There's been a wild party at the New York City Board of Elections. With plenty of movies--"The Green Mile," "Braveheart" and "Unbreakable"--and pop music from Willa Ford and R.E.M., plus MTV videos. All free and all illegal.
To join the fun, online party-goers just directed their Web browsers to an election board computer site. Then they made their own copies of the entertainment stash before officials noticed this virtual rave party erupting in their computers.
Episodes like this one, which went on for weeks until the Board of Elections shut down the site last weekend, are part of an online piracy wave that is sweeping across the Internet.
When the online music-sharing service Napster was shut down by a judge four weeks ago, its millions of users had to go somewhere. Many shifted to the dozen or so legal online alternatives still in operation.
Others moved underground.
Computer hackers have taken the Napster idea and run with it, breaking and entering hundreds of corporate, university and private computers to store illegal copies of movies and music. Then they invite Internet partiers to swoop in and grab their own copies. It's the online equivalent of teenagers hopping a fence to throw a pool party: If the homeowner suddenly returns, they run down the street to the next vacant pool.
When the New York election board shut down their site, hundreds of other computers worldwide had already been hacked for Napster-like swapping parties. Computers operated by Hewlett-Packard, AT&T and DePaul University have recently been hit by these digital party pirates, and hackers boast of success against Microsoft and Kmart as well.
If unchecked, hackers virtually colonize some organizations' computers. For example, the elections board has been hacked six times in the past month alone--turning it into a film and music festival.
Elections board computer managers were exasperated by the latest hacking wave--although no election records were involved, they said. "It's very disturbing to find out that somebody is coming in and we don't even know about it," said Steve Ferguson, an information systems manager at the elections board. "[But] no matter what we do, at some point there's some [hacker] who can get around it. . . . There's always someone cracking those codes."
Unlike Napster and some rival sites established for sharing music, there is no central hub to record communications among hackers or track pirated titles. So record companies and movie studios stand little chance of finding, let alone prosecuting, digital pirates.
