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IFPI Employee Describes P2P Sabotage Activities
Maxwell'sSilverLART writes "From The Reg: Matt Warne, an employee of the international version of the RIAA, admitted that he helped the organization spread garbage and random noise on the P2P networks. Apparently, they used multiple DSL connections to present the appearance of separate users, disguising the origins of the files. His group has stopped, but he claims several of the big record companies are still doing it themselves. And here I thought all of their garbage came on CD."
If the record companies die does that mean no more crappy music being shoved down my throat?
www.pile-a-pish.com
Garbage isn't so bad...their lead singer is hawt... Mee-yow!
Cheers,
Bowie J. Poag
Here is a list of P2P Unfriendly IP's you can block.
. 160.127.255
R anger:204.92.244.0-204.92.244.2551 92.0.0-65.192.0.255. 255.255e fender:66.79.0.0-66.79.255.255- 208.225.90.255
MPAA:63.199.57.96-63.199.57.1281 28-64.166.187.1925 51 28.0-207.155.255.2555 5.2552 7 .155.128.0-207.155.255.2559 .0-64.94.89.2553 5.247.255. 255I AA:208.192.0.0-208.192.255.2556 .32.50
OverPeer:65.174.255.255
OverPeer:65.160.0.0-65
Ranger:216.122.0.0-216.122.255.255
MediaForce:65.
MediaForce:65.223.0.0-65.223
MediaForce:4.43.96.0-4.43.96.255
MediaD
RIAA:208.225.90.0
RIAA:12.150.191.0-12.150.191.255
MPAA:64.166.187.
MPAA:198.70.114.0-198.70.114.2
MPAA:209.67.0.0-209.67.255.255
NetPD:207.155.
NetPD:128.241.0.0-128.241.2
UnknownC&DCop:64.106.170.128-64.106.170.19
BayTSP:209.204.128.0-209.204.191.255
Vidius:20
GAIN(spyware):64.94.8
GAINCME(spyware):66.35.247.0-66.
GAINCME(spyware):66.35.229.0-66.35.229
MediaDefender:64.225.292.0-64.225.292.127
R
Xupiter.com:63.23
Xupiter.com(mirror):63.208.235.30
I get dozens of hits to each IPchains rule everyday when I am using P2P.
I've come across some of this stuff, mostly I got mp3s that were the right length, but just silence rather than what the file was named.
:)
They find their way into my playlist if I am not careful, and when I am using it for background music while intensively coding I usually don't notice when one comes up, but it scares the shit out of me if a really loud song comes on after it.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
With shit groups like Powerman5000 and Rob Zombie out there, does someone really need to waste time adding to the noise and garbage?
Modest doubt is called the beacon of the wise. - William Shakespeare
But worse, they are too late. P2Ps are already almost useless. I'm using gtk-gnutella right now and I have stuff in my download list that's been there for literally WEEKS. It's impossible to find anything and even impossibler to get anything you do find. Not because of the RIAA, but because of the leeches and idiots out there.
Why is there no great uproar when a private user puts misnamed files on the network? Or when software goes online? Why do we save our complaints for when the legal owners do something against the spirit of the system, rather than when someone else does something against the law?
I can't say that I don't give a fuck. I've just run out of fuck to give.
The alternative explanation for the persistence of this noise material is that users are extremely inattentive, and that's difficult to believe.
It's pretty easy for me to believe.
I use P2P primarily to check out new bands. Often I will just download the song that most people have available, hoping it will be a representative tune.
As often as not, however, the most widely available tune has some problem, like being misnamed for example.
This can't be caused by intentional poisoning. Rather, people are lazy and just leave the crappy files sitting in their download folders.
"If I could live to be several hundred
I could take a walk and really wander, really wonder."
An AC describes how he posted random crapfloods and goatse.cx links on a popular, yet pointless, tech discussion website.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Make that two bags of potato chips.
I was a fearce Napster leech, then AudioGalaxy, and now KaZaa Lite. I have only run into this garbage once or twice, in about 20 gigabytes (on a dialup) in the last few years. KaZaa Lite does allow you to listen to partially download files but if the bastrads are smart, they will screw up the last verse.
Still, I do not doubt the RIAA/MPAA and other forces of darkness are trying to poison the Net. I imagine worst yet, they will be put somekind of marker in files so that they could do some tracing of some kind.
EVIL!
I don't see anything wrong with this. If it makes it harder to pirate the music and it isn't a DOS against the network or another person. So what? If the copyright owners want distribute blank songs or garbage songs on p2p networks. Let them do it. It would also be interesting to find out if they paid the artist for using their name on a product they are distributing.
Look, as much as I resent the RIAA, I have to say that they have a total right to fill up P2P networks with bogus files that look like copyrighted material.
What, you are not able to pirate a copy of some new album? Poor baby. Pay for it. You _really_ are ripping off the artist if you steal it. Yes, you are also ripping of the RIAA (which I don't care about). But don't complain that your organized theft ring is being hampered by the rightful owners of that property.
I despise the RIAA and how it treats their artists. But for the love of all that is right, don't *steal* in reaction. That is certainly not going to make the artists lives better.
Buy from alternative record labels. Go see your friends bands live. Write your own music. Read a book. Play with your computer. Make out with your girlfriend. Or, if you really want that album, pay for it. Or don't and boycott the bad labels. *That* choice is yours.
Everything Metallica has released since Master of Puppets has been garbage :).
damn
Modest doubt is called the beacon of the wise. - William Shakespeare
Sorry, but he sounds like a disgruntled employee. And this doesn't look like somebody who's disgusted with the recording industry to me...
Maybe in your world, but in my world it isn't.
This is called civil disobedience.
Though I'd rather take from people willing to give.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
As an ethical issue, downloading songs we havent paid for is just plain stealing. And they tried to shut down the source (the transfer tool and servers), byt the judge bitchslapped them down.
What choice are we leaving them? They're spreading corrupted files. It's not like they're ping flooding every user. They're just sending what the USER REQUESTS.
I'm relieved that's all the Riaa are doing. After all, protecting the groups' rights are what they're about.
Now, IANAL, but it seems like the outcome of such an action would be positive for the geek community:
Anybody see why this wouldn't work (unless some clients failed to put the clause in)?
We are using Mozilla and don't see the ad. Plonk.
What sort of things are we talking about?
"Since Monday, we've also received a number of reports of some very curious IP traffic. If you're in a position to do so, can you please check your logs, so we can piece together the rest of this mystery?"
There is so much garbage in the logs nowadays that it is very difficult to pull out something significant. Of course, this is all according to plan.
I actually e-mailed Richard Stallman a couple years ago when I realized a great way to spread the GNU message.
My question was whether disguising pro-GNU songs (such as these) as Billboard Top 40 hits and sharing them on Peer 2 Peer networks was a "right" thing to do.
He suggested that I not do it, but did thank me for a good laugh.
Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate. Ex-O'Reilly/MIT employee, now a full-time Google employee.
I have been running Limewire, and has anyone else noticed that no matter WHAT you put in the search box, you nearly immediately get three hits back with exactly that title and an appropriate extension? One is a broken move file that just locks your player, and two others are pr0n teasers.. but that must be a large server with a fast pipe... because it consistant, and it is FAST.
Has anyone run into this with any of the other P2P clients, or is it just limewire specific?
(I would think that would be a better way to tie up the services anyway.. just have a remote server that responds to incoming searches with a couple of crap files. Get enough of them doing it, and the S/N ratio will get so screwed people will stop using it.)
Maeryk
Feminine Protection? What is that? A chartreuse flame thrower?
And here I thought all of their garbage came on CD
This is the same "garbage" everyone is trying to download on the P2P networks, which must mean they like it, therefore it is not really garbage. Let me guess, you use the P2P networks to download legitimate mp3s from unsigned bands. I will never believe that. Let whoever on this board has *NO* illegal mp3s on their hardrives be the first to flame...
once again, the IFPI and RIAA don't understand technology. given the infrastructure, p2p users could 'moderate' content up and down, and 'metamoderate' the moderations of other users (wonder where i've heard of those terms ;) ). but seriously, this technological solution would destroy poisoning efforts - as content and users were moderating, crappy content would be marked as 'to be ignored', and valid content would sift to the top of the heap.
smd4985
playing little guerilla internet tricks rather than trying to understand/reform your industry. It's so much simpler to poison a well rather than figure out how to use it to make money and satisfy your "customers". It's so much more restful to sit around and blame "pirates" rather than addressing new technology and a changed customer base. It so much less tiring to pay off legislators to outlaw things that are inconvenient rather than putting together a business model that isn't 30 years out of date. Thanks IFPI.
When I do a search on gnutella, I used to get nothing but good information. Then about three months ago I started seeing files like (say I was searching for Avalanches)
...and so forth. Its pretty easy to avoid them, I don't think they are fooling anyone. I've never even clicked on them to see what they actually contained.
Avalanches.jpg
Avalanches.mpg
Avalanches.mov
Wait, I did get snookered once. I was searching for "Camaflouge" the old Depech-mode sounding 80's band, which I haven't found a way to purchase the CD anyway. One of the files I pulled down turned out to be a really sweet rendition of "I Know that My Redeemer Lives". I suspect it was a fellow mormon reminding me of my values. But I liked the rendition so much that I kept it and play it.
(By the way, I own the Avalanches CD)
________________________
OnRoad: Hacking that which costs more money and is more deadly. (Its just a car-enthusiast site really)
".... all of their garbage came on CD"
........
For the N'th time NO Record Company Garbage does not just come on CD, it comes on Video Tape, on DVD, Over cable, Over satelite and TV channles, Radio, The Internet
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Everytime I'm looking for something I can always find it, out of the 5 million GB or more available on Kazaa, gnutela, etc. thats available, the size of their operation would have to be enourmous to put a dent in file sharing, let alone stop a dedicated searcher from finding what they want. It's easy to set up a couple downloads at once, then check them when they're done to see if it's what they're looking for, it only takes a few seconds of a song to know if its what you wanted.
Everybody denies I am a genius--but nobody ever called me one!
for real taste of random noise check this out
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
P2P networks are already chock full of bad 'rips' full of pops and skips, or poorly/wrongly encoded (like 56k mono), misnamed songs, and so on.
Eventually the people who get 'into' it figure out who enjoys the same sort of music they do, and who tends to have quality mp3s on their sites. So the metalheads migrate together, and the hip hop fans, etc.
If they stray outside their 'clique' and get a garbage tune or two, they delete them and move on.
They also 'poison' newer, profitable releases, and I've found that a huge chunk of the P2P'ers are there for older or more obscure music. The fact that there's a garbage version of Britney Spears' latest floating around doesn't bother a Deadhead or someone looking for underground punk tunes in the least.
So, I suppose it could discourage a handful of 13 year old newbies if by luck they manage to get the garbage files the first time they try it. But it won't 'kill' the networks.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Seriously - they can't compete in terms of volume with absolutely everyone else on the network. The chance of a particular file being junk is quite low. If they want to do this, then fair enough. I don't really disapprove of their methods or their motives, except that it's a waste of time and money.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
But hey, I can totally see why this method of poisoning the file is preferable to the music companies. It still allowed me to hear the entire song, but it made the song completely unacceptable for permanent use.
Honestly, I wouldn't even mind so much if this the way all downloadable music went, certainly if the alternative is to take it away completely. At least this way, we could tell if plunking down the bucks for the whole CD was worth it.
This, coupled with actually lowering the cost of CDs could possibly make everyone happy.
People will eventually find files they're interested in, junk nothwithstanding. It just makes it a little bit more inconvinient.
be careful what you say about the riaa in your posts, or they'll use the same tactic here, on slashdot, and post random garbage comments to drown out the anti-riaa noise...
wait... garbage posts on slashdot!? it's already begun! how much are those trolls getting paid?!
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Only good songs will propagate in the network. Kazaa has millions of users so the RIAA has a bit of a problem. The only way to get a significant amount of garbage on is to use a lot of accounts and be very persistant. I've never downloaded a junk file at all. All the other comments a read basically say the user found a couple junk files, not enough to ruin their experience.
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
and it actually sounded better/more original than what I was looking for. Can somebody post the RIAA junk nodes so I can download some more muzak?
This might be a little offtopic but I thought it was interesting. I attended a Spoken Word Event by Henry Rollins. He discussed his views on P2P and downloading music off the net. His basic view was go ahead download my stuff. "I would rather have your time than your money," he said. Amen. I liked it so much I added it as my sig, sorry about the repetition.
"I would rather have your time than your money" --Henry Rollins Jan 14 2003 on the topic on internet file trading
Filling up p2p networks with silent/garbage mp3's might disappoint a number of users enough into not using/trusting the service, but at least a handful of them will try to find alternatives such as IRC networks and private FTP's (which is the only thing some people use).. Not everyone is using kazaa et all. Also, what about good-old trading with their friends? This is something the RIAA/IFPI will never be able to stop. Why? because people have been trading cassette tapes/records/mix tapes/cd's forever. It might slow it down, but the RIAA is still a few dozen people trying to stop a way bigger amount of users. They should really focus on one, single solution, rather than little problems. Until they do, expect music downloading/trading to keep spreading.
And here I thought all of their garbage came on CD
No, most of their *REAL* garbage comes out of the politicians they've bought over the years. That would probably be on Legal Paper I guess, but (hopefully!) not on CD.
Black holes are where God divided by zero
I also thought the comment that one of the major mistakes that the industry made was letting napster et. al. create the expectation that music was/is, and hence should be, free (as in beer). Record companies resist lowering the price of CDs in part because they want to preserve the belief that $16.95 is a "reasonable" price.
The idea that people base their purchase decisions on what items "ought" to cost is almost completely at odds away with how consumer behavior is modeled by economists --- the analytical results that show how markets are efficient would go right in the trash under these assumptions about individual behavior.
annmariabell.com
foldplay your photos won't know what hit them.
Has anyone ever thought that the RIAA should be charged for this action? Because this action not only disrupts Pier to Pier, it also produces excess
traffic on the networks the servers are on and can
be classified as a deniel of service attack.
Someome should do something about this.
They should use p2p like a radio broadcast, put low bitrate encoded versions up for free, advertise sites where the high quality encodings can be purchased for $0.50.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
If I may a copy of something I bought to give to my friend, is that stealing? It used to be covered under fair use, especially since neither of us makes any money on it. If I were to share the same content with just my friend over a network using an IM or ICQ or FTP or eMail, that's pretty much the same transaction in another form. If I share that same content with a number of people who I don't know quite so well, how did that suddenly become stealing?
Sometimes I worry that I'll develop Alzheimer's disease, but no one will notice.
eDonkey and eMule (which uses the eDonkey network), both linked to from ZeroPaid use a hash of the file itself for indexing. You can change the file name but as long as the file itself doesn't change there is no problem. It's unlikely that you get junk on the eDonkey network as long as you're getting a file with many sources.
Trolling is a art,
They cannot do anything to the p2p netowrk I use.. it's invite only to get access to it.. (Open Nap server system) we have approximately 200 people on it now, and have had to kick only 1 person.. they were acting like the typical leech.. so they are blackballed... simple really. we allow someone to join and become a part of the network for 10 days with no files to share. (mp3 and ogg only) and anyone that doesnt add new material usually get's a warning, but no warning have needed to be issued.. we have a HUGE amount of IUMA artist music on it.... the legal stuff :-)
nothing below 128kbps and users regularry weed out the crap so that you are used to getting a good copy the first time.
I know I'm not the first to organize a private P2P but I do know that's where the RIAA can do a damned thing... and unless you are on the invited list you cant get in it to spoil it.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
is there any way to 'solve' the problem? if P2P clients had EULAs (and lord knows I hate the things) that prohibited intentional fraud and misleading titles, would that in any way be helpful or would it instead just hinder those who want to make their own mixes and versions? could something like that be selectively enforced by the owners of P2P software? or does enforcing anything about usage and content on a P2P network make the software makers too liable if illegal media appears on the network? is there any way to prohibit or hinder this sort of behavior?
Troll.
You're essentially saying that every single band from the last 40 years that has any kind of name recognition is garbage. That's a lot of bands to be smacking down with one offhand comment. Sure, there's a lot of crap out there like Creed and Mariah Carey, but if you put together a list of all good bands that have had major label deals *ever*, then that's a mighty long list.
P2P networks are great...people share their files and download other peoples shared files...
Its kinda special in a way. Like communism. In theory its perfect! Everyone shares and plays nice with one another, everyone has access to everyone elses files so what you have that I want, I can get! Likewise, what i have that you want, you can get!
Then of course in this utopia of piracy there will be some waves, hence where communism comes in. In a practical use, there are bastards that dont share their files. This makes a larger load on the people sharing their files, and less of them do so as well. Then there are bigger bastards that even fake share items so you wont ban them. Then there is the RIAA and such trying to screw things up. Not unlike communism, P2P is plagued by the few who dont do their share!
So enough of a rant of communism, lets get back to P2P. I guarentee the cost of the bandwidth those boys are using far outweighs their gains. Sure, everyone may have once or twice got a Britney Spears song that was all static, but that wont stop them from trying again! To compensate for the sheer number of users they would have to have mad boxens using mad bandwidth...not worthwhile
On a side note, what happened to just getting 0day albums from xdcc bots?
[I can picture a world without war, without hate. I can picture us attacking that world, because they'd never expect it]
If the user gets frustrated enough when trying to download music illegally maybe they'll actually spend money to buy music.
And the money spent on this music funds the company putting random noise on this medium instead of producing more, better music.
What happends when more money is spent on protecting the music than actually producing music?
Just random thought noise.
Disinformation, the act of spreading rumors, false orders, and couterfeit money is as old as warfare itself. Usually, the production cost' of disinformation is much less than the 'production cost' of truth. It's easy to spread a rumor about ambushed soldiers, whereas actually ambushing someone is pricey. Fake Confederate dollars were much easier to print than real ones, etc. Al Qaeda knows this, and it's rumor mill is going full steam.
Now to the immediate fight: the RIAA and record labels have decided to invest time and money into producing counterfeits and disinformation. The problem is that the very structure of P2P networks makes this overtly pricey:
1. The RIAA must proactively produce 'bad' Britney Spears
2. Some dope must download this 'bad' track-- but once they find it's bad, they delete it. The track never gets past that first copy.
Whereas 'legitimate' tracks get copied and passed around by everyone, because the legitimate tracks are keepers, and they expand virally.
Eventually, the RIAA will come under such heavy costs to maintain their disinformation campaign, that it would be cheaper to start using the P2P system to their advantage (theoretically)
davejenkins.com |
The Register dropped the ball on this. There is a non-trivial number of peer-to-peer users who just download things because they can. Much like the core of packrat warez traders they're not so much interested in the specifics as trying to have the largest collection. (And when you get warez from one of these packrats, you'll often get software that's seriously broken.) They're not really going to listen to the two months of continious music they have, just a small subset. Clearly they're rather have real songs, but they never bother to check. It only takes a few of these people to create the impression that the network is full of garbage.
Search 2010 Gen Con events
Don't like what they're doing? Design a better P2P solution! You're the best and the brightest (or so some of you keep claiming). P2P networks with no trust metrics are subject to corrupt data abuse. Why don't the (anonymous) IDs or IP ranges end up with negative trust metrics, so that other users download their files from slightly-more-trusted hosts? And why isn't there some kind of legal EULA to "sign" before files are browsed or downloaded? "Legitimate" users (that's us!) have the software sign it automatically, while "they" have to modify their software to send the OK without meaning it, so their access to our systems is illegal.
Out of curiousity..
has anyone ever run into these kind of problems when downloading mp3's from the various mp3 channels on IRC?
I've always felt safe knowing that, while the courts and companies can play the Napster Startup/Shutdown game till they all die of redundant bordom, i can always count on finding most of what i want on various channels on various networks, and i've never come across these type of "poisoned" files.
Anyone else have different experiences?
I was just thinking. What happens if you downloaded a bunch of songs that they distribute on physical media and get taken to court by them. You could easily argue that you had heard that they were willingly distributing garbage files on the P2P networks, and were merely trying to aquire some examples of them to see what all the fuss is about.
:)
Since they are placing the garbage up there themselves, wouldn't that imply that they were approving download and listening of the garbage files? The real files got in the way, and you were busted before you had a chance to delete them.
Seems to me that they were better off before, simply sueing the file distributors as they find them. *shrug* Just thought I'd share that little thought.
... I'd rather just mine for Smithore.
that he helped the organization spread garbage and random noise on the P2P networks.
No wonder there are so much junk out there, 50 MB files that have nothing in them but crap.
Chick with Big Knockers
Not sure which Camouflage album you're looking for (they're releasing a new one this year), but most of their stuff can be found at A Different Drum (which has lots of other similarly-styled stuff you might like) or even Amazon.
We've got confirmation of what we've pretty much assumed is going on, and someone else saying the RIAA and co are scum who exploit and destroy artists.
.
What I find amusing in these articles is they often ignore what goes on beyond P2P - people trading WITHOUT the networks, or using them together to find non-garbage songs, or ripping CDs, then sending songs to each other via non P2P methods.
The only way the RIAA can mess everything up is if they force ISPs to monitor every transaction and get access to every computer . .
. . . which sort of seems to be their goal. THAT'S the important news. We already know they're scum.
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
The alternative is the eDonkey 2000 model, which is have trusted sites that publish the hashes of known good content, and then just search the network for that content. Of course, eDonkey2k is so atrociously hard to use and cranky that it will never gain too much popularity (this is based on using it some 6 months to a year ago, maybe it's changed since then - of course, I think that is part of the point - make it only for |33+ folks, keep out the llamas so it doesn't get shut down).
Courts should, in principle, use the precident of citizen arrest to grant any law abiding individual the authority, post ex facto, to apprehend or disable any enemy combatants. It is perfectly legal to locate these terrorists and kill them, and their supporters, without any intervening court approval nor any obligation to report to the public. A Federal Court of appeals has upheld the lack of legal status of enemy combatants therefore there is absolutely no legal barrier to us, supporters of freedom, from hunting down every last of these sons of bitches and their families.
No just send them a message: Such and such a file is bogus content.
I guess that the RIAA's anti-piracy measures are getting so bad that they're circumvented well before they're implemented.
There are already networks out there that incorporate MD5 checksums in order to avoid bad files (example, example). Couple that with a simple checksum repository (example, example). Or maybe even a search engine (example), and you never have to download another bad file again.
[PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
Something about this story rang some bells in what is left of my mind, and I did a bit of digging. Here's another one.
Modest doubt is called the beacon of the wise. - William Shakespeare
Labels spoof files on p2p networks. Duh. Short of suing the entire world, that's currently their best weapon against piracy. Sure it doesn't stop it, but it does make it more of a pain in the ass.
/.). Long story short, this paper went to the voting delegates at the national NARAS meeting. They voted NOT to support the RIAA's stance on mp3s and NOT to support the RIAA's current marketing scheme where Britney Spears says downloading = stealing.
At the same time, I wrote an influential paper for the NY chapter of NARAS disputing all of the RIAA's claims (much of the support used in the paper came from articles posted on
A part of that paper said this:
Record labels are confused and contradictory. They use mp3s in private while they deride it in public. If they're promoting a new band, they'll post the band's songs on p2p networks (often in a covert manner) with the hopes that they'll be traded and talked about in chat rooms. If it's an established act with a history of sales, they'll "spoof" the p2p networks with fake files. It's just another way of using mp3s, albeit in a subversive and anti-customer way, which is par for the course.
I figured as much... A few months ago I was trying to d/l a decent copy of "I'm Gonna Getcha" from Limewire. There were plenty of files, but most of them were bogus: distorted, or the chorus was looped 20 times so it beefed up the file size.
Who but the RIAA would do such a dastardly deed?
Luckily, now that the album has been released, it's been much easier to find it on Limewire.
Ever since Kazaa has put out their 2.0 and onward line of clients (and Kazaa Lite as well by extension of it) there is a Quality Vote feature for all of your files. If a file is shared by 58 users and they all gave the file Excellent rating, you can feel self-assured that the file is what it says it is. I doubt 58 people would go out of the way to vote a garbled/garbage file as Excellent to propogate an RIAA/IFIA spoof file (note that the rating does not follow the copy of the file to your computer).
As long as people are honest about the file's integrity in their voting (what motive would 3/4 of those serving the file have to lie?), then this sort of RIAA/IFIA subterfuge will be sunk.
Mordor...a magical, mythical land where women are more rare than dragons--but where every man would rather find a dragon
A P2P filesharing network is a thing where people can make available files to other people who are able to dowload those files from wherever they are made available. What exactly constitutes a sabotage activity in such a situation? Offering a file obviously not. Using non-unique file names? Probably not, as this happens every day without people complaining. Being a certain entity? Well, then there is no point in mentioning P2P networks; just declare entity X evil regardless of context (which might compatible with the facts in this particular case). Is it sharing noise in a filesharing network? If so, why?
http://erichsieht.wordpress.com/category/english/
how is a DOS a "terrorist action"
did anyone die, lots of violence, feat etc?
no, i didnt think so
more conformity of terrorism, the big bad scary terrorists
Do not sign her up for spam. I repeat do not sign her up for spam. Amy Weiss Senior VP, Communications Recording Industry Association of America 1330 Connecticut Avenue, NW #300 Washington, DC 20036
-Dipster
scheduled to include feechurns such as the much dauNTdead PostBlock(tm) device, & the equally notorious foems list, buy default? keeps the rif-raf DOWn.
no gnus is.........?
va.msn.?net?, not likely. run for yOUR options, if you have any left. lookout bullow. some are saying there is evidence that the supreme being (the 1/5 element) we've been trained to denIE the existence of, is ?alive?, &, well, slightly peaced off. pay attention. that doesn't cost much.
"...And here I thought all of their garbage came on CD"
If it did, their wouldn't be a P2P network to worry about, now would there?
You need a FREE iPod Nano
No matter what you put in, you get a file back instantly, some of which are some kind of pornbots or something, and i have had a few where they are a virus, i believe. It seems to change the names of its files on the fly. Its kinda neat, in a way, i wonder who it is.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
Freedom of speech. If you can share what you want, so can they, I suppose.
I always thought those really weird repeditive songs were just remixes.
Each tie you come across one such filie, its jsut as easy to hit delete and get one of the other 20 from hte search list. So basicly they are showing us they can waste thier and our time unless they can over run average 4 million users (of just one p2p program).
I, like probably a great number of Slashdot readers, use Kazaa. There is a feature that allows you to rate a file's technical accuracy/integrity. On it's face, it looks easily spoofable, all that the RIAA et al needs to do is set the integrity rating at "excellent" and boom.
Not so fast. The idea of P2P is that person 1 shares with, say, 20 people, those 20 people each share with 20 people, etc. The more aggressive and possibly effective the industry gets at poisoning the data pool, the more people are going to rely on the built-in moderation mechanism (the integrity rating). In other words, they'll receive the poisoned data and then either rate it low or, more likely, simply delete it. Since P2P is a tree structure, the poison will only expand to a few branches and will be utterly swamped by good data that is rated well.
In order for those wishing to poison the data to overcome this obstacle, they'd have to create a number of nodes that I would estimate to be at least 5% of the legitimate users. Right this second I show 3.8 million users on my network, so that would involve them creating roughly 190,000 fake accounts, all with discrete IP addresses. For integrity's sake, I'll admit that I pulled the 5% figure out of my butt. Could be lower, could be much higher. It's just a guess. But the percent would have to be lower by several magnitudes for it to be realistic from a technical point of view.
I'm not sure I've been clear enough in this description, but what I'm saying, in a nutshell, is that there exists techniques -- currently unused, for the most part -- which would become more used if the poisoning became effective. In other words it would be self-attenuating. The more they poison, the more people use the rating tools, the less effective the poisoning is. Sort of like a thermostat.
My
Limekiller
I think it's hilarious that the record companies are resorting to the same *questionable* type tactics that all of you philanthropic file-sharers are.
Troll or no troll - what are you going to do? Cry that what they are doing is illegal?! I think its really funny that you all cry like there's some sort of unfair play here when they start playing your own game.
It's sorta like telling the cops that the druggie down the street didn't give you your change when you bought your kilo last week.
File sharing is illegal - you are paying nothing for something. Keep doing it, and the people who have to pay thousands to produce a CD can't recoup their cost - you will have to see less music!
Am I the only one who thinks this way?
--ja
For a minute there it looked like you were making some serious points. Then I got to this line:
Make out with your girlfriend.
That kind of delusional thinking just wiped out any semblance of reality that your post might have had. :)
GMD
watch this
So, start searching for random strings, identify the servers that respond, and create a DNSBL to block them.
Create a DNSBL and get enough people to use it, and the problem solves itself.
www.eFax.com are spammers
These people just dont get it. With the hopes of poisoning P2P file populations with garbage, do they actually hope to discourage users? I remember when I still used P2P for fileshareing, if I got a bad file, that just made me more determined to find a good one. These people dont give enough credit to the persistence and patience of people looking for music. Just because they put out bad files doesnt mean it will discourage users anymore, theyll just keep on looking until they find a good one...
2. Some dope must download this 'bad' track-- but once they find it's bad, they delete it. The track never gets past that first copy.
Ah, if only p2p networks were so efficient. Most people just aren't as deligent as you about cleaning up corrupted stuff they download as you are. With harddrives in the tens of gigabytes these days, there's no pressing need for the average user to get rid of every single junk file. Most people are lazy, lazy, lazy. They download a whole chunk of mp3s at once and figure they'll sort through them later. Maybe that won't happen for a few days. In the meantime, others do the same thing and download it off him before he gets a chance to delete it.
I don't quite understand your arguement about why creating bad mp3s is so pricey for them. I'm sure they can whip up a short program that will automate the process. Then they just pay some intern minimum wage to run batch jobs and create a huge amount of corrupted files. They can repeat this process over and over.
I'm not saying that the RIAAs tactic is sound. But I also think that your conclusion that "Eventually, the RIAA will come under such heavy costs to maintain their disinformation campaign, that it would be cheaper to start using the P2P system to their advantage" is flawed. I think this is a dirt cheap and easy way for them to feel like they are doing something about the p2p problem.
GMD
watch this
How about they use it in a positive way.
Instead of sharing a corrupted Britney song, why don't they take a song by an unknown artist that person might like, and tack on an advert on the end.
Sure Britney might not like the competition, but its a good way of promoting acts.
P2P Networks need a moderation system, perhaps similar to slashdot's. Have metamoderation, where you can listen to an mp3 and judge if it is rated well. You could have a system similar to slashdot's where user's that put up mp3s that have been rated well automatically get bumped up a notch (+2). Don't allow moderations until some metamoderation has been done. I think the community would be willing to take an extra few minutes of effort to help police itself and ensure quality.
Hmmm, not quite. When it comes to those who care more people use P2P than don't.
See this is the internet and everything is distributed (not the hippie generation where your approach might actually work). Millions upon millions of people disobeying the law is infinitely more formidable than getting a couple hundred to take a fall for millions.
You see, if the civil disobedience came only from a few people in this situation they would be squashed and become an example, not a martyr for the cause.
By effectively eluding the government and **AA people are out rightly defying the law in masses. Meaning, if the government does not change its policies it will be forced to imprison its population. Because this cannot occur and have the government still exist, the masses will win over the few.
It's only a matter of time and determination.
It seems to me that their DSL provider could say that they were in violation of their TOS by knowingly spreading false material. Maybe it is spam in some sense.
Since absolutely none of these things came to pass with the major labels, we conclude that smart record company executives either now work in other industries, are not powerful/convincing enough to drown out the idiots, and/or are starting their own small labels to go forward with these ideas and to be ready to swoop in and pick clean the carcasses of the lumbering dinosaurs who currently control the industry.
It would explain the amount of "In Soviet Russia" jokes too...
You need a FREE iPod Nano
The dummy results always come from the same few machins; they say they're running Gnucleus, and I believe it - access to the source code helps if you mean to screw with Gnutella in this way.
The .exe files in the !!_YEEHAA_!! zip files probably hijack Internet Explorer - going by what comes out of running 'strings' on them, they also add a whole lot of porno bookmarks - venusseek.com in particular. This is just a guess as I'm not planning to actually run this thing on Windows :-) The images and mpgs just show an ad for some porno site.
The .vbs viruses... they seem to have come from Columbia. A look at the source of one of them reveals
rem "Plan Colombia" virus v1.0
rem by Sand Ja9e Gr0w (www.colombia.com)
rem Dedicated to all the people that want to be hackers or crackers, in Colombia
rem This program is also a protest act against the violence and corruption that Colombia lives...
rem I always wanting that all this finishes, I have said...
rem Santa fe de Bogotá 2000/09
rem I dedicate to all you the song "GoodBye" of Andreas Bochelli
It relies on user stupidity and Windows' habit of hiding file extensions. Instead of 'virus.mp3.vbs' the user sees 'virus.mp3' and thinking all is well doubleclicks to play it. VB script promptly scans the whole hard disk and creates a copy of itself under the name of every MP3 it finds. That's why you tend to get double results - maybe Quadrophenia.mp3 and Quadrophenia.mp3.vbs from the same user. It also seems to redirect IE's start page to a FortuneCity site, and has a bunch of other stuff going on related to script kiddie life and Colombian politics.
Compared to this sort of malevolence, a Coral song that craps out after five seconds and continues in silence is positively benign.
What I want to know, though, is why I keep getting back 'Free Bird' by Lynyrd Skynyrd no matter what I search for?
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
So I went out and bought her CD, but found out that I can't play in to my computer (which IS my CD player by the way). "No problem": I thought to myself. Since I already own the CD (that I can't play), I'll go onto Kazaa and download the tracks. BIG PROBLEM, as every one of them has been altered with a 'swishing' tone every 30 seconds or so. In disgust, I returned the CD. If Norah doesn't want me as a fan, she can go fuck herself. Actually, I wonder if Norah (even) knows and appreciates how hard her label works at derailing her career?
Use as your search term an incomplete title/artist, eg "Barry Manil" and then you can see and ignore the titles with only the incomplete string. Worth doing anyway because of mispelled tracks.
What I want to know, though, is why I keep getting back 'Free Bird' by Lynyrd Skynyrd no matter what I search for?
I believe that someone, somewhere, may be trying to tell you something...
Consumers want better, cheaper music aquired more easily.
Music industry does not provide
Consumers develop network to provide better(?) cheaper music more easily.
Music industry tries to break network
Consumers develop safeguards against industry attempts (firewall, blacklist, file signatures)
... <-- You are here
Business adopts consumer ideas to make money
Music industry follows
At some point, as long as anti-capitalists don't step in and ruin it, it is inevitable that the music industry will give consumers what they want. Somebody will step in and build a viable music business around a p2p platform, and make lots of money. Then everyone else will follow. This is exactly how capitalism is supposed to work, and has for a few hundred of years. The only time it fails is when government steps in and throws it off. That is why capitalist countries produce better goods and services than communist ones.
I downloaded Red hot Chili Peppers's song 'By the way' not too long ago... until I heard the CD version, I thought the mp3 I had was the real deal. What they did, was keep repeating a specific beat throughout the song, and messed up the lyrics just a little bit, what's left is a listenable and good version, and unless you've heard the store-bought CD, you'd never know.
I'm wondering if mabey they did this to test how many peope would download it. Some sort of survey to see how much attention we'd pay if they released lots of songs in the same fashion.
I also remember talk back in the day about how they'd release 'baked' mp3s, so your burner would throw out errors when burning. I don't burn cds, so I don't know how true this is, or if they're still doing it.
Anyway, just my $0.02
"What I want to know, though, is why I keep getting back 'Free Bird' by Lynyrd Skynyrd no matter what I search for?"
for me it's a different song... but always the same one... I now set up filters in all my gtk-gnutella searches along the lines of:
if name is not "what I searched for" discard
haven't seen one of those results in a long time (I also set up simple size checking on there as well, if it's only 2k it's probably not the file I'm looking for.
"For the IPFI however, the poisoned network grew too expensive to justify...The body wanted to concentrate its attentions on large scale copying outfits."
Holy cow! They're actually going to pursue the important problem and not the casual user? When is the RIAA going to make stunning realization?
Here. Good program to block these IP addresses and will work for any Windows P2P clients. :)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
There are ways to protect P2P networks from sabotage. One utility, BitTorrent, uses a cryptographic-quality checksum on file fragments to eliminate non-authentic pieces. Once one downloads a valid ".torrent" definition file, and BitTorrent reports the download as having succeeded, one is guaranteed that file is complete and non-corrupt.
You can get more information at http://bitconjurer.org/BitTorrent/.
Man, one of those words belongs in a pair of smartass scare quotes, but I just can't figure out which one.
Most of you are too young to remember this, but this was the same sitation warez was in in 1984: people sitting on mountains of stolen software and not letting others download it because they didn't have anything the hoarders wanted but didn't have -- duh! At least they didn't call it "sharing".
Oh, look at that, I figured it out after all.
As a Columbia student, Columbia resident, Columbia wearer, Columbia listener, Columbia purchaser, and Colombia consumer -- and as an American, patriot, and staunch promoter of all that is good and right in this world -- I beg you to kindly note the small, but significant, difference between Columbia and Colombia.
Think of the children! Otherwise, the terrorists have already won.
Thank you.
The first step to not getting your ass beat by the cops is:
DON'T BREAK THE LAW!
There is a non-trivial number of peer-to-peer users who just download things because they can. Much like the core of packrat warez traders they're not so much interested in the specifics as trying to have the largest collection.
I agree completely. In fact, I basically made the same comment above. KaZaA v2.0+ has incorporated a "File Integrity" feature that allows users to vote on whether the file is usable or not. But the problem is that most users don't bother to vote on the file. I almost wish that KaZaA and other p2p services would REQUIRE users to verify that the file is good once it's been downloaded. I envision a pop-up dialog box saying "Listen to XXX.mp3 now?" If the user clicks "yes" then the song would play and afterwards the p2p client would ask "Keep XXX.mp3?" which would force the user to decide whether to keep it. If the user picks "No" to the "listen" dialog box, that's fine. But the next time they fire up their p2p client, they'll get the same dialog box. Basically, the p2p program would continue to harass them about files they've downloaded but haven't verified the legitimacy of.
One problem with this approach comes when video clips are considered. I can easily see someone downloading an AVI encoded with DivX 5.0.2. They try to play it, but because they only have DivX 3.11 on their machine, they can't see the clip and decide it's corrupt. A *really smart* client would then advise the user that they don't have the proper codec before they agree to delete the file. But that's probably more than really needs to be done. I'd just like to see people keeping their downloadable collections a little cleaner for the rest of us. The current approach of relying on users to do it voluntarily simply isn't working. Perhaps a little incentive is required to remind them to keep their house tidy.
GMD
watch this
If they're going to distribute blanked out MP3's, we should plant blank cd's in the record stores.
You buy 50 jewel cases for 5 cents a piece, work up cover art to make them look like the new wannabe punk band album, throw in a 1 cent CDR, include a little note about the cause, and put them on the shelf. They look just like the real thing, but the stores are bombarded with returns, they complain to the RIAA, and the RIAA backs down.
Okay, so it's not the greatest idea, but we ARE smarter than the RIAA, come on people!
What disturbs me is the great amount of misnamed files that contain somewhat objectionable content. Some are named as such things as disney movies, or pokemon, etc... but contain adult content. I'm sure at least a few kids have come across this crap on kazaa.
Some of said clips (or those somewhat ambiguously named), contain content of somewhat dubious legality as well (not copyright legality, I'm referring to the content itself being very very wrong). It's bad enough that I see such things when browsing my kazaa cache... but it's worse when I think that somebody may have sniffed my (static) IP and associated me with it - or others have downloaded it off my PC.
The messaging feature is nice... I can let people know when I find bad, or immoral, downloads - and hopefully help filter the crap-files.
such behavior is not legal here in the US. If we could get more information about the worm this guy was distributing (and maybe one that the record company's are supposedly distributing), we could sue the individual companies.
Columbia is also a groupie and a space shuttle.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
What we really need is a filesharing network linked to a public database of md5 checksums. A web-of-trust community-rating model could be used to allow users to assign a quality rating to each file/checksum record in the database. The checksumming integration could then allow prospective music thieves to find music by searching for highly-ranked checksums.
The system could also be used to report and moderate-down users advertising md5 checksums that don't match the files they are sharing.
I'd imagine a single high-quality encoding of any given song would quickly proliferate. No more broken files. No more misattributed ID3 tags.
-- "The reward of suffering is experience." - Aeschylus
Sorry, but the MD5 solution won't work, if there is a publicly known method of retrieving good values you just setup your custom client software so that it downloads the database of good values and transmits good values for bad files. You have to download the entire file to make sure that the data you are getting doesn't match.
Why should the music industry be able to poison the well?
Because there might be legitimate artists trying to use P2P as an avenue for spreading their popularity.
Let me ask you another question....
Why shouldn't a large motor car company be able to drive 10,000 cars on a highway at 5 miles an hour?
The net belongs to everyone. If you pay for bandwidth and someone is sending you junk in that bandwidth then they are stealing money from you.
42 - So long and thanks for all the fish.
But whoever said the record labels act or think logically? Bit of devil's advocate here...
Current copyright law doesn't allow the consumer the right to distribute recorded works. Only the person with distribution rights can legally do that.
That's their quibble. Your mp3s are allowable through fair use for you to use, not others. (Thank goodness they lost that battle.) Legally you can't distribute copies of your mp3s to other people, even if they have a copy of the exact same CD you used to make the mp3s.
Absolutely Stupid.
The law's just outdated and should be changed. The problem is the old fuddy-duddies who can't wrap their brain around the fact that once you and I both buy the CD we're not going to give them any more money for that title. W(ho)TF cares if I make copies of your mp3s? They already got their money from me. It's not like they've jumped at the opportunity to sell music in that format...
So that's what it is.
Of course, the trick with filesharing is how to validate that both the person making the mp3s and the one downloading them actually have the CD.
-r
Just because something is free does not mean you have to take it.
You can just "preview" the file while its still downloading. Then you won't waste time downloading it at all. Might need to download a meg or so before you can preview tho...
Static? I hope they weren't sharing copyrighted static... Or worse yet, silence!
It's fast because it's coming from your roommates machine down the hall.... he needs to get out more =/
- Toby
It appears it's only triggered by certain keywords (e.g. britney, christina, etc.) - oh well. search for that, sort by size, and ta-daa...
Michel
Fedora Project Contribut
See, you're breaking the law from the privacy of your own home. This means that the government doesn't see that you're doing it, so you're not making much of a statement. You're not going to acheive anything doing it this way, and you know it. This makes it not civil disobedience, but regular lawbreaking.
Not everyone believes that fair use sharing of their music with a few friends is illegal. It does not constitute a republication and therefore does not violate copyright. This is essentially what peer to peer does, it simply eliminates the need to copy things onto tapes or a CD. Most people, don't think there is anything wrong with music sharing any more than they think there's something wrong with lending a book or getting together to watch a movie in their living room.
The movie and music industry would like us to believe that sharing is wrong, but people are not going to be convinced. You understand why "hiding" in your house works, don't you? It's because people would be outraged if the police started breaking into private houses because their teen age children had swapped a few dozen songs over the home computer. Just let them do that and see what kinds of laws get enacted. They are trying to take away everyone's rights by pretending that only a few people can or want to engage in music sharing. Don't worry, they are wrong and it's not going to work.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Ever met a rich whore? Neither have I. People who sell out like that are always pawns and never have anything.
The wistle blower should not be trusted. If he had left while the effort was ongoing instead of after it was shut down, his credibility would be much greater. I don't believe him when he says that he did not engage in cracking and other illegal activity. We have several posts here that attest to the fact that people are using the P2P networks to spread viruses. All we can be sure of is that the RIAA and friends are doing everything in their power to eliminate fair use music sharing.
They hate music sharing because they don't control it. If people are free to share what they realy enjoy instead of being forced to listen to programs designed to sell 40 albums a year, the recorded music world will once again regain the diversity the real music world still has and we will start to see more recording lables than you can shake a stick at. The RIAA will be ruined, of course. Oh well.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
So if I'm looking for the garbage file named after Pink Floyd's Wish You were Here which RIAA has freely chosen to distribute... and I accidentally get the file corresponding to the actual Pink Floyd song, what kind of weird legal footing does that put me on.
Your judgment has been clouded by an all too common
First up: cars and horses. Planes and trains. Email and snail. (You left out how the airplane industry is hurting the auto industry since people fly across the country instead of drive.) These are not very good examples. Why? Cars offer (environmental issues aside) a better service than the horse-drawn cart arrangement. The same can be said for planes vs. trains and email vs. snail mail. The reason people are not restricting themselves to the old technology is that the new stuff is better. That is capitalism at its best. Somebody came out with a better product and won over the customers.
I have yet to be convinced that listening to mp3s is significantly better than listening to CDs. As far as I can tell mp3s and audio discs are pretty evenly matched. They are good at different things and have different things going against them. MP3s let you bring a lot more music with you. Good thing. The trade-off there is sound quality. More quantity, lower quality. Bad thing. Audio discs don't let you diminish the quality of the tracks. Good thing. But you have to bring more of them along. Bad thing. (Although, one might argue that hunting through hundreds of mp3s is harder than hunting through a few extra CDs.)
These are the two main reasons I'm not switching:
1. Players. There is one place I can listen to mp3s. One. As in one whole number larger than zero. I listen to music in lots of places. At work, in the car (or a plane or a train), in the kitchen, in the living room and at the computer at home. That last one is the sole mp3 friendly spot I have. And, it turns out that this place garners the lowest amount of music listening time. I have CD players already at work, in the car (and one I bring on planes and trains), in the kitchen, in the living room and at my computer at home. For me to adopt mp3 as a format I'd need to be able to play mp3s everywhere I can play CDs.
That's money I have to spend on mp3 players. Money I feel should be spent on other things. Not to mention that the players will probably break soon after the warranty ends. Thus replacements are necessary. More money. Blech.
I can already play CDs anywhere I want to. I like how they sound. And you want me to give that up?
2. Time. I'd have to spend time converting everything to mp3, or looking around online for good quality rips. Then, I have to get the mp3s onto something the player will read. Admittedly, that's a small factor, but it's there. Either way, that's time I'd rather spend doing something else. Especially since I don't think the benefits of using mp3s are all that impressive.
So there's the problem. In your examples the new technology provided very obvious and distinct advantages over existing technology. I progressed from LP to cassette to CD because each time I felt I was getting something out of the move. That made the work worth it. Cassettes are more portable than LPs - big advantage. CDs sound better than cassettes, don't lose the portability, and make songs easier to get to - big advantages again. I've evaluated the mp3 vs. CD issue. I don't see a big advantage to mp3s. Certainly not one that worthy of the time and effort it would take to switch. So why should I bother? Because you say so? Some argument.
The "technology has moved on" bit is a nice sound byte, but it's hardly convincing. I'm glad mp3s work for you. That's great. CDs work for me. Your insistence that "there's no need for records (or CDs?) anymore" comes from the fact that you have no use for them anymore. It's a common refrain around here, "my way is bettter than your way because it's my way so listen to me." Saying it a lot, and loudly, doesn't make it true.
-r
Just because something is free does not mean you have to take it.
don't believe it is wrong
and who said that civil disobedience can't be applied to corporations as well as governments
oh and btw, civil disobedience basically means doing it anyway and has nothing to do with being public, your arguement is totally false
The big problems with checksums are that you can't validate a checksum until you've downloaded the file, and that you can't identify a bad copy that you don't have a known checksum source for without a human listening to it all, and that checksums are only useful for identical copies of originals, not for music that has an uncompressed original which lots of people rip and distribute, because the compression process produces different results for different parameter sets. For music that you're trying to play while downloading, or for videos that might take hours to download, that loses, and on many of the file sharing systems out there (especially the original Napster), it was really easy for somebody to look like a great download site. If lots of people really are using checksum validation lists, that might cut down on the number of bad copies that get redistributed, but basically it's pretty easy to flood or hack the network. And even if you've got a list of trusted people, if you've downloaded a copy from Jack before he's had a chance to listen to it, it might still be bad (in particular, it might only have the bad bits near the end, and maybe the middle is good, or maybe it's just degraded quality.) That would certainly have been a problem with original Napster.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Here is a big list of IP's to block.
And, personally I think mp3 is superior in all respects.
The trade-off there is sound quality. More quantity, lower quality.
mp3 quality is much underestimated. Like any lossy compression, there is a fine art to setting the encoding options. I'll agree 128kbit is pretty poor, fine through computer speakers or headphones, but if you get a decent soundcard and wire it to a good sound system, you can really hear the difference.
However, if you use VBR with just the right settings, the sound is infinitely better. On almost all sound systems, indistingishable from CDs. Check out the r3mix website, where a lot of work has gone into discovering what these settings should be. They used professional blind listening tests in the process, and came up with something pretty damn good. The files can range from 128kbit/s for basic music, but if the music requires it (the encoder knows this), it will go right up to 260-270kbit/s. 256kbit/s has been proven to be completely indistingishable from CDs by the experiment referenced in the "Quality" page on the site. This involved 300 audiophiles, a pretty good sample group for this kind of test.
If you have the time, I'd really recommend trying it. The encoder I use is called CDex, completely free and in the quality settings, it actually has a predefined setting for the "r3mix preset". If you've seen the command line parameters to the encoder, you'd see why that's a very good thing!
I listen to music in lots of places. At work, in the car (or a plane or a train), in the kitchen, in the living room and at the computer at home. That last one is the sole mp3 friendly spot I have. And, it turns out that this place garners the lowest amount of music listening time.
That was my worry too. But it's easy to get over, for instance there are plenty of portable players you can get for either solid-state storage, or CD-R. They are the same price portable CD players were just 2 years ago. I've got a mp3 player in the car, it was pretty cheap as well, so that's covered. At home, I have a second sound card in my PC, that only winamp uses. The sound can easily be piped into other rooms, if you are up for a bit of DIY. I've hooked it up to the kitchen myself, and have a second, pretty old networked laptop in the bedroom for music there.
At work, I play the music through a web server, direct from my home machine. There is no way that CDs can compare to that. Give it two years, you'll be able to do it to your mobile phone.
And as a last resort, check out the RomeMP3 player, one of the most inspired ideas I've seen.
I don't see a big advantage to mp3s.
Are the type of person who likes to make compilation tapes, or your own CDs? If you just like listening to complete albums, then the random access nature of mp3s won't be of much use to you. I do like making up the odd mix up, especially when there are friends around. Just queue up a few songs with a easy to use interface (no searching through disks, missing/wrong/scratched disks) and you are set. Great for a party, as anyone can pop up and queue up a song of their own, especially if it has a web front-end, just about anyone can use a browser these days. But can your aunt or a drunk person eject and play a new CD in your home system without mass destruction? ;-)
And if that person wants to hear a track you don't have, you can usually download it at faster than real time, and play it right there and then. That's a killer app.
I'd have to spend time converting everything to mp3, or looking around online for good quality rips. Then, I have to get the mp3s onto something the player will read.
Growing up, I'd always wanted a juke box, which then became a large multidisk CD changer, which I never did get round to getting, as they all were not very good in the audio quality department. I heard of mp3 about 4 years ago, and it sounded like the way to go to get that much wanted music system. So, I do have the fortune of already having my entire CD collection on a very large hard drive, and the desire to do so!
Encoding time for new stuff has never been an issue for me, besides, you don't need to baby sit the encoding process anyway. Most encoders check the CDDB database for the track titles etc, and some ever have a batch mode, where you put in one disk, wait for it to pop out, and put in another.
If you have friends also doing it, a set of CD-RWs becomes invaluable. And you can listen to them on the drive home.
Burning media for portable devices is almost disposable. If you lose or have the disks stolen, you haven't lost anything more than a few 15 cent disks. I have no worries about keeping around 100 albums in the car, provided they are out of view! Nothing more frustrating that paying to have your window fixed, all for nothing of saleable value whatsoever!
Give it 5-10 years, and most people will be using some form of compressed media for music. That format may or may not be mp3, but we shouldn't hold up any sentimental feelings for the format, ditto CDs. When I'm talking about what I think the future of media may involve, I'm not talking about a specific file format.
I'm not saying CD will die either. The number of working CD players in the market will keep the format around for a very long time. As these break, they will eventially be replaced with newer technologies, much like the migration from cassette to CDs. Remember when you only had one CD player?
Perhaps I wasn't clear. You and I very obviously have different goals in terms of the music listening experience. Starting from that foundation isn't it easy to see that you'd end up loving mp3s while I'd end up saying "CDs work fine for me" ?
I have no desire to convince you to stop using mp3s. I'm OK with both of us being right. What's with the need to convince me mp3s are better? Or worth my time?
Let me target a particular idea. You said, referring to the sound quality of mp3s, "on almost all sound systems, indistinguishable from CDs." I agree. Encoded properly, they sound pretty much the same. This I say from personal experience, not word of mouth tales. But for me to go through the trouble of making the CD to mp3 conversion I'm going to need them to sound distinguishably better than CDs. They don't.
All of your points, while true, still sound to me like I'd have to put in time, effort and money. For this, I get sound quality equivalent to CDs, but now I'm out said time, effort and money. As I said, I'd prefer to devote all of that to other things. For example, I'm trying to learn bass guitar. I definitely would rather be doing that than encoding mp3 files. Automated batch jobs or no, it's still pulling me away from what I'd rather be doing.
I promise this is the last time I will say this: for me to make the switch to mp3s they have to offer me enough of a payoff to make the work worthwhile. I saw the payoff when I moved from LPs to cassettes. I saw it again when I moved from cassettes to CDs. I don't, yet, see it with mp3s. That's my mileage on this topic. And it's the only mileage that matters to me.
So, I'm not going to tell you that you're wrong. Or that your points are invalid. I'm just going to say that they aren't applicable. What I object to is the implication (in your original post) that there is something wrong with me (or people) because I (we?) don't see it your way. Something may be wrong with me, yes, but it's not this.
A little background. Once upon a time, I did try the very thing you assumed I didn't. I tried making a conversion to mp3s. You know what I discovered? Not only was I not really taking advantage of what they offer over CDs, but I wasn't using them at all. Except for being at the computer (where I do the least amount of my music listening) I had no way to play them. I look at my life now and see that without taking on what I perceive as mispent time/money/effort this is still true. It's not that I've never tried using mp3s or don't understand that they do sound good. It's just that they don't fit into my life. I know people dig on the long playlists and random access. And that is pretty cool, from a conceptual standpoint. Honestly, it's just not very important to me.
A couple of other things, briefly: I do like mix CDs. I like making them. (I won't bore you with the details of how I approach making mixes but it does sound to me like what you do with yours is very different from what I do with mine.) Most of the CDs I make are for my wife, who travels for her job. She needs to be able to play them in rental cars or they're just not useful. I could ask, but I'm pretty sure built-in mp3 players aren't standard in cars yet. Nor will carrying extra gadgets make traveling easier. And, I also like listening to albums from start to finish. I don't buy many CDs. A result of this is that I am rarely burned by the "2 good songs, 8-10 filler tracks" syndrome so the entire album is worth listening to.
I'm the first to say that in a few years I might not be using CDs anymore. Then again, some cars still come with only a cassette player as standard. You have to add the CD player. How long will it be before mp3 players come built-in the low-end models? Quite awhile, I'd imagine. And as you said, mp3s might now be the wave of the future's future. So why switch, just to switch again? As new technologies come out, I evaluate them and see how they fit into my life. When I find stuff that works, I use it. When I find stuff that doesn't, I think, "that's nice. But not for me." What I refuse to do is change my life around for the sake of some new file format/technology.
That's just how I go about it.
ps - the Rome mp3 player is cool, but since my car only has a cd player, it's not really worth picking one up.
-r
Just because something is free does not mean you have to take it.
I agree that every consumer bears the cost of lost sales due to piracy, but why do so many people go there in the first place?
I downloaded from Napster when I couldn't find music on the store shelves (Try finding / Ordering the CD's "Heroes and Villians" by Exposition, or "What's the Name of that dog" by Shithook to name a few), they were right there on Napster. Even with the music companies consent, how many back-albums will they update to sell (Do you honestly think they will update all the old "Go-Bot" cartoons to DVD, or what about "Pee-Wee Herman")?
They should recoup some money from sales lost to Piracy, but they shouldn't charge $2 less for a single opposed to the whole album.
Just playing Devils Advocate.
I am getting into abstract painting. Real abstract -- no brush, no canvas,
I just think about it. I just went to an art museum where all of the art
was done by children. All the paintings were hung on refrigerators.
-- Steven Wright
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