Re: Password bootleggers

[Eric Hellman <eric@hellman.net>]

I have been able to find sites like these anytime I bothered to 
look over the last 10 years. I don't think I've ever seen the 
same sites twice- they pop up and disappear all the time. The 
reality is that if you give out credentials to 10,000 students, 
and have even a 99.9% good behavior rate, then you have 10 
students behaving badly. Good administrators have to make 
trade-offs between treating the 99.9% with the trust they deserve 
and weeding out the 0.1%.

I have briefly thought about the feasibility of a service that 
would help libraries and publishers monitor this problem, but 
I've never encountered anyone motivated to support such a 
service. Libraries and publishers typically have triggers in 
place that flag excessive use; low level misuse is hard to detect 
is also not a problem (at least not a problem causing pain).

In my analysis, the economic damage of such activity is primarily 
in two areas:

1.Publishers who want to sell products in aspiring international 
markets will find that the demand curve is more elastic than it 
would be in the absence of password leakage.

2.When there are digital downloads with high demand- mostly 
music, videos, and pornography- that are protected by passwords, 
leakage should be expected, and appropriate measures should be 
taken.

Eric Hellman

http://hellman.net/eric/
now blogging at http://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/