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."

Comments

Re:MD5?

[Anonym0us Cow Herd]

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.