Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Professor and Student Thwart P2P File Sharing

Posted by timothy on from the oh-the-humanity dept.

Digitus1337 writes "Wired has the story. 'A computer science professor and graduate student have been awarded a patent for a method of thwarting illegal file sharing on peer-to-peer networks by flooding the network with bogus files that look like pirated music.' This raises the question of whether or not companies that are already using such techniques are in violation of the new patent. Good news for subscription services?"

5 of 382 comments (clear)

  1. Uh, prior-art? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    Spammers have been doing this for years, ever since Napster and Gnutella came out. And, people have been filtering it since then. Once a P2P system has some sort of trust system built into it, this becomes far less effective.

    1. Re:Uh, prior-art? by Gortbusters.org · · Score: 3, Informative

      This is true in both P2P networks as well as a challenge for large distributed systems. In fact, global operations are always a difficulty. Searching an entire P2P network is a hit or miss operation since you never know when one of your peers will be online/offline. Sometimes that's solved in the protocol, sometimes you need a global system with the protocol.

      One thing about P2P that I've found interesting is how P2P internet phones never really caught on yet. With something like Linphone and SIP, you can have a phone that looks like AIM/Yahoo/MSN. You just double click on a buddy and make a call. No toll charges, no centralized server keeping records of your phone call, pure communication at its best.

      --
      --------
      Free your mind.
    2. Re:Uh, prior-art? by arekq · · Score: 3, Informative
      It is definitely possible to have more than one file having the same MD5 hash, but it is practically impossible to find those files from the hash.

      So, if you just change the positions of the values within the file, it's extremely unlikely that it will have same hash.

      If someone managed to figure out a way to generate a file from a MD5 hash, then it will become useless. (IIRC there's a site that tries to find two files having the same hash, to test the reliability of MD5.)

  2. Not quite by vlad_petric · · Score: 4, Informative
    Patents are retroactive - they're effective from the application day, regardless of the time it takes to process them.

    So it's safe to put 5. Profit :)

    --

    The Raven

  3. but... by AnonymousCowheart · · Score: 3, Informative

    but, as soon as you get a bad download, you erase it, so people dont spread them. If you search for a song using say gtk-gnutella, just download the file that has the most sources. It's highly unlikely that 80+ people will have a bogus song under the file you're looking for. We're in trouble if they start sharing on multiple IP's though...