Boing Boing readers fisk Lifehacker.com on MPAA shutdowns


Yesterday, I posted this news about the Motion Picture Association of America's shutdown of sites including lokitorrent.com. Actually, the MPAA did not shut down the webservers, per se — it replaced site contents with this notice, which read in part, "YOU CAN CLICK, BUT YOU CAN'T HIDE."

A number of readers wrote in to point out that Gina Trapani, editor of the new Gawker property Lifehacker (whose launch was backed by a $25K sponsorship from Sony) picked up the Boing Boing story with a different approach. In her Lifehacker post "Don't Steal, You'll Get Caught," Trapani wrote:

"Moral of the story? Things you do on the internet are never anonymous. So if you steal, you can get caught."

To which BB reader Ian Clarke, founder of anonymous filesharing system Freenet, replied:

She is talking complete rubbish. Even trivial precautions, such as using Tor or Freenet, render users completely anonymous for all practical purposes. Unlike Tor and Freenet, BitTorrent was never designed to provide any anonymity for its users, so nothing about this latest news comes as a surprise to anyone that knows the first thing about P2P architectures. And don't even get me started on her use of the work "steal" to describe copyright infringement – its like using the phrase "road rape" to describe jaywalking.

Reader Zack took issue with the post, too — here's a snip from his reply:

you can click but you cannot hide? puh-leeze! if there's one thing that's become quite clear it's that hackers are pretty good at hiding…i knew that [Lifehacker.com's] "sponsored by Sony" thing wasn't good news. they've covered the MPAA's take down of lowkee as "did you dare to take on the Man? guess you better prepare for some unwanted Man-love, then." they're also pitching "hacks" that come from such dodgy underground sources as Microsoft. lifehacker's brilliant advice? set your windows updates to automatic.

Link to previous Boing Boing post, link to Lifehacker post.