micromux

Stealing Your Music

There are a number of ways your computer could be employed to download copyrighted content illegally. The RIAA wants to prevent this from happening and has been taking unsuspecting P2P users to court in an effort to protect intellectual property. Patricia Santangelo is the among the latest of these plantiffs, and rather than accept a settlement she has spent more than $25,000 to take them to court.

Patricia contends that she is innocent because she has no computer literacy, which would make it impossible for her to have downloaded this music illegally.

What if Patricia owned a gun and failed to secure it with a trigger lock? Imagine if her children had friends visiting the house and they found the unsecured gun, would Patricia be innocent if these kids used the gun to kill someone? Even if the murder was accidental, Patricia would be held accountable because she neglected to store a dangerous weapon in a proper fashion.

Now let’s turn to the question of how she should have secured her computer. If the kids were using the system in an unsupervised fashion, Patricia should have password protected the machine and they should have not been allowed to access it with any superuser (Administrator) privileges. It was her responsibility to understand how to properly configure her computer, imagine if a gun owner could plead innocent because they were shotgun illiterate.

If the kids were restricted from installing any new software and if Patricia had taken the time to secure her computer using a properly configured firewall, then it would have been unlikely they could have used her machine to download music.

Obviously, this kind of protection won’t always be sufficient. A truly capable hacker would be able to circumvent virtually any restriction once they are afforded physical access to the computer. For example, boot the computer from a USB thumb drive and circumvent access restrictions on your operating system altogether. This could also be accomplished remotely using malware or perhaps by exploiting a weakness in your operating system.

If you have taken every reasonable precaution to secure your PC, and a malicious hacker still finds a way to gain privileged access to your machine, are you still guilty if the RIAA discovers copyrighted music on your hard drive? This is a much more difficult question, and won’t be something that the courts will need to consider in Patricia’s case.

Computer Upgrades

It is becoming increasingly obvious that it is time for a new round of computer upgrades. The recent release of KDE 3.5 and the forthcoming Microsoft Vista are advancing the graphical platform in a number of key areas.

Read Computer Upgrades >>

Cloning an Operating System

Recently, a computer upgrade required an operating system transfer from an old computer to a new system. The old drive was a 1.4 GB Samsung and it would easily fit on the new 4 GB Maxtor drive. After hooking up the new drive as a slave disk, booting Knoppix seemed like the easiest way to get Linux running on this PC. Once booted, the new disk is called /dev/hdb and the original disk is /dev/hda. Be very careful with these instructions, if your configuration is different the devices will also be different.

To transfer the data, it is first necessary to replicate the primary partition. This is done by asking the old drive for the size of the partition in sectors:

# fdisk -l -u /dev/sda

Disk /dev/hda: 1024 MB, xxxxxxxxxx bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, xxxx cylinders, total xxxxx sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1   *          63      208844      104391   b   FAT32

Your new disk should have a partition that ends at 208844 and that is FAT32. Create a new partition on /dev/hdb that is the same type and ends at the same location. You do not need to format this with the filesystem, use dd to clone the data:

# dd if=/dev/hda1 of=/dev/hdb1 bs=1024

There will be very little feedback while dd is running, this utility will copy the contents of the old partition to your new partition. When this is complete, you will also need to clone the MBR (Master Boot Record) so that the new drive boots the same way. This can be done like so:

# dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb bs=446 count=1

That’s it, your new disk has the contents of your original drive and should be bootable. You may want to expand the old filesystem which can be done using the parted utility; however, if it is an NFTS partition it’s probably not recommended.

Turn off the computer and unplug the old drive. Retarget the new disk from slave to master and reboot, you should now be running the computer from your new drive with your old operating system. If you have also upgraded your PC hardware in the process, be prepared with your original Windows media.