From: Hallam-Baker <hallam@ai.mit.edu>
Date: Fri, 6 Jun 1997 03:16:11 +0800
To: nelson@media.mit.edu
Subject: Re: Password pirates plunder XXX sites, from The Netly News
In-Reply-To: <199706051836.OAA01401@pinotnoir.media.mit.edu>
Message-ID: <199706051855.OAA20888@muesli.ai.mit.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



> >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