Slashdot Mirror
Spoofing P2P Networks as Marketing Plot
prostoalex writes "Salon's technology section talks about major music labels spoofing the peer-to-peer networks. The users of AudioGalaxy, Gnutella or KaZaa have probably seen a surge of fake MP3 files when conducting a search on a popular title. The MP3 looks legit, but contains a 20 second clip played over and over. Such promotional tracks were especially popular with newest releases, such as Eminem and No Doubt, as pointed out in the article. Who posted the fake tracks to the p2p networks? Could it be, as Salon suggests, a suburban mom, who does not agree with controversial lyrics, or would it be the label, trying to prevent piracy and promote the new album at the same time?"
Could it be could the Music industry actually figure out how to use technology instead of fighting it....
Wait, Hey mom stop stop uploading MP3s!!
"All I can tell the "lesser of two evils" folks is that if they keep voting for evil, they'll keep getting evil."-Lp.org
I have downloaded files in the past where the content repeated itself. It's interesting though because
I have downloaded files in the past where the content repeated itself. It's interesting though because
To view the rest of this comment for only $4.95, visit http://www.riaa.org
Why do people keep these song shared? I've found one or two of them and deleted them immediately. Maybe we should all do our part and message anyone who shares these songs asking them to delete the track and stop wasting everyone's resources.
It's not as bad as the renaming of some old movie to look like a brand new movie release, but both are annoying.
I remember this happening on napster. They also had songs that at the end or beginning said "If you enjoy this song please buy our cd from our website, etc..." I remember a specific Econoline Crush song that was like this and widely distributed on Napster.
Does the name Pavlov ring a bell?
If you make the analogy between file sharing and free speech, I guess this would be the labels taking the "more speech is the best solution to bad speech" tact.
I'd much rather see this than action through the courts.
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
I have about 1/2 a gig of what I call 1/2mp3's that I got from people cancelling me out in the middle of a download. Yes they are shared, no i'm not doing it to screw with you. It's just that i'm too lazy to go through my share folder to clean them out.
Posting to support their own conspiracy theories and get their stories on /.
It almost seems as if we should start CRC checking the files through the P2P app. Get several, verified versions floating around at common bitrates (and a VBR version)...
That way we don't have to deal with garbage like this, and also have a guaranteed, legit (so to speak), quality copy (at least at the said bitrate) to download.
It's probably the best 10 seconds being repeated so it works out in the end....
.. such as ep2 .. lord of the rings.. spiderman ect... hehe i'll bet there were a bunch of really pissed off kids on 28.8 modems dling that ...
Of course the best annoyance i read about was how some people kept uploading fake blank videos in the couple of hundred megs and posted them as current movies
hey baby, hey baby, hey!
hey baby, hey baby, hey!
- colin
Anybody who uses a fileshare client can quickly figure out that if a file is not multisourced, it might not be legit. These files will not be kept on peoples drives, they will get deleted right away, and then their presence will shrink into oblivion. It's a sneaky idea, though.
I'd find it even more clever if they put subliminal messages in the repeated tracks. Way to use technology against people to do your evil bidding ;-)
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
This is actually really good news. It's a sign that the music labels are going to try to deal with the P2P phenomenon on its own terms, not in the courts.
Fortunately, we will likely see a surge of new features in the more popular P2P clients that permit easy filtering of such "bad" files (e.g., an easy "delete and remember checksum" button). But as long as its a technological battle as opposed to a legal one, than it can be won.
On the other hand, the music labels may be shooting themselves in the foot in some cases. If I was trying to get the hot new "electronica" single, and ended up with "a 20 second clip looped over and over" I might not notice the difference!
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
Look, if it is the RIAA distributing these tracks the solution is simple. All we have to do is download the track, copyright it, then sue the RIAA under their own legal documents for illegal distribution of our own intellectual property... In all seriousness, this could be more than a minor annoyance on the RIAA supported P2P software. Imagine spending $1.00 for a download and it was merely a repeating promotional clip. "I'm sorry, you can only have 299 songs this month as of this download! But of course we do have some reccomendation as to which songs you may wish to acquire..."
i have been looking for a good mp3 databasing type program ... something i can organize my mp3s with ... establish naming standards and apply renames en masse, another nice feature would be the ability to detect whether or not a song is complete. any suggestions?
It's hilarious, click on the ad and you get a single line "[can't process this directive]" (Solaris/Netscape)
;)
Go to the front page, the whole damn site is down.
The funny part was because they were advertising their cool, super duper, oracle beating unbreakable database. Ya think it was their webserver or database that caused the problem?
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
I hope it is the music companies who have found a clever way to shut out free-loaders. One of the points that people often ignore here is that a wide-scale solution to music piracy does not have to be technologically perfect; it merely has to make it sufficiently inconvenient or shameful to pirate music that most people won't bother. That's essentially what the much-loathed DRM technology does. This new technique of flooding the netwaves with junk clips is even better because the only "victims" are criminals.
-a
---
The advantage of the GPL is that your customers can continue to maintain your code after you go bankrupt.
How to rationalize theft.
Note, I'm not preaching about how you "shouldn't steal music" (see my rant about what's wrong with DRM). I'm just saying if you get something free, don't bitch that it isn't perfect.
this is getting old and so are you
blog
and i thought they were just boring repetitive songs, you know, like the ones they play on the radio too. i think the RIAA is to blame for those as well.
I want 2D games back.
Hey, this is better than putting up malicious content disguised as MP3 files and hoping it gets launched by the client or user. Haven't you seen those redirects that pop up when you let a gnutella search run for a while?
Who posted the fake tracks to the p2p networks?
Fake music? Theres no such thing!
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
I think this is a fine idea by the record labels, if they want to do it, go ahead.
I would REALLY love the ability to moderate people though. I've downloaded my share of BAD quality stuff, and sometimes from the same user, so it would be nice to moderate someone out to nothing-ness status, as well as say "Only download from high moderation point users first" etc.
All repeating a line over and over again did was piss me off while i was downloading the eminem show. It made me not want it anymore, because hell... maybe thats how the cd was. So I definitly don't think it was done to make people want the album more. Thats what real songs and radio is for. Then again with dsl, just download 15 at a time and find the one tahts good. Suck that riaa.
can't sleep slashdot will eat me
On the other hand, the Eminem files or whatever that are GOOD will eventually spread out, making your chances of finding the right file better with time.
It's nothing to be worried about, as long as people do a good job of stealing and organizing their music (tongue in cheek).
Berto
I think that it is the person who is sharing's resposiblity to keep their mp3 collection correct and in order.
I have at various times, had over 4000 mp3s at once, and always kept them sorted well enough, as well as having the correct information- so it's not impossible for the average user who has 200 songs or less to keep their track titles correct.
I have seen too many users who had the songs name matched up with the wrong artist (which is some cases is disrespecting the artist that it was labeled for), as well as bad rips, clicks and pops, half tracks, etc...
For the most part, unless you have 200gb of mp3s (as one person I know has, and they are VERY organized), then you should be able to keep yours in order. It is your resposiblity to do so, you owe it to the community.
I wish that someone would figure out a way to have a checksum for the mp3, to make sure that it is finished, and without viruses.
As a final note, I have noticed games and other things being mislabeled quite often as well on the filesharing services. I did a recent test of this (on an extra computer). I found a few viruses in the lot, but asides from that- I attempted to download GTA3 (I own a real copy of it, so i don't feel bad about attempting a download that I won't use.) and got Need For Speed: Porshe Racing instead, and a monster truck game on another try. I tried to download the Sims Hot Date (also owned by me), but found that it was also bogus, didn't work, etc... this occured on many files.
Now the easy solution to this is for me to use IRC to find stuff and FTP servers... which I do for the most part, and find it FAR more reliable. I simply wonder if the gaming companies are also flooding the services with crap...
Tibbon
tibbon.com
This is an interesting idea, yet I don't think it will be very viable. With sharing networks such as edonkey (www.edonkey2000.com) files are downloaded and referenced based upon a hash/crc/guid whatever you'd like to refer to it as. So unless they work on spoofing this the only people they are going to thwart are the n00b users, as anyone with half a brain will be downloading the right version (oxymoron i suppose).
Now what may work is actually going along with the bandwagon and releasing valid mp3 files that are watermarked, or soundmarked. I remember a few months ago where every mp3 I was downloading (mostly top40 stuff) had some guy in the beginning introducing it, and then speaking gibberish at random points in the song. Not unlike a big NOT FOR RESALE sticker. So if say eminem released his album online beforehand (or some singles) and put this type of watermark in it, with perhaps a message in it like : "Preorder the cd now and recieve $5 off, or a free hat". I feel that would be alot more productive than this crap. Now there just wasting everyone's bandwidth.
they're always posting something that's been posted before
--fetch daddy's blue fright wig, i must be handsome when i release my rage
The only way (I think) to stop these kinds of "attacks" might be if the users can rate the content. That way users can help eachother in localizing and avoiding the crappy files. Not sure how it could be implemented, though, and I'm not sure how to avoid the record companies from creating massive amounts of clients that all give positive ratings on their own crappy files...
Mats
"The MP3 looks legit, but contains a 20 second clip played over and over."
That's not spoofing...it's called "techno."
Could anyone really blame the industry for saturating P2P networks with fake files so that when you try to steal from them you're actually wasting your time? I mean one can't whine too much about piracy becoming more and more difficult...
In tonight's news, to keep one step ahead of the RIAA, the major P2P networks upgrade their clients to include CRC and file size checks. Some companies are rumored to also include automatic .SFV file checking.
You meant drive SUVs right?
This message brought to you by the Council of People Who Are Sick of Seeing More People.
Actually, Salon quotes Eric Garland, CEO of peer-to-peer measuring service BigChampagne:
"What you want to do is excite the consumer and titillate and create demand." He notes, however, that the "danger of try-before-you-buy" is that if a user doesn't like a previewed track, "then the industry and that record would have benefited from [that user's] ignorance."
Hmm. Now isn't that interesting.
So...
RIAA doesn't want Joe Consumer listening to the crap (Top 40 I guess) they release before he buys the album, because then he might realize it's crap and the RIAA is just liberating money from a fool.
OK, so let's go with that for just a moment here...
That means that what the RIAA releases as "today's hottest bands" are really just a bunch of second-rate hacks (not even first rate!) who've been blitz-marketed into every teenager's record collection. So, as Bono (right?) said on that VH1 special (paraphrased), "It's not casette copying that's killing the music industry, it's crap music killing the music industry."
Frankly, I think that has always been true.
What I want to know is... if the band is so unbelievably fantastic, why do they need all the heavy marketing? Sure, some marketing to appeal to the fence-sitters, but you don't preach to the choir.
So, the RIAA is spending billions to market Britney Spears to make us believe she's the best thing since sliced bread (or better yet, to make us think it more than we already do it seems), when Britney fans will buy the CDs anyways. And somehow they claim they're losing money here. Hmm.
All the word games, legal lunges, and slight of hand gets old after a while. Is anyone else getting a vision of the RIAA as another Ross Perot jumping in an out of the "race" all the while annoying us with lots of charts and a funny voice?
This is how They should try to stop copyright infringement. Putting aside the copyright debate for a moment, this is away to make it inconvienant for people downloading material, without engaging the courts.
You could take this same approach on other things as well.
I have always felt radar detector should be legal. If the loac PD don't like it, just put up a device that fired a signal at a random interval to trigger the radar detectors. Don't involve the courts in something you can solve yourself.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I think this is a really good tactic for the music industry to use in their struggle against P2P piracy. Yes, piracy. I mean, regardless of whether or not you personally are downloading music or other files in a legal fashion, there are tons of other people (likely the majority) of people who are using this to do something which is considered illegal by law. Is it a good law? Doesn't matter. It is the law.
So, when Joe College Student downloads the latest MTV-hyped band that sounds like metal, grunge, and rap all thrown together in a blender, he gets a 20 second clip and an advertisement. What is Joe going to do? This is kinda/sorta like the highschool kid who spends $60 on a bag of off-the-shelf herbs and spices.
Now, here's the thing that really makes this a Good Thing. If this becomes common practice amongst the music industry, it could very well have the unexpected side effect of thwarting legal attempts to get P2P services shut down. I'm not a lawyer, etc, etc, but I'd think that you would be hard pressed to present a case to shut down a service that you use yourself.
And of course, now that the ante has been upped, I'm sure the P2P community will respond by improving their software to add features to combat the music industry's latest tactics. I'm not sure what form this will take, but perhaps some sort of public key watermark by trusted encoders or preview features or something even better.
In an odd, preverse sort of way, this is almost the first step in making peace between the P2P community and the music industry.
We have been thinking about this problem for some time. Our solution is a mechanism called "subspaces", where users can effectively vouch for the authenticity of data, even though that data might be anonymously inserted into the network. Even those vouching for data can remain anonymous, they will be motivated to stay honest to maintain the reputation of their anonymous identity. You can learn more about subspaces here.
Suburban moms won't touch a computer. They're evil, they're Hal 9000, besides, what if they screw them up? Most women are so technophobic that if they had run the world from the start, humanity would still be in caves if we even had survived. They wouldn't have let us have any stupid gadgets like fire and the wheel.
How ya like dat?
Why I only use kazaalite! No more annoying banners or other crud to put up with!
---cheers
The facts expressed here belong to all, the opinions to me. The distinction between fact and opinion is yours to decide.
I use it. It's awesome.
http://www.chaoticsoftware.com/
Ya gotta love barenaked ladies... (and the band by that name too)... A few weeks prior to the release of their last album, all the tracks appeared on Morpheus... leaked by themselves! sorta... During a few points in each song various band members chimed in with wisecracks about file trading, computer stuff, etc... The tracks served both to promote the songs as well as give the fans something unique, yet different from the studio releases... It was great! I burned a copy of this version and purchased the actual album when it was released... both are classics... I'm all for this practice, though i can't imagine such creativity coming from most other RIAA contract holders (I doubt that RIAA approved of BNL's antics, for that mattter...)
Once I was downloading the Scorpion King, and as usual I previewed it a couple of times during the download to make sure it was legit. Well, after I downloaded the whole thing, I looked at it, and it turned out to be just the trailer for the Scorpion King looping like 25 times. Much like pop music, those cheesy movies pretty much look the same all the way through so even if you previewed it in the middle of the movie/song you wouldn't know the difference.I never did get to see that movie but I heard that it's just a looping of the Rock doing the eyebrow thing.
Just a note about Top 40 Napsterizers in my area:
..
Most Eminem-bots around here wont even complain that their Eminem CD wont play on their PC, and they STILL bought it. Of course they downloaded the mp3s, but they buy the CD too (its called franchise penetance, and I'd be more sympathetic to the RIAA if wasting money on brands, regardless of quality of product, wasnt America's favorite passtime, anyhow. Do they really honestly think people are downloading top40 bands because the quality is top notch? Nope. The big bands are Brands, and nobody likes to own a brand without owning some officially licensed 'gear', which is the CD in this case.)
The RIAA's archtypal top 40 uber-pirate downloader does not exist! Instead, those downloaders have ALSO been rushing to their local store, repeating, "I know I'm a sucker, but hes so cuuuuute, I have to buy his CD!" for the last 5 years
So, I'd say, they are targeting an audience that is buying CDs from them anyhow. I certainly dont know too many NON-top40 downloaders who are buying CDs nearly as religiously as the brand whores who need their latest Eminem or No Doubt (tho thier last single is pretty catchy, I have to admit they've grown) or big label divas.
How does this impact this story? I think if it is the RIAA or labels that are doing this, they are wasting their time, and the bandwidth of the last slice of their realiable, heavy user consumer base. It might work tho, which is fine with me as it would leave the people actually using file sharing networks to increase their exposure to new music alone to pursue such a noble quest.
"Old man yells at systemd"
For example: there could spring up various independent directories of MD5 checksums for songs known to be either good or bad. Various individuals could maintain these by hand, or P2P clients could allow the users to collaborate on such a shared directory by allowing users to simply click a button to associate a "trusted" or "untrusted" score for an individual file. File scores could then end up being aggregated into a reputation for a given person. Someone impugned a lot would get a bad reputation for sharing bad files, but allowing meta-level moderation (not unlike that in slashdot) could make this work both ways: someone who repeatedly impugns someone who actually deserves a good reputation would themselves lose reputation points.
An example of a trust metric can be found here.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
I know that were I to ever download fake songs that were put on p2p programs by a record label, I would have no qualms copyright infringing the entire album outright. I'm sure that others would have the same reaction as well.
There is no way for the record labels to use spoofing to prevent their songs from getting out. Sure spoofs will be downloaded, but then deleted, while the real songs spread. When will they learn that by fighting the consumer they only encourage copyright infringement?
I love it,
I would be so wonderful to see something as stagnant as the music giants hire hackers to counter the p2p networks. If it were really true, think of the implications....
Contermeasure, Counter-countermeasures, Counter-Counter-countermeasures...
Nothing like a good fight/challenge, Finaly maybe these P2P will start to index MD5 checksums in a Central or distributed DB and toss out bogus or corrupt MP3's. Ranking and PGP keys for the anonymous rippers?
What is the next move in the game beyond that?
To be honest the P2P network stuff I have seen so far is quite primitive, it's amasising it works as well as it does. All this is good for evolution of P2P software.
JLS
I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it. - Pablo Picasso
From the article: "MetaFilter's Haughey says 'record companies would love it if people were frightened of file-sharing networks and never touched them again.'"
I'm really surprised the record companies haven't taken advantage of this to advertise their pay services. Why play just a looping 10-second piece of the song when you can play a clip and then say, "To get the whole song legally for just $1.95, visit Pressplay.com" or something to that effect? I know that eMusic and some other services used to advertise their presence in the ID3 comment tag of the MP3, but this would seem to be wholeheartedly more effective.
The real question is, do the music companies really want these for-pay services to succeed, or do they want them to fail so they can frame Internet users as thieves? I'd say that both viewpoints exist in the RIAA. That's why these services aren't even advertised, especially not in a means such as the above, which IMHO would be quite effective.
I worry sometimes that all this "music revolution" will give us is uncopyable CDs. This would be a huge disappointment to those of us who don't want to gyp the artists -- we just want music in a more flexible format than a CD can offer. I, for one, am hoping that the potential of mass music distribution via the Internet can become a reality. If the record companies only squash the P2P networks without providing an alternative, this will only serve to alienate customers. On the other hand, if the record companies work with us to provide a low-cost way to distribute music legally (with rights to copy it to other devices), both the record companies and artists have a chance to become much more profitable while continuing to make their customers happy. I sincerely hope the latter will occur.
Simpli - Your source for San Jose dedicated servers and colocation!
1 - Sue out of existance centralized networks.
2 - Send out viruii to decentralized networks.
3 - Fake files on decentralized networks and report to users ISP.
4 - Send out massive ads on decentralized networks and spam the net to death.
5 - Piss off more ex-consumers like myself that used the p2p for sampling.. ( seriously )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I suggested this a while back:c id=3108 069
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=28940&
Really it seems the best course of action for them. Make it terribly difficult to find a track and couple it with cheap, easy downloads of MP3 songs and you've got a winner.
Thanks,
--
Matt
[With a system involving hashes of the contents of the compressed audio data,] we don't have to deal with garbage like this, and also have a guaranteed, legit (so to speak), quality copy (at least at the said bitrate) to download.
If the hashes aren't signed, the labels can forge the hashes. If, on the other hand, the hashes are signed, the labels can send takedown notices to the sites hosting the trusted rippers' public keys.
Will I retire or break 10K?
And then there's the matter of file sizes. Look at this:
03/02/2002 07:35a 746,689,484 movie - CENTROPY release -No subs CD 1of3.mpg
03/07/2002 04:36a 721,932,332 movie - CENTROPY release -No subs CD 2of3.mpg
03/02/2002 11:58a 425,062,892 movie - CENTROPY release -No subs CD 3of3.mpg
3 File(s) 1,893,684,708 bytes
You can fit roughly 650 MB on a 74 minute CD-R, or 700 MB on an 80 minute. There's no way that the first two parts of this movie will fit without violating the spec! And there's no reason for it, because the total, divided by 3, will easily fit on either size CD-R: 631,228,236!
Obviously, the only reason for doing this is to keep people from burning the movie onto CD-R's, which prevents archival storage and means that you have to decide to either keep it on your hard drive, or eventually delete it and hope that you won't want to watch it again.
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
Then realizing what crap they've been listening to all this time, a sense of taste develops.
These awakened consumers of music spread the glorious truth: The real art is to be found not in mass-marketed image advertunesing, but in lovingly crafted songs by talented, yet overlooked artists.
I'd say more but I'm off to get the soundtrack to 'Spiderman'! That generic mispelled band name rap/rock angst filled warmed over grunge-RoK is super hot! And yet cool at the same time!
The RIAA says: "Go ahead and listen! We'll make more!"
H3Y! W47CH 7H47 M!ST3R!!!!!!!!! 1 4M 5U8UR84N M0M 4ND 1 4M 31337 HAX0R!!! W4TCH 0U7 R W1LL H4X UR G1BS0N!!! 1 W1LL 0WN J00!!!!!
They are spoofing the top 100 albums on P2P networks? Fine, the top 100 sucks anyway.
CAn we accuse the recording industry of being terrorists now? They are attacking the internet. They are trying to bring down a computer network by inserting "trojan horses" of false data into them. Shouldn't this be prevented under the DMCA or something?
;)
Oh, and last time I checked, it's not legal to break the law just because the other people are "bad".
--ST
http://www.theMediaBunker.com
You may have better results if you spell the title of the movie correctly. Not that there aren't any misspellings on P2P networks (that'll be the day...), but I would hope it would be out there spelled correctly.
somebody's making a buck off this. Only a matter of time. Like the other poster said, you get what you pay for...
[trying to get a movie in theatrical release and getting a different movie entirely]
This is actually a bug in the AVI format. If I remember correctly, AVI stores quite a bit of meta-data about codecs and the like at the end of the bitstream, making it impossible to watch any part of the movie until the whole movie has finished downloading. This is why we should switch to more streamable bitstream formats such as Ogg or QuickTime. If a pirate were to use a streaming-friendly format, her clients would be able to look for the mode-7 intro titles after about twenty minutes of downloading.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I have had downloads that are very short and pop up a browser advertisement for pr0n. It is pretty annoying. They usually have the same name as a popular file and are mp3 or mpg. Damn its annoying. Usually the files are smaller than they should be so I have learned to avoid them for the most part.
FoundNews.com - get paid to blog.,
I encountered a few of these mp3s a while back.
My suspicion is that it's with the RIAA, because otherwise the songs in question would be undownloadable from Audiogalaxy's filters. I did recall wondering why Eminem's Without Me was the only non-filtered song that I could get, then tossing it away in disgust when I listened to the repeat.
I love to see cool, random stuff like this happening on these sorts of networks... this sort of nearly prankish interaction is the proper spirit for the duel between recording companies and P2P services.
Not only does it not involve lawyers in any way (a deal maker right there) but it also creates a robust meta-game within the service- can you find the real mp3? Can you develop a reliable way to repeat that process?
As long as no one goes to court or Congress when they start to lose, this is the way things ought to be.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
For Kid A radiohead had pretty much no advertising (i think, the only thing i've seen for it was a blip on MM), no singles, no videos and a small concert tour (no big arenas, at each place they were setting up a tent). And the thing still got to #1 like in a day, i think.
Talk about quality/fan base...
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
Some people (myself included) actually rename the files after they download them
This does not make it unique. KaZaA and WinMX find multi-source downloads solely on the basis of the MD5 hash of the file contents.
Will I retire or break 10K?
The most important gangster since Al Capone. He made the cover of Time magazine as the gangster the law couldn't touch. Truly a criminal celebrity, he will me missed.
The recording industry has been being killed off since home recording came out in the 70's. Every. single. year., profits have declined!
Last year was the worst of all, with their profits somewhere down around that of the buggy whip industry.
So don't you come crying this geek lament about home recording not hurting anything.
Kid Rock needs your help! Won't you please help stamp out piracy before more of our talented artists end up starving in the gutter?!!
I downloaded the entire album "Rock Steady" by No Doubt for my girlfriend and burned an extra copy for myself. I listened to it a week ago in my car and (though I've never been a huge No Doubt fan) was surprised at how TOTALLY REPETITIVE each song was and I quickly chucked it under the seat (where CD-Rs go to die). I lost any respect I had for No Doubt for putting out such a trash album. I just went and grabbed it and listened to it and guess what? ... every song was one of these decoys! All made up of about a twenty second hook/chorus. Funny thing is, my girlfriend hasn't noticed or complained!
The new Eminem album, "The Eminem Show", was due to be released 6/4/2002. The record label changed the release date to 5/28/2002 after it learned the album was pirated weeks before the release! Eminem's comment on the whole thing was, "Whoever put my s___ on the Internet, I want to meet that motherf_____ and beat the s___ out of him."
:(
Time Time, not free
He is not very fond of people downloading his mp3's 3 weeks before he was planning on releasing the album. After what he said, makes him a prime suspect... but do you blame him? I would be pissed too. However, I wouldn't pay 30 cents for a cdr of all his albums.
I'm at the video store the other day and start browsing over at the beginning of the New Release section. A man says to his (wife?), "What about Ali?" A woman perfectly fitting the stereotype of trailer trash responds with, "No I hear that's pretty stupid. I mean all it is is some guy who... Hey! They have Corky Romano!!"
I almost wet my pants laughing and had to run away before they heard me laughing at their expense.
--
dman123 forever!
Filtering out the -1s and 0s since 1999.
will do telnet over email. Ive seen commercial services for this, but i want to run it on my own server.
What is with this full scren moving advertisement that pauses between pages?
Its bad enough having 'in-line' ads, but this is a bit too much..
No more Salon for me.. phfft.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I ran across a couple of these No Doubt mp3s right around the time they released their most recent CD, I grabbed a few of the songs to see how I liked it, considering I liked their first CD, and the crappy radio stations around me play nothing new except for 1 song from each CD.
I thought to myself "hmm, I like how the songs sound except they're really freaking boring how they're so horribly repetitive" and that was the deciding factor in my not purchasing the CD.
Klowner
...sorry about that. .. I did it again!
Opps
Frankly, I'm shocked anyone noticed.
...or, selling out my peers
Could you imagine content providers giving you files in exchange for your posting their bogus clips to p2p? Even better, earn more credit by how many copies of the ad (appropriately tagged to identify the original poster) get spread throughout the network.
Just put a keyphrase in the filenames to identify complete copies, such as "Hilary Rosen sucks ass".
I don't suppose they would spoof that.
Alex
Heisenberg may have been here
IPs below a certain score don't get shown
Any application based on the uniqueness of Internet Protocol addresses will fail on the real network. At least with Verizon Online dial-up service, all you have to do to get a different IP address is hang up then dial up.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Haven't used it, because I haven't used a P2P network in a year or two, but it's worth a look:
hksfv32
As a side note, AIM+ is a great program for fellow AIM addicts.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
There are a couple of ways to stop this. For Kazaa users, if you find a file that is not what it is named as, keep the fake name but add something like (fake really -name of actual movie/mp3-). For example, you download a fake AOTC.avi simply rename it AOTC(fake really forrest gump).avi. That way, when people search for AOTC, your renamed file will show up with all of the other files that are the same filesize and people will be able to see that that file is not what it was named.
Another way is to simply preview the file with Divx Fix if it's a Divx encoded avi. I've saved myself a lot of wasted downloading that way.
If they admitted that anonymous file-sharing was really not such a convenient way for people to violate their copyrights, then their whole case for twisting the copyright laws in their favor would fall apart.
send all spam to theotherwhitemeat@ropine.com
The problem is that if you have specified clean copies, then it makes it real easy to filter them. On the other hand, if you were to specify a black list of known sources of bad files and specific CRC's of known bad files, it would clean up the noise a bit.
Though I have to say, it is nice to see the RIAA taking an intelligent approach to this. Much better than trying to sue everybody and shut down all the P2P networks. There's nothing wrong with P2P sharing, only sharing of pirated music. In that case, the RIAA simply makes it next to impossible to find legitimate copies of music on the system.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
So if say eminem released his album online beforehand (or some singles) and put this type of watermark in it, with perhaps a message in it like : "Preorder the cd now and recieve $5 off, or a free hat". I feel that would be alot more productive than this crap.
It's possible to hide a watermark in an MP3. For instance, Aphex Twin hid a picture of his face in a song, and I've written a program to hide text.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Jeesh it's the truth, I wasn't trying to flame, the truth is there are probably TONS of people out there with 1/2 downloaded mp3's because the person hosting them cut off their download. Whoever modded me down needs a head check.
I've been spoofing a real Slashdot poster for the last two years - as long as the checks come in, I recommend Windows XP - with .NET technology!
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
I tried to download Star Wars: Episode 2 in the days before its release and ended up with a trailer for J-Lo's Enough, looped over and over for the appropriate amount of time to make it the same file size as the real Episode 2 avi. At the time, I had assumed that some evil individual was just f-ing with people, but maybe it was a marketing ploy?
-- Adam
If you look at the P2P networks as they currently stand, they are quite raw and chaotic. Somewhat like the concept behind open source development, the same openness that allows the lables to exploit a weakness in P2P is forcing the developers of these networks to identify and fix the weakness.
People are making joking comments about putting in a slashdot like moderation system or CRC checks on the files, but both of those are good options. A CRC check on the file to determine exact duplicates will prevent anyone from downloading the same spoofed file twice (imagine you check an option that marks the file as 'bad' and all the files of the same size and CRC are removed from your view). A moderation system would work even better, but in that lay a whole new realm of problems (how do you prevent spoofed moderation?).
Still, I think from this sort of thing will emerge a solution and the next generation of P2P networking. Well, I hope.
----- sXe
Great! Now I have to go home and find out if the repetitive drivel I downloaded was really Britney Spears' music or if it was something planted there by the record companies...
This tactic could also be seen as a foreshadowing of what music fans could have to deal with when the music industry finally folds. Selection is the music industry's job. They select artists and songs for promotion and distribution. One way to view their work is that they produce a monoculture of pop music in which alternative music has little chance to survive. Another way to see it is that a pop music monoculture is what the audience wants most of the time. Without the music industry, how would the good songs be chosen? Are you confident that you'll still find your preferred music? If so then P2P polution should not pose a threat. After all, what is the difference between DJ "what's clipping?" Joe's trash remix and No Doubt's acid loop remix when there's no "MTV" making the good songs recognizable?
Could it be, as Salon suggests, a suburban mom, who does not agree with controversial lyrics, or would it be the label, trying to prevent piracy and promote the new album at the same time?
If a suburban mom is more clueful than the record execs, then game over, man.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I just burned a copy of this for a friend (finally got off my ass) so that's why I remembered this
A few years ago, Public Enemy came up with a remix album, Bring The Noise 2000. 27 tracks, moslty remixes, but a couple new ones to keep it interesting. They wanted to release it, their record label Def Jam, said no. OK, we've got these tracks, and we want folks to hear em. So they converted to MP3 and released them on the net. I was lucky enough to get them all, not a bad album.
Once Def Jam found out, they told PE to stop. Basically, their contract says Def Jam has the rights to all their songs. Kind of weird, yeah, they technically own (in an IP sense) the tracks, but they don't want to do anything with them. PE didn't deprive them of revenue, because they didn't want to sell them. This rift cemented PE dropping the label and they released a single called Swindler's Lust, which contained the chorus If you don't own the masters/the Masters own you. They went to AtomicPop, and released one album There's A Poison Going On with the previously released as MP3 Swindler's Lust track before Atomic Pop kinda imploded. The album was for $8 dowloaded, $10 for a physical one with Chuck D's autograph (which I bought). I later saw the album for $17.99 at Virgin Megastore.
OK, so whats the point?
1) record labels are kind of slimey. They sign you, give you a huge advance against your sales, and that locks you in. Odd that they talk about "artists rights" in P2P talks when they generally squash artists rights themselves. See: Prince and that whole T.A.F.K.A.P. crap, that was due to a fight with Warner about him using his born name.
2) the entire industry is ripping us off on CDs. I get an autographed copy sent to my house for $10, meanwhile I have to spend $14-$18 for anything at a store. CD's are cheap as hell to burn, no moving parts. A cassette needs oxide layers on plastic, glued to two leaders, on a two part spool, with a case, fasteners, and the little sponge thingy to ensure contact with the read head. But CDs are still $3-4 more? Hows this happen, how does every label still charge $18? No one got the bright idea that their costs have dropped in the last 10 years so lets see if we can cut the price some?
3) Related to #2, CDs cost too much. Labels worry about dropping sales, make the cost reachable to folks. $10 is a good price point, and if a small label thinks that's profitable (maybe not Atomic Pop did go under, but it may be to other factors) a multi-national conglomerate can make money at that point. I have 200 CDs or so, just bought some last week, but they cost too much.
I'm not justifying piracy, you play by the rules. It's just in this case, the decks stacked a lot to the house, and I'm not too surprised there are folks who cheat also.
Nope
It's wrong for someone to write a program that exploits obvious problems with Microsoft outlook, but exploiting p2p or iMac firmware issues on CD players is a perfectly acceptable way to "get back at" those darned copyright infringers?
News flash: Most of the interstate highway system is free. Does that give me the right to blow up a highway? Hardly.
-- Ken Kinder ken@_nospam_kenkinder.com http://kenkinder.com/
Of course, being that hashing is becoming popular with Gnutella, it will be easier to avoid false data. However, there is not a system within Gnutella that shares this information with users and can be used in the interface, it's more of a back-end thing currently to help in multi-source downloading.
Some of the problems -
If someone goes to the trouble of doing this, and you set up a ratings/trust/whatever system, they're going to try and get over on that too. So you need a way to deal with people who are actively trying to wreck the system, maybe on a mass scale.
Also, you want to make all of this as brain-dead as possible for the typical user, so they may even be unaware of the bad data.
I'd also say that being that this isn't a big problem on Gnutella currently, and Gnutella has more important matters, this will probably be on the things-to-do list until it becomes a bigger problem, since it's unimportant right now. Although I really would like a good meta/ratings system. I'm writing a Gnutella client and having problems with just the basic spec though. Gnutella allows for "private" data to be sent on hits though and other expansions.
Forget all this p2p crap when napster came out i said o when napster got shut down i said saw that coming IRC has been around and trading mp3's, and movies long before shawn fanning and it'll be around long after the riaa has won every battle against piracy it can fight.
my roommate does the same thing... the irritating part is that he whines that he's got no disk space, when he's probably got over a gig of broken mp3 files...
The RIAA and the MPAA needs to pursue 'spoofing' vigorously. I don't believe that any court-sanctioned solution will put a stop to Internet piracy. It is shameful that people would justify breaking the law and steal music or movies because they know enforcement is not economically viable. It is revealing of a society's values and its lack of acceptance of the fact that intellectual property is the same as any other kind of property. People that refuse to buy CDs and build huge libraries of illegal works instead have no moral authority or claim against owners of property. They are the same people that would steal from Wal-Mart if there was no risk of enforcement or social stigma. Respect property.
Note I didn't say if you can't beat'em, lobby congress to destroy a legal infrastructure in order to put money in your own pocket. I've been saying for years that if the MPAA threw hoards of half length mp3's on P2P networks, and then provided an alternate service where I could buy the songs I liked, but not the crap I didn't, they would be rolling in the dough. Whats more, it would leave all of the best of P2P networks while destroying all of the worst of P2P. Could it be possible that these guys are starting to get a clue? I know it's too much to hope for, but this seems like a perfect way for the RIAA to coexist, and even profit from P2P.
To tell you the truth, most over-700 meg movies WILL fit on a regular 700 meg CD if they are made into video cds.
the compression scheme is such that we get a bit more space to work with.
and BTW, usually it's one of us ripping it for sharing purposes, not the industry itself.
(just for fun)
duh duh duh duh duh
...someone with non-trivial resources bent on flooding the network with junk?
It seems to me that it would be extremely easy to generate massive amounts of junk into a P2P network under legit looking names. A large music company could easily put up a hundred servers, each virtual hosting a hundred P2P nodes, and then generate multiple bastardized variants of each song so that they appear to come from multiple nodes in multiple versions. Impossible to distinguish from the real thing unlesss you download it. They could keep generating new variants as old ones fall into disfavor.
This looks like a really hard thing to combat. They don't have to worry about losing credibility either. Even if you put in some kind of a co-operative moderation system, they can use those 10 000 P2P nodes to moderate each other up.
"I have opinions of my own, strong opinions, but I don't always agree with them." -- George H. W. Bush
They change their business model and just provide us what we want.
Inexpensive, portable, downloadable music.
See, that's not so hard to say!
I think many people, including myself, would actually pay money for mp3s which are:
1. Professionally ripped (no skips or other imperfections)
2. At a high bitrate
3. Downloadable from a high-bandwidth server.
Polluting the P2P networks helps them make their business case for their own music services, and isn't any less nice than what the P2P networks are doing to them.
I don't intend this to be a flame or a troll, but seriously, we shouldn't hold the RIAA to a higher standard than we hold ourselves. I'd much rather see them fighting back through technology than through draconian legislation.
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
... will it be before Slashdot re-runs this very article?
they did the same thing with the new Sheryl Crow. took me almost a month to d/l the damn thing (almost made me start buying CDs again). if it's just spoofing, that's no problem; i was worried it was some kind of bizarre copy protection where you'd only get a short loop if you tried to rip a song (i guess i can sleep easy tonight).
Pardon me if this post is redundant (too lazy to read the comments) but every P2P prog has a preview feature that lets you hear the first few seconds of an MP3 after downloading a few hundred KB. Spoofing is far more effective on .avi vids and software and as every Kazaa user knows, it is way overdone. I wish I had a nickel for every shitty sports game renamed into Medal of Honor or GTA3 and spread thru P2P.
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This is actually in use already.
Gnucleus is taking a step that should've been done a long long time ago. The other benefit to a unique identifier is that it allows you to safely download a file from multiple sources.
Prior to this, all that was being checked was the filename and size. It was really annoying when you did a multi-download and happened to get two different files pieced together.
Given these precedents for spoofing and the extraordinary measures record labels undertake to prevent music piracy, it's easy to wonder why spoofing, or even more invasive tactics, aren't used more. - Salon Article
Because geeks aren't just expensive to retain; we're also difficult to hire for "invasive tactics".
To your average geek, "Hacker for the RIAA" ranks even lower than the sysadmin at Monsterhut. We may have achieved a veneer of profesionalism and a healthy contempt for the juvenile antics of "black hats," but deep within the subconscious of every SAGE-certified, ethics conscious techie echoes the annoying, high pitched laughter of their l33t f03; tormeting his dreams with fevered promises of glory from electronic vandalism.
On the other hand, doing dishonest work for the man appeals to no such rebellious inclinations.
The RIAA would LOVE to deploy fleets of sophisticated viruses, send out worms to delete their files, and so on. The only reason they don't is because they can't hire enough talent to actually do it. The number of people the RIAA could convince to do this for them pales in comparison to the number of teenagers who will do it out of sheer unfocused malice. The RIAA's efforts to destroy filesharing barely register as a blip against the backdrop of random pranksterism.
The upshot - your scruples makes a difference! Don't go work for the RIAA; hold out for a job with dignity. It does make a difference.
On the other hand, judge not lest you yourself be judged. Before you heap too much condecension on the 13 year old bragging on the IRC channel where you're trying to talk about anime, go dig up some of your old posts from when you were that age.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
OK, they got me. I love No Doubt, and purchased their two previous CDs. So I downloaded "Rock Steady" (well before it was released) planning on buying it when it hit stores, and it was GOD AWUL. So guess what, I didn't buy it.
:-p.
Come to find out the version I had was bad.
By the time I realized this however, I had already heard more then I wanted off the radio. I downloaded the two singles off the album and thats that.
So congrats to radio execs, you've lost another sale
I don't condone piracy, but I do think P2P networks are great, and I also think its OK if you sample someones music before you buy the CD(assumming you buy the CD instead of just listening to ripped MP3's over and over).
Does anyone know of P2P software that lets you create a 'friends list' or something to that effect in order to maintain a private group of P2P file sharers. I'd love to be able to do that, then be able to distribute MP3s to people on my friends list.
The Slashdot style of friends works pretty well too. I read lots of comments, but I definitely pay more attention when I see that glowing green orb on the page.
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
uncopyable digital data...?
You serious?
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
Simple: because you simply can't do that yet.
The day that MusicMatch and Pressplay offer plain vanilla MP3's of their songs for download at $1.95 a pop is the day they begin to win back mindshare and marketshare from the P2P services.
Until then, they are stuck with desperate measures like these to gum up the P2P works.
-Renard
I wouldn't call it eminently solvable. The situation in the web is fairly static and there is a central computation point at Google to hold the necessary data. Here you would have to store every moderation as a link connecting node A to node B and somehow perform a distributed computation in order to isolate the self-referring parts of the network. While doing that, you would also have to prevent the tainted parts of the network from interfering the the computation.
It presents an interesting problem.
"I have opinions of my own, strong opinions, but I don't always agree with them." -- George H. W. Bush
i think that truly spoofing P2P network protocols would be much funnier. being that the gnutella protocol is open, it wouldn't be too hard to put together a gnutella client that gave out bogus file information (saying it has files that it really doesn't) and responding to file requests by putting together mp3s that are just a repeating "don't steal music" message for the length of the track.
THEN, you could make your collect song name information (so that it'd have a nice big list of songs to fake, to trap more people) by running searches on some number of requests come through the network.
you could probably fake CRC's too, by having your client just report whatever the other clients are reporting.
hell, if you were the RIAA, you could offer free music in return for people running this spoofing client on their computers based on how much bandwidth you've contributed. i think that people would trade idle computer time for free legit music downloads.
i'm not saying that i'm against p2p networks, or even piracy for that matter. i just think it'd be interesting to see somebody go this far.
-c
I already have every single track ever recorded.
You lose, RIAA!
Game Over!
Insert coin to try another industry.
Maybe they run clients with files like this to collect ip addresses and usernames of people downloading in preperation for a big lawsuit or public flogging?
There are only 10 kinds of people in this world... those who understand binary and those who don't
a crappy workaround that i'd like is the ability to blacklist users that post consistently bad results. gay porn, rotten mp3, etc. could be filtered this way. only problem is that it isn't scaleable and you'd hafta be burned at least once before knowing whether to block a user's results. also usernames can change frequently, as can IP addresses.
..if you are might consider switching
If a jeweler leaves out fake jewels, and a thief takes them, does the thief have the right to be upset?
It only suprises me it took them this long to figure it out. Massive media companies have massive money, which means massive hardware and bandwidth. They can flood the networks with garbage at an incredible rate. Hell, they could just ask their employees to allow the company to use their (the employees) home machines as ersatz servers, meaning, the fake files would come from tens of thousands of sources. Give everyone who signs up for this 'Share the Trash' program a shot at a free dinner or an extra day off, and most of the workers will be happy to go for it. Don't even bother trying to keep it secret -- making people believe there's nothing valuable on the P2P networks will be part of the strategy.
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).
Buy a Nintendo DS Lite
I would record my wall with a USB camera for 10 minutes then rename it to something like Nude TEEN XXX HOT. Then would put it in my shared folder for morpheous. Figured it would make da kiddies work for thier porn.
On another note I think I will record a track of me saying "Thief thief thief thief thief" and make it match up with some of the top 40 songs then name them as per each song and load up kazaa tonight.
-THIS SPACE FOR RENT!
*check bitrate, filesize, download from other source.*
Eat it RIAA! w00t!
They can't forge the hashes, if the protocol is not hacked and the program is closed source.
I'm thrilled they finally got around to this. By all means, fight within the rules, don't try to buy new rules to make the game illegal. This is the closest thing to a clue any anti-MP3-piracy "advocate"/corporation has demonstrated yet.
is competition good, or is duplication of effort bad?
with iMesh, you can download part of a song, and preview it, so you don't have to waste ur time downloading the entire thing (especially annoying on dialup), Reece :)
This happened with us. At our house we downloaded the track called Business a few days before we bought the Eminem Show album and it was just a few lines repeated over and over. I just assumed the preview option wasn't working in our P2P program since its happened before or that the song was really that repetitive. It could happen.
I don't think I buy the idea that Eminem did something like this himself though, or even came up with the idea on his own. Same with No Doubt- its likely the band members didn't have anything to do with the files being changed. More likely blame the label (Interscope), as the article attests. So in essence I guess I'm just saying its happened to me too!! and I agree!!
Most people would die sooner than think; in fact, they do.
Am I missing something here? Looping 30 seconds of the song is completely lawful? What happens if I share one file looping the 1st 30 seconds of a song, another file looping the 2nd 30 seconds of the song, etc. etc. etc. I'm still sharing the whole song, just in smaller chunks. Is this still completely lawful?
If something I said can be interpreted two ways, and one of the ways makes you sad or angry, I meant the other one.
Actually I've downloaded a few of these MP3's...they proven to be fantastic remixes. The loop has been made very well and chop-free.
To make a pun demonstrates the highest understanding of a language
This was about 2 years ago, in the middle of the Napster era, and the reports at the time suggested it might've had a positive effect on album sales. Nice to see that the RIAA are so one the ball by doing it two years later.....
(Details here and here among others)
This post will enter the public domain 70 years after my death, unless Disney buys another extension.
FastTrack (Grokster, Kazaa, iMesh) relies on trusting it's users to provide authentic content. Anyone can share anything they want, mislabelled as they wish. Multi-sourcing exists on FastTrack, but only with up to around 10 users at most due to it's centralized structure.
Audiogalaxy, on the other hand, is centralized and can multisource from thousands of users, and group them together based on sharing of identical files (determined by a modified MD5 hash). Britney Sphere's latest single I'm A Slave For You, 128kbps, 3:36 is currently shared by 2627 users. That's way more than you'll get on any FastTrack or WinMX network. And since Audiogalaxy downloads the most popular version, it is very difficult to inject bogus crap -- in fact, you'll need to have more users sharing the fake files than legit. As a whole, users often remove fake files leaving the legit shining brightly through.
Regardless, it's all irrelevant once one enters the real MP3 scene on IRC and FTPs. Not just anyone can share files on most channels, only approved xdcc bots can. In addition, they only share specific "releases". Groups base their reputation solely on the quality of their releases. New groups on the scene often put out re-encodes and other junk which is nuked on a global scale. No site worth it's salt carries it. Well-established teams, on the other hand, are respected and sites carry their content, where sites are either +m IRC channels or ratioed FTP sites.
In conclusion, there is no need for peer-to-peer. Multisource downloads are a fad. We have enough bandwidth already. The protocols to distribute and disseminate content has been here for years: FTP and IRC. And they both work better and resist spoofing more effectively than whatever new protocol an inspirating programmer puts out this decade.
"The lesson to be learned is not to take the comments on slashdot too literally." --Vinnie Falco, BearShare
I'm a big Counting Crows fan--have been since about '95.
Anyway, they're coming out with a new CD in about a month. I've preordered the CD from Amazon, but the 49kbps stream of the album they provide (to purchasers) just isn't cutting it. I tried searching LimeWire for songs from the album and, to my dismay, found several of the looping MP3's.
I then visited the Counting Crows Forum to see what was going on. To my surprise, many fans boasted that they were hosting the looping files. These "hardcore" fans didn't want Everyday Joes downloading the songs...their rationale is that if someone is a "True Fan" they should have to really search for the MP3's (as they did).
Boggles the mind.
Edonkey with sharereactor.com. No more fake files. Problem solved.
This is why we need communities of IP non-respecters instead of every-man-for-himself downloading based on the file name looking like what you want to download.
graspee
I agree that they probably will try to hide that they're doing this. If they were ever confronted on it, I wonder what would their be?
<dreamsequence>
"No, we did not release those professionally mixed and recorded advertisements onto Kaaza, despite the fact that the talent and studio time is all on our books and that the voice actors have made no secret that they were involved. In addition, the 1-800 number and special offer code referenced are obviously a hoax, since we would never put time and effort advertising to a community which we still believe to cause a significant negative impact on album sales."
</dreamsequence>
I wouldn't put it past them...
Oh.. damn... I just thought it was really repetitive dance music. :-) Oh well..
~ kjrose
They can't forge the hashes
Now I realize that I didn't really mean "forge the hashes". What I meant was how will users know that a given hash corresponds to a file that actually contains the correct sound? A limewire-like rating system can be exploited easily if the RIAA writes a bot to vote for its own broken files.
if the protocol is not hacked
It will be cracked, if only by the NSA, who passes the information on to the FBI (a unit of the Department of Justice) so that the FBI can investigate criminal copyright infringement. Security through obscurity doesn't work.
and the program is closed source
Any program compiled into a binary can be disassembled to a machine's assembly language and translated (by hand) into C++.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Straight CRC checks won't work, btw. You'd have to download the whole file to do the checksum. Better to sign the file in chunks. Or, use a fancier scheme:
You could do a web-of-trust type verification. Logically, divide the files into medium-sized chunks (say 32KB). Allow people to sign the chunks (w/private key), thereby endorsing the content as "valid". You can download a chunk, and see if it's been verified (preferably by someone you trust, or someone who's been signed by someone you trust). If it has, download the next, see if that's been verified, etc. (Again, if you only sign the whole file, you have to d/l the whole file to verify the sig, which is pointless).
Now, of course ppl. could falsely sign something. So, you 1) allow more than one signing of a file. 2) distribute keys with a PGP-style trust web.
So, suppose I put up a P2P host. I allow ppl. to download my public key, along with signed files. Someone will be willing to try out my files. They find it valid, so they sign my stuff, and send the signiture back to me. They also sign my key, perhaps indicating a level of trust in the signing.
As time passes, I can build a reputation in the long list of people who have signed my key and my files. You can trust the stuff I have up to be good because the stuff I've had up before was good, and this long list of people are willing to vouch. Probably, you trust at least some of these people directly (they've shared good stuff with you), so their sig. means something.
Now, an attacker can take advantage by gaining trust, and then spewing abunch of crap. BUT, they have to deliver good shit first. If they abuse it later, well, have the signatures be dated, or provide for revocation certificates.
Or we could go back to the old-fashioned way of doing it. I trust the stuff I download because I've shaken the hand of the people I'm downloading it from. Or because I've taken a risk in the past with them, and they paid off, so now I trust them enough to let them get my stuff, and they trust me enough to let me d/l theirs. Much more personable and friendly that way.
Maybe as an extremely short-term measure. Long-term, this approach is doomed, because there will be too much demand for it to be fixed by a "web of trust" or centralized checksum databases or something.
If metallica-master_of_puppets.ogg can be pollution, then kernel-2.2.21.tar.gz might be pollution also. It's a problem that needs fixing, so it'll get fixed. Then these kinds of attacks won't work anymore.
Copyright infringement cannot be stopped by technological measures.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I can just envision the execs....
1- "Hey, here's an interesting thought, guys"
2- "What?"
1- "Let's make everyone who downloads our music get annoyed so they won't bother downloading it anymore, and then they'll be forced to buy the CDs"
2- "Yeah, but won't that also detract them away from downloading our music"
1- "Exactly, now they'll be forced to pay big money for CDs"
2- "Yeah, but why would they buy the CD if they don't know if they like the song?"
1- "Well, because they'll have no choice"
2- "But, aren't there independent artists on P2P, can't they just download their music, and if they like it buy their CDs"
1- "Why would they do that?"
2- "Well, because then they know that they will enjoy the CDs"
1- "Naw, look at the sales, we sell more CDs"
2- "But, isn't that just because we have our CDs on sale in more places?"
1- "Meh... leave me alone, it's a good idea. Trust me."
2- "Okay, at least it'll be cheaper then all these lawsuits."
++
Strange minds these Music people have.
(Just my thoughts... nothing more)
~ kjrose
Even to very rare music tracks and bands. I suspect a bot is actually doing it, as it replaces one track with another track at random. I downloaded one song, but instead it was Enya, and another song, but instead it was new-age pipes.
I work in mergers and acquisitions for young technology companies - and I can tell you a fair amount of venture backed companies sprung up in the peering space after Napster's popularity took off, without any real idea of how they would make money. Thank god this kind of thing is over. In any event, fast forward to now - they are close to out of money and still searching for ways to use their technology - guess what they found...
Labels will pay them to spoof the major P2P networks...
I spoke to a company about 2 months ago that had one major label client and was after 3-4 more, as well as a few studios. Not making much money, but more than they were - which is zero.
Just think, the cost incurred by the RIAA in hosting all that crap music. The number of systems needed to saturate the P2P systems, the storage of the files, the bandwidth needed to make their nodes get hit more often than ones with 'valid' content, the cost of making the files, the administration of the project..
All of that costs money. And what does that result in?
RIAA: "Due to the cost of combating digital piracy, profits are down again, Mr. Senator. Frankly, we'd rather that money went to a more worthy cause. *wink* *wink* Won't you help us out?"
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
Don't share your download directory. Examine for bad content / naming in the download folder before moving it to the folder of things you would like to share.
I've also noticed LimeWire interweaving different files into one frankenstein file, possibly because of a bad source file or the download was continued from a different source. Anyway, future SHA-1 checking in LimeWire should solve this problem and allow for swarmed downloading. I think they call it the HUGE code. Forgot what it stands for.
"a 20 second clip played over and over"
Isn't that called Hip Hop?
"We shall party like the Greeks of old! You know the ones I mean." - HedonismBot
Tons of junk on kazaa has the wrong name. You download a pirate copy of some game only to find its a completely different game to the file names suggestion. And people dont rename it!
loply.com
The bare naked ladies did this almost 2 years ago when people were still using something called "napster". They uploaded songs that would have the first 20 seconds of the real track, and then say stuff like "now go buy the real album" and then have silence for a while. This isn't really a new strategy of artists.
If they were really smart they would generate files with the same name and of exactly the same size as those on the network. Then, as a result of the kazaa multiple download system peopel woudl end up with pieces of garbage interspersed with their movie. The next person who downloads ends up with garbage in different places and so on... the whole system is screwed. How easy would it be to make a piece of software to look for titles, generate random bit streams with those titles and then post them on the p2p network?
I've been seing some decimal on slashdot, which geeks hate. So I've been posting this reply. So, why are you using decimal here? Do you understand number bases? I think you don't, otherwise you would use hexadecimal. Repost in hexadecimal--you may use "0x" as a prefix or "h" as a suffix. Perhaps you can learn at this since it is possible you don't understand. Or perhaps you are too stupid to ever understand hexadecimal and will be stuck with decimal.
Truth is, nobody wants to pay for mp3s. If I paid $1 for a song, I sure as hell want it in an uncompressed unerasable format (ie a real CD).
Being able to buy an mp3 feels too much like pay per view.
I've been seing some decimal on slashdot, which geeks hate. So I've been posting this reply. So, why are you using decimal here? Do you understand number bases? I think you don't, otherwise you would use hexadecimal. Repost in hexadecimal--you may use "0x" as a prefix or "h" as a suffix. Perhaps you can learn at this since it is possible you don't understand. Or perhaps you are too stupid to ever understand hexadecimal and will be stuck with decimal.
Most of the slashzombies have the ethics of the monsterhut sysadmin. They're only ranting about how "information wants to be free" as a shoddy post-hoc way of justifying their criminal tendencies. Most of them would probably work for these guys at the drop of a hat if it was more profitable for them to do so. I'm sure they could find an equally convenient, if shoddy, rationalisation.
In a discussion with a friend a few years ago about Napster, I actually said that record companies should do this. I'm not surprised to see it happening (but I am surprised it took them so long to do it... always assuming they did.) The only problem is that such a move would look (and does look) desperate.
The reason this strikes me as a good thing is that, in some sense, record companies are showing signs of coming to terms (even reluctantly) with the competition that technology offers or at least acknowledging that it isn't going away or can't be legislated into non-existence. True, this isn't the most admirable way to approach it--akin to pissing in the pool because the other kids won't play your way--but at least it doesn't involve lawyers and IP laws.
I can't put it into words beyond that, but my gut instinct here is that this isn't so bad and may be an indication that the music industry is running out of ideas or resources to combat the inevitable. Maybe when they reach that point, they will be faced with the unavoidable conclusion that file-sharing isn't the end of the world.
--Rick
--Rick "If it isn't broken, take it apart and find out why."
Try constructing an argument with logic.
My god, are you that stupid? The RIAA would ALREADY own the copyright on those tracks.
Are you pissed because you cannot pirate songs as easily as you used to? Oh thats right, its fair use to have a copy of a song you don't own and play it over and over again.
BIG DEAL....
Yeh, BIG FUCKING DEAL.
Ok, they put scrap ? What happens everytime someone do something bad? Yes, we change how things work and everything is back even worst than before, or should i say better because no one can mess with it anymore... just like people used to abuse NET splits on IRC, to abuse the IRC servers etc... after it happens, someone fix it and the little trick doesn't work anymore.
CRC check, MD5 check, integrity check, check for renamed files containing the same content as other on the network...
if you ask for more, we will just do like EBAY... RATING.
Once again, the music industry it just shooting them-self in the feet and pissing off people while agraving everything.
Pirate networks will be full-proof if that's what they need.
My buddies and I used to rename MP3s and share them on Napster. I used to laugh at the poor souls downloading Britney Spears. I would always wonder what thier reaction would be when they found that they were really songs by Noisex, Gridlock, and PAL.
Well, it's time to sue the recording companies and everyone doing that. They 'fool' people to use their bandwhich in not-attended way. Imagine I paid an extra 200$ month because I break my download limit downloading those shit. Time to sue them... haha
Thanks, I got one off Songspy and was wondering what that was. Now if only we could figure out who's doing it.
Good watermarking algorithms can work with lossy compression. Just because you lose *some* information doesn't mean you lose *all* of it.
Eh? The P2P network stuff is primitive because it just isn't a very sophisticated idea. Napster was the bomb because they had more or less the right idea -- creating an index of songs. The P2P networks were born because you can't do that anymore.
So it is nonsense to suggest that P2P networks will evolve to start indexing MD5 checksums or whatever, because it is precisely that kind of indexing that these networks were created to circumvent in the first place. Should such a system nevertheless come into being, then the next move will be pressure on ISPs to reject transport of any "unlicensed" traffic. TCP ports will be for sale like the frequency spectrum.
When they do, I'm going to purchase it so I can share it on freenet, but since it does not work, I'm going to use gnutella to share it.
If the hashes aren't signed, the labels can forge the hashes.
At the least your client can then be smart enough to start the download all over again if the hash doesn't match. A better solution (which someone else mentioned) would be to break the file up into smaller chunks, and then you could check the hashes one chunk at a time. It would also facilitate downloading from multiple sources simultaneously.
Really, this would be a nice feature. Instead of going through 10 different copies of each song to make an album, you could just leave your computer on overnight to automatically put together the album for you (finding the best quality mp3s for each song). Assuming you've received permission from the artist and his/her record label, of course.
Hell, If I paid $1 a song, most CD's would be under 12 bucks.
Linux - Because Mommy taught me to Share.
The first band to do this kind of thing that I remember, was Offspring. Does anyone else remember getting that "lick a camel's ass" song after downloading Offspring-Original-Prankster.mp3 ? .. and the "lick a dog's balls" song? ..oh brother.
Turns out those were actually songs by another artist named Wesley Willis. I highly recommend "Rock and Roll McDonalds".
- Do your part to help conserve disk space, shorten your si
MP3 files designed to destroy your speakers. All it would take is a very high level 21KhZ tone injected in the encoding process every time there is a cymbol in the music. Almost nobody can hear the high frequency, but it will melt tweeters.
An engineer who ran for Congress. http://herbrobinson.us
Seems to me that this idea's gonna backfire on them... if you make it hard for people to find a good version, they'll be more excited when they do - positive reinforcement for downloading songs! :-)
Well, as logical a move as it seems to be (trying to scare people off "pirated" MP32s)... and assuming the **AA wants to eventually control pay-per-download as well.. occurs to me that by polluting the content stream right now, they are undercutting their own versimilitude when they do start offering pay-per-download. Would you trust them to offer you a "clean" product in the future, if you knew for sure (or even reasonably suspected) that they were the source of the current "bad" MP3s?
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Yeah, I do that too.
Pull the %20's out, sometimes re-order the artist and title (I mean come on folks, 80+% of the songs you see have them one way, why the hell do you have to do it differently?) Now and then I have to rename a song since some putz clearly had no idea of the correct title (Teenage Wasteland by the Who? Never heard of it. Try Baba O'Riley.)
Now and then if I'm feeling up to it I'll fix a hosed up MP3, like one with part of a preceeding track at the beginning or simply too much silence.
If I get a crap MP3 I always make sure it gets trashed so no one else gets stuck with it by leeching it from me.
I'm reminded of this educational fable:
There was a farmer who raised watermelons. He was doing pretty well but he was disturbed by some local kids who would sneak into his watermelon patch at night and eat watermelons.
After some careful thought he came up with a clever idea that he thought would scare the kids away for sure. So he made up the sign and posted it in the field.
The next day the kids show up and they see this sign, it says "Warning, one of the watermelons in this field has been injected with cyanide."
So the kids run off, make up their own sign and post it next to the sign that the farmer made.
The farmer shows up the next week and when he looks over the field he notices that no watermelons are missing but he notices a new sign next to his. He drives over to the sign and takes a look, it says "Now there are two".
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
I used to do this all the time when the ftp ratio sites were big.
So do I
Writers imply. Readers infer.
Don't know if this will be read but... the networks should provide a way to specify a checksum of a legit file so if it doesn't match, then don't download. Due to the decentralized nature of some, this might be hard to do, but users should be able to "vote" if it's a crap file or legit... this would help weed out the "crap" from the actual...
Thanks
There has been VERY little good music produced in the last decade. All the good stuff has already been posted.
Try warez.com, eassywarez.com and new-warez.com and you will know what I am talking about. As these sites have a lot of cross-linking, they get a good ranking in Google, and will always appear first when you search.
Anonymous P2P with direct search by key is the answer. Like FreeNet but way more efficient. Please support it. GNUnet is for all, at it really has the potential to become the next generation in P2P.
Okay, and how do you authenticate MD5 checksums?
/.
First you need to know the length of the said track (hmm, labels will know this before you do...), you need to easily upload this (hmm, anyone can upload it?) and then keep mal-sharers from uploading a different MD5 sum... Or maybe a rating system, but then you get into some of the same problems (karma-whores, etc) that are the problem with
Cool, now you've got the labels paying Trolls to spam the MD5 db, and put up the wrong sums, etc...
Nice idea, but you need someone to do the work of authenticating the songs the first time thru. With advantage to the labels. Can still be done, especially with their learning curve time, but it's not an end-all solution.
-- Ender, Duke_of_URL
>Just because you own the CD doesn't mean you can
>legally download the MP3. See RIAA vs. mp3.com.
Got a link?
I recall this was covered under fair use, in the VHS/betamax wars. Just like time-shifting.
-- Ender, Duke_of_URL
The people I got movie passes for used up more than $9 worth of theatre expenses. Granted, I did take 10 people with passes I had available to me. But the theatre was filled up, and it was a free showing. And that does cost the theatre (1 screen) the cost of hiring 3 different low-wage lackeys, @ $5 an hour, total 2.5/3 hours (cleanup etc)...
-- Ender, Duke_of_URL
Download song,
re master clips from song on a "indi" lable
copy right it
tell the RIAA that they are:
in violation of the DMCA (the repeating loop)
and copyright(song clips)
Thank you RIAA!
Yes I know most of you reading this have about as much clue as folsomman and the attention span of a dead may fly but trust me this is fucking brilliant
now if only you loosers would stop buying shity CD's to stop encoruaging the A 'n R homo's from raping us with 20 doller shit that sings like
(to the tune of row row your boat):
Please please post more fake mp3's
THen i'll hapilly gladly steal them
downloading downloading downloading
remastering remastering happly
NOW I get to sue the RIAA under DMCA
For life is a but dream for you
During a conference on C-SPAN, which was something like a roundtable discussion about E-books and such, something like a banquet with about 8 professional speakers/guests, among them was an official from one of the xxAA's. I can't remember. Maybe it was RIAA. He mentioned as part of making a point about something else that, "maybe the current strategy of diluting the p2p public domain might be sufficient to make it no longer cost effective to steal..." That is probably not a direct quote, but if you would hear the direct quote, then you would agree with the way I reported it.
Some people have discussed ways to circumvent this spoofing, by using e.g. checksums to validate real mp3 files. The good news is, this isn't necessary.
P2P works because many different users share files, so you can often find files you want on a user close to you, or with a fast connection. But the other advantage is that P2P creates an ecosystem in which dodgy files get deleted. I have downloaded a lot of mp3s, and I actually very rarely get a bad mp3. (I get plenty of bad music, but that is a different matter.) The reason is simple - users delete bad mp3s. Good ones survive and are replicated.
Exactly the same thing will happen here. The music industry can put up 50 copies of a 20 second promo, but ultimately, if there is one copy of the original song, that copy will spread. The industry just doesn't have the bandwidth or storage space to compete with millions of users.
There's been a lot of comments along the lines of "why don't we try and find out what the file is before we download it". Nobodies pointed out that edonkey already does this. It uses hashes of the known files that are placed on sites such as sharereactor to identify the files. The forum even has an area where you can post hashes of fake files.
You know, I'd pay a corporate copyright owner 50 cents - perhaps even a dollar - a track, if I could get a track that was:
As it is though, my choice is to pay $5 per decent track (plus a bunch of filler) on a shiny bit of plastic - and then gamble that I can rip them - or download half a dozen versions from gnutella, pick the least screwed up one, and name and label it correctly myself. The door's still open, guys.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
OK, so it hasn't happened yet, but it could... Or maybe it already has... Don't forget to keep downloading all those MS updates for the 'security' holes they keep finding...
I remember doing this sometime last year... took a few songs from the Boston-area grindcore band An*l C*nt (heh, great stuff- 39 songs totaling ~35 minutes) and relabeled them to things like "Britney Spears- I Love You (early demo)" and "Christina Aguilera- Be Mine (rare!!)" and sat back as people lapped em up. I wonder what they thought...
the coolest club on
what, you don't like me mocking Recording Academy CEO Michael Greene's speech.
... but now I realize that it is all about downloading free Eminem MP3's, free porn videos and so called "appz" - Windows applications with their copy-protection removed.
So the Freenet guys are all just a bunch of freeriders - I once though that those guys were some kind of idealists, but now I see that they are only in it for the "free" (as in beer) stuff.
This has probably been thought of before, but would it be possible to use a checksum scheme to identify a particular file, so that files of the same name but differing quality can be distinguished? I'm thinking about the same type of MD5-type checksum that's currently used to verify software archive integrity.
Scenario:
1. One of the P2P/Gnutella clients could add a feature where the MD5 (or similar) checksum of each shared file is calculated at startup and distributed along with the file information.
2. Any third-party site could provide quality-rating/endorsement of a particular file by listing the name and checksums of files that had manually been checked for quality. This could even be linked into the P2P client.
Is there already this type of checksum available?