Hatch Takes Aim at Illegal Downloading: "kill their computers!"

www.washingtonpost.com...

Not that we couldn't see this coming...

Hatch Takes Aim at Illegal Downloading
By TED BRIDIS
The Associated Press
Tuesday, June 17, 2003; 5:22 PM

WASHINGTON - The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee said Tuesday he favors developing new technology to remotely destroy the computers of people who illegally download music from the Internet.

The surprise remarks by Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, during a hearing on copyright abuses represent a dramatic escalation in the frustrating battle by industry executives and lawmakers in Washington against illegal music downloads.

i read bout this the other day. I doubt it will happen. but if they do do this im startin a militia whos with me

doesnt matter even if they do do it, someone will find a way around it. but that pretty much sucks crack that they would even think about doing something so malicious

I don't understand how such technology could possibly work. The only way I can think of would be to create some kind of firmware virus to target the computer's BIOS, I'm not even sure if that's really possible though. That wouldn't even really destroy the computer though, the worst it would do is ruin any motherboard that has the BIOS chip soldered directly to the board.

Anybode else have any thoughts as to how they could possibly do this?

Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) suggested Tuesday that people who download copyright materials from the Internet should have their computers automatically destroyed.

But Hatch himself is using unlicensed software on his official website, which presumably would qualify his computer to be smoked by the system he proposes.

The senator's site makes extensive use of a JavaScript menu system developed by Milonic Solutions, a software company based in the United Kingdom. The copyright-protected code has not been licensed for use on Hatch's website.

"It's an unlicensed copy," said Andy Woolley, who runs Milonic. "It's very unfortunate for him because of those comments he made."

wired.com...

Will someone PLEASE go smoke his website???

I was watching on Sky News quite some months ago now that when Eminem releases a new single, that his producers actually upload tons of blank mp3 files onto the web and run them on KaZaA to name one P2P program in order to avert people further attempting to download the file after failing the first few times.

This was quite an interesting tactic on their part, I myself found one of these mp3 files which is basically tagged with the right details, of the right length, blah blah... perhaps if other companies did this it would stop even a few (thousands) from trying.

For some reason, I'm not scared.

I remember that simon, madonna also did it...

But her website was hacked the next day for 24 hours, and naturally, the person uploaded her entire album for people to download free.

They cant start breaking computers and if they do, they'll enrage every user.

They've only gotten away with it until now as they havent hit a place where hackers and script kiddies convene, like IRC or FTP. And when they hit those, there will be hell to pay.

The hash that Madonna posted as a decoy on kazaa (Which said "What the F*ck are you doing?") actually was more popular than the song itself. Within a day or so, someone had mixed this with the song itself (to form a version that was never legally released) which by far outstripped the original song in popularity.

A good question: If Mr. Hatches idea did come to pass, does that give the US the right to destroy computers in other countries? In some cases, that could be considered an act of war.