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Legislators Looking At Peer to Peer Monitor
rocketjam writes "According to CNET News, a California based software company has developed a song-identification technology which could be incorporated into file sharing software. It would then monitor music being downloaded or made available in a shared folder, identify songs by a process which examines their 'psycho-acoustical' properties and then compare them to a copyright database and stop them from being traded if a match is found. Audible Magic, has been demoing its technology before legislators and regulators in Washington D.C for the past month. The RIAA is greatly enamored of the concept and has helped the company get access to government officials. However, the technology would obviously require the makers of file swapping software to add it into their products either voluntarily or through legislation."
Would you rather have the RIAA sit on the networks and monitor traffic themselves, or have the government do it for them?
Out of the pan, into the fire.
I have been pwned because my
If we remember our history from way back in Y2K, the original Napster was ordered to install a technology that would block copyrighted songs or shut down. Simply doing filename-based blocking didn't fly, users simply used phonetic spellings. Napster did actually come up with a blocking system that's much like what's being proposed by Audible Magic, but it was too little, too late. See, with good blocking employed on the network, the Napster network lost all of its value. The users fled, and it was game over.
So, you could say such technology, or at least some way to stop users from sharing illegal-to-share songs is already required for any service that operates in the USA. It was found out that nearly 100% of Napster's traffic was illegal, because once they actually blocked the illegal stuff there wasn't much if any traffic left.
Of course, the Kazza's of the world are never going to comply with that, but they already exist in a semi-outlawed state by being forced to incorperate in outside-of-US-reach locations just like online gambling sites do. They're already doing their best to avoid US laws of any kind. Since the barn door's already open on this type of program, I'm not sure there's anything US law can do to truely stop illegal music sharing.
So, this piece of technology might be a great technical discovery, but it's got no use in the real world. It's been tried before. The people who want their copyrighted music for free will just go to systems US laws have a hard time controling... and this system is no solution to that problem.
Reminds me of the "identify a song recorded off the radio" feature of the Neuros mp3 player... Only evil... Really evil.
1. You swap every other byte or
2. You add a header to the beginning that says "REMOVE THIS HEADER"
3. You zip it
4. You tar it
Or any other of an uncountably infinite number of transformations.
There's nothing they can do about it technologically unless they lock it down at hardware level (and I won't buy a machine like that). Everthing else is just fooling around...
The following will be said in this thread "THE RIAA is EVIL, burn in hell!" "Stealing music is illegal.. shut up asshat it's copyright infringement." "The music produced nowadays is utter crap" "Use freenet" and so on....
Of course they'll add it, voluntarily even. Just think - you request a download of a particular band's song, and the software verifies that you're getting the illegal file you want instead of some cranky artist going, "What the &#*@ do you think you're doing?" and some silence.
-Adam
I don't know about you, but I have well over 20 gigs of MP3s/AACs at the moment, and I still have a few thousand CDs and Vinyl albums that I have to download. What kind of insane amount of work will my PC have to do to examine that much audio?
Compress it (tar, zip), and once they get wise to that, there would be a million little utilities that could be written to move the bits around in the file, like reversing, or doing some sort of shuffle.
The problem then becomes a matter of distributing these utilities. I know, P2P!
I've long thought about a sort of whistle-me-a-Google/name-that-tune search engine, where you know a snippet or melody of a song that has no lyrics or you have no idea what the lyrics are, and it peruses a vast collection of songs...
Could this be the answer, these 'psycho-acoustical' properties?
There are too many different file sharing programs out there now for this to work. The government would have to make the P2P programs that do not add this software illegal. Even then, I do not think that this would work, even with the most Gestapo of tactics that the RIAA will try. This reminds me of China outlawing FreeNet. There is also IRC if any of this fail. We still have the Internet Privacy Act of 1996 in our favor. (The law that won't let RIAA, or government officials in a private channel if they have been told that they are not welcome.)
But we've all benefited from the file sharing madness. File sharing completely changed the medium in which most people received their music. Instead of spending $18.00 for a CD at Virgin Megastore, they would spend $0.00 for it on Kazaa.
This of course launched Itunes and the rest of the online music stores. Now you ask... what does this mean to me?
I don't know about the rest of you, but I myself have a rather large CD collection. In that collection, there are some CD's you can listen to from start to finish. Others I'm not so lucky. There are the two hit tracks that we all heard on the radio, and the rest is bullshit. Buffer material to fill up the CD.
Well, much like other folks, I grew tired of being anal raped by the Record Industry. I grew tired of shelling out my hard earned cash for buffer material.
I like to think that Itunes will cause artists to recognize that they can no longer get by on bullshit CD's. I like to think that artists will be forced to make better music in hopes that the consumers will purchase more of their songs, thereby making them more money.
File sharing changed everything... and in the end... it's for the better.
Cheers!
Hmm.. I think I have a patten for something like this.. not really but if they are required to use it can the companie charge for it? I mean how can the file sharing companies still distribute free versions if they have to pay a royalty? advertisments can't be making then that much money can they? I mean they have verry limited cost now, once the software is developed or upgraded most of the cost is covered by using it one users computers and such they just need a website and bandwidth for downloading the program.
And seeing how these guys are basically pupets of RIAA whats to stop them from hiking the fee's way up to effectivliy close the p2p buisiness down?
I don't use p2p software myself. For me it is easier to break into the local clearing house and just grab a hardcopy. They never notice it and there aint much difference in it.
what stops me, joe coder from hacking together my own open source p2p file sharing tool, to get around this? i mean look at gnutella for example. sure you can stop the big boys with targets on them, but it will be impossible to make a program which doesn't have said functionality cease to exist.
:)
you can't make information "not exist"
It works so well because the waveforms it picks up is nothing more then consumer grade muzak. So be it, all the better. I've always wanted a meathod of cleaning up all the hiphop crap from P2P networks. Heh
Life is not for the lazy.
Screw the RIAA - I want to see this technology used in an ID3-tagger/file-renamer. o:-)
If it has a false-positive rate at all, there will be enormous public outcry about how it infringes on legal trading.
How about these psycho-acoustical properties, is it good or is it whack?
"... add it into their products either voluntarily or through legislation."
Gosh, that would be effective! Almost as effective as that striking success of limiting spam by legislative fiat.
Or trying to outlaw crypto years back.
When will people learn that perhaps there's money to be made by giving people what they want, instead of trying to hinder them by laws which will be ignored?
No, the Universe doesn't revolve around Washington D.C., regardless of the distended view our out-of-touch legislators have deluded themselves into thinking
How are they going to control that? Like DeCSS?
...remember good 'ol times when IP used to mean Internet Protocol....
Gotta love lobbyists and legislators. What if I don't want to give another corporation information about what I'm trading. What if it's my own copyrighted material, wouldn't there analysis be creating derivative works without my authorization? What happens when I block their server on my firewall? What happens when their server gets hit by a DDOS? Too many things can go wrong here.
This is interesting, but it leaves a lot of important questions unanswered, technically as well as legally/politically.
For example: just how computationally intensive is the Audible Magic "listening" algorithm?
If it occurs client-side, does that unfairly mandate a higher caliber of hardware for a user to partake in file-sharing? How easy would it be to hack or fake out this kind of software? The better question may be: is it easy enough for the kind of non-technical mass user that has made P2P such a success?
If it occurs server-side (at least, as much as this term is accurate in the case of file-sharing paradigms that have supernodes or the like), who's responsible for setting up and maintaining it? Does file-sharing become impossible if these things go down?
The article mentions the Napster era of faking out filters by simply changing file names. Could you fake this out by changing your audio files to have extensions that identified them as something other than audio files? If not, does that mean the software will be stupidly trying to "listen" to pictures I'm sharing of my last kayaking trip?
Ultimately, if this is somehow legally mandated it'll probably kill Kazaa etc. the same way the courts effectively killed Napster. Hopefully that won't happen, but it's interesting to examine the airtightness of the solution nonetheless.
"We want you to install and run this program."
"Why?"
"It will watch everything you do, download, or put on your computer, and if it deems a file to be illegal it will delete it."
"Oh, okay."
aha.
ahaha.
AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
It says I've uploaded 42 gigabytes of MP3s to Kazaa.
Hey... Who's that knocking on the door?
The RIAA is greatly enamored of the concept and has helped the company get access to government officials.
What I find really sad is that it takes a large corporation like the RIAA to get a voice heard. Shame on you America.
Karma: -2^0.5 . Mainly due to the imbibing of dihydrogen monoxide
So, (and no, I haven't read the entire article) does this "technology" work no matter what the file type is? I mean, does it only work for MP3, or does it even work on the FLACC, AIFF, VQF, OGG, WMA(shudder), WAV, MIDI, or any other sound file/compression people may come up with? Not to mention if the song were rolled up in a tarball or "zipped" or renamed or encrypted or sent as a "hash" file (remember DeCSS? there was a version of it that came as a rather large prime number, which when run through some hash algorithm would leave you with the source code.)?
For those who describe their systems as 'boxen', do you order multiple 'boxen' of corn flakes also?
This software contains code which will identify and restrict you from doing what the RIAA deems is bad. Please do not spend the additional 20 seconds it would take to find and download the crack that removes all such restrictions. Thank you.
Kazaa isnt based in the US. US laws have no jurisdiction over the developers.
Make it illegal to distribute any software in non-compliance? Download it from a server in Japan or Europe.
Make it illegal to use software that isnt compliant? Now instead of the RIAA suing 12 year, the FBI arrests them.
More election year rhetoric? perhaps...
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
Why doesn't the RIAA just try to get the legislature to pass a bill wherein they are allowed to go door to door and check everyones "puters" for "illegal" downloaded music files. Oh wait.. that's basically what this would allow... If you aren't a criminal, you don't have anything to worry about. But then again, why would you be on a P2P network anyway, you criminal!
Here's what I want to know. Ok, you have a file accessible to the public that matches something copyritten. Oh well, what if you are sharing the files so that you can get to them from another location. Just because someone in the public has access to a file on your machine, doesn't mean they have the right to take it, and when they do, that doesn't mean you gave it to them. Correct?
Fight Spammers!
2) Most P2P applications support resuming from partial downloads. If the monitoring software cuts you off partway through a download, just continue downloading from the point where you were cut off.
Of course, there's also the fact that getting this attached to every P2P program is a Herculean task, but I don't count on that stopping our Legislators from passing a law mandating it.
Sono koro, bokura wa, sore ga sekai no shinjitsu da to shinjite ita.
> However, the technology would obviously require
> the makers of file swapping software to add it
> into their products either voluntarily or through
> legislation.
I'd like every financial transaction in the world to result in $1 being added into my bank account. All I need to do is convince financial institutions to add that functionality into their products, either voluntarily or through legislation.
Has it somehow escaped the attention of these people that P2P applications aren't able to be regulated by legislation? If that were the case, why not just go all out and introduce legislation worldwide to have people killed off if they swap music or video files.
As far as voluntary inclusion of this feature is concerned: if one P2P app implements this checking, another will be produced somewhere in the world without it and people will use that instead. It's a Darwinian process; no matter how good a P2P app is in other ways, if it includes this feature people will drop it cold. The P2P applications that are commonly used for file swapping are now mature and interchangeable to the point that there is no reason to stick with one that has a feature you don't like.
Hopefully some clever kid got his research grant approved for coming up with this idea though
Why bother even wasting a second on this sh!t ... nobody with an IQ above 70 is going to use it!
so whats different?????
9 6, 716085,00.html
http://media.guardian.co.uk/newmedia/story/0,74
you hear a song in a bar, you phone a number on your mobile and hold the phone up for a few seconds to record the song and you get a text message with artist/track name
What's next is a software program that's exactly the same as this one, except instead of looking for, identifying and reporting copyrighted files on your computer, it's looking for terrorism.
I think we all know what comes after that.
I am certain that they are well aware of how difficult (impossible) this is. There must be some other motive behind this move.
Making noise ? Trying to mask the fact that copyrights are too hard to enforce in an environment where information exchange is happening at uncontrollable rates and speeds and between uncountable people across continents ? Give the false idea that their antiquated business model can prevail at this day and age ?
Whatever it is, we're going to witness that it is in vain. I just hope that all these attempts and researches find use in other areas...
Bias Meter:
[Perl ---------|-- Python]
So, effectively, they'll be asserting through de-facto law made through government mandate, that stopping the transfer of anything that sounds like what they are looking for can take precidence over the free trade of information.
Fine. Really - highly annoying, and a misuse of power, but fine. If they want to take the time to listen to a small percentage of those files, suing people and publicising it, fine. Let the reign of terror continue. I honestly don't listen to their music anymore anyway.
As a consequence, however, software which will encrypt content and sender/reciever identification will become much more robust and ubiquitous. That I wouldn't mind seeing.
I empathise with the music "industry" - many of these people are acting out of a motive of self-preservation. But they make their living by offering a service - they can't just threaten people into choosing that service. Here, they are demanding the whole nation change it's rules of conduct to meet it's desires... they may get their rule change, but they won't change people's conduct, nor will they convince people to pay for their services this way. They have to provide better services for that to happen.
Hopefully the music industry will wise up to their real source of self-preservation - dissolving the RIAA as a legal-punishment agency, and turning it into a real service-enchancement agency. Make us want you, don't keep trying to force us to need you!
Ryan Fenton
The RIAA could make the following proposition to ISPs: You install this monitoring software on your network, in return, we give you a little kickback for each file your users legally download from our various services. Well even buy the hosting services and bandwidth from you!
If AOL, Earthlink and MSN were to make such a deal with the RIAA, it'd take a huge bite out of P2P songswapping.
...people start sharing "backward" music files.
MusicBrainz has been using these "TRM"s (essentially track ids) to identify music to correctly add ID3 tags to your music collection for some time.
The more people that use it, the more accurate and complete it becomes. It is basically a free CDDB replacement (the biggest one I think) but kind of works in reverse as well (matches mp3s to their associated CDs).
Kinda cool, check it out.
I.O.U One Sig.
I'd rather just steal music anonymously, thanks.
This will only really affect those who indiscriminately upload/download/share music. The vast majority of people I know only share music/warez with people who they know through one or two degrees of separation. A group of about 10 of us have tens of terabytes between us.
Think about how you might buy or sell weed. If you go downtown and buy it from a bum, chances are that you'll eventually get busted in a sting (in addition to getting some crappyass weed). If you buy from someone you know fairly well, then you're cool.
just swap pieces of the song around...like abcd to cdab. It doesn't have to be complex, only infinitely variable.
But there is another kind of evil that we must fear most... and that is the indifference of good men.
Bill likes my site micro-soft.ca George likes this one operationiraqliberation.com
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
but really, it is BAD to have law makers being conned into thinking information can be filtered. I would love to give them a lesson in steganography or 100's of other ways around jokes like this, but really, once laws are made, its gonna be a giant snowball of "patches" to the laws thereafter. The business world needs to catch up with the times, but more importantly, legislatures need unbiased technology advisers.
I am tired of long-haired record execs who think they are intelligent just because they have a customer base with a big appetite for their product when they are operating under an illegal monopoly. oh wait, naw, record companies dont fix prices, i forgot.
Error: Id10t detected
Large corporations are really funny business.
Aren't they supposed to be the one to demand "self-regulation", "less government"?
This is just weak copy protection JUST SO something like the DCMA can be used on P2P networks.
If there's no copy protection, the DCMA is useless... BUT EVEN IF there's something as trivial as a weak protection that is easy to block... say hello to my little DCMA.
With this kind of protection system, I envisage a future P2P network full of backwards songs, or encrypted tunes with unscrambling keys or passwords in the filename enabling you to decrpyt them - something the protection software won't be able to work around easily.
What's going to happen when chart-topping artist has a track which can be found on a P2P site... and looking down the list, you notice about 200 different encryptions of the same tune?
How do you keep track of and police that?
The whole idea of copy protection is just plain stupid in the long run.... history proves it.
Maybe one day people will realise that EVERYONE listens to music somewhere and at some point, and will simply tax everyone for the privilege of being able to get and hear it.
It's a crummy and unfair compromise for sure... but at least that way the RIAA, MPAA and everyone else will shut the hell up and let everyone have unfettered access to culture.
Well, this is the best idea I can come up with to solving the digital rights issue.
The only other option would be for distribution channels to rely on IPsec-level encryption in order to distribute films and music to specialist hardware..... cue Microsoft stage left.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
The RIAA's anti-swap activities are breeding a smarter and more resourceful brand of file-sharing software faster than venerial diseases adapt to antibiotics.
Right now the masses might be using FastTrack or gnutella, but the tide is sure to shift as soon as these networks are crippled or shut down.
The future of P2P clearly involves strong encryption, and is also likely to employ some "invite-only" attributes. That future software is here today; all that is lacking is the user base.
Trying to "filter out" or "regulate" file sharing is akin to trying to "filter out" or "regulate" voice over IP. Or, if you prefer, like trying to deliver content to me for my viewing while simultaneously attempting to prevent me from duplicating it - flatly impossible.
So I ask the "inventors" of this media-analyzing software, can you make my encryption transparent? Can you "peer" inside my tunnelled session and identify the content by artist and title?
This will turn out exactly the way every other bogus "piracy prevention" fiasco has.
1) Company releases "copy protection" product which flatly falls on its face (that is it purports to accomplish the impossible).
2) Company sues pre-existing services and products for "patent violation" (after all, these pre-existing products clearly violate the new patent if they are able to "circumvent" the system, right?)
3) Some service gets shut down, ten others replace it.
This is yet another example of big business and government trying to influence a medium which is specifically designed to resist any from of centralized control. The internet is one of the most powerful forms of free speech which we have in the world today and the move towards censorship (i.e. china) is starting to tarnish this. Like it or not the p2p phenomenon is out of the bag so to speak. Before actions such as these are taken the pros and cons must be carefully evaluated because there is truly no way to completely control internet copyright infringement without stepping on the toes of somebody's personal liberties. Which is more important to you? Intellectual property or the ability to say what you believe without fear of punishment.
Of course, there would be no point in putting this code in the p2p software if someone could just comment it out before they recompiled it. So evil open source code must be outlawed. Hail Microsoft.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
http://www.musicbrainz.org/ - download the mass tagger. It uses a similar algorithm, so you can get an idea of how much cpu it'll chew up per song.
I recently did a report on the Prohibition of liquor in the '20s, and one tactic the rumrunners used was selling "juice" that included specific instructions that said what to "NOT DO" because it would cause the juice to turn into hard liquor.
Even if the government did by some act of legislation, the RIAA, and the gestapo, get all P2P software to incorporate it, open source programs could have a little readme that says "DO NOT delete line 276, it calls the copyright-protection function."
In conclusion, there is absolutely no way in h3ll the government, the RIAA, or even the gestapo can enforce this (dumb) idea.
68.3% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
This is still fairly easy to defeat.... just invert the bytes of the files or gzip the file or whatever
Another doomed approach to solve a social problem with technology...
George Soros should finance the first Open Society satellite to be launched above state laws to protect evaporating freedom.
Until then you can just call your elected officals and tell them you are watching very closely how they bend over to big muzik biz.
You can tell them, you can't vote to anyone who is caught in this POSITION.
this song: stolen
this song: stolen
this song: stolen
this song: stolen
this song: stolen
this song: Your comment
this song: violated the "postercomment"
That way, you would be throwing a legitamite file format at the P2P scanner, and it has an MP3 embedded in it.
Calling atheism and agnosticism a religion is like calling bald a hair color.
Could the patent on the MP3 format be used to prevent or hinder this, if the guy with the patent was interested in stopping them?
We can't get players that can play everything, why can they legally get scanners that scan for everything?
what about DJ mixes? would the "acoustic modelling" give a false positive?
Do you guys know the song, Taking Care of Business?
Well, after the band had it's first hit, the president of their record company invited them for a lunch, where he told them: give me one more song like this, and I guarantee you that you will not have to work for the rest of your life.
The band did just that, and the president has kept it's promise.
The other day I read in Time Magazine that Sting still gets over $US 2000 a day as royalty for Don't stand so close to me.
I do love Sting, as anyone else... but the wealth distribution system has some serious flaws here, obviously.
Does a hit really have such impact on society, humanity that demands such financial rewards?
These numbers can shed some light about the length, how far the beneficiaries of this system would be willing to go to keep up with the status quo.
this is just so asking for it...
In Soviet Russia, Monitor looks at Legislators.
Free as in mason.
So what's the difference between finger printing and water marking? Or are they one in the same? I know water marking does degrade the audio or visable (as in looking at the soundwaves) frequency that can be found and defeated but is there more to that?
The secret to getting modded up is to allways say i've got karma to burn in your sig..
The courts have already ruled on the legality of prior retraint -- it's not legal. So the legislature (being led by the nose by the RIAA and MPAA) can look at legislating this all they want but short of a constitutional amendment and the courts will overturn it because there's already a world of precident in regards to this.
But hey, maybe on the 429th page of the "no gay marriage ammendment" they can throw in a few things making prior restraint legal then not only can they monitor your downloads but they can cut off your kids limbs at birth to ensure they never hurt anyone.
I guess it would be hard to identify certain scenes though.
Don't forget the rising number of open source solutions. You can just forget about putting anything like that into them. It will be easy enough for anyone with sufficient coding skills to remove the parts that identify songs, and voila, you've got a free system again.
And for each iteration the software will move more and more towards secure crypted and hard to trace methods of sharing. Making it easier and easier to use for far worse purpuses than downloading music. A very real life example would be the spreading of child porn.
Searching for "Britney Spears_XXX" images is now impossible!
With it, they only have to have a letter from Ashcroft saying it is OK to pick your locks, sneak and peak your data, monitor the keystrokes on your keyboard, tap your phone, capture every bit of data passing through your internet connection and whatever else they can think of.
The only thing they have to do is somehow connect it with terrorism. But that really doesn't mean much, look at what happened with the guys in Vegas (a public corruption and money laundering probe).
So much for needing to get a warrant. Here in America... (oh forget it, it's 2004 not 2000).
I agree that we should encrypt everything, but as the previous poster indicated, that would probably be all the justification Ashcroft would need go after you.
I agree with Michael Moore on this one. Dude where's my country?
Who will guard the guards?
In any case, my understanding is that two separately ripped and encoded MP3s are rarely identical because of ripping errors and different implementations of the MP3 algorithm.
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
To use the same analogy, even distributed P2P programs today generally use the "can you hook me up with someone that has weed?" method and makes the trade directly rather than actually passing it up and down the chain.
There's lots of ways to do 1-on-1 trade, but no program of the type "ask my friends if they have any friends or friends of friends that has weed to sell", passing it up and down so everybody is only acting with people they know and trust.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I'd suggest you go here:
http://www.cacr.math.uwaterloo.ca/hac/
and read a little.
Public key cryptography is based on the intractability of one way functions. The simple fact that someone has your public key does NOT enable them to decrypt data sent to your private key.
You are thinking of symmetrical encryption schemes. Where both parties use the same key.
Who will guard the guards?
adding monitoring to a file sharing program (or any program) would that catagorize as spyware? And the goverment is going to force that on us, because they assume everyone who use file sharing program sharing music? just some thought.
Protest this robbery like I do.
Don't buy it.
Don't download it.
Vote with your wallet.
If everyone did, there would be no RIAA and no music labels. There would only be artists free to profit from their works as they see fit rather than enslaved by big business.
Who will guard the guards?
Don't you already pay taxes on any electronic device that records anything?
One of those "special" fees that are included with the cost of the product?
I believe they started doing that with the invention of audio tape or thereabout.
Apparently that isn't enough to releive those starving top 40 artists, but we still pay it anyway, right?
You zip the file? Makes it harder. What if you password zip the file? impossible.
Does that mean they want us all to wear portable MRI scans?
"Look, it seems he is listening to Metallica! He must pay!"
Somehow I really doubt this will work...
"/Dread"
heheh... hahahaha... hahahahahahHAHA..
HAHAHAHAHA HA HAHAHA HAHAHAHAHAHA HAHAH <cough> hahaHAHAH haha HAHAHA <snort> hahahaha
haha funny hahaha
ahem
Yeah, good idea.
Ashcroft's Patriot (Act) trumps your Privacy (Act).
Oh and BTW (at the risk of being redundant) Ashcroft's Patriot (Act) trumps our Constitution too.
WTF happened?
I'm tempted to close with an All Your... (comment), but last time I did, I modded a troll (by Ashcroft?).
Who will guard the guards?
That's as stupid as expecting to completely protect music against copy without noticing that one just has to copy the analog signal sent to the speakers, and there's nothing to do against this. They are amazingly clueless about what technology can and can't, they never realize that the problem with human being is that they can and will adapt themselves to new technological constraints...
They really beblieve Santa Claus will bring them a Monopoly Enforcment Unbreakable Device for Xmas!
It'll come as a patch from Microsoft.
Stoopid Luser will install it.
Just like one of the virii a while back.
The thing is, I had a few clients (one was a CEO) install that virus. It was out before the virii filters caught it. I wish it was Durl.
Speaking of which this site is funny. I laughed my ass off when I found it from somebody's sig last night.
http://www.scumgroup.com/
I'm not affiliated. Just thought I'd share.
hoping to not get modded off-topic
Who will guard the guards?
When there is So Much Free As in Beer around here.
Who will guard the guards?
sounds like fairly simple circumvention technique; similar to the chinese google workaround.
They rediscovered the ID3 tag commonly used in MP3 songs, they patented it and finally showed the concept to RIAA and expect fileshareing NOT to use cryptografy and related protocols in the next few versions.
The company's main demonstration for the last several weeks has been a version built into a piece of open-source Gnutella software.
I don't know that much about licenses, but shouldn't the modifications to Gnutella force them to release the modified source?
If so, they must release the source fully so we can see how they are doing the filtering.
Anyone know if you are allowed to modify Gnutella without having to release the source?
I was originally thinking "keep that shit away from me!" but then I realized that it means that a network which incorporates it would be free of RIAA songs meaning it would be made easy for me to steer clear of anyone associated with them while giving anyone who wants to see his songs traded a good platform.
In the UK at least there is a company called Shazam (http://www.shazam.com). You just dial 2580 on your mobile phone (numbers straight down the middle, ideal when a little worse for wear) and point your phone at pretty much any piece of music playing for 10 seconds or so. You then receive a txt message a few seconds later that tells you exactly what the tune is. It really is quite incredible to see it working and it's been implented beautifully. Never again do I have to sit in a bar trying to work out wtf that nice tune the bar's playing is.
I really wonder how this will work with Open Source...
I mean, if the law says this kind of DRM has to be in $FILESHARING_APP, but $FILESHARING_APP's license says the code has to be open source, what will they do?
I doubt the company that created Audible Magic wants their precious "industry secrets" open sourced...?
Two Worlds - One Sun [Spirit]
Song identification could be done in theory just by compressing very lossily; to, say, 1kbit.sec-1. I guess it might require an extension to the envelope transform to work at low bit rates; but, ultimately, it ought to be possible to determine, say, that a compressed file is a particular piece of music.
.....
.tar.gz, commenting out the "unwanted" checks and recompiling it?
However, it probably would break down with encrypted file transfers; and in many jurisdictions, it is against the law to attempt to decrypt something unless you are the intended recipient {hence DeCSS is fine, because the owner of a DVD is the intended recipient of the encrypted data}.
I personally use apache-ssl for all my file sharing needs, mainly because the client is so readily available. Although I haven't paid for a proper SSL certificate, that doesn't mean the transfers aren't encrypted
And if someday, somebody does decide to include some sort of song-identifying bit in their file sharing software, then what exactly is there to stop me from just downloading the
The RIAA et al must face facts. Their business model is dependent on an assumption which time has given the lie: that the equipment needed to manufacture high-quality recordings was beyond the reach of the lumpenproletariat. It was great while it lasted, but it has come to an end, and only a fool could have failed to see that this would be the case. The only way there is any money left to be made is by selling stamped CDs cheaper than burned CDs {the cost of which includes bandwidth, time and hassle} -- after all, whoever saw a bootleg copy of a book?
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Let's see.
Kazaa.
eDonkey.
Gnutella.
MSN messenger.
Yahoo messenger.
ICQ messenger.
Jabber.
Usenet.
FTP.
HTTP.
Email.
Did I miss any? (answer: about a jillion).
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
test.
If a 100 Slashdoters were told that they could get into an Officemax/Best Buy/Circuit City and fill up a cart with whatever they want, and just walk out -with the chance of ever getting caught being 0.0001% -
How many would resist the temptation
What planet are you on, buddy? Hussein "violated 1 UN resolution"? Hussein's Iraq not only flagrantly violated 16 resolutions (the 17th would have been the one the US unsuccessfully pressed for before the war), but more importantly threatened their neighbors and brutally oppressed their own people, as in murder, disappearance, torture, and ruthless suppression of free speech. WMD or no WMD, Baathist Iraq was a monstrosity, and I am proud that our government had the guts to step in and take Hussein et al out of power. "International law" is not like the law you and I follow when we obey traffic signals and pay our taxes. Under international law, whomever has military control of a region can be considered a sovereign ruler (irrespective of the niceties of elections, etc.), and a sovereign ruler can murder and torture his own people without violating international law unless it meets criteria for genocide. Simple murder and torture of the political opposition is an "internal matter" that is not under the jurisdiction of bodies like the UN Security Council. Isn't it a great world we live in?
As for Israel, I don't think their hands are entirely clean with respect to violence in the conflict with Palestinians, but to liken Israel to Baathist Iraq is utterly insane. Face it, over one third of Palestinians favor the murder of Israeli citizens for as long as is needed to overtrow the state of Israel - the Israelis are in a tough spot, and I think they have been about as fair as can be expected.
Ok,r vices/en tertainment/31669.html
t or s.shtml
i onCenter/ Global/FArticleDetail.asp?lArticleId=2394&lNodeId= 931&channel=931&channelId=N931A2394
it's not inside a MP3 player but it works via handy.
http://www.vodafone.de/kundenbetreuung_se
http://www.shazamentertainment.com/mobile_opera
in english
and here an article from technology review Germany:
http://heise.de/tr/artikel/44675
And some marketing stuff from Philips
http://www.research.philips.com/Informat
The Vodafone service works quite good for the actual chart hits, btu who cares about that shit? It's on MTV all the day.
But it's quite cool to hold your mobile in the air, while you are in the club and it says that it is . But for music which is not so popular its not working.
But maybe when the databases grow much larger there will be a future, together with mp7 its a "good thing"(TM).
Greets from old Europe
And that would be a huge victory -- they're mostly concerned about the nature of this as a mass cultural movement. And they know perfectly well that some will always copy, and techies will have the tools.
But this isn't merely about techies, it's about everybody.
If people can't stop themselves from clicking spam-virus-attachments, they won't be using their wetware to tar scrambles.
Here's what I do: Bitty Browser & Andromeda
I swear that when I glanced the test I read it as "The RIAA is greedly enamored of the concept and has helped the company get access to government officials."
-
Roses are #FF0000, Violets are #0000FF, find / -name '*base*' |xargs chown -R us && mv zig greatjustice
I wonder if the file sniffing method would work on something like this? http://offsystem.sourceforge.net/info.php
If all the files being traded are legal, why bother with peer-to-peer at all - why not just build a Napster-style directory?
You can then go to the above web site and buy the music you played down the phone. It's stunningly and sometimes disturbingly accurate. It's recognised every piece of music I've played at it, even the theme tune from "The A-Team". I don't know where they get their database from, but it's massive.
Think about it, what would it take for P2P to use encapsulation out over the internet. for it to build a "tunnel" to each supernode? that way, whatever they have out on the good ol' net to sniff these copywrighted songs out can't crack the encapsulation, and sees it as standard traffic.
Their site primarily promotes it as a network appliance, that "passively listens to all traffic on the network" and "block all P2P traffic or specify that P2P transactions are limited to a specified bandwidth" or "You may also choose to block only offending copyrighted works from being traded on your network". So it doesn't have to be installed on the client or server side. Any network provider, business, school, etc., could install this appliance.
I would like to borrow this technology to make a program that would automatically update the mp3 file info and filename. My collection is pretty messy and this could be the answer!
Nah, use n of m secret sharing. Multiple people share files containing totally random numbers, but provided you have n of those files, you can extract the data that's hidden in them.
It would be interesting to see the RIAA go into court claiming that distributing files full of random numbers is copyright infringement.
I wonder how accurate it can be, especially if the music being analyzed represents a soundalike cover of a song. I've had the (mis)fortune of hearing some "tribute" bands that sound remarkably like the originals, occasionally so much so that if you weren't aware it was a cover band you'd swear it was the real thing.
Even the musicbrainz site says in their faq that signiture colliisions are possible (but doesn't say how common).
The new file identification algorithm from Microsoft will say that any song with the words XFree86 will be identified as "Me so horny" from the "2 Live Crew".
I think the quote you are looking for is this one:
- Edwards' Law
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.
--with-fbi-bust-my-chops
make
make install
...is there something like open source for music development and distribution? Like some sort of... MusicForge?
How suprising, go figure. Do you wanne shepard sheep or individuals? What presents least problems?
This is probably why governments worldwide are totally paranoid when it comes to weed. It's absolutely harmless, but it makes people unconformative. Which in the eyes of any government probably is a bad thing.
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.
Can it read the properties then? or better yet zip it and re add the mp3 extension.
IT also seems to me that the p2p software being written now a days is taking things like this into consideration and what this leads to is legisslation on what can and can not be written ito software, it could become illegal just to have a non branded p2p program.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Audiogalaxy was the best! I have never ever on a network anywhere been able to grab so much weird and uncommon music. I never had any trouble finding what I wanted and new interesting things.
By far the best music-service ever. Ofcourse it was plain out illegal, and I guess the labels didn't like users getting accustomed to a decen't digital music-service lifestyle. It would seriously undermind their dinasour-assess.
The shutdown of AudioGalaxy is one of the sadest things I can recall ever happening to the net.
I want the net to be free again. *sigh*
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.
I say mod this guy up, +1 Funny!
But your method would never work. If we terrorized/DOSed the fingerprint-server the system wouldn't work... Oh wait...
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.
Surly a PERL script could fix all of MP3's in a matter of months. Then we'd all be sharing files on alternate networks with correct tags. FINALLY!
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
Century 12 tap is a peer to peer monitor.
Big deal. They can drop em in anywhere they want and watch anything they want and you'll never know it.
But it will probably cost a HELL lot more money, resources and time, than any anti-piracy scheme this world has seen so far.
Not to mention the infinity ways of DOSing such a service allready mentioned in this thread, apart from just actually using it, which should be pretty considarate DOSing itself.
Are they really transferring the burdon onto themselves voluntarely and not the consumer?
I'm confused, this must be a trick.
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.
Yes, encrypt. We shall see what will happen to DeCSS and XBOXes after encryption will become ellegal in America.
There you are, staring at me again.
Now that said, I do still agree with you, even with regards to Israel. I didn't always feel that way, but the more incursions into Palestinian territory and creation of Jewish settlements in said territory I have read about, the less sympathy I have for the Israeli government. The people, OTOH, both Palestinian and Jewish...
Sorry for straying OT.
It does indeed appear to be the U.S. dictating economic policy around the world. Shouldn't the EU recognize this and take action? I really wish it would, because that would force the U.S. to reassess it's own policy, maybe, and even as a U.S. citizen, that would be greatly beneficial to me. Frankly, I think 90% of our politicians could be charged with treason for putting their special interests ahead of the interest of the country.
Just my two cents worth...
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
Despite what the article says, the song does not identify "psycho-acoustical" properties of the music files, because that's impossible. Psychoacoustics is what happens inside your head when you hear something - if they had software that could figure out what you were thinking, I'm sure they'd have better uses for it than developing anti-p2p technology. Nope, they're looking at plain old acoustical properties.
On stereophonic equipment, the monaural sound obtained through multiple channels will enhance your listening pleasure.
Let me get this : .
If I download an LEGIT mp3, it get's uploaded in the same time to their servers for analisys ?
ok , makes sense
Who is paying for the bandwith that was consumed during the upload ?
NPR had a report this morning which included mention that soldiers in Iraq are buying truckloads of pirated CD's at $2 apiece. I don't see RIAA going after them anytime soon. Hmmm, double standards anyone?
Big Endian to little Endian and vice versa.
There's a growing sense that even if The Future comes,
most of us won't be able to afford it.
-- Lemmy
Don't different encoders have different algorhythms to deal with psychoacoustic properties? You can bet if it pleases the RIAA, it WON'T please the consumer, but thats no surprise, is it.
Show the RIAA your displeasure by boycotting purchase/download/distribution of RIAA affiliated artists work.
So if I'm downloading a song, and this program blocks me because it determines that the song is copyrighted. Oops, guess what, downloading a copyrighted song isn't illegal... unless one doesn't own the original medium (disc).
You could easily have 3rd party software which adds sufficient noise to a music file to kill the psychoacoustic model, but through the same software you can take it away once you've finished downloading.
You could also have some sort of public key in the ID3 tag so that you download an encrypted file and the decrypt it with that key.
You could make the first 5 seconds of music unrecognizable to the program, and then cut out those seconds with an MP3 editor or splitter.
The ways to ignore this POS legislation are just limitless.
This is not a troll. I really am interested in your logic.
How about these.
You bring your car to the garage. It gets fixed and the bill comes to some amount of money. You are expected to pay the mechanic this amount. Lets say it was all labor as well and no parts were replaced. You use your extra key and get your car back some night without paying the mechanic for the work he did. Did you just steal from him or did you just violate his right to collect the money you owe him. What is he no longer in possession of in this example? The car was always yours, you just took it back without paying the bill. If the answer is nothing then you did not steal from him although I think a court would disagree.
The following argument is a bit absurd but the point is made. Don't think about the details, think about the concept. Ignore that the charge uses $20 worth of electricity or the outlet is on the street.
Since many people claim that theft can only occur when a physical object is taken then how about electricity. Assume a city produces their own electricity via a solar grid. Say you are walking down the street. You see an outlet. You decide that you need to give your cell phone a quick charge and plug it in. You leave your cell phone there (because this is a perfect world and it won't get stolen) and it charges. When you get back there is a city employee there holding your cell phone (He unplugged it to plug his whatever in) telling you that you owe the City $20 for the electricity you used (your cell phone takes a lot of juice to charge). Did you just steal from the city or not? You didn't take anything "physical" from them.
All my *legally* downloaded XM, MOD, SYMMOD, and IT files sum up to about two gigs, and it'll run for about six days before repeating.
Some of it's crap, most of it's good. But almost all of it is original, and not something you'll hear on any of the top-20 radio stations.
Incidentally, does anyone know of a player for those file types that will take full advantage of my SB Live?
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
How much are we willing to pay in additional judicial expenses, delays in our court systems, and increased requirements for jail cells?
Taxpayers who elect politicians who profess a tough stance on the War on Some Drugs seem not to mind.
.. I guess we'll have to put all our mp3's into ZIP files and name them something like. "(songtitle)-zipped-rename mp3 to zip.mp3" The monitor thinks it's an mp3, it can't recognise it so it lets it go. This would work right?
---- "Excuse me. Where's the children's gun section?"
Patriot Act III
As part of the campaign to ensure homeland security the DOJ will be mandating the installation of camera's in every room in the US. These cameras will be used to ensure that all US laws and moral codes are observed at all times and to gather evidence for subsequent prosecution of offenders.
This cost of the installation will be deducted from your tax refund as your contribution to homeland security.
With this new technology the RIAA and DOJ will be able to ensure that the music you are listening to has been sourced from a Govt/RIAA approved vendor.
===---===
Together, we will drive the rats from the tundra.
I don't see how this would work on an open-source P2P project. As a project manager, I would require that the code be included, if mandated by law. However, because I'm open source, you as a consumer could remove said code and recompile. Voila. No more bloated code. Let them "legislate" the inclusion. The Open Source movement won't care, we'll include it, and then let you remove it if you want.
Perhaps, this scenario would provide those who fail to see the value in Open Source to "come around". Trying to legislate open source is like trying to legislate a persons thoughts. Can't be done reliably.
To know is to have knowledge....to understand is to be enlightened.
As the "War on Drugs" has shown, depite increasing sentences through the roof drug use is still increasing. Unfortunately noone wants to back off on these entences because they will a) look weak on crime, and b) annoy all those voters who are emplopyed by the DEA, the prisons, gun manufacturers, etc.
Recently a study in the State of California showed that despite the appeal of the "3-strikes you're out" law id has had a negligable (possibly even harmful) effect on crime. It has also cost the sate so much money that (before the gubernator arrived) there was open talk of dropping it. Haven't heard anything along those lines lately.
As for the other restrictions that you mentioned, the scary part is under the SSSCA and it's descendents they were proposing exactly that mandatory restrictions on tools for the sake of one or two corporations.
I don't bet that this will ever actually stop any piracy, but I bet it could be handy for fixing up all your tags!
Kazaa lite isn't as bad as Kazaa. Not only did Kazaa load my computer with spyware, but when I got rid of it with Ad-Aware, my network connection broke! Kazaa is evil, K-lite++ is, although not neccessarily good, better.
There should be a law requiring/prohibiting that (Please circle one)
I download a bittorrent of a gentoo live CD and it gets blocked because its the exact same info as the new Britney Spears album.
"And at the instant that you walk out of the store with your cart, every item in your cart (including the cart!) is magically duplicated back in its original positions on the store shelves for the next Slashdotter!"
Life is not a MMORPG. Bugs in the system that allow item duping are fine with me.
I believe really detecting a particular content is equivalent to the halting problem. Then again, so is virus detection. In other words, it's not doable in a really general case, but you can case by case it to some extent.
Anyway, if this starts happening, fileswappers will probably encrypt, or winnow and chaff, or steg their files.
encode the song backwards for sharing... their accustical analyzation scheme will be totally fooled.
then switch it around again for playing.. this process could even be greatly simplified with a couple winamp plugins.
send in the next victim please.
I say just encrypt the file and post the MD5..
Sure, many Windows users don't have a glue, but it doesn't take many. If the source were open, then someone would recompile it without the spy software installed, and on a p2p network it wouldn't take long before the other users had it too. After all, one thing the RIAA has done a good job of is make it well know that you don't want them tracking what you do with your computer, since apparently even innocent people have been targets of their expensive lawsuits. But the point isn't really if many people will do it, it's if any people will be able to do it. If they can mandate RIAA code in p2p software, then the next step is certainly to be to put a stop to open source code, since open source could allow a work-around.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Let's face it. Kazaa's busniess model is to make money on advertizing. No music file sharing means no clients, which means no revenue for Kazaa. They make money from illegal file sharing. They can't afford to have illegal file sharing stop.
Vote for Pedro
One word - gzip. Wait, SHHH, let them scam RIAA.
You don't need to scan the copyright database.
These aren't the files you're looking for.
Move along.
Hang on, i recently used Musicbrainz to do just that - scan my whole mp3 collection and compare it with an online fingerprint database. Well actually that was more so that it would automatically rename my files and add the correct id3 tags.
The point is, these file sharing clients aint just gonna get hacked to bits, we are going to take the piss so far as to actually use this system to make the filesharing network work better - someone will release a kazaa-lite style hacked client that uses the fingerprinting to correctly identify files, delete fakes, add meta-tags and generally make our lives easier. RIAA, suck my cock.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Maybe im talking crap but in my view, any politician who is so deluded that they think they can impose restrictions which amount to the same thing as book-banning should really not be working in the government. You wouldn't accept this kind of lunacy in any other profession - doctors, pilots, soldiers etc have to prove they are competent and even take regular evaluations, we cant just sit by while the people in charge fester away in their little world and loose all connection with the real world while affecting our lives on a daily basis. This isn't just about one thing it counts for all the stupid decisions being made out there.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
At least the technology demonstrated by AudibleMagic could have a good use (and no, I don't mean in P2P software, in fact count that whole idea out in this rant). It could be used as the next CDDB technology... Think of it:
Online databases of psycho-acoustical information on enormous amounts of music could be created (depending upon the amount of data needed to uniquely identify a particular song/piece). New software could be written to poll the database from your MP3 collection and automatically fill in the ID3 tags... It could have many powerful uses.
However, as I'm sure most would agree, it could also have many negative side effects, the big one being previously mentioned.
# fuser -v
#
...and how long before the government collects data identifying the songs you listen to and correlating that with political leanings? "Oh, that person listens to Ani DiFranco - must be an anarchist or communist. Better tap their phone."
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
For example could it tell that Vi*gra, V1agr-A and viA$gr*a are all the same word that I have in my blocking rules? Then it could read subject lines and block spam!
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.
The issue here is that congress can and undoubtedly will apply legislation to both the software design and network operations. I for one don't want either.
;)
The larger issue is the fact that the congress can apply legislation that cost the software manufacturers money. An online database serving that many requests per second is not a cheap operation to run, implying to me that this company will charge for use of it's service. Trying to charge the end users directly would be difficult. Charging for the SDK, and the number of hits by software package would be easier to accomplish.
In the past when congress decided to regulate an industry it was for the good of the public. Architecture and plumbing standards are examples of this.
This case however, cannot be in the interest of the public now matter how you stretch it. I'm of course not a lawyer, and congress would like us to believe they can do anything they want.
Intelligence is a matter of opinion.
a software technology that can't be beaten.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I've always found.. for the past couple of years.. that although maybe the masses are on kazaa, it seems there are more files on emule?
.. and it does download as fast as kazaa if you leave it on for a while.. people WILL be willing to wait that extra qeue. Why will they? because I did. I didn't like kazaa since even the lite version attacks the CPU power even when it is idle.
I don't know.. it could be that the masses are on kazzaa adn gnutella, but why are there so many rare files one emule?
I was annoyed with emule when I first ran it for a few months.. as it was slower than kazza. But it just depends on who has the file, since with edonkey some people put limits on the uploads (kb/s).,. But if I leave emule on for a while, suprisingly it picks up to be just as fast as kazaa.
People will not be afraid of moving to emule, since it has more files
I coudl care less if I have to wait a few seconds or hours extra in qeue.. if there are more files and the speed is generally the same or really close. And it seems to be that even 2 years ago emule had more files than kazza.. so I don't get why the masses are on kazza if there seems to be more files on edonkey.
This is immensely bad news for Metallica cover bands - if you're any good, you're doubly fucked because you're going to get sued by Lars and James and then your fans are going to get sued by the RIAA.
There are no karma whores, only moderation johns
Just use a SSH server to share music with trusted friends. It's almost impossible for anyone to work out what you're doing.
What about adding like 30khz blips in the song to mess with the recognition software? At that high of a frequency we wouldn't even here it.