Thankfully this monster is finally off the streets
FBI nabs worker at DVD company for ripping prerelease blockbusters
Submitted 1 month ago by cm0002@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
Comments
Orcspit@lemm.ee 1 month ago
pdxfed@lemmy.world 1 month ago
National security priorities definitely in order.
Antagnostic@lemmy.world 1 month ago
My tax dollars at work‽
finitebanjo@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Honestly, yeah, he was enabling Russian Hackers.
WR5@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Thankfully your banjo playing days are finite.
singletona@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Yes let’s not go after the south African literally fomenting the rise of a fashist takovet. Let’s go after the guy selling bootleg DVDs.
finitebanjo@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I’m okay with both. This guy was enabling a Russian Hacker network.
LavaPlanet@lemmy.world 1 month ago
He shoulda just said he was training an ai model!
finitebanjo@lemmy.world 1 month ago
He didn’t get arrested for theft. He got arrested for being part of a distribution network that empowered Russian hackers.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
Downloading is absolutely illegal, it’s just not really enforced because you need to prove criminal intent. You’re still accessing copyrighted material without a license, which is a copyright violation.
Distribution has much higher penalties and is more likely to push people to buying (harder to find copies = potentially more legal sales), so that’s where enforcement is focused.
daggermoon@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Glad my tax dollars aren’t going to waste /s
SplashJackson@lemmy.ca 1 month ago
Lol corporate enforcers paid by taxes
TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world 1 month ago
finitebanjo@lemmy.world 1 month ago
He really wasn’t. The media he distributed came with Russian malware.
bhamlin@lemmy.world 1 month ago
But i collect russian malware. I was expecting that release. Where else can I find that? It’s gone now, and the collector’s value has skyrocketed.
jerryq27@programming.dev 1 month ago
They’re going after Meta next for pirating terabytes of books to train their AI, right? Right??
j0ester@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Do as I say. Not as I do.
emberpunk@lemmy.ml 1 month ago
Lol that’s hilarious if not sad.
CriticalMiss@lemmy.world 1 month ago
The comments (and maybe the article too, I didn’t read to the bottom) are misinformation. This guy isn’t enabling Russian hacker groups. What happened is he ripped the BluRay and posted it online. Since it got a lot of hype Russian hackers decided to use that opportunity and ship a similar file ending in .exe instead of the usual Matroska format (.mkv) you see usually with ripped BluRays. If you were around torrent communities back then you know this to be false. These are your tax dollars at work, potentially jailing someone up to 15 years for ripping a BluRay.
adespoton@lemmy.ca 1 month ago
Fails to mention he also was selling the discs online.
But they want to sentence him for 15 years for this, even though his actions likely saved lives during the height of COVID if the allegations are true; if they aren’t true, he harmed nobody because those 10 million people wouldn’t have seen the movies in theaters anyway.
ragebutt@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 month ago
DVDs?? is this article from 2006?
Mezmer1zed@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Weirdly enough, DVDs are still by far the most popular physical format.
Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I still buy them, but I prefer when it’s a dvd/blueray/3D (if available) combo pack.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
Well, they’re often cheaper and easier to rip. I ha e a bluray reader w/ Libredrive flashed, but not everyone has that.
Cocodapuf@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I’m going to go out on a limb and say this company that makes DVDs probably also makes Blu-Ray discs.
giacomo@lemm.ee 1 month ago
what kinda 2009 headline is this?
police also confiscated 50 pairs of counterfit ray-ban sunglasses and 20 lbs of zippo lighters
Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Plot twist. It was 1 zippo lighter, but it was a comically large one. It just weighs 20 lbs.
singletona@lemmy.world 1 month ago
At that point wouldn’t it just be a really shitty flamethrower?
MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml 1 month ago
stole “numerous ‘pre-release’ DVDs and Blu-rays” between February 2021 and March 2022. He then allegedly “ripped” the movies, "bypassing encryption that prevents unauthorized copying
How? Especially pre-release bluray?
SkybreakerEngineer@lemmy.world 1 month ago
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
spyd3r@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
Hey, that’s the combination to my luggage!
MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml 1 month ago
Hex?
ivanafterall@lemmy.world 1 month ago
They should demand thorough answers from this vigilante and put them on YouTube so all the world understands not to do this!
MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml 1 month ago
No, i mean, bluray encryption is partly bound to keys and the player. Even blurays from 2020 often fail with libbluray and a newish player. I see no way to rip a pre-release bluray.
d00ery@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Soon it became dangerous to download the movie, though, as popular demand for the movie quickly put a target on downloaders’ backs and scammers soon planted malware in Spider-Man movie torrents that ReasonLabs reported used the movie to “lure in as many victims as possible.”
ReasonLabs said that the malware was “likely from a Russian torrenting site.” It took over the would-be Spider-Man movie watchers’ computers without setting off Windows Defender and with the goal of cryptomining in the background for the bad actors’ benefit.
CaptainBasculin@lemmy.ml 1 month ago
Some players might have vulnerabilities that people exploit; but honestly it’s very rare, especially with most people auto updating their programs.
Most of the time it is indeed “download spider man no virus no survey 2023 free download.exe”
ozymandias117@lemmy.world 1 month ago
If they’re being shared as disk images, basically every Blu-Ray has an embedded Java program, also
ladfrombrad@lemdro.id 1 month ago
tldr: people using Windows can get duped into running what is basically a Powershell / Shortcut to pwn themselves
I cock blocked them with Qbit even though I don’t use Windows
Duamerthrax@lemmy.world 1 month ago
tldr: people using Windows can get duped
Truth.
finitebanjo@lemmy.world 1 month ago
The video itself is a set of instructions, and when a video player interprets those instructions there is a window of opportunity.
gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
Thankfully, no crime was committed
Rhoeri@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Good to see them going after the real criminals…. Back in 2002.
drmoose@lemmy.world 1 month ago
🎶 there goes my hero 🎶
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
Watch him as he goes.
SlopppyEngineer@lemmy.world 1 month ago
How “Les Misérables” of them. Jean Valjean got 19 years for stealing bread. 15 years is light in comparison.
rob_t_firefly@lemmy.world 1 month ago
YOU WOULDN'T SPIDER A MAN
GrumpyDuckling@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
I knew they were going to start cracking down on piracy. They’ll use it as an excuse to make vpns illegal.
Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Shhhhh, don’t give them ideas!
umbrella@lemmy.ml 1 month ago
what year is it
User79185@discuss.tchncs.de 1 month ago
DVD?
Global_Liberty@lemmy.ml 1 month ago
Better hope I’m not on the jury.
Veedem@lemmy.world 1 month ago
15 years? Wow. He could have run down multiple pedestrians, killed one of them, and used a false insurance claim to try to cover it up and gotten a third of that.
wthr.com/…/531-f7ddb3c7-c316-4b5a-b62f-b6162eff69…
Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
Just goes to show how horrendous this sort of crime is. I hear dvd pirates are on the same cell blocks as pedophiles in prison.
Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world 1 month ago
What? Really? I would have thought dvd pirates would have far worse conditions than pedophiles.
MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml 1 month ago
One is running some nobodies over, the other making a rich guy some pennies less rich.
Must set a precedent, y’know?
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
on paper
It’s making them less rich only if you assume pirated copies would’ve been sales. That’s generally not the case, and piracy can often increase sales by pirates recommending things to people who will actually buy.
Broken@lemmy.ml 1 month ago
Goes to show, he should have made a run for it and hit a bunch of people with his car. Then he’d get a reduced sentence.
booly@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
People generally aren’t sentenced to the maximum penalty for a crime, so it’s not very useful to compare the maximum potential sentence for a charged crime versus the actual sentence received after conviction on another crime. The Indianapolis hit and run carried potential penalties of more than 15 years. This DVD guy will probably get less than 5.