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Professor and Student Thwart P2P File Sharing
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?"
The patent was apparently first filed for in 2000 (early days of Napster), so it may be that they were among the first to develop this. It'll be interesting to see how they try to enforce the patent rights...
IRC. Unless this thing can stop IRC, it's only making it harder for the casual filesharer. Determined individuals will just go elsewhere.
If there are 10000 bogus files, but only a handful that have more than 5 sources, chances are these are the real McCoy and all the others are the decoys.
:-)
And even if there are 10000 files around with a lot of sources for each file, I'm sure people will start trading files containing the RC5 checksums of real files, on IRC or something. Hell, they might even P2P the real-files index
In short: should the RIAA/MPAA and friends even adopt that technique, it'll give them only a very temporary reprieve. They really should realize the cat's out of the bag and they should start thinking of new business models around digital file sharing, not against it.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
To have shame requires you to have honor.
Wouldn't that be an example of prior art? If so it wouldn't cause much of a problem for them.
Either way, I have to wonder how effective this method would actually be. Surely I could get around it by simply downloading the file with the biggest number of sources?
It is like someone patenting the process of "harassing people". I don't know whether to cheer for it because it makes harassing more expensive, or to feel sad about the overall state of affairs at the USPTO.
I am sure there is plenty of prior art for this. DDOS, bogus uploads to P2P (e.g. people try to become the "supreme being" on kazaa by putting dummy files named after the latest hits). If the only difference is the "intent" and "amount" of the junk sent to P2P networks, granting a patent looks ridiculous.
However, if it there is a lawsuit between these guys and the MPAA/RIAA, I will cheer for the patent.
S
If you eliminate one technology, another one will pop up in its place. Maybe even just an improved version of the one currently in place! Since this has been done before, you'd hope that they did an improved version of it in some way, and that's how they got the patent? It hasn't worked yet, and it won't work anytime in the future either.
All this does is damage a network through crap flooding anyhow. It will kill freely distributed content as well as the content they are attacking. On the same note, I think that it's complete crap that you can patent something like that. Patent a means of attacking something? If they can patent this, I really need to patent my method of ridding people of underage drinking, known as firing a pistol at the containers that they are holding.
I use bittorrent for my content, and have no need for something that someone is trying to keep me from using, hearing, or seeing by eroding my privacy and rights. If they want to put a barrier between me and their product, I won't waste my time or money on it.
That's scary.
When someone uses P2P on Fastrack or other popular networks, generally the more mainstream a song the more bogus files there are. I can guarantee you that 90% of peers out there serving a popular song will have a bad (Beeps, static, sounds, etc. purposefully scattered through the song) copy.
Back a year or two ago, I remember encountering an mp3 file being served by over 1500 sources on FastTrack, and it was screwed up beyond belief.
I use Apache for all my file sharing needs. Anyone wanting to download anything from me needs either my domain name or IP address -- and has my word that the files are genuine.
Ultimately, the Internet will recognise the uploading of "poisoned" files as damage and route around it accordingly.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Things that are really, really hard to implement in a true P2P network:
- Global trust matrix
- Economy
- Authentication
These are hard because the equality of peers can always be exploited by users with malicious intent. They can join in the P2P network as multiple peers (if a network limits one user per IP, an attacker with multiple computers and sufficient resources can compromise). Remember that in a true P2P network everyone is equal - it is nearly impossible to implement schemes that avoid the Sybil attack.
You need a central certificate authority to validate the autheticity of users. And, that is a big no-no in P2P systems.
So, forget about trust matrix. You can't trust anyone in a true P2P network.
now supporting:
cmdrTaco for president '04
michael for oval office intern summer '05
My faith in the patent system decreses yet again.
I patented making MP3s full of shit noise and then naming them after known works of music? Couldn't the artists sue them for slander against their music? If I took a chior of mentally handicaped people, recorded some of their music, and distributed it as "Backstreet Boys - Every body now" (or whatever they name their stuff)... someone could take offense to that and probably take it to court.
Maybe - just maybe - this is a good thing. The question is, did it happen at a useful point in time, or is it now irrelevant?
First off, many P2P networks are smart enough to easily defeat this attack. Reputation tracking alone, out of several technologies already implimented to prevent this attack, is almost enough.
Keyword here: almost. I've gotten a number of "Excellent" rated files from kazaa and found them to have the same annoying screech-pop sounds and any other ones. I no longer pay any attention to whether or not a file is rated because it hardly makes a difference.
How is rating a file going to stop this? The only people who use it are the RIAA anti-piracy people. They get 50 people to rate it excellent, and then everyone downloads it. The find out its the same pop-screech sound, but they leave it on their hard drive and don't rate it down. Other people see that there is an enourmous bandwidth for this "excellent" file and figure its a sure thing. Wrong!
You're nothing; like me.
All it takes is someone to put it all together, most of the bits and pieces are already there. And that, is only a matter of time. Unfortunately, I suspect there will be some collateral damage:
They're now trying to cure what I would call light sniffles with heavy antibiotics when it comes to information control. One day, not so many years from now someone will point at the copyright holders and say: "You see the movie of this 4yo eating cum, that'll download if I double-click? We can't stop it, and it's all YOUR FAULT"
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Why would you email these people and complain? Applying social pressure isn't going to stop the march of progress any more than the RIAA sending nastygrams is going to stop me from adding code to P2P clients and working on approaches to counter attacks on P2P networks.
r s-can't-effectively-beat-it network will be reached. The RIAA/MPAA/people protecting content are guaranteed to lose. Even harsh legislation against copyright infringment just promotes increasingly more anonymized systems like Freenet.
:-)
Spamming is a known attack on most P2P networks, because such networks treat everyone with a certain level of (possibly undeserved) trust. It's not rocket science, and if people designing networks failed to take it into account and allowed it to be an effective attack, it's *their* problem (just as the RIAA devising a business system with expensive music and infeasible protection has copy protection as *their* problem).
This does nothing to solve the thing long-term.
Here is what will happen.
Initially, P2P networks took a "trust anyone" appraoch. (Napster, etc). This rapidly was shown to be infeasible, and systems allowing black/whitelisting users, allowing trusted endorsement of files (Sharereactor and similar), and allowing community rating (Bitcollider) popped.
Hale and Manes just took the obvious next technological step, which is to make it easier to attack the network -- have a system that learns what people are suckers for most, and to exploit it (well, and just about every other claim they could think of to throw in, but that's the meat of the patent). I think that it's absurd to make this patentable, frankly. These ideas are not only obvious, but have been floating around on P2P system development forums. Furthermore, the academic and business systems that we have rewards people like Hale and Manes for creating bullshit patents -- that's still not their fault. It's that of the people who have control over the patent process, which is ultimately all of us.
It's quite possible to counter whatever Hale and Manes are claiming is new and revolutionary. There are current systems like WASTE with simple trust systems -- users can be in or out, and anonymous users aren't trusted. It may take a trust network with non-binary trust (this person is *really* trusted to provide good files, this one not as much) and transitive trust. The schemes coming from Hale and Manes are quite beatable, though -- it's a losing position to be holding.
Anyway, after someone comes out with a trust system, people like Hale and Manes will then come out with patents on processes that demonstrate attacks on whatever statistical methods are used to assess trust in such networks.
The algorithms will be tweaked by P2P folks, and eventually a pretty-good-to-the-point-that-P2P-network-attacke
Content providers will be forced to move more towards service-oriented systems (you buy a music "service" with access to a vast music library, and then content creators and marketers are recompensed based on how much their content is used). It's not the end of the world for anyone, and the same cycle of upheaval and technological improvement has happened time and time again in many areas. In the end, we generally have a more effective system for all involved.
I personally *like* it when people run out and attack P2P networks. It drives people to do systems right, rather than just hack things up without a thought for security (and unlike a cracker breaking into a computer, someone attacking Gnutella doesn't prevent anyone from getting work done or expose personal data). I think that producing "properly built" networks that don't have such weaknesses is an absolute blast, a fun research topic, the side that gets all the love from people who are trying to toss data around, etc.
Heck, it might even be neat to work under Hale and try to thwart the latest in anti-sharing strategies that one of his other students has come up with.
May we never see th
Thats real academic merit. They took something that has been going on for years, patented it, and in the proccess pulled the internet deeper into the depths of distrust and garbage traffic.
I hate all software patents--I don't make exceptions based on who is hurt by the patent.
"Only your key is known to the central sites so that your identity remains anonymous but your habits can be tracked"
You contradict myself. You are not anonymous if someone knows who you are. You might get a feeling of anonymity because of the shelter provided by the powers to be. But, that is all at their mercy.
Don't confuse privacy for anonymity.
now supporting:
cmdrTaco for president '04
michael for oval office intern summer '05
What... It took a professor and a student to concieve of this? It's childs play, and issuing a patent for this sort of thing seems useless, but who cares. This technique won't work on all P2P networks. DirectConnect (DC++ anyway) shows a hash code along with the search results. Simply ignore the files that have the same size and different hashes. If you download the wrong file to begin with, then download the other heh. Plus, the DC hub daemons seem to only allow 4 search results per person searched, so at worst, you could get 4 bogus hits from any one source of bogusness. In the ongoing war between anti- and pro-file swappers, technology WILL escalate until someone stays on top, and my guess is techniques like this won't keep traders down for long before they solve the 'problem' of fake file shares.
Yeah, when the government and corporations can no longer censor the population, who will have power? Hopefully not the people, they don't deserve it.
Hell, as far as I'm concerned we should extend the laws of felons. Who knows what they could do if they got a hold of an mp3 (they'd probably share it) or a book (they'd probably photocopy it).
Perhaps we should have security clearances just for different types of books. I mean you don't want joe-average-schmoe to read a book on how to build a nuclear reactor do you?
This threat isnt going to keep me awake at night if it's confined to music, but as the article says,
Hale said the technology could be applied to protect all sorts of sensitive or confidential material.
This means we won't be able to trust the current generation of P2P networks for authentic news, commentary from reputable sources, free (as in either) software, accurate documentation for same, or any data that some powerful organisation doesn't want us to share. In many cases such forgeries would be illegal under copyright, trademark, defamation or competition laws, but proving which cuckoo laid the egg could be very difficult.
Ask me if I've been required to disclose any crypto keys.
> You need a central certificate authority to validate the autheticity of users.
A way-out is to make it expensive to infiltrate the P2P network at large-scale. For example,
files could have a quality record attached, that lists what each previous downloader voted
about the quality ("good" vs "fake" file). Cryptographic algorithms could be used to make it
excessively expensive to compute a valid quality record. Time for one computation should be
a decent portion of minimum download time, eg 10-60 minutes for a 700MB file. The P2P system
could pre-compute the vote record while downloading the file and then let the user make his
vote. If you were to insert fake votes into the system, you would have to go through the
expensive algorithms for each and every individual fake vote.
When searching a file, the P2P system could cryptographically verify the votes, and weed out
the "cheap" fake files (that didn't go through the expensive computation).
The cost of cryptographic effort could be configurable. The releaser of a file could judge
the risk of "his" file being attacked (and with how much effort), and thus choose a cost
setting that is low enough to be reasonable for the downloaders, but high enough to void
all attacks.
Problem solved - peer network users will quickly be able to excreed bogus files by declaring them as 'suspicous'. Quality content will flow to the top and will be shared more effectively. In fact, while this might throw a monkey wrench into existing clients and frameworks, it might actually lead to higher quality downloads.
Rather than authenticating 'good' users and 'bad' users with a review system like ebay, wouldn't it just make more sense to have a hash of each file shared, and then only download those files with a high number of users sharing it. Then all the spam files would have 1 or 2 copies each and the real files would have like 50+ copies.
How does this ruin the P2P network? It has absolutely no effect on the network and the underlying applications at all. It just ruins the copyrighted content on the network without doing anything to the network at all.
"I have a porkchop, you have a porkchop. I have a veal, you have a veal".
The courts, however, might rule that one cannot patent things such as this-- there's little-to-no qualitative difference between folks patenting this and me patenting a method for a DDOS or patenting a method used in a computer virus. Depending on the judge, they may be in for a surprise if their patent goes to court.
Morality hasn't been a factor in patents for ages, and was inappropriate when it was. You can patent bad things.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
That might be funny, if P2P were criminal.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
There are no grounds for a lawsuit against them if they were using the technology before the patent was pending: in that case, it would be "prior art", and the patent owner could in fact be penalized in court for not revealing the prior art in their patent application.
Don't sweat this one too much: it sounds like another case of the patent office being overworked and underpaid and issuing a stupid patent.
Until you can, it's just too unsafe for you to continue posting here.
(And before you tell me that there is is no difference between posting online and writing to your local paper -- our bodies have learned to adapt to print media, not to electronic communication.)
There are plenty of alternative technologies that don't involve the Internet at all.
Posting to Slashdot is just too unsafe to use.
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana