Being transparent
14 years ago
A cyber crime is a criminal activity on the internet. It can be illegal access, illegal interception, data interference, systems interference, or electronic fraud. The computer crimes we most talk about are child pornography and confidential information interception (credit card pass codes for instance). Cyber crime seems to be a growing trend.
But when it come to cybercrime I instantly think about… well me. I’ve got to plead guilty, I am an addict of peer-to-peer. I download many American TV shows. In peer-to-peer distributed network people make a portion of their resources (such as processing power, disk storage or network bandwidth) directly available to other network participants, without the need for central coordination instances.
Peer to peer isn’t illegal, what’s illegal is that people share files and documents that are the property of someone else.
Peer to peer is associated with some values we give to the Internet, like sharing freely.
Authorities try to stop these practices. The webmasters and the users of these P2P websites are sometimes hard to find and punish. Law varies from country to country. Plus, when a website is closed, it can be re-opened under another adress. Let’s focus on the particular case of Guiks.net. This French P2P website has been infiltrated by the ALPA. Its administrator, Meskalyn, was summoned to the gendarmerie last week. He was told to either close the website or be prosecuted for counterfeit. Meskalyn chose the first option. The community already got organized to take over and open a new private website.
Foreign authorities didn’t get the same answer. Do you know The Pirate Bay ? It is another Swedish website that indexes and tracks BitTorrent (.torrent) files. It bills itself as "the world's largest BitTorrent tracker and is ranked as the 104th most popular website by Alexa Internet. The website was recently raided from Sweden but the famous community moved to the Ukraine, where the threatens of the BREIN made them move again. To France ? Of course no ! They settled in a fallout shelter in a Dutch forest. How exotic !
But when it come to cybercrime I instantly think about… well me. I’ve got to plead guilty, I am an addict of peer-to-peer. I download many American TV shows. In peer-to-peer distributed network people make a portion of their resources (such as processing power, disk storage or network bandwidth) directly available to other network participants, without the need for central coordination instances.Peer to peer isn’t illegal, what’s illegal is that people share files and documents that are the property of someone else.
Peer to peer is associated with some values we give to the Internet, like sharing freely.
Authorities try to stop these practices. The webmasters and the users of these P2P websites are sometimes hard to find and punish. Law varies from country to country. Plus, when a website is closed, it can be re-opened under another adress. Let’s focus on the particular case of Guiks.net. This French P2P website has been infiltrated by the ALPA. Its administrator, Meskalyn, was summoned to the gendarmerie last week. He was told to either close the website or be prosecuted for counterfeit. Meskalyn chose the first option. The community already got organized to take over and open a new private website.
Foreign authorities didn’t get the same answer. Do you know The Pirate Bay ? It is another Swedish website that indexes and tracks BitTorrent (.torrent) files. It bills itself as "the world's largest BitTorrent tracker and is ranked as the 104th most popular website by Alexa Internet. The website was recently raided from Sweden but the famous community moved to the Ukraine, where the threatens of the BREIN made them move again. To France ? Of course no ! They settled in a fallout shelter in a Dutch forest. How exotic ! An endless tag ? I don’t think so. In the USA the repression is way more active than in France, and way more dissuasive. What is to be done against peer-to-peer ? I don't have the solution and I'm not shure I want to find one but France seems to have chosen the path of repression too. The government hired a new team of specialists to infiltrate P2P websites.
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