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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?"
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
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.
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)
I doubt it's that - what you've got there wouldn't repeat.
So why not just delete the files when you come across them?
Oh, also too lazy to listen to the music you download? Why didn't you say so?
You must be one of those people who download stuff for your "Collection" because it's the size that matters, not what you do with it!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.
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
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
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.
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.
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!
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!"
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
[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 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
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
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.
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.
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
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...
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.
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.
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/
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.
...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
Any application based on the uniqueness of Internet Protocol addresses will fail on the real network
Precisely. How about fetching, say, 50 MD5 sums from a server's inventory, and looking up the average rating? Nahhh.. it would take too much to fetch MD5 sum ratings over the already sluggish network, and you wouldn't know who's rating to trust.
Intelligent Life on Earth
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
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.
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
It certainly happened with Eminem tracks (at our house we downloaded the track called Business a few days before we bought the album and it was just a few lines repeated over and over), but not sure that he, Dre, or Interscope would do something like that themseleves. As much as they are concerned with copying, they didn't do much to protect the cd.
Most people would die sooner than think; in fact, they do.
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
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
Expanding that from music to movies, Memento was a huge hit with an advertising budget of about $9.
Quality stuff sells itself. Crap needs a lot of marketing.
-B
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!
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 think Gnutella supports a keyword that's used to indicate which logical network you're joining. So long as you keep one server up and running on that logical network, more clients can join. There are probably tons of "private" networks out there already.
Intelligent Life on Earth
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
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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."
Dude, any good client will do several things:
* Put files into some "incomplete" directory and don't move them into your collection until they are complete
* Won't share files that are incomplete
* Will even keep trying to connect to the other person, or better yet, will search for other copies of the same file, so that it won't matter if somebody disconnects.
Do yourself and others a favor by upgrading (I use Bearshare, and any decent client will do the above things). Other's won't have to suffer through your shared crap, and you won't have to listen to incomplete songs. Is it really that complicated?
Oh, also too lazy to listen to the music you download?
So I've heard (I never participate in these illegal activities myself), when you want to find songs from a particular artist, you generally just select all and click download. So you wind up with 500 downloaded songs when you really only wanted 5 or 6.
rubbish. it has nothing to do with size.
you know very well that each and every one of those incomplete "no doubt - hey baby hey baby hey" mp3s DIRECTLY EQUATES to lost revenue from sales of cd singles. you know very well that cd singles can cost as much as $10 a pop. so, that's a $100 pirated right there.
multiply that by the 100's if not 1000's of songs on your computer and that value grows to as much as $100,000.
multiply THAT by the millions and millions of poeple STEALING this music around the world, and this problem is brought into perspective.
we must stop these insideous crimes. we must bring to justice these CRIMINALS with the harshest punishments and fines imaginable... and put the money where it belongs: in the big fat record exec's offshore bank accounts.
sigh.
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
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?
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?
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.
doh, what can I say? ;o)