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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."
How many people and companies that are willing to make money by being scum...worse still that the patent office is willing to grant them a patent on being a scum. P2P is good for the world, why the hell can't people just get over it and let it be.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
Aren't they illegally distributing these copyrighted content without permission, which is still criminal regardless if it is of low quality?
Or do they have the copyright owner's permission (i.e. licensed), in which case it is legal to download those recordings?
...and it's called Google!
Just think about how google works, I look for "slashdot" and what comes up in the first page of results? Now think why, it's because loads of other people have been there before me and they thought that www.slashdot.org was exactly what they were looking for.
now apply this to p2p, someone posts crap, I download it, it's crap, I delete it, problem solved, the file doesn't distribute because I don't share it, if nobody wants a file then it gets disregarded. okay so it won't be so effective against less popular music, but that's not the kind they're likely to try and propagate.
This kind of this has some crossover with the network theory post from today (yesterday?). If you're interested in P2P I'd recommend reading about it.
but the client supplies the checksum. There's nothing to stop a client from sending a phony checksum.
What if the content were divided into blocks. Each block has its own hash. As you are downloading the content, each block can be checked. As soon as you encounter a corrupted block, you blacklist that node.
Really a trust based ratings system is going to have to be established. But in a way that it totally decentralized.
This can be extended such that you download different blocks of a file from different nodes at the same time, thus getting the file sooner.
In fact, what would happen if no single node had a complete file? This might not absolve you from copyright infringement though. So suppose that in order to form each block of the file, you actually had to download multiple blocks by their hash number, and XOR them together. Yes, it might take 3 times the bandwidth to download a file, but not necessarily 3 times as long in real time on a broadband connection.
Now if Joe offers block 0x2857389298371987578392 of bytes that must be XOR'ed with two other blocks in order to produce the first block of the file, is Joe guilty of copyright infringement? But that same block might also be needed to reconstruct The Constitution of the United States, or the Bible or Moby Dick.
The process of obtaining a file would be to first obtain a trusted list of the block numbers you need to obtain. Then you download those many blocks over the P2P system. The blocks you obtain may come from many different nodes. You just recombine them by mixing and adding water.
The price of freedom is eternal litigation.
Bandwidth's expensive. If we could at least come up with a system for users to have to actively opt to share each file after they have played them and can verify its quality -- instead of downloading bad files, not deleting, and thus sharing them -- that would slow the spreading of these files. Opting-in would, of course, slow down the general proliferation of good and bad files and would make it more difficult to find any files as fewer would share users, but I think it's a good trade-off.
That would leave the record industry cops with a lot more uploading to do. 700+MB is a lot of bits to move, and they have to do it every single time a user initiates a transfer. Are the odds that that user (assuming he only shares it if it's good and does not spread bad files) would go out and buy the movie/CD instead of either continuing to try to find a valid file, or simply giving up altogether? I highly doubt it.
Then again, there are believed to be some weaknesses in MD5, making this a little bit easier.
TANSTAAFI: There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free iPod.