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New Kazaa Lite Protects Identity
Denver_80203 writes "Found this story about the new Kazaa K++ 2.4.0 and it's new sister program which claim to protect your identity while sharing files. Any of you folk know how legit this could be? We all knew it wouldn't be long... is this the war or just another battle?"
Who wants to bet that the news won't report that filesharing has jumped back up %15, and then some with the advent of this.
Well K++ edition bascially contains a wrapper on the Kazaa application so that one can modify the memory accessed by Kazaa easily, and thus those who use K++ edition automatically has the K-Lite Master (1000) ranking on Kazaa. Its simply a matter of manipulating the values at the memory address.
I would think that extending on that principle, they could write protect or just dump gabarge into the memory space where idenities are stored.
Of course, I don't have the K++ source, so how would I know, it's just a theory.
From the article, all this seems to do is some basic housekeeping to ensure that your search history is not stored, and interact with a database of IP addresses known to be used by the RIAA
:)
This doesn't seem to be anything revolutionary, or, interesting.
If the services went through some kind of anonymizer, that would be cuter. Of course, the bandwidth demands would be huge.
What may be an alternative is to produce a collaborative download system. I request a download, which is proxied by another random user (provided I return the favor). Even if you had RIAA sniffers, all that could be proven is that MY IP address downloaded something, but not the ultimate destination of the data.
Of course, if I have illegal music on my PC, then I am still screwed. But I leave solving that problem to the reader
Next move I see is for a single source to be limited to providing 20 seconds of a particular music file so that we can take advantage of more fair use laws.
;)
Really, I'm not sure why I haven't seen this used yet. Almost all the major sites out there that provide music content will let you play a 10 or 20 second sample of the music for free (and as far as I know, they don't have to license it), so why can't filesharing system users legally do the same?
It just so happens that each user has a different clip... and the software is intelligent enough to piece them back together into one music file instead of me having to do it by hand
KappaStone
Why don't we put a EULA in the new Kazaa programs, which say something like this:
I don't belong to any organization related to RIAA.... I won't use any information obtained from the use of this program, or the study of the way this programs works, to sue others users of this or related program... I don't suck
And then require, from some point in the near future, that everyuser of kazaa has accepted this EULA
IANAL, and I don't know how an EULA like this would stand in a court, but should work for a time at least.
In the worst case, if the EULA doesn't stand in a court, it would provide a good case against crazy EULA's
It's a win-win!!