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Surveillance on Peer-to-Peer Networks

Posted by michael on from the spy-v.-spy dept.

n7lyg writes "Salon has an article by Janelle Brown that asks (and answers) the question 'Who is spying on your downloads?' It discusses the use of various P2P tracking tools by RIAA and IFPI and others to monitor file trading on both Napster and Gnutella networks. Freenet seems to be more or less immune to this sort of monitoring at the present time, due to the distributing the files throughout the network. More big brother tactics..."

3 of 115 comments (clear)

  1. Don't Worry... by Jethro73 · · Score: 5

    From the article: I know that your IP address is 28.294.22.1, your ISP is Earthlink, and you logged in last at 2:26 a.m

    Whew... Don't worry about their spies... they don't even know the addresses can't go above 255... 8^)

    Jethro

    --
    Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
  2. File Sharing Services and the WebHancer Connection by Carnage4Life · · Score: 5

    I recently submitted an article about how I found a piece of spyware that is installed by a number of music sharing systems including AudioGalaxy and iMesh on my machine. Of course, Slashdot rejected it. Since it is ontopic for this discussion here it is:

    The SpyWare Invasion

    While writing a proxy server for a class I noticed that for each URL I clicked, a number of POST requests were being sent to d2.webhancer.com and d3.webhancer.com. Wondering what was up I decided to go to the Web Hancer website where I found out that WebHancer is a company that claims to have an installed base of millions of WebHancer agents that report web browsing statistics to their corporate headquarters.

    WebHancer currently charges businesses $12,000 a month to access these usage statistics. I found the webHancer agent on my Windows machine (after a quick 'ps -W | grep gent')in "C:\Program Files\webHancer\Programs\whAgent.exe" and deleted it. What I am wondering is how the Web Hancer agent got on my machine since I don't recall being asked whether I wanted to install any spyware. Also exactly how many of their millions of anonymous usage statistics are being generated by unsuspecting users?

    Which program did I install that decided to place this Trojan on my machine and is there a blacklist of such programs? AudioGalaxy

    Finally, while searching for info on Web Hancer I found Ad-Aware which claims to locate and uninstall such spyware.

  3. Good luck by Safety+Cap · · Score: 5
    As technology advances, we leave the would-be-surveillance folks in the dust. The only thing they can do is a few high-profile busts.

    I can imagine what would happen if/when I get busted. I may pay a fine. Heck, I could see a few days in jail (doubt it for a non-violent crime, but this is the RIAA we're talking about here). More importantly, I would never, ever, ever buy another CD from that organization again. If it was the RIAA that was behind the persecution, then I'd boycott their member companies. What do they get? One less customer.

    How long can record companies last that piss off and alienate their customers? It will be very interesting to see what happens when the contracts of well-known (and lesser well-known) artists come to an end.

    That will leave them free to get with a good web host, a couple of programmers and voila - downloadable songs at a reasonable price. Who needs Best Buy/Tower Records/RIAA?

    They can run, but they'll only die tired.

    --
    Yeah, right.