252 DEAR HACKER

252 DEAR HACKER

Dear 2600: I’m really pleased to see you boosting your coverage of recent incursions

by corporate America into consumers’ privacy/property rights. While such issues might not be the central mission of 2600, this issue is going to become one of the most important and explosive ones in American culture in the past 50 years.

strupp We agree. But it’s hardly a recent phenomena.

Dear 2600:

I just found out something quite disturbing at my workplace. I’m an analyst for a major ISP in Canada and I had an interesting conversa- tion with my friend at the abuse department. It seems that the RIAA is pressuring us to shut down customers who have been involved in file sharing, especially on the Kazaa network. Apparently, the volume of threats by the RIAA, Sony, and other organizations is around 1000+ emails per month. They are receiving detailed logs with IP addresses and the names of the files that have been traded (even though every- one knows it’s no proof). They’ve installed a new script on the Radius server to break down logs in smaller chunks so they can be searched faster. Needless to say, that is quite disturbing. So far, they have not shut down anyone, only sent warnings by email to the “offenders.” They’re in the process of deciding what to do next. I’ll keep you posted.

I thought you would find this interesting. Quebec

It might be interesting to find out exactly how they’re getting these logs in the first place. Are they perhaps running some sites of their own? Or is your ISP monitoring what their users do?

T H E M A G I C O F T H E C O R P O R AT E W O R L D

Dear 2600: Recently, I bought the Sony MZ-N505 Minidisc recorder. I wanted

to use it to make high quality recordings of my band and my friends’ bands in live situations. I had no intention of clandestinely “bootleg- ging” the copyrighted material of paranoid mega-acts like Metallica or Linkin Park, due to my lack of interest in their lousy, overproduced, overprotected, irrelevant garbage.

A few weeks ago, I decided to try to get a good live recording of a friend’s band at a club. The result sounded excellent and when I got home, of course I wanted to put it on my hard drive to edit, EQ, and burn copies of it (with the full knowledge of the band—they even requested a copy). It was to my surprise when, after installing Sony’s bundled Open MG Jukebox and NetMD software, that there was no feature to transfer (or “check-in” as they call it) data from the MD to the computer using the supplied USB/MD cable.

I learned that the USB interface was only to be used to “check-out” purchased music from the hard drive to the MD unit. The only per- mitted function of “checking-in” is to return previously “checked-out” music from the MD back to the hard drive, a function that I cannot imagine ever having a use for. Apparently, Sony did not include a truly digital USB/MD option in order to discourage piracy (Sony is, after all, a major publisher of music content as well as audio hardware).

So what are underground music enthusiasts and “tapers” like myself supposed to do to transfer uncopyrighted music to their computers? Here’s the only answer I have come up with: We must play the MD, in real time, into the analog line-in in the computer’s sound card, and then edit it using a sound-editing program (I use ProTools Free).

This outrageous example of prohibitive software is infuriating to people like me, whose main purpose in getting an MD recorder was for the perceived ability to record high quality music and transfer it digitally to the computer. I’ve searched the net for shareware or free- ware programs that enable high speed USB/MD interface, but have come up empty. Mostly, I just find entries on bulletin boards full of