Page 1 of Big Brother is watching you - when you surf the net.

I found this on another forum, it urges people to warn members of other forums so I thought I`d let you all know.

While I am not condoning the illegal downloading of software and movies (which is against forum rules to discuss) it is worrying if the article below also refers to MP3s which I know most people on these forums download.

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copy & paste

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www.mediaforce.com <<=== If you visit any other boards please post this so others will be aware of these *******s. This company practices Intrampment. What I mean by accusing this is that they post movies and software on KaZaA or IRC channels, they then wait for people to try and download the stuff and then report YOUR IP number back to your Internet Service Provider claiming that you are "abusing" the Internet and commiting "copyright infridgement". These *******s are my new enemy. They sent my ISP a nasty letter stating what I said above. In return my ISP sent me a letter via mail threatening that they will pull the plug on my Internet account. These *******s at MediaForce will now be posted all over the Internet - Hacker forums, privacy-rights forums, news forums, and who ever else will listen to me.. lol.

I hope you all support this. This is our right as the paying customer to keep this scum at bay and fight to keep OUR INTERNET clean from such "Big Brother" wannabe companies! Copyright laws were made to protect companies from others making "PROFITS" off their products, not sitting down at your computer to listen to some songs or watch an old movie!

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There have been scare stories around like this for a good few years now so I don`t know how true this is or how much power this mediaforce company have.

This item was edited on Friday, 2nd August 2002, 18:07

lol so if they do this, they would end up sending letters to everyone and then the ISP would have no customers lol, the thing you should be worried about is Mircrosofts new OS which tags every file on your computer and only allows you to communicate with other comps with the MS OS basically stopping you from downloading warez, mp3, porn... and you also have to buy specific hardware to run the OS.. sound stupid, well this is microsoft were talking about, I would love to see what the office of fair trading think of this new OS when they get closer to releasing it hehehe

I saw this to the other day, seem a good idea to moderate the net, but its so huge, how could such a small group deal with everything?

It sounds like an urban myth, or a case of Chinese whispers gone wrong.

This "MediaForce" company seems to offer a service, whereby you pay them to track down people offering illegal downloads of your software, and get the files removed. Which seems all very fair, useful, and above board.

I think the "Big Brother" thing is either a complete fabrication, or written by someone who mis-read MediaForce`s publicity material. I don`t see how they could do this efficiently or what purpose it would serve, since as far as I know there`s no scope for "entrapment" within copyright law. Either MediaForce have permission from the copyright holder to offer these files for download (in which case it`s completely legal for you to download them) or they don`t (in which case it doesn`t matter whether you download them or not - they, not you, are breaking the law in the first instance).

It`s a bit like having some cakes outside a cake shop with a sign saying "please take one". You can`t be done for theft if you do, because permission was implicitly given. If the cakes weren`t theirs to give away, on the other hand, then they would be in hot water whether or not you decided to take one.

I bet that the original writer had loads of illegal "MP3z" and "warez" in one of his shared folders, and he was done for that, rather than for his downloading activities.

Mike

This item was edited on Sunday, 4th August 2002, 11:12

On the even more Big brother issue I think I heard that from August the 1st government bodies are able too and can look at what we all access on the net. I suppose that means emails too.
From what I gather they can sneak in to anywhere they like now.
I dare say its like on the phone if you say certain key words apparently your call is locked onto and monitored.
Anyone know more about either thing, Best mark.

It`s not new on Aug 1st, it`s been going on a good while. They can monitor email, site visits, mobile phone conversation, etc, etc. It`s called the RIP Act - Regulation of Investigatory Powers. ISP`s have to keep logs to be able to show what you have been up to if asked.

A news article about it here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/theissues/article/0,6512,387405,00.html

A site called EchelonWatch here:
http://www.echelonwatch.org
They campaign and publicise against Echelon (the system that monitors everything listening for keywords) run by the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Their site is a lot smaller than it used to be, with a lot less info. I think they`ve been got at :-)

There`s a good collection of news reports about it on this site here, run by a Croatian Investigative Journalist:
http://public.srce.hr/~mprofaca/echelon01.html including the first article which is about Menwith Hill in Yorkshire, which we often pass when crossing the Dales.

RIP Information Centre:
http://www.fipr.org/rip/

Lots more info about RIP here:
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&q=%22rip%2Bact%22

Mark.

This item was edited on Tuesday, 6th August 2002, 20:46