Slashdot Mirror
Mission: Infiltrate the P2P Network
prostoalex writes "Wired News unveils the secrecy behind Overpeer, the company whose mission is to infiltrate peer-to-peer networks with low-quality audio and video files, or corrupted chunks of data which carry the same name and have the same size as originals. Apparently OverPeer even managed to procure a USPTO patent on (a) producing an advertising digital music file by deteriorating or damaging a sound quality of an original music file of a record of a cooperating record corporation; and (b) distributing the advertising digital music file through the communication network."
Seems like they are trying to piss in the pool to drive everyone away.
or corrupted chunks of data which carry the same name and have the same size as originals.
Isn't there some magical algorithm that produces an unique checksum number for a file, and if it were missing chunks wouldn't that reflect in that magical number? Don't most P2P networks use this magical MD5 checksum algorithm to ensure files aren't screwed up?
Gee, you would think the patent office would realize they just awarded a patent to the same guy that sells server pixie dust.
I know some P2P networks just match file size and name, but I'm pretty sure most of the good P2P networks check a file's MD5 to see if it is the same as another. If the MD5 matches, it's probably the same file, despite having a wildly different name.
Unless Overseer or whatever found a reverse algorithm for MD5, I doubt very much that they could degrade the qualify of a music file in such a way that the MD5 doesn't change.
My wife and I sat in our office last night and pondered what percentage of downloaded music falls into fair use. In other words, what percentage of the songs downloaded are actually owned by the person seeking the download?
My wife and I have over 200 CDs. It would take use an enormous amount of time to rip all of those CDs. Is there anything wrong with us wanting to download the music that someone else has already taken the effort to convert?
I may be wrong, but I imagine that people are more interested in downloading because of the "laziness" factor.
Simply put, how do they know what is or isn't legal?
There are plenty of bands that release some or all of their tracks for free....how are these guys determining WHAT gets fubar'ed and what doesn't......could a new file naming convention by P2P traders make this REAL hard for these guys..? How aer THEY choosing what content gets whacked?
Sehr geehrter Toilettenbenutzer!
From the article:
2) Collect illegally produced digital music file.
3) Edit illegally produced digital music file (damage sound quality).
4) Distribute digital music file on network.
All of these are illegal under the DMCA.
Oh, I get it, it's ok to break the exact same laws you're trying to get the general public to stop breaking. I know, lets run around and rob the thieves and rape the rapists, that'll get them to stop too. Why didn't we think of it before?
<sigh>
Damien
What the are doing is essentially sabotage, and shooting themselves in the foot besides. Those persons who delivered us anartistic offal on CDs have merely found a way to do the same over P2P networks. The reason the recording industry is doing so poorly has nothing to do with the P2P red herring, but rather, is entirely due to a dismal lack of quality.
Fast machines, powerfull AI, impulsive invention,... All I lack is a good espresso machine!
Tit. Tat.
I might not like it, but this response seems pretty logical to me. The Industry has declared war on P2P as the source of their dwindling profits. (I'm not going to argue the validity, that's irrelevant.) Of course they're going to try to sabotage these networks any way they can.
This puts the ball back in the court of the P2Pers. So what's the next step? Seems to me it won't take long for someone to come up with either a moderation system or IP blocking scheme that will force the Industry into a different line of attack.
When are these people going to learn that if they spend 6 months developing a technology to "protect" their copyrighted info, it will take 6 days (if that) for someone to defeat it?
Dime to donuts someone has a way to beat these bogus files within the week...
-mh
Surely it won't take very long for people to discover the IP addresses that the rogue files come from and block them? A (long) list of rogue IP addresses was posted on Slashdot a couple of weeks ago.
Summation 2
People will just delete the junk and keep the good copies (think about spam).
The good copies get moved to the "good stuff" directory (available for download) and the bad stuff goes to
Here's a thought: don't steal the shit! Hm... Nah.
"On some level they understand that P2P users are also potential customers -- record buyers, video renters or gamers -- and don't want to alienate them"
Well if you want my business, then maybe you should give me a sample of what you have to offer, and not just waste my time in the first place. But then again, If I can buy a complete movie on DVD for even as low as $5 on sale, or $20 not on sale, why would I want to pay $18 for a CD with maybe 15 tracks if I'm lucky.
Either way, these businesses need to figure out how to attract my attention, rather than ram their practices which are tried and proven to be not working, down my throat. Can't open my wallet that way!
Mine means my own, but how can this be if I owe for it?
They're getting PERMISSION from the copyright holders to do this. They're not collecting anything. Record companies will say "Hey, you have full right to distribute fake Metallica files" and you know what? It'll be LEGAL. Turn! Brain! On!
"For the promotion of USEFUL arts and sciences..."
How does protecting sales even come close to meeting that hurdle?
--- I wish I could hear the soundtrack to my life. That way I'd know when to duck.
It's the age old Pissing in the well trick.. if you poison the source then people wont use it.
Unfortunately there are at least 90-100 more talented programmers and solution finders to every employee they have out there that will find a way to detect or reject their junk. This company has nothing of value to sell to any interested party, just like macrovision is 100% worthless (both 1 and 2 are easily removed without effort and only $5.00 worth of electronic parts, or a simple $10.00 box that can be purchased most anywhere called a "video stabilizer")
Let them do their worst, let the companies waste their money on this snake-oil salesmen. i dont care, it will never affect me, and by the time the first 2-3 of their supposed files get in the wild there will be patches to kazaa-lite , open nap servers, and gnutella clients that simply will not list these files.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Regardless of the debatable benefits to the recording companies, doesn't this approach do the most damage to the artist by reducing the public's perception of that artist's overall quality?
Most corporations would never allow low-quality reproduction of their branding, even for legitimate business use. To do so would undermine the value of the brand because of the association with lower quality.
An artist's professional reputation is based on the public's perception of their quality. Seeding the market with poor quality content only causes the public to associate that artist with poor quality.
Ultimately, this will drive consumers toward artists that fight to protect the quality of their on-line body of work.
Personally, I feel that the recording industry can keep people buying their product if they enhance the music with liner notes, album art, and other forms of content that are harder to distribute in its original format.
Don't through out the artist with the bathwater.
trichard
Kazaa has that, they call it an integrity rating. Files are rated Excelent, average or poor.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
[i]How many people and companies that are willing to make money by being scum...[/i]
Dunno. How many people here are trying to avoid paying money by being scum and downloading material in such a manner that the original writer or artist is deprived of their revenue?
P2P is good for the world,
Prove it. Substantiate or retract.
why the hell can't people just get over it and let it be.
I guess you dont have your livelihood and income reduced by thieving maggots, do you?
Thats the point I think patents should be useful to the general public this patent clearly is not....
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
Here is a company whose goal is, simply, to sabotage an existing system/service. All talks of legality aside, there's something amazingly pathetic about this. Forget trying to make something people want, just hire someone to wreck the competition.
.
Of course someone will find a way around this. And it won't stop fileswapping on P2P networks or other methods.
Hmmmm. Maybe this guy has the ultimate scam. As file traders find new ways around what he does, he can sell new methods to his clients . .
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
all this discussion of checksums and the like is totally irrelevant. quite ignoring the fact that its the host that supplies the checksum (if its too be of any use in selecting potential downloads), its very unlikely that any two renditions of the same audio file would be identical. CD-based digital audio is not a bit-for-bit perfect transfer medium (hence error correcting h/w and s/w in the drives). Rip a CD on two different drives and the chances that some bits will be different in the resulting files are really pretty good.
Checksumming only works if the assumption can be made that there is a single unique version of the file. That isn't true in the most common cases.
The measure may be as simple as letting one listen to the song as it is downloaded, and having the users "moderate" it, à la Slashdot.
What we have is a huge cluon deficit on the part of the record companies.
As long as the focus is on how to violate copyrights we will never be able to do the much more complicated and involved work of convincing artists to ditch the hindrance of the publishing industry and take advantage of new technologies to reach a bigger audience for a lower investment (and, given the spectacularly rotten economics the biz offers musicians, make more money to boot). Everybody wins except the recording giants. Ah, that sounds like work. Better get back to pissing and moaning that they're slipping poison pills into your free stuff.
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
[...mention of Freenet...]
I find Freenet to be very slow. I try it out about once a year. Probably more now that it is fairly mature. I don't think I've tried since last spring. Need to try again.
What I'm suggesting is NOT freenet. But more like Gnutella, OpenNap or FastTrack augmented with the blocks concept.
Freenet goes to much more trouble in order to insure that you don't even know where certian content is stored or who originally posted it. If the RIAA/MPAA/Overpee-er become obnoxious enough, then Freenet may be the only viable mechanism to ensure freedom.
Freenet also doesn't (last I knew) solve the Trust problem. In my post (grandparent), and one of it's sibling grandchildren posts, I suggest more about how the Trust problem could be solved. Over-pee-er could still contaminate Freenet with bogus files. How do I know which file is really LOTR-II without downloading it?
The price of freedom is eternal litigation.
Another amazing fact was the mod of this post. You make a very broad statement. 'P2P is good for the world'. Why is that? I know why it is good for you and me. It make it easier for the technology haves to download the music, games, videos they love so much. but why is this good for the world? How does this help society in anyway? Don't get me wrong I think the level of crap produced by the Music industry is at epic levels. However, the movie industry and game industry have been producing some major pieces of work. Yea they may be over priced and poor people may not be able to afford them (but I bet these same people can afford a kick-ass system to run those games on).
Or maybe you just wanted to try out the full game. Whatever. It don't matter. What makes this P2P good for the world?
Nothing. Don't try to justify your behavior. You can't. It's like using drugs. You don't use them to make you a better person. You use them because you can and it's fun. So please, don't try to make yourself out as any better than the 'scum' that would try to stop you. There is no honor among thieves.
The P2P concept is awesome. It is a great way to quickly exchange ideas, papers, shareware/freeware, etc. But when was the last time you downloaded anything other than copyrighted material from a P2P system?
I think you guys are pretty confused about MD5s.
Billions of crap files have exactly the same MD5 as your favorite Brittney MP3. This is because (duh) the MD5 is much shorter than the file itself.
True.
Where I think you are confused is about the nature of MD5.
MD5 is not just another hash function. It is cryptographically secure. This means that you will never ever, in the life of the universe, be able to find nor contrive / construct a file with an identical hash. That is the whole point of MD5. Otherwise digital signatures and certificates would be meaningless.
The price of freedom is eternal litigation.
Sure you (or the recording industry) can put as many locks on as you like, but if i *really* want into your house badly enough, I'll find a way in.. even if i have to drive a car through the front door. This is why the industry is fighting a losing battle. It was over before they even started fighting. They don't have the talent/resources to stay ahead of the masses. Sure, they can make a particular P2P service more inconvenient, but there will always be plenty of public and/or trusted private sources from which to dowload. And if/when the signal to noise ratio gets bad enough, people will simply invent or find another way to do it... then what? How many times will they go through this before reality begins to sink in?
There are many ways of justifying actions other than through the morality of those actions. I don't read books to make me a better person, I read them "because I can and it's fun." Perhaps reading makes me a better person (sometimes yes, sometimes no), but that's not why I do it. Does that mean I can't justify reading? And yes, sometimes drugs can make people better, too. Recreational drugs can make people less tense, they can give people new perspective, they can introduce people to whole new worlds of experience. Do they do this for most who use them? Probably not. But there is more "honor among thieves" among recreational drug users than exists between record labels and their consumers.
It's this puritanical stance that has really started to get me over the last few years. "Just because it's legal, doesn't make it right", true, but just because someone doesn't think it's right, doesn't make it so. Everything doesn't have to make the world a better place to have justification.
That aside, I do agree with your thesis. "P2P makes the world a better place" is one of the most specious and nebulous statements I've heard in a great while.
"You use them because you can and it's fun."
Whoa there buddy, there's a lot of things that humans do because they can and it's fun. Not everything needs to be done to improve one's person.
For example, unless you're a hardline religious conservative, sex is the first thing that comes to mind. People don't use that exclusively to procreate, and it's exercise value is arguable... in fact it's a great way to spread disease. We still do it of course, because it's fun.
Of course, moving off to your more reasonable point of "What makes this P2P good for the world?". The value is that people can examine things before purchasing them, which the can't legally do now. If you play a game and it sucks, too bad. Buy a movie and it stinks, so what. Buy a CD and it's full of crappy remixes and vapid lyrics, oh well (don't give me that "but you would have heard it on the radio" stuff, the radio doesn't play what I like to hear in these days of consolidation).
So, I download music online. If I like it, I buy the album. If it sucks, I don't. Yes, it's illegal. So is speeding. So is oral sex in the southeast US. So is lighting firecrackers in the northeast US. So is breaking curfew for teenagers. So is passing on the right. So is making a loud noise past 10pm. So are a ton of other things that people blow off on a regular day because they are fun, and it's stupid for them to be illegal.
Oh, and something else that's illegal.. Civil Disobedience, which is really what P2P is. Call it Corporate Disobedience, or Copyright Disobedience, or whatever you like. What it really does is show Corporate America that people hate their methods of media distribution so much they'll do whatever they have to to get around it.
And, finally, the Artists. Isn't all this P2P shit bad for them? Hell no! I never would have heard of the Cruxshadows, Claire Voyant, Attrition or The Shroud if it wasn't for P2P (you'll never hear them on the radio), but now I bought all their albums AND go see their shows. Since they don't make jack off the albums but they DO make money (the artists, not the record companies)off the shows, I think that makes it good for them too.
First of all, it pays our bandwidth and the infrastructure. I'm all for that, obviously.
Second of all, it destroys the validity of their statistics about how many files are downloaded. Their statistics on how much cash they lose through this already are bogus, but now they can't even give good numbers on how many files are transferred, because 3/4 of the downloads may be wasted through broken fake files.
Third of all, this will lead to more cool research in cryptography. There will be papers about how to make this kind of attack more difficult and how to build trust metrics between anonymous peers (and that are very interesting problems, you should consider doing research in the area!).
In the short run, this pays for bandwidth with the profits of the record companies. More bandwidth will be used to do more file sharing. One day, RIAA will understand that they are financing the infrastructure of the enemy and shut overpeer down.
In the long run, RIAA will raise the price for CDs even more, to pay for overpeer and the infrastructure of the P2P people. That will cause even more people to not buy their music but download it instead, hastening RIAA's run towards obsolescence.
I think you will find the P2P companies will never actually defend filesharing of copyrighted works.
Thier very survival relies on the fact that thier software has significant non infringing uses, and that is the basis of the defence derived from the Sony VHS judgements.
Overpeer would not be degrading the quality of service because there is no service with P2P software - the P2P companies provide the software - Napster provided a service (the master index) and they got nailed for it.
Surely if someone attempts to carry out your property from your home you would expect the court to be sympathetic to any reasonable attempts you took to prevent it?
You wouldn't for instance expect a legal challenge from Joe Burglar against Chubb because a recent change in the design of your front door lock is reducing the quality of service hes getting from his lock pick supplier?
At the end of the day this idea threatens no one who is genuinely using P2P networks as so many people claim they are.
If you trade in copyrighted works then this will make your life a little harder.
Deal with it.
Our community started the war when they wrote Napster, now someone is bringing it out of the courts and onto our turf.
As the SAS say "Big Boys Games - Big Boys Rules"
OverPeer even managed to procure a USPTO patent on (a) producing an advertising digital music file by deteriorating or damaging a sound quality of an original music file of a record of a cooperating record corporation; and (b) distributing the advertising digital music file through the communication network."
... this is a good thing! now they can prevent other people from doing this, and the aggregate amount of this activity will be lower, which is just fine by me.
hey
-- p
The only solution for idiotic patents, greedy corporations, and lame ass IP laws are to ignore them totally.
What I think is needed is something along the lines of a 'non-extradition' country an Amsterdam, a Vegas, or what have you, where servers can be located (asylum granted).Where no questions are asked, everything anonymous and idiotic laws will not be enforced. Like a swiss bank account.
France wants to censor your site?
Fuck you, and you don't know my name.
The puppet US corporate gov't wants to arrest you for breaking shitty encryption?
Fuck you, and you don't know my name.
Want to use hyperlinks, one-click shopping, or use a programming technique people have been using for years, but recently awarded a patent?
Fuck you, you don't know my name.
Want to share source code that enables you to watch something you purchased legally, but you can't in the US or Europe?
Fuck you, and you don't know my name.
Want to host a blog site (term sucks, i know) without being worried that someone will post a comment that offends a corporation, and your getting sued?
Fuck you, and you don't know my name.
Point is we need just one *country* (sorry HavenCo doesn't apply IMHO) where they respect citizens rights. The ISPs have sole rights to decide what types of sites they want to host. Lawyers, suits and foreign govt scum are refused entry and information.
This is kind of like an author hiring people to go to every library and vandalize their books.
Why does the recording industry hate its consumers so bad?
"The large print giveth, and the small print taketh away" -- "Step Right Up", Tom Waits
You think your definition of quality has any kind of significant impact on record sales? I beg to differ. In fact, I do differ. Where are the masses that would come out and buy all these high quality albums? I'm sure some people would, but not a lot. The music barely matters at all in fact. I think most people buy certain music to give themselves a certain image, or associate with a certain subculture, or to be cool. So it's all about how the band is promoted. If your band is promoted to goths (just using the term makes me cringe) as the hot new must-have music, then the goths will buy it.
This is done other ways than just advertising, though advertising is a huge deal. Certain bands or artists get in the news or involved in controversy. I'm convinced most of these are carefully planned to appeal to the target audience.
I used to bulls-eye womp-rats in my pants
If the RIAA is purposefully trying to saturate P2P networks with low quality files, then they are essentially saying that it is accecptable to distribute copyrighted works -- as long as they are low quality. If that is the case, then aren't they shooting themselves in the foot by setting a more difficult standard for themselves to use in legal cases? For example, they know Kazaa user X is sharing 600 copyrighted works, but unless they download every one of them from this user, how can they argue that they are not the very files which were distributed(legally) by the RIAA itself?
The reason why the recording industry is on such shaky ground is that they really have no reason to exist. They don't produce the music, they don't even pay for the CD's themselves. The artist does this and only gets a three percent cut of the profit. The job of the recording industry is to find/exploit the talent and to shove the product down the consumers throat through promotional gimickry. Their secondary job is to eat up all the profit and lobby for laws to protect their reign since in a free market they can't exist for long. In the digital age even the record companies image of usefullness has disappeared since we don't see their name on the product anymore.. we just downloaded it on gnutella. People wonder why we want to give a record company $14, the record store $5, and the artist $.60. I say, if you want to be moral, pirate the CD and send the artist $2.. that's more than they'll get from the record company. As far as thwarting spoofing there are options. How hard would it be to get a list of MD5's of good files going on a web site? We still have free speach don't we? Also, the spoofers will be using the same hosts to do the spoofing...just finding the bad files and posting where they came from would help.
My Blog
I'm on my way out to patent a method of replacing the text in books with a lower quality version of the original to be placed in libraries in an effort to curb readers from enjoying books they didn't pay for.