The Shadow Internet
Topsite
URL : http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.01/topsite.html
TITLE : Wired 13.01: The Shadow Internet
The Shadow Internet
-------------------
They start with a single stolen file and pump out bootleg games and movies by
the millions. Inside the pirate networks that are terrorizing the entertainment
business.
Anathema is a so-called topsite, one of 30 or so underground, highly secretive
servers where nearly all of the unlicensed music, movies, and videogames
available on the Internet originate. Outside of a pirate elite and the Feds who
track them, few know that topsites exist. Even fewer can log in.
Within minutes of appearing on Anathema, Half-Life 2 spread. One file became 30
files became 3,000 files became 300,000 files as Valve stood helplessly by
watching its big Christmas blockbuster turn into a lump of coal. The damage was
irreversible - the horse was out of the barn, the county, and the state. The
original Half-Life has sold more than 10 million games and expansion packs since
its late 1998 release. Half-Life 2's official release finally happened in
November, after almost a year of reprogramming.
When Frank (who, like all the pirates interviewed for this article, is
identified by a pseudonym) posted the Half-Life 2 code to Anathema, he tapped an
international network of people dedicated to propagating stolen files as widely
and quickly as possible.
It's all a big game and, to hear Frank and others talk about "the scene,"
fantastic fun. Whoever transfers the most files to the most sites in the least
amount of time wins. There are elaborate rules, with prizes in the offing and
reputations at stake. Topsites like Anathema are at the apex. Once a file is
posted to a topsite, it starts a rapid descent through wider and wider levels of
an invisible network, multiplying exponentially along the way. At each step,
more and more pirates pitch in to keep the avalanche tumbling downward. Finally,
thousands, perhaps millions, of copies - all the progeny of that original file -
spill into the public peer-to-peer networks: Kazaa, LimeWire, Morpheus. Without
this duplication and distribution structure providing content, the P2P networks
would run dry. (BitTorrent, a faster and more efficient type of P2P file-
sharing, is an exception. But at present there are far fewer BitTorrent users.)
It's a commonly held belief that P2P is about sharing files. It's an appealing,
democratic notion: Consumers rip the movies and music they buy and post them
online. But that's not quite how it works.
In reality, the number of files on the Net ripped from store-bought CDs, DVDs,
and videogames is statistically negligible. People don't share what they buy;
they share what is already being shared - the countless descendants of a single
"Adam and Eve" file. Even this is probably stolen; pirates have infiltrated the
entertainment industry and usually obtain and rip content long before the public
ever has a chance to buy it.
The whole shebang - the topsites, the pyramid, and the P2P networks girding it
all together - is not about trading or sharing at all. It's a broadcast system.
It takes a signal, the new U2 single, say, and broadcasts it around the world.
The pirate pyramid is a perfect amplifier. The signal becomes more robust at
every descending level, until it gets down to the P2P networks, by which time it
can be received by anyone capable of typing "U2" into a search engine.
This should be good news for law enforcement. Lop off the head (the topsites),
and the body (the worldwide trade in unlicensed media) falls lifeless to the
ground. Sounds easy, but what if you can't find the head? As in any criminal
conspiracy, it takes years of undercover work to get inside. An interview
subject warned me against even mentioning Anathema in this article: "You do not
need some 350-pound hit man with a Glock at your front door."
The upper reaches of the network are a "darknet," hidden behind layers of
security. The sites use a "bounce" to hide their IP address, and members can log
in only from trusted IP addresses already on file. Most transmissions between
sites use heavy-duty encryption. Finally, they continually change the usernames
and passwords required to log in. Estimates say this media darknet distributes
more than half a million movies every day. It's also, by any reading of the law,
a vast criminal enterprise engaged in wholesale copyright infringement.
But the Feds are getting smarter. Last spring, the FBI and US Department of
Justice launched a series of raids codenamed Fastlink. Working with cops in
Sweden, the Netherlands, and eight other countries, the operation seized more
than 200 computers. One confiscated server alone contained 65,000 pirated
titles. Fastlink rubbed out a few topsites, but new ones filled the void. The
flow of illicit games and movies slowed briefly, then resumed. In April, federal
agents interrogated Frank and impounded all his computer equipment. So far, no
charges have been filed. "But the Feds had no idea about Half-Life," he boasts.
"I was never connected to that shit. If they found out, I'd be in jail."
Bruce Forest, a self-described "elder statesman" in the piracy scene, started
ripping and trading in the ancient days of the late '80s. While he no longer
actively traffics in bootlegged media, he maintains contacts that give him
access to the most exclusive topsites. What the topsites don't know is that
three years ago, Forest came in from the cold. "Basically, I'm a double agent,"
he concedes. "Though I don't fink anyone out. I'm not a cop."
As a consultant for one of the world's largest entertainment companies, Forest
notifies his bosses whenever one of their movies appears on a topsite. Thanks to
his unparalleled access, he enjoys a bird's-eye view of the scene. And because
he's ostensibly on the right side of the law, he's uncommonly open with
information. This makes him an anomaly within the paranoid byways of the media
darknet.
Forest runs his business from the first floor of his rural Connecticut home.
He's in his mid-40s but moves with jerky, adolescent energy. His brown hair is
in perpetual disarray, and he pads around his office with bare feet, dressed in
cargo shorts and a faded polo. Gold and platinum albums from his days as a
producer at Island Records, MCA, and Arista line one wall. A baroque array of
computer equipment fills the next, including 13 CPUs and 16 external hard drives
(for a total of 3 terabytes of storage). His desk runs the length of the room
and supports five full-size LCD displays. I hear a soft ping. "That tells me a
movie just made its first appearance on a topsite." He points to a window on the
monitor. It shows an innocent-looking list of files from an FTP site. The
uppermost file says, "Hellboy.SCREENER.Proper.READ NFO PRE VCD." Translation:
The DVD of one of the year's biggest box office hits has been pirated two months
before its intended release date. "The FBI would kill to be sitting here looking
at this," he says.
Even first-run movies get ripped. "Remember what happened to The Hulk?" he asks.
On June 6, two weeks before its official release, a near-final version of The
Hulk showed up online. To hear studio executives tell it, the bootleg went
straight to the P2P networks and spread like a contagion.
"Bullshit," says Forest. "Trying to distribute The Hulk through the P2Ps would
take months, not hours." That's because files on the public file-sharing
networks, where no single node is much more powerful than the next, spread at a
glacial pace. Furthermore, when users connect to a P2P network - FastTrack, for
example - they connect only to a small proportion of the number of other users
connected at the same time. So unless a topsite seeds a file across the P2P
network, the odds are slim that someone searching for a copy will actually find
it.
Forest pushes a hand through his hair, leaving it standing on end, and rotates
in his Aeron to look me in the eye. "Here's what actually happened: Universal
gave the workprint to its Manhattan ad agency. Then the print got to SMF. And
bam!" SMF, Forest explains, is a piracy group that specializes in acquiring
movies in theatrical release.
Before the folks at SMF could release the movie to a topsite, they had to
compress it - from roughly 9 Gbytes to 700 Mbytes, small enough to fit on a
single CD. Now the film drops. Forest won't say to which topsite SMF first
posted The Hulk, only that "SMF had affiliations with certain sites, so it must
have been one of those."
Within an hour, word had spread that The Hulk had appeared on the topsites, and
the "races" began - copying and distributing the files to as many other servers
as possible, as quickly as possible. "The races are over like that," says
Forest, snapping his fingers. "It's amazing."
Soon, The Hulk was working its way down the pyramid onto slightly less exclusive
sites called dumps. "These sites are a little slower, and they aren't getting
stuff first," explains Forest. "On the other hand, they're getting a lot more
traffic." With as much as several terabytes of data storage, the dumps are the
workhorses of the distribution process, storing hundreds of thousands of media
files filtered down from the topsites and rolling them to the next layer of the
pyramid, the distribution channels.
In 24 hours, SMF's single version of The Hulk had metastasized into at least
50,000 copies. Within 72 hours, the movie was all over the most popular P2P
networks. Before it reached even a single shared file folder on Kazaa, Forest
estimates there were already several hundred thousand copies in circulation,
guaranteeing that casual computer users would be able to find and download it
easily.
One of Forest's computers pipes up again. Another bootleg has just started its
race down the pyramid.
Movie pirates get their booty from one of three sources: industry insiders,
projectionists, or agents placed inside disc-stamping plants and retail outlets.
"Half the kids in the scene work at Best Buy or Blockbuster to get their hands
on stuff they can release," says Frank. "At the factory, maybe 15 percent of CDs
and DVDs are defective," says Forest, "usually just because the label is off a
little bit." They're dumped into a rubbish bin, ripe for the picking.
Release groups break down broadly by medium - videogame, film, music, television
- and then often into genre. One release group, for instance, specializes in
obscure Japanese anime. Another works exclusively in Xbox games. Every release
group has the same ultimate goal: Beat the street date of a big-name album,
videogame, or movie by as much time as possible.
In 2003, Frank and his friends started a release group devoted to first-run
movies. They placed an online ad, and a projectionist in Maryland responded. The
projectionist, who never told Frank his name, proposed to send them the movies
shown in his theater in exchange for free downloads from the topsites. Frank's
posse wanted to test the guy first - standard procedure for a release group. "We
had to know he wasn't a narc," says Frank, "and that he could get us quality
product on a regular basis."
Frank's projectionist passed this test by providing the group with a high-
quality copy of Spy Kids 3D: Game Over. The bootleg was posted the day after it
hit theaters. Theaters get movies several days in advance so that exhibitors can
check for defects in the reels. "Our dude would just run the film before anyone
got to work, and record it from the booth," he says. Frank and his friends
christened their group "MaTinE." Because their supplier - the projectionist -
could get them high-quality recordings, MaTinE got noticed. "Eventually, we were
putting our movies on one of the best topsites in the world," says Frank. He
won't tell me the name of the site, noting it got busted by the FBI. "I can't
have them thinking I put the heat on them, know what I mean?"
The quality of bootlegged films varies, depending on the technology used to
capture the original reel. The best are produced using expensive TV studio
equipment that can convert film to video. The next best are "telesyncs," copies
of a movie in which the visuals have been captured by camcorder but the audio
comes directly from a patch into the projector. "The top telesync groups, like
Centropy, VideoCD, and TCF, are using $10,000 camcorders they get directly from
Japan, cams you can't find in the US," says Frank. The least desirable releases
are "cams," made by an audience member with a camcorder.
I ask Frank how his group could afford such exotic toys. "People buy them for
us," he says, as if this explains everything. "Usually, these people were in the
scene at one time, and now they just want free downloads without having to
contribute." As it turns out, much of the extensive hardware - from superfast
processors to servers with terabytes of storage - are donated by these well-
heeled patrons. "Does Bruce Forest do that?" I ask. "I don't know," Frank says,
laughing. "What did Bruce tell you?"
In fact, Forest freely admits to being a supplier. "I have bought everything
from hard drives to complete computers for various people in the scene. I've
probably bought 15 camcorders alone." He says he considers it a business
expense, and writes it off on his taxes.
Whatever the original source - stamping plant, movie theater, or local
Blockbuster - the film has to be properly prepared for distribution over the
networks. Converting analog to digital is a difficult, time-consuming process.
And getting it into a form that can be easily compressed into a digital box many
times smaller than its original size is an even bigger undertaking. If it isn't
done well, a topsite will reject the file. "Quality control is the number one
job of the release groups," says Forest. "Topsites will only take a file that
fits a long list of specifications. It basically has to be perfect."
To make sure it is, release groups rely on highly skilled technicians
responsible for compressing and packaging the media file. As Forest and I watch
the ripped copy of Hellboy, he pauses the movie. "Look at this," he says. A
massive fight has just taken place, and Hellboy is perched on a bridge
overlooking a devastated cityscape. It's been raining, and the havoc is
reflected in a puddle, into which he stares deeply. "Oh my God. Look at that
reflection. Do you have any idea how hard that is to capture?"
Different scenes require different treatments. "It's almost like using a
paintbrush," says Forest. "A good ripper will know exactly how to apply the
codec properly." A codec, or compression-decompression algorithm, is a method of
reducing file size to ease its transfer over the Internet. Video is normally
compressed using variations of MPEG codecs. A serious ripper will adjust the
bitrate of compression in every scene of a movie to account for changing hue and
lighting.
Toby is a master ripper. At 22, he's got a big man's frame but looks
malnourished, like he doesn't get enough vegetables. He spends most of his time
preparing movies for the Netflix Project. Started by an anonymous donor - again,
an angel investor willing to devote money but not time to media piracy - the
Netflix Project aims to archive every film offered by the subscription service.
"Netflix offers about 25,000 movies," says Toby. "We've got maybe half of them."
Each time Toby finishes condensing and packaging a movie, it gets placed on a
central server. The archive is free for members who score a password and can get
through the encryption. (Asked for comment, Netflix politely declined.)
I'd been told Toby would be cagey, but I find him funny and sweet. In 2000, he
moved to Atlanta to attend college, but after spending a year and a half holed
up in his dorm room ripping and burning, he flunked out. "Computer science is
impossible," he says. "But I didn't really go to class, so part of it might be
my fault, sort of."
Two weeks before the release of A Perfect Circle's new album, Thirteenth Step,
Kevin races home after high school each day, goes down to his basement, and
checks various release sites to see if someone has posted it. Kevin resides a
few levels down the pyramid from the topsite operators; he's a courier for a
couple release groups dealing in emo and hardcore rips, and A Perfect Circle is
the file du jour.
Usually such a sought-after property first appears on sites far more exclusive
and glamorous than the ones Kevin has access to, but he's hopeful a copy will
show up soon. Couriers like Kevin are the grunts of the system, but without the
"curries" transferring and duplicating files, the massive distribution network
would break down.
Finally Kevin checks a site telling him that a rip of Thirteenth Step has just
been uploaded to a secure FTP site - a week before it hits the stores. He curses
under his breath. More than two minutes have elapsed since the file first
appeared. The race is on, and Kevin is already at the back of the pack. He opens
FlashFXP - a program that allows him to directly transfer files - and begins
copying the CD to as many sites as he can. Then he sits back to watch the race.
Everything now depends on the whimsy of Internet traffic and the speed of the
server farms whose bandwidth he is pirating.
With his quick, eager intelligence and, more important, a high degree of focus,
Kevin spends hours at a stretch performing the minute tasks of copying and
transferring files, usually to networks in the middle levels of the pyramid.
It's through grunts like him that a song proliferates from 10,000 copies to 1
million. The night A Perfect Circle's CD was posted, Kevin stayed up late
spreading the file around the Net. The curries competing against him must have
gotten stuck behind some double-wide trailer of a packet, because Kevin's
credits poured in.
Credits are how the curries - and most everyone else - get paid. Back in the
early days of the scene, when there were maybe 100 dedicated geeks trading
copies of The Last Ninja over their Commodore 64s, the rule was established that
site members had to upload one unit (kilobytes at first, now megs or even gigs)
for every three they download. The rule creates an incentive to obtain and
release, and it's this odd form of greed that drives the scene. It's true, as
Forest likes to point out, that no one gets paid (unless they strike up
relations with for-profit Chinese bootleggers, which is considered bad form).
But they do get a lot of free stuff - movies, music, games, and software -
without having to deal with the spyware, phony files, and traffic jams that
plague the public P2P networks.
In fact, pretty much everyone joins the races from time to time. It's how the
pirates while away their idle hours - the release group operator waiting for a
new movie to be delivered, the ripper biding time while his gigabyte-sized files
compress. Yet the best racers aren't even downloading all the pirate media they
have access to. They have credits to burn, but that's not all that drives them.
"It's about being the fastest," Frank says.
The kids in the scene aren't trying to bomb the system. They don't care a whit
whether major labels suffer more from file-sharing than indie labels, or if a
ban on prerelease DVDs affects Miramax's chances at the Academy Awards. They do
this because it feels mildly rebellious, like smoking a doobie behind the local
Kroger or setting off the school fire alarm - and because it's fun.
Like ants, curries are monomaniacal about tiny tasks - they copy and move files
from place to place - but together they form a force so powerful that it
threatens to displace the traditional forms of media distribution. In fact,
Forest believes the scene will eventually go legit, and he's even started a
company, called Jun Group, that uses the topsites to promote movies, musicians,
and TV shows. "The topsites don't care where their files come from, as long as
no one else has them," he says. Last summer Jun Group dropped a collection of
live videos and MP3s from Steve Winwood on the topsites. "We got 2.9 million
downloads," says Forest, "and album sales took off."
Behind the Scene
----------------
Call it trickle-down file-sharing. The goods - a game, movie, song, or other
piece of copyrighted media fall into an insider's hands. Then it's only a matter
of hours before a drop becomes a tidal wave.
- Erik Malinowski
1. THE INSIDER
Industry and theater employees run their own straight-to-video operations.
Hackers looking for prerelease videogames target company servers. And before
that long-awaited CD hits Amazon.com, moles inside disc-stamping plants have
already got a copy.
2. THE PACKAGER
The pirated goods are passed on to a release group. These groups take multi-
gigabyte movie files and squeeze them down for easy online trading.
3. THE DISTRIBUTOR
Release groups are known to have exclusive relationships with certain so-called
topsites. These are the highly secretive sites at the top of the distribution
pyramid. When a topsite operator drops a file, the avalanche begins.
4. THE COURIERS
Alerted by release groups, worker bees spring into action, copying and
transferring files from the topsites to lower-level dump sites, and then from
there to P2P networks like Kazaa and Morpheus. For the couriers, the payoff is
props from their peers and credits redeemable for goods on upper levels of the
pyramid.
5. THE PUBLIC
After the file is copied thousands of times the P2P networks saturate, allowing
casual file-traders easy access to the newest movies, music, and videogames.
Contributing editor Jeff Howe (jeffhowe@wiredmag.com) wrote about desalination
in issue 12.11.
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page revision: 3, last edited: 24 Nov 2019 21:11
