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Breaking copy protection, while it's often not an easy exercise, only has to be done once for distribution so that's clearly not the reason [console] video game piracy isn't as common right now. Here are a couple of good reasons that consumer piracy isn't quite as rampant (it still exists) and both are related to the adoption of DVDs:

1. The larger the game, the bigger the hassle in transferring it over the net. While it's relatively easy to download a 650-800MB .iso file for a Playstation or Dreamcast games, downloading a DVD's worth of info (assuming the game actually utilizes the space) is much more difficult.
2. Consumers are currently lagging behind the console storage medium. It's a very rare computer these days that is sold without a CD burner (and a DVD-ROM for that matter) but DVD burning is still in the process of being adopted (format wars - DVD-R/+R/-RW/+RW/-RAM - don't help) in the mainstream, and you still can't get one for $27.
3. The third reason is only applicable to Nintendo, but it's still worth noting that using uncommon formats (cartridge and mini-DVD) still prevents a lot of the "casual" piracy.

Personally, I hope that console video game copy protection keeps getting tougher. I can count the number of times I've had to replace a CD or DVD video game (stored properly) because of media failure on one hand and still have fingers left over, so I'm not a big fan of the back-up copy "excuse."

While I'm realistic enough to recognize the video game prices won't be going down (US$50, pre-tax, new release), I can certainly envision them going up if piracy becomes as rampant on the new consoles as they were on the Playstation and Dreamcast. It won't affect games like GTA which will get their sales anyway, but I certainly don't relish the idea of spending $70 or more for another game that might not be as well known just because others are breaking the law.

If you're just after music then you're probably better sticking with Kazaa.

If you're after movies (especially), computer games and other software then eMule is great. Try sharereactor and click some links if you want an idea of what Emule's capable of.

The problem with eDonkey is that it's pretty centralized in terms of the way OpenNap was centralized (actually more, as there is no "networks" in eDonkey). If the RIAA/MPAA saw eDonkey as a threat, they could easily take down the individual server operators (like the RIAA once did with OpenNap server operators)

Overnet tries to solve it, but it's just not there yet compared to KaZaA and even giFT/openFT. Hopefully it will be in the future, because I love ed2k and related services.

Why wouldn't it work for KaZaa? It works just fine for Overnet/eDonkey. You have sites like ShareReactor, which do indexing for known good releases with their MD4 hashes. You click on a special ed2k:// link and it'll download just that file. No chance in hell of a bad copy sneaking in.

KaZaa is a much larger community than eDonkey. it worked for eDonkey, so if KaZaa gets it, I see it definately working.

Now if they would only release a Linux command line client...

Cheers

This is why websites such as ShareReactor and FileNexus exist, so people can publish the correct checksums of their known-good files for others to download without needing to search for them.

If you stick with clients like eMule and cool file spoltlighters like ShareReactor there would be no worries.

How does the system ensure that the file the hash was computed from is the same file the client will be giving to other users?

If I read your question correctly, you're referring to what's called a hash collision, that's highly unlikely. Schneier's "Applied Cryptography" has a lot of good reading on this. Parts (or "chunks" as eDonkey/eMule call them) which come in 9 MB pieces are also checked. It's a pretty sweet system. When you see a file with a lot of sources and you've gotten the file ID from a reputable source, say ShareReactor or FIleDonkey you shouldn't have any problems.

It's not too hard to avoid low quality/bogus files. All you need is some form of rating and feedback system. ShareReactor fulfills this need for the eDonkey network, providing links to verified versions of files. I imagine it's very possible to decentralise this system significantly, or even to integrate it into the file sharing protocol itself, in order to reduce the possibility of the rating site being shut down.

This thought occurred to me last night while doing some kazaa downloading. Maybe a better P2p capture system would involve each client downloading 1 frame per movie, and sharing that with the world. The clients could assemble the movie from a distributed network, much like a frame server does in premiere.

eDonkey does something similar for the files that it downloads. It divides the file into 9mb chunks and when you have one complete chunk, that part is shared on the network. It works really nicely for large files like movies and ISOs. eDonkey also has this neat feature of having urls that stores the file's hash value. So if you share a file, and wan't people to download that particullar file, you just publish the url on a web page. There are whole sites devoted to edonkey links. ShareReactor and FileNexus are the two most common such sites. Check them out and see the power of this system! The eDonkey network is based on servers and anyone can set up one. The maker of eDonkey has now come up with a serverless P2P system called OverNet that is based on the same edonkey protocols for file transfers and link sharing

If you wan't to use edonkey, then get the open source eMule client. It is an edonkey clone with better features and it is open source. It has a lot of mods for various types of addon features. I personally use the eMule Plus MOD. It even has a web server that you can use to control the client remotely!

I guess that the RIAA's anti-piracy measures are getting so bad that they're circumvented well before they're implemented.

There are already networks out there that incorporate MD5 checksums in order to avoid bad files (example, example). Couple that with a simple checksum repository (example, example). Or maybe even a search engine (example), and you never have to download another bad file again.

You should also check out EMule. They picked up where the EDonkey developer left off, and added a bunch of functionality and features. And the best part is that you can click links from places like Sharereactor, come back to your computer 24 hours later and it's there, with no further intervention from you required.
Just click and walk away...

PS-Did I mention that there's no spyware?

sig2dat, kazaa lite and a verified list.

Plus eMule/eDonkey2000 (if you must)/Overnet, and sharereactor, complete with voting.

Overnet released their command line client for the mac. It is great. If you do not fear the terminal, then use Overnet. Overnet is compatible with the edonkey dllinks. You can find the available files with their corresponding links at Sharereactor. Just type "dllink" in overnet and paste the link from sharereactor to download the file. There is no fancy GUI yet, but I'm sure that when this gets bigger, it will have one. I highly recomend this application, but be warned of it's lack of gui. For other file sharing information I recomend zeropaid. Although they don't have the latest mac software, and they are mainly M$ users, they can give you a general idea of the programs available for download.

Of course, as most likely already mentioned, you can get most of the "great" books at the Project Gutenberg website (http://gutenberg.net/).

But with that, maybe this is another great legal thing that P2P can come to the rescue of? Firing up KaZaA Lite, I was able to find PDFs of many of the same books that Gutenberg only has in ASCII form (PDF, in my mind, would be a lot nicer to read and could also retain graphics, styles and fonts). Maybe eDonkey has them too? You can always check for them at Share Reactor or Share Live...

OK, first off there is a little knack to searching on eDonkey. You first have to make sure that your firewall will accept connections through ports 4662-4663 (and forwarding to the machine running the donkey)... most of this info is on the eDonkey site.

When it is up and running, you can do a search when you are connected to a server (a good idea is to get an updated serverlist, one of the places I go to is The Donkey Network). If there aren't any of the files there, then click the 'Extend Search' button that pops up to the left of the search button... to do more searches, click the button then press and hold down the enter key for less than a second, do more short bursts to let any server search results get through.

A lot of the files will be dependant on what people are sharing, and the more blue the colour, the more people have the same file. A great place I've recently found that lists certain Sci-Fi files is Varelse's Sharepool, and another site for other links is ShareReactor.

A lot of the server work (updating lists, etc) has been automated in Overnet, but I haven't been using it at all yet. As I said in the first post, it takes a little more work to learn eDonkey, but I've found the quality of files that are being shared far superior to the FastTrack network (esp. for very large files). There are times that I can't find stuff on the Donkey network, so Kazaa still comes in handy.

Seems like someone has made a little patch to change the values from resource-eating test mode to a playable mode...

Get it at ShareReactor via eDonkey.

At least it could help you tune the thing ab bit. :)

What... this one? Doom III

Failing that, the more direct approach is to copy and paste the following links into your edonkey or overnet client's console (aka message) window:
dllink ed2k://|file|doom3.e3-demo.README.ShareReactor.txt |302|01c39f4c97aae55beab8f9517aed8740|
(.. for the README instruction file)
and
dllink ed2k://|file|doom3.e3-demo.ShareReactor.rar|381781 972|1d67104ded376842d34827573abcdc64|
(.. for the actual EXE demo for PC).

The demo file is in RAR format. You will need the WinRAR utility installed to decompress it. The download is a trial version that is time-limited, but it will work for you.

I think Kazaa will die like Napster or AudioGalaxy did. Don't use Kazaa. Please try edonkey2000 network. It's free, it's available not only for Windows, and you don't need to watch any commercials.

Emulators there are not..
but ISO images, there definitely are...

If you really want M$ to lose money, figure out a way around their copy protection, write an emulator, and watch how fast ISO images of the games start floating around IRC and p2p networks. Don't feed the beast by buying another xbox please!

Psst.. they already are

I personally use Kazaa Lite for mp3 and edonkey for other *cough* software and media. There are a few nice sites for your edonkey needs. :)

You're absolutley right. It's actually already done. Edonkey2000 already does this (site such as: ShareReactor and FileNexus have long lists of high-quality material, all of which is proven to be real. Also for other p2p systems like KaZa there are tools that can make hashes. Of course there are sites that list good hashes.

A P2P program call edonkey (don't laugh) has partially solved this problem.

In order to dowload a file, you can use a URI such as (ed2k://|file|The_Adventrues_Of_Pluto_Nash(2002).C D1.FTF.eDKDistro.Sharereactor.bin|559778352|1b153e 31f5fdbe829488989d04dda2b1|/
). The URI contains the "local filename", size and SHA-1 hash. A companion web site acts as a directory of URI's for popular content. The content is screened by the folks running the site. It has now reached the point where the "pirate" teams have accounts and post SHA-1 encoded URIs before releasing the content into the wild. Most edonkey users don't use the embedded search and instead use directories such as sharereactor.

Not one link, eh? Plenty?

ShareReactor

FileNexus

Asia Movies

Jigle

Various sites specialised in files of certain languages (French, German), such as Spieleplanet

etc etc etc - just search for eDonkey links.

There are also IRC channels and uncounted web boards (similar to Asia Movies) dedicated to sharing ED checksums.

Oh, and about the checksums... look at a popular song, and see how many variations exist in file size at the same quality. Are you saying different files with different sizes won't have the same checksum?

Here: edonkey + ShareReactor's Adult DVD rips. Now you're up to date (unless you're a masochist and prefer the old festering pits of IRC/usenet/FTP).

Gnutella and FastTrack are more suited for small & medium-sized files. eDonkey -- specifically its Forced Partial File Sharing feature -- excels at distributing large files.

Oh yeah... buy the DVD if you like it... and if you don't mind the 'nonsescript' charge showing up on your card (because there's no fucking anonymous digital cash alternative, and there'll probably never will be because "the terrorists could use it to kill your children"). Pornstars need to eat too(!)... at least until such a point in the future where tech allows you to direct your own virtual pr0n stars. :)

--

And in the very very very very unlikely case (I need to believe that) that the backbone providers don't have any backbone and cave, you just know something OTHER than DNS will be layered (securely) ontop of tcp/ip. Assuming that the backbone ISPs don't also outlaw random data (i.e. suspicious encrypted activity) crossing their lines, there's not much they can do anyway.

--

There is a DB like that for the edonkey network, at ShareReactor.

--

You can't watch this excellent pr0n? That's just awful!

So as I said, I do see this as one of the problems to be solved, although I feel it's of lesser importance. There are many ways of doing this. One of them is previewing - when downloading an audio or video file, when you're about 100k into it (100-200k if it's video), do a preview and see what you're getting. With this looping stuff you have to go farther than 100k however - preview one fourth to one third of the way into the audio files. Many Gnutella clients have a preview feature, as does Fasttrack (Kazaa).

Another method is to ban IP's and IP ranges spreading this. This is already being done - it's only a minor fix because they will always get around it, but it will help somewhat, they won't be able to have big servers spewing this stuff 24/7

The real way to fix this however is hashes. Which are already ubiquitous - they already exist and are known on Gnutella (Shareaza, Gnucleus, Morpheus, Bearshare, Limewire), Fasttrack (Kazaa) and Edonkey2000. On Gnutella (Shareaza) and Edonkey2000, you can click through or cut and paste these URI's (URLs) to files from web sites (or Usenet, IRC, e-mail, instant messengers, whatever) and start searching and downloading the files - for FastTrack (Kazaa), it is a little bit more time-consuming and complex, but worth it if you're going to be downloading a large file. The hash technology is already there, the key now is finding a trusted source for hashes which are both good and whose data is findable and downloadable on p2p networks, and for those sources to survive. I guess I'll detail how this is currently working with the various p2p networks, why not?

There are four major p2p networks - Gnutella, Fasttrack, Edonkey and Freenet. Freenet is a publishing network, the others are all file sharing networks, which is what we're concerned with. Gnutella and Fasttrack are the two largest networks. Edonkey2000 specializes somewhat in large files however, so if it's 100MB+ files you're after, Edonkey2000 is on par, and perhaps better in some ways currently, than Gnutella and FastTrack. Edonkey2000 and FastTrack are closed networks - closed source server/clients and closed protocol networks. Gnutella is open, the protocol is open, and robust open source server/clients like Gnutizen exist for it. This gives Gnutella advantages, such as a choice of multiple clients for virtually every platform, as well as other advantages. Of all the file sharing p2p networks, Gnutella is my favorite and I believe Gnutella is the future of p2p. I think competition amongst p2p networks is healthy however as every can steal everyone elses best features and innovations.

Gnutella files are hashed for HUGE with an implementation called sha1. You can read about the technical aspects here if you wish to. These hashes are useful for finding additional sources for found files so that one can resume downloads or download from multiple sources with integrity. Actually there's one caveat to that - if you are downloading from an honest client, it will tell you a truthful hash of it's data. A client could give a fake hash and then send other data - but you would have to directly download from the rogue. How clients deal with this is even more complex - Gnucleus downloads overlapping chunks - it downloads 1-2000 from one source and 1950-3950 from another - if 1950-2000 do not match from both sources, it marks both chunks as possibly bad. You can read more details about this in Gnutella documentation and discussion groups.

Aside from this usage, these hashes can be used externally as well. Currently, Shareaza, which is a pretty good servent (server/client), is the only one from which URI's (URL's) can be cut, paste, and clicked through to from the web/IRC/e-mail etc. I'm sure clients like Gnucleus will have this ability in the future. If you had Shareaza installed, you could click on a link like this - which is an, I believe uncopyrighted, Chomsky speech, Shareaza would launch (if you don't have it already) and would ask you if you want to download the file or cancel. If you select download it would connect to GnutellaNet, search for the file, and if it found a host which has the file and which has upload slots open, would start downloading it. Actually, the Slashdot "allowed HTML" filters are pulling some necessary characters out of the above link, so you can't click through on /., although you can on a normal HTML web page. I can't post an URL that you can cut and paste either since /. forces a line break after 40 characters or so, if /. didn't do this and the below was in one line, you could have cut and paste it into Shareaza, I'll show it here for an example, imagine this was all on one line for you to cut and paste, or better was just a link to cut. You can do this on any HTML page, it's just the Slashdot HTML parsing messing it up -

gnutella://sha1:HXHSJ6ATN3LQCCIOBGUEWV5FFCKP2KBL/N oam%20Chomsky%20-%20Audio%20Book%20-%20Noam%20Chom sky%20-%20At%20Johns%20Hopkins%20University.mp3/

I would give the above link a rank of "7", because the last time I searched for it, 7 people replied they had it. I have several hashes with a score of 80-90, meaning you're more likely to find or download them, but the above is the only one I have that I have enough confidence in that the data is uncopyrighted.

So now you have one link to a hash - where can you find trusted sources which tell you what hashes are ubiquitous, making it more likely you will find and be able to download them, are rated in terms of quality by multiple sources and so forth? Well for Gnutella, one source is Bitzi. You can search for data there, see what is the most reported, what things are ranked, see comments, see bit rates, file sizes, artists, titles and so forth. It is very cool. Most interaction is from Bitzi into Shareaza (the only Gnutella client that does this currently), but from within Shareaza if you find a file you can type "find Bitzi ticket" and see if the hash has been reported on already. One thing which I'm sure will soon be remedied is that Bitzi does not have direct clickthrough to Shareaza, I have to copy hashes to my clipboard, edit them to Shareaza format and paste them into Shareaza. I'm sure soon Shareaza and Bitzi will agree on a standard and remove this step so I can just click through. And soon Gnutella clients other than Shareaza will have this ability as well. Bitzi's data base is open to the public, you can read their open data policy on their web site, anyone is free to use the data as long as Bitzi is credited. Bitzi.com is the only large, good source of Gnutella hashes I know of. Edonkey2000 has had hashes for a while, and has several good, large sources for hashes such as Filenexus.com and Sharereactor.com. Since Gnutella is a larger network and it just implemented this ability, I'm sure it will have even more and larger sources in addition to Bitzi. And since Bitzi's database is open to all, if Bitzi goes down someone else can open the database up again somewhere else. I'm sure in the future, even the trusted rating system will become distributed.

Gnutella uses the sha1 hash, Edonkey2000 uses another, and Kazaa uses another. Web sites exist that centralize the hashes for these. I'm sure soon web sites will exist that coalesces and translates all of this. Gordon Mohr, who runs Bitzi, wants to see a universal p2p tag, magnet, which is agnostic about which p2p backend it is using. Why not? We can have a tag that we (more or less) trust, and can retrieve the data from Gnutella, FastTrack, Edonkey2000 or Freenet. It's a great idea.

I am less interested in other p2p networks than Gnutella but I'll discuss their hash and meta-data web sites a little. The most interesting one is Edonkey2000, which as I said, has come to specialize in large (100MB+) files, and which I have to admit is a pretty good way to download large files with some guarantee of integrity. There are two major meta data sites for Edonkey - Filenexus and Sharereactor. There are other sites as well. If you're looking for large files, they do a pretty good job currently.

Fasttrack (Kazaa) uses hashing, but the Kazaa client is not that friendly to this kind of thing. So Fasttrack/Kazaa is more of a pain in this respect than any of the others. Nonetheless, you can download a program called Sig2dat that helps you copy and paste FastTrack's UUhashes. The you can go to web sites that give meta data, rankings and so forth to these hashes. Kazaa/FastTrack is unfriendly to all of this so it is much more of a pain - you have to install files that help you do this (sig2dat), you have to restart Kazaa for every file you want to download in this fashion and so forth. With Kazaa, all of this is a hassle, it's much easier to do in Gnutella (Shareaza), Edonkey2000 and Freenet.

And lastly there is Freenet. Freenet has been using hashes since the beginning. Freenet is a publishing network, not a file sharing network. That is nomenclature - file can be and are shared on Freenet - from html pages to gifs and jpgs, to mp3's, to avi's, although Freenet is the last place you want to look for large files, Freenet's bailiwick is small files. Even a 4 meg mp3 on Freenet is harder to find and slower to download than any of the other 3 networks. Small files are the domain of Freenet - HTML pages and images. The Freenet protocol is more rich than the other protocols in many ways, thus you have more than just audio and video files going over it, you have third-party applications utilizing it, thus you have things like Fproxy (A world-wide web equivalent which runs over Freenet) and Frost and Freenet message board (Usenet equivalents - both for text and binaries). One benefit of Freenet is it's hard to crack down on people for publishing information - because no one knows who data is coming from or going to. This is not absolute, but it is much safer than the file sharing p2p networks in this respect. Also, people publish data, so that what you put out is stored somewhere other than your computer, and if your web site or shared file or whatnot is popular, it will be out there all the time without your node needing to be connected. Freenet also used a lot of signatures, encryption and so forth, so you already have a pretty solid trust mechanism and data integrity. It depends on what hash is used - KSK hashes are insecure, but SSK are signed. So with Freenet there are large upsides and downsides - the downsides are downloading is much slower, since you're downloading via intermediaries, not directly, and the larger the file, the slower the download and the harder it is to find a complete file. The upshot of Freenet is that there is less of a legal risk with regards to sharing/publishing data, data is signed by the publisher which greatly helps integrity, and also Freenet's protocol allows extensions other than file sharing with it's own internal network - web and Usenet like applications, and I'm sure there will be more in the future.

Share Reactor. They release the files into the wild through edonkey2000, provide the MD5 checksums of the file you want to download, and edonkey2000 does everything for you. It already has a nice and juicy base of supporters (although I wouldnt say humongous, like Kazaa, specially because of the server "issue" in edonkey2000, but that is being taken care of anyways.)

Its a great system, Share Reactor cant get sued, edonkey2000 doesnt have centralized servers, and I get much greater speeds than in any other P2P program. Sure would be great to see other people take advantage of the great possibilities that edonkey2000 (and other P2P programs) can offer like Share Reactor does.

Needless to say, I highly recommend it.

Check outSharereactor it's like a shopping mall and they accept donations.

A lot of this stuff you can't even get on DVD ("so that means I'm justified in infringing on copyright until such time that a new business model legitimizes the market demand... MY demand.")

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I gotta say, the best file sharing program I have found for large files (like mpegs) is eDonkey2000. The linux client works really well, too. If you check out ShareReactor, they post up big lists of all kinds of files you can get off donkey, but of course there are many, many things on donkey that aren't listed on Sharereactor.

Donkey uses MFTP (I think Morpheus does too, now, actually...) where it takes a file, and hashes it to generate a unique ID across the network. Then, when you search for the file, you'll find many users with the same file, so it'll get different parts of the file from different users, speeding up the whole process. Also, people are forced to share any partial files they have, so the availability is usually pretty high.

I find it can be a touch slower for getting small files (like .mp3s) than gnutella, but for big files (like mpegs), nothing beats it.

Doesn't work:

Reason 1) Most p2p clients return the most popular files, so if someone downloads a fake, they will delete. Unless RIAA or whetever is running a p2p farm.

Reason 2) Someone said something about CRC. A lot of clients do what is called we usually call hashing, with SHA1, Tiger (even bitprint), etc... But it's widely used to compare versions of the same file, regardless of the title. No Gnutella client currently supports search by hash, but Edonkey does (also urls like edonkey://HASHNUMBER)

Anyway, fakes are usually useless. And all they do is incite the user to go to sites like ShareReactor and read the new and the forums. So the user begins to meet with other people, form a community, learn more and more how to do p2p the right way.

Oh, btw, Morpheus 1.9 will be out soon. Probaly a crap release like the first Preview Edition, which is a Gnucleus clone.

Also, search by hash and download of segments (unfinished parts of a file from other computers) are expected soon to be deployed on Gnutella. I just hope the damn GDF decides this fast, since it's really the next step that should be taken (IMHO).

2600.com can't host DeCSS, and 2600 can't directly link to other sites hosting DeCSS, but they are allowed to list the links in plaintext. Is the next step really going to be outlawing links with search criteria embedded in them? I can't believe it.

Anyway, if that actually happened, and a site like ShareReactor was forced to be castrated like 2600 was, and only textlinks were allowed, I wonder how long before a convenient workaround sprang up? e.g. A browser plugin that transformed useless plaintext links like "ILLEGAL://PointerToPointerToPointerToThoughtCrime " into clickable links for external apps.

Oh... Pssssst: DeCSS
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Helpful links :

Edonkey

Sharereactor (Select Anime from menu, then click 'complete list of releases')

so what? watermarking Divx/MP3.. that won't stop me using iTunes to rip legit CDs and pass them over to my friends, or share over p2p's. and who actually downloads legitimate divx? would the watermarking affect DVD-Ripped Divx movies at sites such as this? if not, the, this won't really affect piracy very much, and like many of you have said, it simply a matter of time before it is cracked. I download Divx movies all the time, and if i like one very much, I'll go out and buy the DVD. Same with MP3s. BTW, theres always Digital > Analogue > Digital - although the loss of quality would be the price to pay for that.

A non-mp3-centric p2p network? must be you haven't tried all of them. I find this one has nearly any movie i'd want, but rarely has more than 5 songs by any artist. It does movies really well, with multiple (slow) simultaneous connections, I always get what i can find. However, finding an MP3 is not worth the work, although YMMV. don't forget to check out this site if you do decide to use the donkey.

-Dave

ShareReactor helps me out a lot when it comes to determining the real and fake files on EDonkey - it's worth a try at least...

If you're having problems finding valid files, try tracker sites like Gowenna/Sharereactor and Filenexus. You can also find dynamic serverlists.

eDonkey's developers are aware of the network's current strain and are implementing a new p2p method for the next version.

In case you are looking for episodes of tv shows, then check out edonkey available here. I have been using edonkey for a few months now, and i have always found more stuff on edonkey than on any other network (kazaa/morpheus included). Also there are a few sites on the net which give out edonkey links which u can use to download verified files! There is a linux client available. Check out www.sharereactor.com for a guide on using edonkey along with lots of links!!