[IP] The Shadow Internet

Thu Dec 30 07:41:33 PST 2004

------ Forwarded Message
From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne at warpspeed.com>
Reply-To: <dewayne at warpspeed.com>
Date: Thu, 30 Dec 2004 02:50:03 -0800
To: Dewayne-Net Technology List <dewayne-net at warpspeed.com>
Subject: [Dewayne-Net] The Shadow Internet

[Note:  The other part of the story that 'Wired Magazine' just did in
their Jan. '05 issue on the Darknet.  DLH]

The Shadow Internet 
They start with a single stolen file and pump out bootleg games and
movies by the millions. Inside the pirate networks that are terrorizing
the entertainment business.
By Jeff HowePage
<http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.01/topsite.html>

Just over a year ago, a hacker penetrated the corporate servers at
Valve, the game company behind the popular first-person shooter
Half-Life. He came away with a beta version of Half-Life 2. "We heard
about it," says 23-year-old Frank, a well-connected media pirate.
"Everyone thought it would get bootlegged in Europe." Instead, the
hacker gave the source code to Frank - it turned out that he was a
friend of a friend - so that Frank could give Half-Life 2 to the world.
"I was like, 'Let's do this thing, yo!'" he says. "I put it on
Anathema. After that, it was all over."

Anathema is a so-called topsite, one of 30 or so underground, highly
secretive servers where nearly all of the unlicensed music, movies, and
videogames available on the Internet originate. Outside of a pirate
elite and the Feds who track them, few know that topsites exist. Even
fewer can log in.

  Within minutes of appearing on Anathema, Half-Life 2 spread. One file
became 30 files became 3,000 files became 300,000 files as Valve stood
helplessly by watching its big Christmas blockbuster turn into a lump
of coal. The damage was irreversible - the horse was out of the barn,
the county, and the state. The original Half-Life has sold more than 10
million games and expansion packs since its late 1998 release.
Half-Life 2's official release finally happened in November, after
almost a year of reprogramming.

  When Frank (who, like all the pirates interviewed for this article, is
identified by a pseudonym) posted the Half-Life 2 code to Anathema, he
tapped an international network of people dedicated to propagating
stolen files as widely and quickly as possible.

  It's all a big game and, to hear Frank and others talk about "the
scene," fantastic fun. Whoever transfers the most files to the most
sites in the least amount of time wins. There are elaborate rules, with
prizes in the offing and reputations at stake. Topsites like Anathema
are at the apex. Once a file is posted to a topsite, it starts a rapid
descent through wider and wider levels of an invisible network,
multiplying exponentially along the way. At each step, more and more
pirates pitch in to keep the avalanche tumbling downward. Finally,
thousands, perhaps millions, of copies - all the progeny of that
original file - spill into the public peer-to-peer networks: Kazaa,
LimeWire, Morpheus. Without this duplication and distribution structure
providing content, the P2P networks would run dry. (BitTorrent, a
faster and more efficient type of P2P file-sharing, is an exception.
But at present there are far fewer BitTorrent users.)

It's a commonly held belief that P2P is about sharing files. It's an
appealing, democratic notion: Consumers rip the movies and music they
buy and post them online. But that's not quite how it works.

  In reality, the number of files on the Net ripped from store-bought
CDs, DVDs, and videogames is statistically negligible. People don't
share what they buy; they share what is already being shared - the
countless descendants of a single "Adam and Eve" file. Even this is
probably stolen; pirates have infiltrated the entertainment industry
and usually obtain and rip content long before the public ever has a
chance to buy it.

  The whole shebang - the topsites, the pyramid, and the P2P networks
girding it all together - is not about trading or sharing at all. It's
a broadcast system. It takes a signal, the new U2 single, say, and
broadcasts it around the world. The pirate pyramid is a perfect
amplifier. The signal becomes more robust at every descending level,
until it gets down to the P2P networks, by which time it can be
received by anyone capable of typing "U2" into a search engine.

This should be good news for law enforcement. Lop off the head (the
topsites), and the body (the worldwide trade in unlicensed media) falls
lifeless to the ground. Sounds easy, but what if you can't find the
head? As in any criminal conspiracy, it takes years of undercover work
to get inside. An interview subject warned me against even mentioning
Anathema in this article: "You do not need some 350-pound hit man with
a Glock at your front door."

  The upper reaches of the network are a "darknet," hidden behind layers
of security. The sites use a "bounce" to hide their IP address, and
members can log in only from trusted IP addresses already on file. Most
transmissions between sites use heavy-duty encryption. Finally, they
continually change the usernames and passwords required to log in.
Estimates say this media darknet distributes more than half a million
movies every day. It's also, by any reading of the law, a vast criminal
enterprise engaged in wholesale copyright infringement.

  But the Feds are getting smarter. Last spring, the FBI and US
Department of Justice launched a series of raids codenamed Fastlink.
Working with cops in Sweden, the Netherlands, and eight other
countries, the operation seized more than 200 computers. One
confiscated server alone contained 65,000 pirated titles. Fastlink
rubbed out a few topsites, but new ones filled the void. The flow of
illicit games and movies slowed briefly, then resumed. In April,
federal agents interrogated Frank and impounded all his computer
equipment. So far, no charges have been filed. "But the Feds had no
idea about Half-Life," he boasts. "I was never connected to that shit.
If they found out, I'd be in jail."

Bruce Forest, a self-described "elder statesman" in the piracy scene,
started ripping and trading in the ancient days of the late '80s. While
he no longer actively traffics in bootlegged media, he maintains
contacts that give him access to the most exclusive topsites. What the
topsites don't know is that three years ago, Forest came in from the
cold. "Basically, I'm a double agent," he concedes. "Though I don't
fink anyone out. I'm not a cop."

As a consultant for one of the world's largest entertainment companies,
Forest notifies his bosses whenever one of their movies appears on a
topsite. Thanks to his unparalleled access, he enjoys a bird's-eye view
of the scene. And because he's ostensibly on the right side of the law,
he's uncommonly open with information. This makes him an anomaly within
the paranoid byways of the media darknet.

  Forest runs his business from the first floor of his rural Connecticut
home. He's in his mid-40s but moves with jerky, adolescent energy. His
brown hair is in perpetual disarray, and he pads around his office with
bare feet, dressed in cargo shorts and a faded polo. Gold and platinum
albums from his days as a producer at Island Records, MCA, and Arista
line one wall. A baroque array of computer equipment fills the next,
including 13 CPUs and 16 external hard drives (for a total of 3
terabytes of storage). His desk runs the length of the room and
supports five full-size LCD displays. I hear a soft ping. "That tells
me a movie just made its first appearance on a topsite." He points to a
window on the monitor. It shows an innocent-looking list of files from
an FTP site. The uppermost file says, "Hellboy.SCREENER.Proper.READ NFO
PRE VCD." Translation: The DVD of one of the year's biggest box office
hits has been pirated two months before its intended release date. "The
FBI would kill to be sitting here looking at this," he says.

Even first-run movies get ripped. "Remember what happened to The Hulk?"
he asks. On June 6, two weeks before its official release, a near-final
version of The Hulk showed up online. To hear studio executives tell
it, the bootleg went straight to the P2P networks and spread like a
contagion.

"Bullshit," says Forest. "Trying to distribute The Hulk through the
P2Ps would take months, not hours." That's because files on the public
file-sharing networks, where no single node is much more powerful than
the next, spread at a glacial pace. Furthermore, when users connect to
a P2P network - FastTrack, for example - they connect only to a small
proportion of the number of other users connected at the same time. So
unless a topsite seeds a file across the P2P network, the odds are slim
that someone searching for a copy will actually find it.

  Forest pushes a hand through his hair, leaving it standing on end, and
rotates in his Aeron to look me in the eye. "Here's what actually
happened: Universal gave the workprint to its Manhattan ad agency. Then
the print got to SMF. And bam!" SMF, Forest explains, is a piracy group
that specializes in acquiring movies in theatrical release.

Before the folks at SMF could release the movie to a topsite, they had
to compress it - from roughly 9 Gbytes to 700 Mbytes, small enough to
fit on a single CD. Now the film drops. Forest won't say to which
topsite SMF first posted The Hulk, only that "SMF had affiliations with
certain sites, so it must have been one of those."

[snip]

Archives at: <http://Wireless.Com/Dewayne-Net>
Weblog at: <http://weblog.warpspeed.com>

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