OVER THE EDGE September 26 - October 10, 2007 On the Digital Front Jeremy Johnson - Staff Writer Canadian Govetbonted! Attempts Warrantless Wiretapping On Canettes In the first issue, I covered the Bush Administration success- fully implementing warrantless wiretapping, which of course violates their own constitution. Now, I bet you thought, “How could the USA do something like that? Good thing I don’t live down there; things like that never happen in Canada!” Well, it seems this utter insanity is spreading throughout the world. Right now, the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) is campaigning to have ISPs (Internet Service Pro- viders) police their networks for copyright infringement. In Australia, the government spent millions of dollars on a porn filter only to have the entire system bypassed by a 16 year old kid in his free time out of curiosity. In China, a dissident blog- ger was arrested and “put into a mental hospital.” You get the drift, controlling the internet is impossible. During the last Canadian government the Liberals tried implementing a thing known as “Lawful Access,” which is equivalent to warrantless wiretapping. At the time, there was much less awareness of what these politicians were up to, so thankfully, it died on the order paper. I thought, “Fantastic, now the Conservative government will take over and sane laws regarding privacy will be passed.” Apparently not. After a series of public consultations on Lawful ‘Access, the government then: literally launched a “secret public consulta- tion.” I honestly wish I was making this up. Somehow, Michael Geist found out about this, but was asked not to post about it online. He went against the order and leaked the news onto his blog. Scrutiny then mounted as a result over the government’s actions. After a few days of intense questions, Public Safety Canada then opened up to a full open public consultation as opposed to something that would “cherry-pick” responses. It was then Stockwell Day made an appearance and an- nounced, effectively, that he was back-peddling and saying that this was all a “misunderstanding” and that he wasn’t really planning (yeah, right) on getting laws implemented. He said this even though Public Safety Canada - something Day is ul- timately responsible for - was quoted earlier in saying that po- lice having to obtain warrants for internet customers’ personal information, such as phone numbers, physical addresses, full names, and email addresses to name a few, is “a problem.” The funny thing is, this is the same government that was screaming for government accountability during the last elec- tion. Now we have a Conservative government mirroring the Liberal government in the same old schemes that would take away our rights: in this case, destroying the laws that protect Canadian privacy. Good thing Day didn’t botch the SPP pro- test or he’d be really in for a public relations nightmare. Oh wait... What a shame it is to see them look at the court systems and say, in effect, “That’s unfair! We can’t have that!’ Quite frank- ly, I find this push for a police state in Canada very disturbing myself. This isn’t China where US corporations invest in the monitoring of Chinese citizens, this is Canada! It’s also a nice to know that we live in a democracy where we have choice in our politicians, either we vote in the same political party to destroy our rights and freedoms or we vote in a new government to come in and destroy our rights and freedoms. I guess in,this day and age though, human rights is simply out-dated to those in power. If you want to know more about (L)awful Access, check out www.cippic.ca and click on the “Lawful Access” link under “FAQ’s & Resources.’ Biggest Leak in P2P History - 700 MB of Internal Media Defender Emails I apologize if this gets confusing — there’s too much stuff to cover here. Let’s put it this way, I thought news that relates to P2P peak- ed on ThePirateBay.org being raided. I was wrong. I then thought it peaked when Sony BMG encoded privacy violating spyware and rootkits onto their albums. Now I am proven wrong again and I think this tops both of these actions. Media Defender is basically a company that major record labels and movie studio pay, literally, millions of dollars to post dummy, blank, corrupted or otherwise fake files onto P2P networks. The goal is to flood the net- work so as to stop (and fail miserably in my opinion) people from downloading copyright- edcontent. — So what happened, at least from what I could gather, was one of their employees signed up, using a known Media Defender IP address to a BitTorrent website with a gmail account using the same password for the ac- count. The people in the BitTorrent website then used the password and email to log in to the Media Defender employees gmail ac- count. The gmail account contained a for- warded 700MB (over 6600 emails): archive of internal Media. Defender email that details everything you can imagine going 6n behind the scenes. They then download every single last e-mail and post the entire archive into P2P networks, namely BitTorrent, but it’s literally everywhere now. So this is where the insanity begins, this company was then exposed for creating a honey pot website designed to trap users for posting copyrighted content, even though they are practically encouraged to do this. This was illegal. They were then exposed to be hacking into various websites (illegal), logging IP address- es of the more popular supposedly “clean” sites, lying to their own clients to skew testing numbers into their favor (breach of contract), using unregistered software in a corporate set- ting (breach of contract), reverse engineering closed source projects (illegal), and violating the GPL (illegal) to name a few offenses. It gets worse. Shortly after the leak, a phone cali was leaked which featured a conversation ‘between Media Defender and the New York Attorney General During the phone conversa- tion, Media Defender assured the government that the phone conversation and the email sys- tem were secure. They then talk about a secret government project to fight child pornography. While this may be one of the only things that improved Media Defender’s image, it was also revealed that the operation was also il- legal because Media Defender is technically possessing and redistributing child pornog- taphy. In order to download a file, you have to upload as well on most P2P networks. After the leak, Media Defender then knocked out their entire email service. Naturally, the email database, the phone call, which is now transcribed, and an entire fake file database for Gnutella have circulated onto public web- sites. This happened over a weekend. On Monday, Media Defender then threat- ened legal action against a website outside the US jurisdiction; Norway to be precise. When the threat was met with ridicule, Media Defender, found out through well known Media Defender IP addresses, proceeded to DDOS (illegally hack) the website with only temporary success. Media Defender has also launched several other legal threat letters, im- properly filed as they didn’t use the DMCA notice scheme, which, in turn, also met with ridicule from the administrators. Seriously, is breaking the law the only thing Media Defender knows? This story is rapidly developing as of this writing. In all my years of watching the copyright debates, I have never seen anything like this. This company’s public image is far beyond repair. This com- ment is also extremely truncated. To find out more info, Google “MediaDefender Leak” to see the utter insanity yourself. Traffic Light Diet (Mark II) What students should really be eating JosePH JEFFERY Sarr Wrirer The Western world is appearance crazy and body image is everything. We’ve some how gone from viewing overweight as a sign of affluence to something to be abhorred. Diets are everywhere and students are notorious for the freshmen fif- teen. So, I’m here to expound on a new, radical diet for stu- dents: the Traffic Light Diet Mark II. Green: If it’s green, it’s good. That’s your usual green veg and crap, but little known facts are that this also includes chips in green bags (Yay for sour cream and onion!), sprite, mountain dew, grass and green items of clothing. Yellow: For yellow you shouldn’t have too much of it. This includes fries, mustard, yellow peppers, yellowy doughnuts — though if you get one with green icing it’s only half as bad for you. Card- board, being a browny-yellow also falls into this category. Red: Ketchup is a prime suspect here, all you ketchup guzzlers put down the sachets and step away from the table. You want to have the minimal amount of these. The category also includes: jam, tomatoes, red peppers, red apples (Green Granny Smiths are okay though). Blood also should be avoided in large quan- tities. Sorry vampires. Anything of a different colour, such as the black casing on traffic lights themselves, may be broken down into its com- ponent colours. Black having no colour makes no difference and can be imbibed in abundance. White on the other hand contains equal measures of all colours so is neither that good or that bad for you, so it sort of ends up fitting in yellow.