’, often in reverse order. In China, things are very different. During my very first trip to the market I saw a policeman grab an item from a shop and stroll away calmly with the ill-fated shopkeeper running after him, tugging his arm. They are far from law, but they sure are bastards. There are no rules, no morals, and few properly enforced civil rights laws (thoughtcrime law on the other hand…) – the police are just bullies with sticks and uniforms (and guns).

As far as first impressions go, the internet actually isn’t bad. I’m using the [still censored] connection in my dad’s apartment (he works in Shanghai) and the upload speed is faster than what Virgin Media give me back home in good old London. The download speed, about 1Mbps, is still one tenth what I get in London, which is still perfectly ample for surfing. Remote desktop on the other hand is torturous. I’m still worried about thoughtcrime and censorship, and since my blog is on the blocklist (well, all wordpress blogs are, I think) I’m typing this up on Notepad and subsequently posting it through remote desktop.

There are though good things about Shanghai. I’m overdramatising the bads a bit as, well, that’s what I do as a cynic. But the prices are undeniably good and conversion is convenient (10Y = £1 almost exactly). Stuffed bao (sort of buns) go for 10p in the supermarket, and clothes prices beat Primark hands down. The underground actually works (unlike London), and there are some great photos to be taken, particularly night shots while I’m recovering from my jet lag.

my attempt at night photography without a tripod

So, that’s what I think of Shanghai after about 3 days. Brilliant place, though a little crazy. If you want me to test some websites to see if they’re blocked, do comment / contact!

Surviving China

Communist China

I’m leaving for the Lake District on Thursday on the school Winter Walking trip, after which I’ll be travelling to China with my family. Being the cynic that I am, I suspect China will be more Ray Mears-esque in terms of tough survival than the potentially freezing/hail-ey/flooded conditions of the Lake District in Winter, and being the masochist that I am, I’ll love both trips. Being the pragmatist that I’d like to think I am, I’ve already started thinking about how to survive the desperately corrupt, totalitarian and uncompromising system of law, justice, police and politics.

Internet: Tor

The ‘Probrem’
Accessing the internet is crucial to me, even at home. My main form of communication with the outside world when I’m not out is through the internet. I rarely make phone calls when email and IM suffice and writing letters is almost out of the question. In China, it will be my only point of communication with the outside world, since I’ll be separated from everyone I know by thousands of miles. Unfortunately China’s internet is segregated from the outside world by the Great Firewall of China which means any data obtained from the censored network of ‘information’ available from inside China is very probably erroneous, especially if it has anything vaguely to do with politics. Most blogs (wordpress for example) are also banned.

TOR: The Onion Router

The Solution
TOR (The Onion Router) is basically an open source software which links thousands of computers around the world in a huge relay network for the purpose of providing what is essentially a very secure proxy. This means anonymity for anyone who uses it, as well as a method for getting round internet censorship in certain authoritarian schools and institutions and, more importantly, China. I shall be bringing with me a portable version to grant me the ability to keep track of and avoid the growing list of poisonous Chinese foodstuffs.

I’d also encourage anyone who reads this to consider running a Tor router and generally helping the cause. There’s a Facebook page and group and a volunteer section in the site. You’ll probably route some of my traffic if you set it up quickly enough!

Internet: Remote Desktop

The ‘Probrem’
There is still a problem. Although I’ll be able now to surf without hindrance (albeit slowly – Tor is rather slow), I might need to access some files on my home computer which are stored on encrypted hard drives. I’d be worried about taking a HDD on a plane trip which, after being bombarded with X-rays then being shaken about a bit, might be rather shaken up. I obviously can’t just use remote desktop normally – China will get the password to my home computer and will probably keylog everything that goes through which would grant Hu Jintao the key to all my data: precisely the opposite of what I want. Remote desktop through Tor is also painfully slow.

Remote Desktop

The Solution
Remote desktop’s security needs to be pimped up. For some, a windows product juxtaposed with the word ’security’ is almost oxymoronic, but I’m not *that* cynical. Some time ago I found a fantastic guide to Remote Desktop which focuses on security. Here are a few good ideas which I took:

1. Lockout Policy

Run >> secpol.msc
Security Settings\Account Policies\Account Lockout Policy
It’s always a good idea to set this if you’re going to allow remote desktop connections to your machine in case Mr Brute Force comes along.

Security Policy

2. Use SSL

Run >> gpedit.msc
Computer Configuration\Administrative Templates\Windows Components\Terminal Services\Encryption
This speaks for itself really – encryption is a necessity if anyone’s going to get round the Great Firewall of China

Group Policy Window

3. Change Port

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Terminal Server\WinStations\RDP-Tcp\PortNumber
If a hacker finds your IP he might immediately try the default Remote Desktop port. Change it to something random like 156 to baffle him. If you’re concerned about choosing a port number, here’s a list of port numbers. Happy reading

Food

The ‘Probrem’
Need I say more?

Everyone knows about China's tainted milk scandal

The Solution
We’re bringing rations from good old Tesco – I can look forward to a holiday of canned food. In addition, there are some food items which are probably not poisonous. Food which has to be imported and can’t be made/grown in China for example. I can’t think of anything immediately… Vegetables should also be fairly safe provided they are properly washed to cleanse them of excessive pesticides and have thick skins. Hopefully they aren’t full of Arsenic like the rice.

Though I hate to say it, China is still fundamentally a third world country, despite her phenomenal economic growth. There are real problems which she faces. I suspect, owing to the way China seems very good at under-stating problems (e.g. SARS some years back) that the economic situation over there is far worse than it seems and I’m genuinely concerned that possible ensuing riots might cause the government to change fairly more violently than I hope. Meanwhile however, I’m really looking forward to being plunged into such exotic territory and actually almost excited about the potential danger – what doesn’t kill me will make me stronger, right?

I hope these ideas help someone – this research should in theory help me. I’m still not sure whether I’m over-preparing and/or being melodramatic about China’s perilous nature. If you think there’s something important I’m forgetting, please point it out to me! I’m making it a new policy to attempt to abide by some of Ben’s rules (an excellent compilation of blogging policy I think), particularly rule three about actively welcoming critical comments. In this case in particular, my holiday (or, if you’re as worried as me, my life) might depend on it, so if you have any advice for me or anyone travelling Communist-Eastwards this Christmas, I’d be very keen to hear from you. TIA

Cover your ass from anti-P2Ps

When record labels are being taken down for sharing their own music you know it’s time to hide. Like it or not, the RIAA and MPAA are going to have to face up to the fact that they simply cannot contain piracy. So long as the media exists in an electronic form, it is easily possible to replicate and distribute it, and with internet speeds commonly measured in Mbits/s, levels of music and film piracy are completely out of the control of the law. So this means that the few unfortunate souls who do get caught sharing files illegally are in for one heck of a punishment and end up used as examples to the rest of the torrenting community.

I’d like to think that most of those who stumble upon my blog can be considered friends, and so in this friendly spirit I offer some advice for those who simply can’t help but fire up uTorrent whenever they miss that one must-see episode of Dr Who. Of course, in no way do I encourage breaking the law, but I reckon if you do, as a friend, you deserve some protection from the huge-capital goliaths of the music and film industries.

Torrenting

Lifehacker had a wonderful feature on BitTorrent privacy which I’m going to replicate partially here rather shamelessly.

Basically the way you get caught on BitTorrent is when an anti-P2P organisation pretends to seed a file and grabs your IP as you download from them (or vice versa), and once they have your IP, you’re pretty screwed.

Solution 1: use IP blacklist blocking programs (PeerGuardian)

Begin Lifehacker copy-paste-summarise:

IP-blocking application PeerGuardian2 (PG2) uses a constantly updated blacklist of IP addresses known to track your activity. By default, PG2 already blocks Anti-P2P organizations but it’s capable of blocking more IPs if you have other privacy concerns beyond P2P that you want to address. PG2 is not and cannot be 100% effective, but it will provide a good deal more protection than downloading without. With PG2 running, you’ll never connect to the IP addresses on the Anti-P2P blacklist, meaning that those organization can’t log your IP and your participation in a copyrighted download.

Solution 2: use a proxy

[Lifehacker]If we’re talking about file sharing, a proxy protects you by routing all of your traffic through another server when it leaves your computer and before it comes back to you. That means that when you’re downloading data using a peer-to-peer protocol like BitTorrent, your peers can only see the proxy IP address, not your home IP address—so even if they are tracking your activity, they’re not actually tracking your address at all.[/Lifehacker]

Apparently a good proxy service is BTGuard ($7/mo), but if you don’t like paying, you might consider using Tor, the Onion Router.

Taken from the Tor website:

Tor is a software project that helps you defend against traffic analysis, a form of network surveillance that threatens personal freedom and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships, and state security. Tor protects you by bouncing your communications around a distributed network of relays run by volunteers all around the world: it prevents somebody watching your Internet connection from learning what sites you visit, and it prevents the sites you visit from learning your physical location. Tor works with many of your existing applications, including web browsers, instant messaging clients, remote login, and other applications based on the TCP protocol.

Your (encrypted) traffic is routed through other peoples’ computers, giving you fantastic privacy for free. The downside is that the network is under enormous strain as many people have exactly the same idea, so download speeds tend to be fairly limited and the damage done to the network’s capability to re-route data is detrimental to the Tor community. Which is why, as a Tor user and relay host myself, I’d encourage you, if you do decide to download through Tor, to run a relay and give something back to the Tor network, traffic-wise.

Solution 3: Encrypt torrented traffic

I suppose if you can’t be bothered to install PG or Tor, the least you can do is make some attempt to hide the data through the encryption service provided by most Torrent clients. There’s a fantastic set of instructions here. Many ISPs understandably hate BitTorrent as it’s apparently responsible for 80% of total internet traffic (Ouch) so throttle BitTorrent speeds. This encryption is designed to get round that, but at the same time affords a limited level of privacy. Without PeerGuardian though, there’s absolutely no guarantee you aren’t downloading from a sting-operation server owned by the RIAA itself.

HTTP Downloading

There are numerous other ways of obtaining pirated material though, including Rapidshare, which are generally less susceptible to spying. There’s an entire forum dedicated to Rapidshare download links of pirated music, films and software, and since your ISP is probably too busy spying on Torrent traffic it’s unlikely to be watching HTTP traffic streams for un-paid-for material, especially since many HTTP downloads are actually legitimate, e.g. from online stores, and regulating it all would be too much of a nightmare. Many Rapidshare download links are also password-protected rar files (forum posts contain the passwords) so even if your traffic gets spied on, ISPs won’t be bothered enough to attempt to brute-force your archive. Even better, if it’s software, the forum format provides some protection as users submitting feedback for download links normally complain loudly if their AV detects malware. HTTP downloads are also easily routed through proxies and require only a browser to initiate so are almost ideal for most people.

Steganography

And of course, rather than making it blatant that you’re downloading pirated stuff but frustrating authorities by encrypting it, you can always try hiding the fact that you’re downloading a song, including concealing an mp3 file inside a suitably large image file:

copy /b image.png + piratedsong.mp3 innocentlookingfile.png

To extract, rename the innocent looking file to have an mp3 extension.

I hope this has been useful to someone, as all these methods have been tried and tested extensively vicariously by myself at some point and been found to work very well indeed.

China and Censorship

China’s reputation for oppression and censorship is truly notorious, in both past and present. There’s a reason why traders call the divider between research and the trading floor a ‘Chinese Wall’: it supposedly prevents any information whatsoever from leaking through. China is surrounded by metaphors and connotations linked to walls and censorship; the Great Firewall of China for example prevents law-abiding and innocent Chinese citizens from educating themselves about the world around them: they have no way of learning about China’s history other than to absorb the government propaganda administered on a daily basis; they genuinely believe America consists of nothing but greedy corporations bullying China and taking advantage of Asia; according to their version of Google, baidu.com, nothing ever happened in Tiananmen Square. Killings, what killings? Nothing happened here. Oceania was never at war with Eastasia… For those without access to the real world, what the government tells them is the real world. Those who control the present control the past, and if an entire population is being indoctrinated with clearly false information about historical events, it’s probably safest to hide underground for a while when that population is freed and told otherwise.

China’s methods of protecting her citizens from the ’scary truth’ are multifarious, immoral and, in my opinion, largely disgusting. Already the immoral nature of the Great Firewall of China, a huge blocking mechanism which denies access to any online information on the tragic parts of China’s history to citizens, is clear and reflects badly on the government responsible, but to make things worse, Google was bribed into censoring search results for terms like ‘Tiananmen Square’ and anything pertaining to the worst parts of China’s history. Even users of Skype, vaunting about end-to-end security and enhanced privacy, were shocked when the creators of the supposedly secure service succumbed to the temptation of China’s monetary offer and surrendered users’ privacy to the Chinese government. And now, as if to confirm suspicions, even internet cafes, used by many for anonymity, are under attack: China has decided to take photographs of all internet cafe customers.

The whole Chinese system of hierarchy is actually rather worrying. In the modern age, certainly in the West, the entire nature of hierarchy has undergone a revolution, most markedly in education. In the past, the teacher-student relationship tended to take the guru-apprentice approach, in which the teacher is infinitely wise and the student never questions and just absorbs. Today, with the explosion of information, the student often knows more than the teacher in specific areas of interest, and the role of the teacher has changed to a guide, someone who teaches the student to teach himself – more a mentor than a guru; indeed, the student is invited and encouraged to challenge established theories with new evidence and question what is often taken to be true. Even the law is often questioned, and the presence of sceptics (in the true sense of the word) in the West has blossomed, and a substantial fraction of a generation has been bred of people who do not just follow rules blindly and instead think intelligently about politics, policy and law before making decisions. China on the other hand has been left behind in both areas, both in terms of information and a culture of questioning. Information on the real world, and on real word politics and history, is simply unavailable to the majority of the population, and the people are forced to obey rules blindly lest they end up imprisoned or, more likely, shot. China has a culture of no questioning, of blind obedience to some higher authority. For the government this is wonderful and it’s a success for internal politics – many Chinese simply believe whatever they are told by their government no matter how blatantly false or one-sided it may be, accept the indoctrination and are blindly patriotic, supportive of a a political structure built on lies, censorship and corruption, and this is actually very dangerous. As China slowly develops into a Capitalist country, and as information becomes increasingly free, the government is going to have to change at some point. Germany was bad enough at the end of the first world war when their citizens believed it was a defensive war, so when – and I think it is a case of when rather than if – China’s government collapses, her citizens will be confused and angry, and 1.3 Bn angry and confused people is really not very funny: political stability will become something of yesterday, the economy may well collapse, and international relations will certainly suffer.

I was actually full of hope that the Olympics would change things. The huge campaign on human rights was given so much exposure that I genuinely believed China would be forced by the rest of the world to accept that it could not continue to oppress information. They even opened access to the BBC website, something I hoped would set a precedent for further steps towards sanity. Sadly China’s human rights and censorship situation, as far as I’m aware, is still very much the same as before.

In Defence of Music Piracy

I recently read this article from Slashdot and here’s my response.

In the American climate of vicious litigation I almost feel sorry for the RIAA. Big companies and trade groups such as the RIAA and the MPAA are bound to sue, regardless of the country they happen to be in and the situation in which their victim allegedly offended, to inspire fear and strike terror into the hearts of those who even dare hover their mouse over a torrent link; so to be based in a country in which their victims actually fight back is really rather unfortunate. Take for example possibly the most famous case of RIAA litigation: that of Jammy Thomas who was fined $222K for sharing 24 files on Kazaa; the big trade group lost. Much of the time victims, unable to afford litigation against the giants, settle for a few thousands dollars of payment outside court, but once the case goes to court, the Goliaths are hit by a wave of bad publicity and occasionally an unsavoury verdict.

On the other hand, the RIAA still has much to gain from such cases. In the case of Jammy Thomas, a ruling in favour of the RIAA would have been disastrous for the filesharing community and a huge success for greedy bastards *ahem* the leaders of the recording industry. The fine was based on a rule invented conveniently by the antagonists in which evidence for a file actually having been shared would have been deemed unnecessary for prosecution, and proof of transaction of information would no longer have been required for file sharers to be crushed by enormous disproportionate fines. A guilty verdict on the scale of $222K would therefore have set a dangerous precedent and left the already stinking rich at even greater an advantage over the innocent music-lover who merely wants to share a fantastic song with a couple of friends. Fortunately the judge had second thoughts about this insanity before realising the illegal nature of the RIAA’s claim and changed the verdict.

My personal opinion has probably already been made quite clear, but I’d like, at risk of utilising tautology (in more than one sense), to expound further. The recording industry has always been over-enthusiastic and hyper-zealous in its war against music piracy. Many cases can be cited, including the ridiculous one brought to my attention by Slashdot in which a clip on Youtube was removed owing to a barely audible Prince soundtrack in the background. What about Dragostea din Tei or ‘Karaoke for the Blind’ to Natalie Imbruglia? Even the makers of South Park, the masters of satire and blunt political humour, picked up on this extremism when the FBI stormed Kyle’s house (or was it Stan’s?) after the kids downloaded about two songs.

A big reason why I feel the RIAA and MPAA’s efforts are ultimately in vain is the domain of such extreme punishment. The people affected by such public examples tend to be those who aren’t extremely tech-savvy and those who almost as a consequence are not as damaging to the recording industry. These are the people who have never heard of SUPER and to whom ‘DivX’ tends to mean ‘that thing that asked me 2 update 2day’ [sic]. These people use Napster and torrents using unencrypted connections and sign up to file sharing services using their real email addresses. These people don’t share files – they just download the occasional TV episode they missed because they don’t know how to stream from BBC iPlayer. And of all people in the world the RIAA and MPAA target them. The real ‘crooks’ are the ones who download and upload through proxies. These people just sit there in Germany or Japan, spitting binaries out into the sea of bits and bytes that is ‘the interweb’ at rates of 100’s of kilobytes per second through anonymising proxies. These are the hackers who use Mailinator to sign up to services, encrypt their hard drives with AES and Twofish and run Tor clients, and have computers dedicated to ripping high-quality video and audio from Blu-Ray and DVDs alike. These people are not afraid of the RIAA; they know they are anonymous and covered. And these are the very ones, if anyone, the RIAA should target.

I also feel that it’s unfair to accuse pirates of damaging the industry as much as is claimed. Mike Henley, a former member of CompSoc, pointed out something that I think makes a lot of sense. If music downloaders suddenly no longer could download it for free, I suspect many of them would just stop downloading full stop. The reason they download is more because it’s convenient than any reason concerning the price: there are simply so many good deals out there that good music is already available for decent prices. Therefore it can be deduced that they are actually not harming the industry – they aren’t reducing demand and removing themselves from the market by downloading for free since the market wouldn’t contain them in the first place.

My final reason is a technical one. The Armchair Economist points out that economc efficiency is completely unaffected by payments from one individual to another since one person’s benefit is another’s loss. Therefore downloading without paying should be identical, efficiency-wise, as buying it from the iTunes store; the difference however is that the buyer has to go through the hassle and spend time paying. This may involve typing in credit card details or typing in a password for PayPal, but whatever the case, it is undeniably true that paying is time-consuming and inconvenient, if only slightly so. This time could be otherwise used to expand the productivity of the economy – by providing a service for example. However miniscule an effect this may have, having to pay reduces the efficiency of an economy. Therefore I’d argue that downloading music for free is more economically efficient than buying it. I like the idea of basing decisions on economic efficiency, and my (probably incorrect but appealingly conclusionary) economic reasoning compels me to take the side of the pirates. This point can also be argued from a utilitarian point of view – the £10 I spend on an album is of more relative utility to me than to an already stinking rich manager. Just to clarify, I am in no way now endorsing stealing which is something entirely different: what I am talking about here is replicating electronic data and distributing it, not taking away any good from anyone else; the record company still owns the music.

Summing up, I’d just like to leave you with this last thought: if sharing 24 songs leaves a $222K sized hole in your pocket, is it really worth cutting down on the file sharing? If you’re completely screwed anyway, what’s the point of sharing 50 instead of 500 songs, or even 5000? In no way am I going to endorse illegal activities publicly, but if you are going to break the law, I’d say go for it in a really big way. Through Tor of course. (And go you)

Patents in Technology

It’s interesting that everything in the world of tech somehow ends up patented, especially everyday objects which are generally considered open-source in terms of patent-ability. I recently hit upon this article which hit me with the news that Microsoft have somehow managed to patent the Page Up and Down keys. All this time I’ve been naively thinking of those keys as simply part of my daily life, available on all normal OS’ until now I’m told I’m pressing on two Microsoft patents to scroll up and down the PDF syllabus for AS computing. Another (failed, I’m glad to say) example is Dell’s attempt to patent cloud computing, a concept which has been around since forever and also something which has such fuzzy legal boundaries that it may be difficult even to define the patent concretely.

In my personal opinion tech companies are grabbing at every last chance they can get to filter some money into their coffers, however ridiculous the patent they need to procure may sound, and I believe this patenting culture will prove a severe hindrance to technological advances through lack of communication and complete information.