11 ms·

Universal asks Google to take down 127.0.0.1 for piracy

99 points by clessg 11y ago

alanh 11y ago
I’ll bite: How do you think this happened?
- emodendroket 11y ago
  Local test servers I guess? I doubt someone goes through by hand finding these links.
- JoshTriplett 11y ago
  Automated system with little to no oversight?
- omouse 11y ago
  Army of lawyers and business people with zero technical knowledge?
- JadeNB 11y ago
  Other replies have indicated, surely incontrovertibly, that this is some sort of automated framework gone wrong (or wrong-er); but, in that case, I think a question is: what's changed so that that automated framework has discovered 127.0.0.1 now, and not before?
  - emodendroket 11y ago
    Probably someone forgetting to comment out some debug code or whatever... it doesn't take much imagination to see how this might happen.
  - oddevan 11y ago
    My money's on someone running a Plex server (or something similar) on their own machine, then going to reddit and saying "I have a copy of [X], you can watch it here:" with a link to 127.0.0.1 (since that's how they watch it, so why wouldn't it work for anyone else?). I.E. We're dealing with the intersection of an automated framework with a "normal."
- scintill76 11y ago
  Plausible explanation here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9931765 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9931765 . In short, a certain filesharing client serves content on http://127.0.0.1 http://127.0.0.1 and links to that are distributed around the web.
- touristtam 11y ago
  wild guess: a branch of popcorntime in French?
tylrmac 11y ago
Might want to take down localhost too just to be sure.
- abjorn 11y ago
  And ::1 while they're at it.
jngreenlee 11y ago
...the call is coming from INSIDE the house...
- samspenc 11y ago
  For anyone who doesn't understand the context: [1] This is a quote from the movie "When a Stranger Calls" [2] 127.0.0.1 is the IP address for "localhost", one's own computer.
  - tvon 11y ago
    Total nitpick on my part, but the line is from an urban legend, which "When a Stranger Calls" (among others) is based upon. A few references: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheCallsAreComingFromInsideTheHouse http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheCallsAreComing... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Babysitter_and_the_Man_Upstairs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Babysitter_and_the_Man_Ups... http://www.snopes.com/horrors/madmen/babysitter.asp http://www.snopes.com/horrors/madmen/babysitter.asp
- davidgerard 11y ago
  THEN WHO WAS TORRENT CLIENT
nickthemagicman 11y ago
OH NO! 127.0.0.1 THATS ME!
anilshanbhag 11y ago
Going on a tangent: Checking DMCA notices seems like this is a good way to find sites which have a copy of the move ?
- markbnj 11y ago
  That's brilliant, even if only for it's pugnaciousness.
- Artemis2 11y ago
  Is is, and Google even gives you a link at the bottom of search results when some results have been censored by the DCMA.
logfromblammo 11y ago
I wonder how long it will be before the majority of this planet's computing power is devoted to automated processes interacting with other automated processes in such a way that the end result is complete nonsense. Imagine spambots communicating with honeypotbots. Adbots serving clickfraudbots. Recommendations engines suggesting new content to ratingbots. Chatbots lying to each other in channels devoid of actual humans.
- IanCal 11y ago
  You might like subredditsimulator: https://www.reddit.com/r/subredditsimulator https://www.reddit.com/r/subredditsimulator
- Impl0x 11y ago
  That's basically how the stock market works already
JoshTriplett 11y ago
Considering that all DMCA notices must include various dire assertions under penalty of perjury, has anyone ever tried to sue/prosecute over a negligently false DMCA notice?
- pasbesoin 11y ago
  Borrowing from others' arguments, one can argue that such selective and/or one-sided enforcement actually weakens a law or regulation. (Meaning here, no penalties for abusing the DMCA.) Akin to speed limits. Make them unreasonable, and selectively enforce them -- perhaps for purposes, e.g. revenue generation, other than their ostensible purpose -- and people lose all respect for them. You may attempt to enforcement through force, but you no longer have the public's buy in and willing participation -- something upon which democracy is founded. P.S. I didn't mean for my comment to ride this high on the thread, by virtue of being a response. Nonetheless, my point: We continue to fight e.g. artificial scarcity and strengthening threats, rather than working with efforts to actually improve the public's experience and gain willing participation.
  - JoshTriplett 11y ago
    [Meta comment on HN comment structure, not related to the topic.] > P.S. I didn't mean for my comment to ride this high on the thread, by virtue of being a response. As long as you're actually responding to the comment you're replying to (which you were), rather than just responding to a top comment with an unrelated comment to make yours more prominent, then I don't see how that could be taken as a bad thing. By necessity, comments are tree-structured; it'd be too confusing otherwise.
- M2Ys4U 11y ago
  It's simply not true that DMCA claims are covered by penalty of perjury, at least not in the way that nearly everybody thinks. The only part that is covered by penalty of perjury is that the person making the claim is, or is authorised by, the copyright holder. This means that you commit perjury if you issue an otherwise legitimate DMCA claim for a work that is not yours, but you don't if you submit a completely false claim for a work that is. That part of the DMCA is just smoke a mirrors, designed to make the censorship regime look like it's fair and balanced.
aaronferrucci 11y ago
rm -rf $HOME - it's the only way to be sure.
waldirbj 11y ago
Actually it's not uncommon... https://www.chillingeffects.org/notices/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&term=127.0.0.1 https://www.chillingeffects.org/notices/search?utf8=%E2%9C%9...
dogma1138 11y ago
Universal might not be as "stupid" as people think... That address is most likely for a client that the most popular french language pirate streaming Cacaoweb site uses. http://cacaoweb.org/ http://cacaoweb.org/ Basically if you go to that site and download the client you will have a web service running on port 4001 which will accept certain parameters. The links for that service (and other similar services) are published on the internet pointing to the local loopback address with a resource identifier of the specific content in question e.g. http://127.0.0.1:4001/?f=4a3aba6e5e7cff2825347f7293a462ae http://127.0.0.1:4001/?f=4a3aba6e5e7cff2825347f7293a462ae Pressing that link on an machine on which the client is installed will allow you to instantly view the content, on machines on which the client isn't installed it won't do anything (think of it as a torrent magnet link). So while it's a bit silly to see that you see a local loopback address on a DMCA request what they want Google to do is to not display search results that actually provide the link to the content, even if that link requires dedicated software. I've encountered this while doing some investigating into several breaches on some sites, the breaches didn't deface anything and they didn't seem like they cared to compromise the content of the site either. What they did leave is allot of JSON content which was looking like this: "episodelinks": [ { "link": "http://127.0.0.1:4001/?f=73b2ca67915c6e6f7cc67dd75379bab6","lang" http://127.0.0.1:4001/?f=73b2ca67915c6e6f7cc67dd75379bab6","...: "en","subs": "" }] }, { "episode": "2", "episodelinks": [ { "link": "http://127.0.0.1:4001/?f=4a3aba6e5e7cff2825347f7293a462ae","lang" http://127.0.0.1:4001/?f=4a3aba6e5e7cff2825347f7293a462ae","...: "en","subs": "" }] }] }, { "season": "2", That content was then accessed over and over by multiple different clients from mostly french speaking countries oddly enough more from Africa and Canada than France (which there is also quite an interesting anecdotal reasons to why, Africa well can't afford and doesn't have Netflix and Canada rarely gets decent french Dubs these days as most American shows will be only broadcast in English even if they are dubbed in French for France or other regions.) Some of the HTTP clients were sending User Agent's of various streaming apps including the cacaoweb client. What Universal seems to want is to make sure Google doesn't display these lists on forums and various sites and there's not really a better way to do it than to include $HOME:1337/agrirpirate! currently :< What people need to understand with the DMCA requests is that it's not intended to only remove the URL from showing up in google results as that is ineffective it prevents any website with that url in it's content from showing up as a result especially when tied to certain keywords. Blocking say the piratebay or whateversiteahsreplacedrapidshare.com on google ins't effective making sure that all of the 10000's of forums that are used to actually publish the links wont be displayed when people search for Taylor Swift New CD Torrent on Google is.
meeper16 11y ago
Now it becomes a true loopback
sprkyco 11y ago
Also it wasn't Universal per se, but Trident Media Group on behalf of Universal. However, in link provided by @waldirbj https://www.chillingeffects.org/notices/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&term=127.0.0.1 https://www.chillingeffects.org/notices/search?utf8=%E2%9C%9... there have been instances of Universal doing such a thing.

99 points by clessg 11y ago

alanh 11y ago

I’ll bite: How do you think this happened?

emodendroket 11y ago
Local test servers I guess? I doubt someone goes through by hand finding these links.
JoshTriplett 11y ago
Automated system with little to no oversight?
omouse 11y ago
Army of lawyers and business people with zero technical knowledge?
JadeNB 11y ago
Other replies have indicated, surely incontrovertibly, that this is some sort of automated framework gone wrong (or wrong-er); but, in that case, I think a question is: what's changed so that that automated framework has discovered 127.0.0.1 now, and not before?
- emodendroket 11y ago
  Probably someone forgetting to comment out some debug code or whatever... it doesn't take much imagination to see how this might happen.
- oddevan 11y ago
  My money's on someone running a Plex server (or something similar) on their own machine, then going to reddit and saying "I have a copy of [X], you can watch it here:" with a link to 127.0.0.1 (since that's how they watch it, so why wouldn't it work for anyone else?). I.E. We're dealing with the intersection of an automated framework with a "normal."
scintill76 11y ago
Plausible explanation here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9931765 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9931765 . In short, a certain filesharing client serves content on http://127.0.0.1 http://127.0.0.1 and links to that are distributed around the web.
touristtam 11y ago
wild guess: a branch of popcorntime in French?

tylrmac 11y ago

Might want to take down localhost too just to be sure.

abjorn 11y ago
And ::1 while they're at it.

jngreenlee 11y ago

...the call is coming from INSIDE the house...

samspenc 11y ago
For anyone who doesn't understand the context: [1] This is a quote from the movie "When a Stranger Calls" [2] 127.0.0.1 is the IP address for "localhost", one's own computer.
- tvon 11y ago
  Total nitpick on my part, but the line is from an urban legend, which "When a Stranger Calls" (among others) is based upon. A few references: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheCallsAreComingFromInsideTheHouse http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheCallsAreComing... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Babysitter_and_the_Man_Upstairs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Babysitter_and_the_Man_Ups... http://www.snopes.com/horrors/madmen/babysitter.asp http://www.snopes.com/horrors/madmen/babysitter.asp
davidgerard 11y ago
THEN WHO WAS TORRENT CLIENT

nickthemagicman 11y ago

OH NO! 127.0.0.1 THATS ME!

anilshanbhag 11y ago

Going on a tangent: Checking DMCA notices seems like this is a good way to find sites which have a copy of the move ?

markbnj 11y ago
That's brilliant, even if only for it's pugnaciousness.
Artemis2 11y ago
Is is, and Google even gives you a link at the bottom of search results when some results have been censored by the DCMA.

logfromblammo 11y ago

I wonder how long it will be before the majority of this planet's computing power is devoted to automated processes interacting with other automated processes in such a way that the end result is complete nonsense. Imagine spambots communicating with honeypotbots. Adbots serving clickfraudbots. Recommendations engines suggesting new content to ratingbots. Chatbots lying to each other in channels devoid of actual humans.

IanCal 11y ago
You might like subredditsimulator: https://www.reddit.com/r/subredditsimulator https://www.reddit.com/r/subredditsimulator
Impl0x 11y ago
That's basically how the stock market works already

JoshTriplett 11y ago

Considering that all DMCA notices must include various dire assertions under penalty of perjury, has anyone ever tried to sue/prosecute over a negligently false DMCA notice?

pasbesoin 11y ago
Borrowing from others' arguments, one can argue that such selective and/or one-sided enforcement actually weakens a law or regulation. (Meaning here, no penalties for abusing the DMCA.) Akin to speed limits. Make them unreasonable, and selectively enforce them -- perhaps for purposes, e.g. revenue generation, other than their ostensible purpose -- and people lose all respect for them. You may attempt to enforcement through force, but you no longer have the public's buy in and willing participation -- something upon which democracy is founded. P.S. I didn't mean for my comment to ride this high on the thread, by virtue of being a response. Nonetheless, my point: We continue to fight e.g. artificial scarcity and strengthening threats, rather than working with efforts to actually improve the public's experience and gain willing participation.
- JoshTriplett 11y ago
  [Meta comment on HN comment structure, not related to the topic.] > P.S. I didn't mean for my comment to ride this high on the thread, by virtue of being a response. As long as you're actually responding to the comment you're replying to (which you were), rather than just responding to a top comment with an unrelated comment to make yours more prominent, then I don't see how that could be taken as a bad thing. By necessity, comments are tree-structured; it'd be too confusing otherwise.
M2Ys4U 11y ago
It's simply not true that DMCA claims are covered by penalty of perjury, at least not in the way that nearly everybody thinks. The only part that is covered by penalty of perjury is that the person making the claim is, or is authorised by, the copyright holder. This means that you commit perjury if you issue an otherwise legitimate DMCA claim for a work that is not yours, but you don't if you submit a completely false claim for a work that is. That part of the DMCA is just smoke a mirrors, designed to make the censorship regime look like it's fair and balanced.

aaronferrucci 11y ago

rm -rf $HOME - it's the only way to be sure.

waldirbj 11y ago

Actually it's not uncommon... https://www.chillingeffects.org/notices/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&term=127.0.0.1 https://www.chillingeffects.org/notices/search?utf8=%E2%9C%9...

dogma1138 11y ago

Universal might not be as "stupid" as people think... That address is most likely for a client that the most popular french language pirate streaming Cacaoweb site uses. http://cacaoweb.org/ http://cacaoweb.org/ Basically if you go to that site and download the client you will have a web service running on port 4001 which will accept certain parameters. The links for that service (and other similar services) are published on the internet pointing to the local loopback address with a resource identifier of the specific content in question e.g. http://127.0.0.1:4001/?f=4a3aba6e5e7cff2825347f7293a462ae http://127.0.0.1:4001/?f=4a3aba6e5e7cff2825347f7293a462ae Pressing that link on an machine on which the client is installed will allow you to instantly view the content, on machines on which the client isn't installed it won't do anything (think of it as a torrent magnet link). So while it's a bit silly to see that you see a local loopback address on a DMCA request what they want Google to do is to not display search results that actually provide the link to the content, even if that link requires dedicated software. I've encountered this while doing some investigating into several breaches on some sites, the breaches didn't deface anything and they didn't seem like they cared to compromise the content of the site either. What they did leave is allot of JSON content which was looking like this: "episodelinks": [ { "link": "http://127.0.0.1:4001/?f=73b2ca67915c6e6f7cc67dd75379bab6","lang" http://127.0.0.1:4001/?f=73b2ca67915c6e6f7cc67dd75379bab6","...: "en","subs": "" }] }, { "episode": "2", "episodelinks": [ { "link": "http://127.0.0.1:4001/?f=4a3aba6e5e7cff2825347f7293a462ae","lang" http://127.0.0.1:4001/?f=4a3aba6e5e7cff2825347f7293a462ae","...: "en","subs": "" }] }] }, { "season": "2", That content was then accessed over and over by multiple different clients from mostly french speaking countries oddly enough more from Africa and Canada than France (which there is also quite an interesting anecdotal reasons to why, Africa well can't afford and doesn't have Netflix and Canada rarely gets decent french Dubs these days as most American shows will be only broadcast in English even if they are dubbed in French for France or other regions.) Some of the HTTP clients were sending User Agent's of various streaming apps including the cacaoweb client. What Universal seems to want is to make sure Google doesn't display these lists on forums and various sites and there's not really a better way to do it than to include $HOME:1337/agrirpirate! currently :< What people need to understand with the DMCA requests is that it's not intended to only remove the URL from showing up in google results as that is ineffective it prevents any website with that url in it's content from showing up as a result especially when tied to certain keywords. Blocking say the piratebay or whateversiteahsreplacedrapidshare.com on google ins't effective making sure that all of the 10000's of forums that are used to actually publish the links wont be displayed when people search for Taylor Swift New CD Torrent on Google is.

meeper16 11y ago

Now it becomes a true loopback

sprkyco 11y ago

Also it wasn't Universal per se, but Trident Media Group on behalf of Universal. However, in link provided by @waldirbj https://www.chillingeffects.org/notices/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&term=127.0.0.1 https://www.chillingeffects.org/notices/search?utf8=%E2%9C%9... there have been instances of Universal doing such a thing.