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Overpeer Spewing Bogus Files on P2P Networks
nimec writes "Zeropaid.com has posted news of a company called Overpeer which is the source of all the bogus mp3 files that are popping up on the various P2P networks. Zeropaid, in the news article, said: 'If you've encountered the "loop" files, in which a section of the chorus or hook is repeated over and over, you've been tricked by OVERPEER. OVERPEER are doing this with the full knowlege and consent of Interscope and Universal Music, in fact they are under contract to Universal and other major record labels, and will be doing a LOT MORE of this type of "interdiction" in the near future.' Right now this doesn't bother me because these bogus files are few, very spread out and it is easy spot them. I'm just afraid that over time people will keep downloading these bogus mp3s and become too lazy to delete them, like they are when it comes to incomplete songs."
There are socially acceptible ways of "trying to stop illegal activities." These are what are commonly called "laws." Trashing somebody's network is not a socially acceptible way of "trying to stop illegal activities," precisely because it contravenes those laws. Lynch mobs are and have been outlawed in most parts of the civilized world for a long time, and the cybernetic equivalent of lynch mobs come dangerously close to violating laws against cyber-terrorism.
The bottom line is corporations and private organizations need to get it through their thick skulls that this kind of private spy-vs-spy warfare may be technically legal in some cases, but it is definitely not in the best interests of civil society. Of course, in an era where the very president of the United States has trouble with the concept of US soldiers being subject to international war crimes tribunals, it's understandable. After all, "how dare THEY think that they can tell US what to do," no matter how heinous the proscribed activity.
It's time for folks to step back and take a deep breath and think about what's best for society and civilization and stop worrying so much about their own private interests. Capitalism may work because it assumes greedy, less than ideal people, but it doesn't constitute a blanket endorsement of bad behaviour. There are other, competing modes of regulating human behaviour, and they are not all based on greed. One of them is called "ethics." Another is morality. Another is concern for ones neighbors' well-being. Despite what the politicos try to tell you, these are not outmoded concepts best thrown on the trash heap of history.
Even the Roman Empire fell. And not because they didn't enforce their copyright laws.
Hic iacet Arthurus, rex quondam rexque futurus.
Unfortunately their response would be that because of all these projected (yes projected) lost sales this is why Overpeer is doing it. They don't care because there is still a lot of people who don't have the bandwidth or the burners to make downloading mp3s worth it. They are only doing this to irritate you. Their real push (not like it is going to work) is to brainw... I mean educate the unclean masses that they are the good guys and the pasty faced geeks running that commie Operating system are the evil ones.
Moderators this is not a flame but a semi humorus but sad view on the situation.
okay, so you get the first 40 seconds of the 180 second song, which is quite a bit really, and you then decode it. Now you have 40 seconds of data, 20 of which may be similar to 20 others. a fairly sophisticated algorithm checks for similarities in the music, and because the music is supposed to repeat itself in the opening, your legitimate file gets whacked.
by now overpeer has heard about this stupid new program, and is now modifying the songs they're dumping into the p2p systems so loop detection doesn't actually help anything. lots of work to have a failure mode that prevents legitimate downloads, and won't stop overpeer.
i don't see a problem with what overpeer's doing anyway. a long time ago a friend of mine came up with a similar but more evil idea. the idea was to sell the record companies a service that would serve out fake files, purposefully mislabelled files, and real files that are subtly but annoyingly processed. add in some shitty harmonics, and try to get people to associate those sounds with mp3 encoding, thus making them want cds.
in retrospect, i wish we had done it, i would've loved to watch all the music thieves explaining why it's evil for me to make music piracy a bit more annoying.
Tome to DOS these dick's computers into a pool of molten metal...