[81274] in Cypherpunks
Re: Password pirates plunder XXX sites, from The Netly News
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Hallam-Baker)
Thu Jun 5 16:05:41 1997
From: Hallam-Baker <hallam@ai.mit.edu>
To: nelson@media.mit.edu
Date: Thu, 5 Jun 1997 14:55:04 -0400 (EDT)
Cc: hallam@ai.mit.edu, dee@cybercash.com, cypherpunks@toad.com,
dcsb@ai.mit.edu
In-Reply-To: <199706051836.OAA01401@pinotnoir.media.mit.edu> from "Nelson Minar" at Jun 5, 97 02:36:36 pm
Reply-To: Hallam-Baker <hallam@ai.mit.edu>
> >I think the problem is that a large number of the people who run porn
> >sites are neither technically sophisticated nor well funded.
>
> That profile's not exactly accurate. Some of the folks running porn
> sites are very sophisticated.
Yes but I don't think those are the ones complaining. I noted that one
of the porn sites has a implemented a very sophisticated version of
the "referer" payment scheme I once proposed.
> More to the point, I don't know of *any*
> site that does the sort of protection proposed above. I don't think
> it's an easy thing to do. An enterprising person could probably turn
> quite a few bucks selling that sort of system.
I'm sure a lot of folks are coding away as we speak. It would be a snap
to do it for a threaded server like IIS. On Netscape the interpocess
communications load would almost certainly burn you.
> But do the porn sites want it? The stolen passwords might partly serve
> as free advertisement. The situation might be similar to (some kinds
> of) pirated software. The stolen version acts as a teaser but
> (hopefully) the consumer will eventually pay himself in order to have
> more convenient access.
This could well be the nub of the matter. It could well be the case that
a lot of the passwords are sent out by the companies themselves. I note
that there is a usenet group alt.sex.passwords...
Phill
