Can Poisoning Peer to Peer Networks Work?

andrewchen writes "Can poisoning peer to peer networks really work? Business 2.0 picked up my research paper from Slashdot and wrote an article about it. In my paper, I argue that P2P networks may have an inherent "tipping point" that can be triggered without stopping 100% of the nodes on the network, using a model borrowed from biological systems. For those who think they have a technical solution to the problem, I outlined a few problems with the obvious solutions (moderation, etc.)."

Comments

Ugh.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why don't you both just do the RIAA's dirty-work for them?

No wonder geeks get beat up.

So if I try to download the latest..

[Anonymous Coward]

tune, I may end up with somthing thats bland, repetitive and annoying.

And, pray tell, how am I supposed to know the difference?

Re:IP address block banning

[Ubi_NL]

what if the they take a few AOL accounts to do the poisoning: mind you that these have flexible IP adresses. Therefore you have to block all of AOL, which is A-OK by the RIAA I suppose...

Or you could not live in the US and have no problem

Simple!

[Eric_Cartman_South_P]

Everyone posting a real song should name it beggining with, "RIAA sucks, fair use is good, and Disney love$ politicin$". They would never want to spread such text, so every song name beggining with the text simply MUST be real.

Golf war?

[Anonymous Coward]

Another example is the iraqui internet during the golf war. it didn't came down. why ? because when using distributed networks (such as P2P and the net itself) the resistability is just plane great.

The hell? The PGA apparently got interesting while I wasn't looking!

Re:Obvious technical solution take 2

[Jedi Alec]

GPG signed by whom?

Well, who do you think?

Attention, the triple X movie you're about to download has not passed Microsoft Digital Signing and could endanger your personal stability...

Re:The easiest solution to fix poisoning...

[kiatoa]

Browse slashdot at -1 sometime. Valid points are moderated down as "trolls" or "flamebait" if the moderator disagrees with them. Goatse links are often moderated up once or twice if they are placed in an otherwise normal-looking comment.

Blatently wrong posts often make it up to +5 informative, while a reply to it that is accurate will only get a +2 insightful.

I've thought about this a little and was wondering What would happen if slashdot started selling higher rated posts. Say for $5.00 I could buy 20 posts. I would tend to use them more judiciously but would have my posts start out at +2. Just a thought.

Re:The easiest solution to fix poisoning...

[mfos.org]

Unfortunatly I doubt there is one easy way of keeping P2P unpoisoned. It's one of those thorny issues that appear simple but really turn out to big bastards, like cryptography.

I was reminded of one of the AI Koans

One day a student came to Moon and said: "I understand how to make a better garbage collector. We must keep a reference count of the pointers to each cons."

Moon patiently told the student the following story:
"One day a student came to Moon and said: `I understand how to make a better garbage collector...

[Ed. note: Pure reference-count garbage collectors have problems with circular structures that point to themselves.]

Popups and popunders and smap, oh my

[Anonymous Coward]

I got a popup when I went to Businessweek, and yet another when I left.

I think someone is trying to poison the environment with these things and kill Businessweek.