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?"

Comments

Great!

[nuclear305]

Now I know who to sue for permanent hearing loss from those annoying shrieks and beeps in those decoy files. Maybe I'll send them a nice Beach Boys CD filled with brown noise...

Re:Great!

[grepistan]

I agree, he is funny :) All that non-nuclear radiation out there is fine. I would be happy to stand outside the Van Allen belts in the solar wind while shining laser diodes into my eyes, but keep that naughty nuclear radiation away from me!

Re:Great!

[some guy I know]

How are you going to prove there is no chance of me getting cancer and dieing [sic] from the radiation released from a nuclear plant? Until you can, its [sic] just too unsafe

How are you going to prove that there is no chance of getting cancer and dying from posting to Slashdot?
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.

Uh, prior-art?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Uh, prior-art?

[jpu8086]

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.

Re:Uh, prior-art?

[Anonymous Coward]

"You need a central certificate authority to validate the autheticity of users. And, that is a big no-no in P2P systems"

You can still be authenticated and remain anonymous. Take slashdot for example. From this you can implement some type of karma (like slashdot) or review (like ebay) system so that users who fuck others fall into the background. Only your key is known to the central sites so that your identity remains anonymous but your habits can be tracked.

Re:Uh, prior-art?

[EeeJay]

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.

Re:Uh, prior-art?

[JamieF]

>You can't trust anyone in a true P2P network.

Man oh man... what is the world coming to when you can't trust anonymous criminals anymore?

Re:Uh, prior-art?

[rfmobile]

You need a central certificate authority to validate the autheticity of users. And, that is a big no-no in P2P systems.

Actually, you don't need a central CA - a distributed one will do. In other words, every peer implements their own "buddy list". The buddy list includes positives (confirmed trustworthy) and negatives (confirmed un-trustworthy). Instead of distrusting every peer, you can choose a list of peers from one peer you already trust, and build from there.

When performing a search, your P2P software might color code the results based on this list. Green for known good peers, red for bad peers/spammers/etc., and yellow for unlisted, unknown peers.

-rick

Re:Uh, prior-art?

[jpu8086]

"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.

Re:Uh, prior-art?

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:Uh, prior-art?

[Gortbusters.org]

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.

Re:Uh, prior-art?

[teklob]

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.

Re:Uh, prior-art?

[Feanturi]

I wonder if it's possible (I really don't know how an MD5 hash works) to download a trusted MP3, leave the ID3 tag intact but scramble the rest of the data and have it generate the same hash? If none of the values changed, just their positions within the file, could that work? It would come out of your MP3 player as total junk but be indistinguishable from a trusted file using current methods of p2p searching, you have to download at least some of it to confirm that it's not the right one. Could that be done? Pardon me if I don't understand how file signatures operate.

Re:Uh, prior-art?

[NoMercy]

There are many ways to make sure this doesn't happen, and inteligent use of P2P systems means it's very dificult.

Though it would be nice to be able to hear parts of a track as soon as a slice of 10 or more seconds is available to judge if it's total noise, and if there are bad parts to be able to mark that secion of the music as bad.

Re:Uh, prior-art?

[arekq]

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.)

Re:Uh, prior-art?

[bungley]

You need a central certificate authority to validate the autheticity of users. And, that is a big no-no in P2P systems.

Bollocks. You can use PGP and whatnot without a central authority, can't you? With p2p, all you require is to determine if a file can be verified to have been posted by a trusted user/handle. This does not necessarily imply a centralised authority. As far as I know, the completely decentralised freenet allows you to do precisely this. Sadly, it's slow as hell.

Re:Uh, prior-art?

[notsoclever]

It's possible to do what you describe, but barring any sudden breakthroughs in large-number factorization and other such things (or someone suddenly recognizing a weakness in the md5 algorithm), it'd take as long as 539514153540300709448526457749/N years to do using a cluster of N computers (assuming you can generate and md5sum 20 candidate bogus files a second, which is wildly optimistic). So, not terribly practical just yet. Though for a more optimistic look we can actually look at the real statistics. So, any candidate file has a 1 in 2128 chance of being the correct one, so the chances of getting a hit in N files is (1-2-128)N. Unfortunately, my TI-85 can't handle this level of precision, so actually computing this probability is left as an exercise for someone else.

Re:Uh, prior-art?

[Anonymous Coward]

How about pseudonymity? Like the old Freedom network from ZeroKnowledge, you have an identity on the network that can authenticate and gain a reputation, but there is no way to connect an identity on the network with an identity in meat-space (including an IP address).

It is a pseudonym, which has a continuous identity, personality, etc. but whose reference is unknown in terms of real name, etc.

This is all that is needed, not true anonymity.

Re:Uh, prior-art?

[notsoclever]

Argh, I thought /. allowed the <sup> tag.

That should read "1 in 2^128 chance," and (1-2^-128)^N.

Also, insert paragraph tags as appropriate. I really should have hit 'preview!'

Re:Uh, prior-art?

[notsoclever]

You've just reinvented kuro5hin.org. Congratulations.

Re:Uh, prior-art?

[Arker]

That might be funny, if P2P were criminal.

Re:Uh, prior-art?

[jacquesm]

thank you for giving me an excellent idea (well that remains to be seen :)

it should be possible to make that global trust matrix work, it just depends on how you define 'peer'. I'll have to think about this for a bit, but I have a gut feeling that it really can be done.

The 'classic' definition of one's peers are the people that you ALREADY have contact with, the internet definition of 'peers' is anybody else that is also connected. And at that level trust basically does not exist. But you can trust your friends, they can trust theirs and so on. A bit like what terrorist/espionage/criminals use, you 'vouch' for someone, and because of that you allow someone else to trust their data. A bit like a cross between napster and 6 degrees.

Re:Uh, prior-art?

[hak1du]

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.

Douceur's paper is irrelevant to this problem (in fact, I would argue that it is irrelevant to any problem, but let's not get into that).

So, forget about trust matrix. You can't trust anyone in a true P2P network.

That doesn't even follow from Douceur's paper. If we have exchanged keys, I have your identity and you have mine. I can determine whether to trust your identity based on your behavior using that identity. If that identity consistently sends me good MP3 files, I trust it, and if it doesn't, I don't. Whether you create other identities that I don't know about makes no difference.

Re:Uh, prior-art?

[jpu8086]

I was just talking about the Sybil attack in general. However, I see how that doesnt follow directly.

However, but do tell how do you trust the first time you swap keys? What if it an RIAA enforcer? And this doesnot have to just deal with mp3/audio files.

I was talking about a global trust matrix. There are many complications with this:

For example: Client A, B, C.

Client A trusts Client B and vice versa
Client A trusts Client C and vice versa

So, Client B is introduced to Client C by Client A.

However, there is a misunderstanding between Client B and Client C and they mistrust each other.

Now what?

Does B still want to trust A? Does C still want to trust A? Does A still want to trust either on of them?

Wow. This situation sucks.

Re:Uh, prior-art?

[Jordy]

So, forget about trust matrix. You can't trust anyone in a true P2P network.

Boy I was going to stay out of this but meh.

You don't have to have a binary representation of trust. You have a weighting metric. You also make every client look like two (or more) clients and connect to two separate segments of the network and ensure that messages are routed from one connection to the other correctly and without modification. If they are not routed correctly, the peer weight drops. If routed correctly, the peer weight increases. This really requires an anonymous network (onion-routed is nice, but the many alternatives will work) so that you can't tell that your two connections are from the same computer (obviously you can't connect to the same peer twice).

What do you associate the weight with? Well... both tokens (client-generated and obviously forgeable) *as well as* IPs. Sure some users on dynamic IPs get screwed, but no one ever said this was a perfect system.

Distributed trust gets complex. All of a sudden you have to deal with trusting the trust relationships of someone else and weighting those and combining them with scores you already have. There was a decent paper on it that you can find on the ACM somewhere.

Well then you get the issue of a malicious user connecting to a lot of peers and causing the peers they are connected to to lower their rating by altering messages. This is really where distributed trust helps, but even without it there is a good reason you use a weight and a reason why you do increase it.

This is not nearly impossible. It is hard and it sure as hell isn't efficient, but certainly much easier than nearly impossible. I've glossed over a lot of the heavy details, but this is slashdot and no one reads these things anyway. :P

Re:Uh, prior-art?

[senatorpjt]

Generally, when this happens, the spam files have 50+ copies and the real files have 1 or 2.

Re:Uh, prior-art?

[Nogami_Saeko]

I thought I saw an essay on Fravia's old site a few years back about faking out checksums. That may not have been for MD5s though...

Looked for it on a mirror, but I couldn't find it.

N.

Re:Uh, prior-art?

[vegetablespork]

And what happened to the old Freedom network? It was conveniently shut down due to "lack of a market" right after 9/11. Can't have Joe Average with strong anonymity!

Re:Uh, prior-art?

[gl4ss]

huh? that's just bullcrap.

What he meant was that it can be known that mr X is mr X(and all the files signed by mr X are really from mr X, and not some bogus mr Y), but not that mr X is mr bill jones from dullville(there's couple of proof of concept projects out already, some that saturate the bandwiths with bogus data if nothing else is moved so if you can just monitor 1 user you can't even know if he is transmitting or proxying anything.).

sure if you raided his home or controlled the WHOLE network you might find that out.

besides, as to the subjec at hand: unfortunately warez circles are pretty good at self moderating the bogus files out where it matters.

Re:Uh, prior-art?

[mrogers]

You can avoid the Sybil attack by only connecting to people you know in real life, but obviously you lose the main advantage of a peer-to-peer network that way: the ability to find strangers and their files. However, with careful design I believe you can still communicate (and share files) with strangers across a trust network - that's what I'm attempting to do in my PhD project.

Some packets have to travel several hops over the trust network, so you have two new problems: sharing the bandwidth and finding short routes.

The first problem is solved by requiring every participant to contribute as many resources to the network as they use. You do this by charging your neighbours for forwarding their packets, and paying them to forward your packets. You're free to set the price as high as you want, and they're free to send the packets by a cheaper route, so you're in competition with their other neighbours to carry their traffic. The payment happens hop-by-hop so you don't need a digital currency, you just keep score with each of your neighbours.

The second problem (finding short routes) is solved by flooding, because that's a good way of finding the lowest-latency route in a dynamic network. But you don't want to flood the entire network because that kills scalability. Instead, anyone who wants to receive connections sends out periodic advertisement broadcasts. Each node that receives the advertisement adds an entry to its route cache. Anyone who wants to establish a connection broadcasts a search for a node with a route to the destination. If the search reaches a node that has seen the advertisement, it proceeds along the cached route to the destination. Since the broadcasts only need to overlap at one node, the diameter of each broadcast is on average half the diameter of the network, so the traffic scales according to the square root of the number of nodes, which is better than unlimited flooding but still not great.

You don't necessarily trust people more than one hop away, so you need end-to-end proof of delivery using digital signatures. When a packet is acknowledged, each node along the route updates its route cache (even the nodes that weren't in range of the original advertisement), so finding a route to a well-known destination just requires finding someone who's communicated with it recently.

Re:Uh, prior-art?

[mrogers]

Some checksum algorithms aren't designed to be collision-resistant, but it's a key property of cryptographic hashes like MD5 and SHA-1.

Re:Uh, prior-art?

[matt_wilts]

From the nunber of crappy rips, files with the wrong titles, etc, that I've seen on Kazaa before now, I'd say that this wouldn't work because it's obvious that there are an *awful* lot of people out there who seem to just be collecting files without actually checking their quality and/or content!

Matt

Re:Uh, prior-art?

[object88]

They applied for patent in 2000. Was anyone doing it before that?

Re:Uh, prior-art?

[Some_Llama]

Well I have downloaded a number (3, 4? i dunno i uninstalled it because i hate spyware) of songs from kazza that had the first 20 seconds or so of normal music, then the rest was that awful screeching sound...

Patent Date

[stevemm81]

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...

Re:Patent Date

[DissidentHere]

It would still be a stupid patent, even if they filed for it in 1990. The idea is not novel, the idea is to increase the noise to the point that the signal is hard to find. The government did this a long time ago with radio/radar jamming. Its not a new or novel idea, just a new implementation. And it is really easy to get around, the P2P network (users) just adapts and finds a way to identify the real thing.

Additionally, the bogus files will not survive because people will just delete them once they realize they are bogus, thus they will not propagate as fast as real files, and will eventually die off. You'd think these acedamians would realize that.

I don't use P2P myself, but I don't think the RIAA would have as much to worry about if they put out some music worth paying for. I'm happy to pay to support artists I like, and iTunes is pretty damn good, but c'mon, the only way I'd buy anything by Brittany Spears is for 30 minutes alone with her to do my bidding.

Re:Patent Date

[Mikkeles]

It's called "jamming" and has been used for many years; electronically, ever since the military has used radio.

This can only be good news for fileswappers. Maybe

[Raindance]

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. The news here is not about the technology used, it's the patent itself.

With that said, this is then a barrier to entry for Overpeer, MediaDefender, and like companies- either they convince these folks to license this technology or they'll probably face a lawsuit (depending on whether they're infringing currently, which is probable).

So yeah, this is good news for P2P filesharing specifically, and P2P networks in general, as being a network disrupter is probably more costly because of this patent.

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.

RD

Dual use

[Anonymous Coward]

Something like this could also be used to confuse the RIAA with their obviously unresearched lawsuits. Hmm...

Good thing I use

[Anonymous Coward]

IRC. Unless this thing can stop IRC, it's only making it harder for the casual filesharer. Determined individuals will just go elsewhere.

Re:Good thing I use

[fafaforza]

Sssshhhhhhh-utup...

Technology Lifespan

[BCoates]

1. Invent product
2. Deploy into market
3. Product becomes obsolete
4. Patent awarded

Re:Technology Lifespan

[Epistax]

Nowadays:

1. Come to a conclusion.
2. File for a vague patent.
3. Wait until many people come to the same conclusion independently.
4. Sue them all.
5. Profit.

Phase 2 of the plan...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Ladies and gentlemen of the RIAA, we will be happy to allow you to license our patent to continue your technology-based counter-p2p operations.... for ONE BILLION DOLLARS!" [touch pinkie to corner of mouth, for added effect]

And of course, phase 3: Profit!!!!

Re:Phase 2 of the plan...

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

we will be happy to allow you to license our patent to continue your technology-based counter-p2p operations.... for ONE BILLION DOLLARS!" [touch pinkie to corner of mouth, for added effect]

It's a technology for p2p Haters, therefore we shall call it "Preparation-H"! Because it's good on the whole.

Re:Phase 2 of the plan...

[Anonymous Coward]

Easily enough done. All they have to do is stop contacting a couple more artists about their royalty payments.

Would it really matter?

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

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.

Re:Would it really matter?

[Coke in a Can]

It's really hard to checksum MP3s, though. First thing I do after downloading an MP3 is change the ID3 tags to my liking, which changes the file, and generally makes it unique, with only one source, me.

Re:Would it really matter?

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

True true, but a majority of people don't do what you do. Proof is, there are files with kajillions of sources: those are untouched files, and they're usually what people go for.

What you do, in effect, is diluting my ability to download the file from other sources than you, because most likely you're the only person to have that version of the file. Which in turns diminishes the overall value of P2P, and also hurts you because nobody downloads from you, therefore you have a lesser rating to download from other people as a result.

Re:Would it really matter?

[ArkanWindsong]

containing the RC5 checksums of real files, You mean MD5 checksum?

Re:Would it really matter?

[iammaxus]

dl kazaalite and try it. Im afraid your wrong, in general, not only is the file with the most sources the spoofed one (if the record companies are spoofing that file at all) but the top _few_ files are the spoofed ones.

Re:Would it really matter?

[John Starks]

It's easy to write a script that checksums the MP3 data while ignoring the ID3 tags.

Re:Would it really matter?

[Nugget]

No, it's pretty much impossible to do this unless you plan to download all the files first which sort of defeats the purpose of the checksumming.

Re:Would it really matter?

[LordK3nn3th]

Hell, they might even P2P the real-files index :-)

Actually, there are many sites out that that index P2P files. Sharereactor was a popular edonkey one that was recently taken down.

Re:Would it really matter?

[Coke in a Can]

"and also hurts you because nobody downloads from you, therefore you have a lesser rating to download from other people as a result"

Not really. I've got over 30GB of files shared, not just music, and there's never any shortage of people wanting my files - my main eMule queue is 2295 users long at the moment.

Re:Would it really matter?

[ghack]

IRC is the best way for trading files anyway...

It is wiser to use that than p2p clients...

Re:Would it really matter?

[SiMac]

No, it's pretty much impossible to do this unless you plan to download all the files first which sort of defeats the purpose of the checksumming.

Not if the checksumming mechanism is built in the client.

Of course, what you would do is say the checksum of the file is the checksum of a real file, but then actually send a file which is just pops and scratches. I'm sure there's some way around this too, though.

Re:Would it really matter?

[benna]

I don't know what any of you are talking abuot. I've never downloaded a fake song. Sometimes movies are mislabeled but I no longer use p2p for that.

Re:Would it really matter?

[in7ane]

It's easy to write a script that checksums the MP3 data while ignoring the ID3 tags.

No, it's pretty much impossible to do this unless you plan to download all the files first which sort of defeats the purpose of the checksumming.

Fortunately you are wrong, if this is implemented within the clients then the checksums sent across the network will be of the actual mp3 data without the id3 tag. It can even be implemented gradually - if implemented: send both checksums, when comparing use the mp3-only checksum if available, etc.

Re:Would it really matter?

[MoonBuggy]

But it's the P2P client that hashes the files and compares the outcome. If the script is embedded in the client program then there will be multiple sources with different ID3 tags not being an issue.

Re:Would it really matter?

[nkh]

And what about the SHA-1 checksums used in the BitTorrent protocol? It's supposed to detect defective packets, it should drop fake packets too?

Re:Would it really matter?

[Nugget]

Replying to all three of you...

I am aware that client and protocol changes could, if embraced by the userbase, incorporate this sort of refinement to the system. I interpreted the original poster, however, as meaning that it would be trivial to do as a person seaching for a file.

While you can argue that he was vague I didn't take the phrasing "write a script" to mean that he was talking about changing the protocol and everyone's client software.

Re:Would it really matter?

[Wooky_linuxer]

Pardon me, you really wrote _should the RIAA/MPAA even adopt that technique_ ? Kazaa is full of bogus files right now. Try to download, say, an U2 song from it and you''ll see.

Re:Would it really matter?

[_Shorty-dammit]

Shareaza already has the capability to ignore tags when making/checking the checksum value.

Re:Would it really matter?

[tepples]

WinMX has had no significant spoofing activity. The fake files seeded by the record labels of Barenaked Ladies ("Pinch Me") and Madonna ("American Life" => "What the fuck do you think your doing?") were quickly marked as "Promo".

Re:Would it really matter?

[Jugalator]

It's really hard to checksum MP3s, though. First thing I do after downloading an MP3 is change the ID3 tags to my liking, which changes the file, and generally makes it unique, with only one source, me.

Yes, but since I doubt the majority are as careful as you to fix metadata (at least past experience on P2P nets seem to show this), the "real" music in its most spread version often still have sources in the hundreds for mp3 music.

Re:Would it really matter?

[AdamPiotrZochowski]

so you are one of the losers who keeps changing the id3 tags.. ;D

but seriously, its not like its magic to create a checksum of only
music frames of mp3s. This has been done few times ago, for example
checkout crc authentication built to mp3, or better yet, use a ready
tool such as
linux -> mp3bookhelper
windows -> mp3-vaccinator

Another way is to compare tree hashes of files. A tree hash is where
you break a file into a binary tree, where each leaf is a hash of a
segment of a file. You combine the hashes of each leaf to get a node
hash. All the way until you get the root node hash. With a tree hash
its quite efficient to figure out what part of file is different and
needs a redownload. That is assuming you are using id3v1 which does
not change file size. This is yet another reason to avoid
id3v2/Ape systems.

--
/apz, "Dishonor will not trouble me, once I am dead." -- Euripides

Re:Would it really matter?

[Gortbusters.org]

Sounds like you need to get your act together and pirate more songs haha!

Most mainstream songs (i.e. ones on the radio) have a large fake song:real song ratio. The methods of 'fakeness' vary:

• Beeps - nothing like some high volume beeps to destroy your speakers/headphones/ear drum
• Intro, then silence - Looks like a valid song, sounds like a valid song, but after 15-30 seconds it goes silent
• Varied Silence/feedback play: I don't know how they do it, but seems like some of the fake songs will play no matter where you start playing them from, but after a few seconds they will either give the feedback sound or go to silence
• Repeat the Chorus: This one is sometimes a hidden treasure. Most songs have a chorus that's normally sung/played over and over in the song. BUt the fake mp3 just repeats the chorus for the entire song! The good news is that if you like the song for its chorus, you may be lucky enough to find a pure chorus version of it, WOOHOO!
• Mysterious WMA files: try and play these on windows and it just sends you to an MSDN site. I never play an mp3 file with a valid proxy setting though, just incase they check those logs...

Lately, I don't see many valid songs at all. All the fake ones are on servers with tons of bandwith, so they download almost immediately. The good news is that fake songs usually have the standard format: "Artist - Song Name", where real songs have something that someone might have actually done themselves "01-Artist_Song_Name' or '[Rock]-Artist_(Album)-Song-Name'... but not many people share that, and the one guy that does seems to transfer at 3-5kb/s :(

Re:Would it really matter?

[kisielk]

You forgot one:

Repeat the first 15-30 seconds of the song over and over again. These are particularily annoying because you may initially flag a song as good if you preview the first bit of it, only to find out later that it's a spoofed version.

Re:Would it really matter?

[ciroknight]

That doesn't make it any harder to checksum the MP3. Changing the metadata doesn't change the data. If anyone implemented a smart MP3 checksum program, it'd simply remove any ID3 tags and checksum what's left: the actual frames of music.

Re:Would it really matter?

[Bastian]

So don't checksum the ID3 tags.

Still, I think there's probably a better way to fingerprint an MP3 than MD5. Maybe something that can recognize two different MP3's recorded using different encoders of the same song are the same song.

Re:Would it really matter?

[ciroknight]

How on earth does that defeat the whole idea of checksuming? A "checksum" is defined as A simple error-detection scheme in which each transmitted message is accompanied by a numerical value based on the number of set bits in the message. The receiving station then applies the same formula to the message and checks to make sure the accompanying numerical value is the same. If not, the receiver can assume that the message has been garbled.. When a user wants to download a song, s/he generally wants the whole song, and not just a segment of it. Therefore, the whole value of the song is checksummed, not just the packet. (well the packet is too depending on the protocol, but this isn't what's in question.)

So simply, look at the problem again, and then post.

Re:Would it really matter?

[Nasarius]

Use eMule/aMule. Download entire albums. Problem solved.

Re:Would it really matter?

[Nugget]

Way to miss the point.

In this context the hash is being used as metadata which is used by the user to evaluate the file prior to downloading it. The hash acts as a way to confirm that the file is what it claims to be (through a simple consensus method). The value of the hash is that it might allow the user to avoid downloading a file which is not what it claims to be.

If you have to download the whole file then the purpose of having the hash in the first place is ruined.

We're not talking about ensuring the integrity of the file transfer, we're talking about assurances on the file's contents.

So simply, review the context before you jump into a discussion.

Re:Would it really matter?

[benna]

I guess its just that I don't listen to top 40 radio music. When they start making good new music that they play on the radio i'll start downloading it.

Re:Would it really matter?

[BCoates]

a progressive hash works just as well on the audio-only bytes of an MP3 as it does on a whole file or any other data. The only hard part is that the various hashing apps need to be able to crack open an mp3.

A clever file-sharing app would 'canonicalize' the data it gets by seperating out volatile metadata like id3 tags and compressors/archivers (.zip, .tar.gz, etc) and have one hash for the meat of the file and one hash for the file and its metadata together. This would reduce meaningless duplicates like the guy that's in love with lame formats like RAR or who always changes his ID3 tags, but not let garbage data in.

Re:Would it really matter?

[upside]

The solution would be to have a "raw download" section on your HD separate from your "personal use" folder. Of course this requires more HD space.

I wonder if this system thwarts the review functionality in eDonkey, where you can leave comments for others users to see. Bogus files tend to have a red exclamation mark next to them.

Also, DC++ hubs are heavily moderated and users with bogus files get kicked quickly.

I'm tired of P2P myself, can't be bothered anymore with either music or movies. I just don't listen to them anymore. Internet radio is a lot more convenient than fiddling with tags or compiling playlists.

Re:Would it really matter?

[Coke in a Can]

I wouldn't change the tags if 95+% of the MP3s I download didn't have a title of "Artist - Title" and the rest blank. Or really off caps. Or bad spelling. If I find a file with the artist correctly spelled in the artist field, and the title correctly spelled in the title field, and any other details not messed up, I'm happy and I don't change it.

Re:Would it really matter?

[ducman]

I do the same thing. So why isn't there some way to checksum just the music part of the MP3, so that the checksum doesn't change when the tags do?

Safe File Share

[toadywonders]

I switched to using media search engines like Singing Fish and altavista. It may be a limited selection, but it doesn't have the crap and security flaws P2P has.

Re:Safe File Share

[ciroknight]

Not only that, media search engines are so centralized if the RIAA giant launches on it, it's toast. P2P is really the only thing that's still legal for trading anything, and everyone knows this. P2P doesn't really have as many security flaws as you think, but it does have trust problems that most other forms of data transmission don't. You can never be too sure who the data's coming from, and whether or not it can be considered good data.

Trust systems could be added to Kazaa or any other network really, but the problem is all the circumventers out there really don't like this, because they want that level of obscurity. That's why we really need P2P systems built from the ground up with this trust relationship in place, like WASTE.

Re:When will this end?

[Anonymous Coward]

To have shame requires you to have honor.

Prior art?

[adam mcmaster]

This raises the question of whether or not companies that are already using such techniques are in violation of the new patent.

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?

Re:Prior art?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well considering that a patent is valid from the day that it is applied for if it is granted, if they developed the technology after the patent was applied for they would be in violation--not prior art. This is of course one of the many reasons that software patents are as retarded as Steinbeck patenting the literary style he used in "Of Mice and Men".

Re:Prior art?

[pantycrickets]

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?

I think everyone here is overlooking the most dangerous attack on these systems. Which I believe to be currently implemented. It isn't that the RIAA or whoever is sharing a big folder of fake songs, waiting for idiots to keep downloading them. It's that they are hosting fake songs disguised and checksumed as the real files. So when you see a file with 100 sources and you start to download, eventually you will pull down a 10k chunk from the RIAA lackey's, which is where you get your snap, crackles, and pops.

The fact that a file has more sources actually makes it a more likely target for this attack for two reasons. First they will be corrupting a more popular file, and second their deception will go unnoticed.

Isn't it a basic part of patent law...

[iammaxus]

...that if you can prove the technique was in use prior to someone else claiming to invent it, that they cannot patent it? Meaning there is no way for this guy to patent it, or at least the p2p networks can argue that they cannot be charged royalties or be in anyway affected by this professor having a patent?

Re:Isn't it a basic part of patent law...

[iammaxus]

well apparently what i posted is meaningless because it says the professor patented this in 2000 which im almost defenitley sure is at least a year or two before the record companies started doing this.

Re:Isn't it a basic part of patent law...

[Joffrey]

>>>if you can prove the technique was in use prior to someone else claiming to invent it, that they cannot patent it?

If in PUBLIC use, you're correct. If in use, but with the specifics secret from the public (i.e., a random observer wouldn't be able to discern that this was being done in the claimed manner), then it does not preclude patentability.

Not quite

[vlad_petric]

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 :)

Re:Not quite

[sydb]

Don't you need:

4.5. Sue somebody

?

Re:Not quite

[Joffrey]

Actually, that's incorrect. You can only enforce a patent once it's issued, and damages are not retroactive prior to issuance.

You're thinking of the rule that your priority date is effective as of the date of application.

Re:Not quite

[BillyBlaze]

Nowadays that's implied.

Uh...

[Cyno01]

I hope everyone sees he good side to this. They can sue the RIAA for patent infringment. Not that abuse of the patent system is a good thing... Hmm, i'm conflicted.

Re:Uh...

[Spetiam]

IANAL, but...i don't think you can sue someone for patent infringement if they were doing it first. anyone know how prior art plays into this?

Re:Uh...

[sydb]

Don't be conflicted. Software patents are bad.
Therefore this patent is bad.

The artists and producers who don't like you downloading their music are also bad. Don't support them, even if it's just by... downloading their music! (Metallica comes to mind). So don't use Kazaa or whatever, use the likes of Magnatune. By supporting independent freedom-loving musicians and producers, you register your anti-RIAA vote.

Finally, anything which attacks peer-to-peer networks will cause evolution of those networks, leading to faster, stronger, better peer-to-peer.

It's a win-win-win situation!

Does this mean

[ciroknight]

They're going to put an end to what the RIAA's doing with Kazaa and other sharing agents now, or that they're going to extend it to other Filesharing networks? And what about having a decentralized file signature service which checks signatures of the songs against known good and bad songs?

The signing program would kinda work, but it'd have to be more centralized than most P2P networks for security reasons... more of a reason to move to Secure P2P like WASTE.

Is this legal?

[wwahammy]

I don't know if anyone has mentioned this but couldn't this be illegal? You're lying and making someone spend money ( bandwidth=money) for something that is just a waste. Whether you're trying to commit a crime or not, its still fraud. Isn't it possible that its also violating laws regarding computer communications crimes?

Re:Is this legal?

[Jedi Alec]

ofc. it's legal. a heck of a lot more legal than all the *real* britney spears mp3's on the networks anyway. basically what they're doing is sharing non-copyrighted material on a p2p network, which happened to be what the network was for *officially* anyway. just because the filenames are bogus doesn't mean anything, p2p networks hardly come with guarantuees....

Re:Is this legal?

[wwahammy]

I'm not saying the 'britney spears' mp3's are at all legal. I'm saying that if you are on a mass scale telling people something is what it isn't and having them spend money on it (using bandwidth) aren't you committing fraud?

Re:Is this legal?

[servoled]

You're lying and making someone spend money ( bandwidth=money)

How exactly are you making someone spend money? There is absolutely nothing about this that forces the users to download the files that you post. All they are doing is posting a file, if you download it and don't like it that's your own damn problem. Since they never implied any value to their "service", made any type of garuntees and never accepted any money from you for accessing their file, on what basis do you possibly think you have to cry fowl?

Re:Is this legal?

[MechaStreisand]

Are you serious? Since when are they telling people what it is? It's just a filename - it doesn't necessarily have to be anything in particular. There's no guarantee, and hence no fraud. Besides, they used their bandwidth of their own volition, trying to download something without knowing what it is. You can't hold the jammers responsible for something that's your own goddamned fault.

Mixed feelings!

[sisukapalli1]

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

Prior art?

[Petronius]

One could almost argue that it's the equivalent of creating bogus web pages filled with keywords designed to skew rankings of a search engine. More generally: creating noise in a communication channel. Whoa! I'm glad we have patents for these innovations.

False patent

[Orion Blastar]

This is called a Cuckoo's Egg and many people have done it already.

The Definition says:

A cuckoo egg is an MP3 file that typically contains 30 seconds of the original song with the remainder of the song overwritten with cuckoo clock noises, white noise, and/or voice messages such as, "Congratulations, you must've goofed up somewhere." Ideally, a cuckoo egg should have the same playing length as the music it pretends to be. The purpose of cuckoo eggs is to deter the downloading and sharing of MP3 files using Napster and similar approaches.

Typically, a Napster user downloads an MP3 file and sometimes share it with others before listening to it. Recognizing this, a cuckoo egg creator creates the cuckoo egg to look exactly like a real MP3 file. The user then unknowingly shares the cuckoo egg with other unsuspecting users spreading the cuckoo egg like a virus. Unlike a virus, cuckoo eggs do not damage computers, but simply annoy and waste the time of those who download the files.

The Cuckoo Egg Project began with Michael and Stephanie Fix. Stephanie Fix is a musician who is concerned about the illegal availability of copyrighted music through Napster. The concept centers on the idea of how a real cuckoo bird lays its eggs in another bird's nest. To the Fixes, the Napster system is like a huge nest of MP3 files, a perfect environment in which to lay cuckoo eggs

The first cuckoo egg was laid on June 10, 2000. Since then, Napster users have posted hundreds of angry messages at the Cuckoo Egg Project's Web site. Whether it's deterring them from downloading other songs has not been determined.

First spotted in June 10, 2000, so the patent is a false or fradulant one.

Re:False patent

[crisco]

Patent was filed in 2000, so it will have to come down to the month and day it was filed.

Besides, I didn't know you could get a patent on telling a lie and then inventing lots of extra crap to reinfoce the lie. Thats all this is.

Re:False patent

[eyeball]

You:
First spotted in June 10, 2000, so the patent is a false or fradulant one.

From the article:
Hale and Manes filed their patent in 2000 and it was awarded earlier this week.

Pretty close actually.

Re:False patent

[John3]

I'd be real interested in seeing exactly when they filed, considering that my brother and I came up with the Cuckoo's Egg Project. IMHO it's not a patentable idea, but try telling that to the US Patent Office.

Re:False patent

[globalar]

Here's what I don't understand. All the pieces of this system are basically already implemented. The P2P clients are available, the spamming system is in place, and using bad data is nothing new. So how can adding these altogether in a single system make a patent? Isn't that like peanut butter, bread, and jelly? It sounds more like a product than any big idea.

Re:False patent

[JasonEngel]

Sometimes I just do not understand Slashdotters. Someone finally comes up with a patent and is in a position to PREVENT other people from posting dummy files to P2P networks. It happens to be a patent, so all of a sudden, slashdotters automatically jump on it and call it bad, hideous, etc, and badmouth the people who received the patent.

The knee-jerk reaction of the people on this site can sometimes be astoundingly stupid.

Is it a bad patent? Yes. Can it be used to prevent people/organizations from flooding P2P networks with false files? Yes.

Now. Stop. Think.

Who does this bad patent affect and who does it benefit?

Re:False patent

[John3]

Found the patent online and they filed it in August 2000. That's after we got plenty of press including a Slashdot article that brought our server to it's knees and attracted a fair number of DDOS attacks. :-)

Re:False patent

[servoled]

From claim 1:

evaluating the effectiveness of said shared decoy media file in inhibiting the identification and retrieval of proprietary media via said automated search engines; and

interactively modifying process configuration parameters to influence the effectiveness of inhibiting said identification and retrieval of proprietary media via said automated search engines.

How does your Cuckoo Egg do either of these steps?

Re:False patent

[rmohr02]

I hate all software patents--I don't make exceptions based on who is hurt by the patent.

Re:False patent

[91degrees]

That's something I can see working.

Just supplying a fake file with no music seems like it would never work, simply because there are a lot more file sharers than there are people trying to stop them, and people are really quite likely to isten to at least the first few seconds to check that their downloaded file was the one they thought it was.

The Cuckoo Egg seems to have worked out a solution to this. I'm quite impressed with the idea. Still not sure it's going to prevent me from downloading music, but I feel it's certainly worth a try. (Yes, I download music. I also realise it's not justifiable, and therefore any reasonable attempts to stop me are perfectly acceptable.)

Re:False patent

[John3]

LOL...we were merely pointing out the obvious flaws in the P2P networks, getting a bit of free publicity, promoting Stefanie's music, and having a bit of fun. And, we put our names out there rather than being an anonymous coward.

Good Idea But....

[Nikker]

Let the cat and mouse game begin!!

Now if we look at the garbage that they will be sending over our precious P2P networks they do have to make some choices...

What protocol??

What file names do they impersonate?, if this is done manually that would definately suck

Will they be able to avoid file hashing (used by E-Mule et al)

even if they can P2P *Pirates* can also use special naming conventions try adding a special chars

Now other than polluting the network and assuming this gets enough hype (RIAA will *love* this) they should be able to get bandwith no probs..

but other wise all they have is some kazaa kiddies with mixed up backstreet boys tracks it saturating the worlds bandwith worth it? They should know by now supply and demand will give us more and more stronger protocols

This is a good idea but will it last?

Hashing

[Datasage]

Just compare the files using a hash. It would be hard to create a file that would produce the same hash, unless you hacked the client.

Bad files would be less likly to be shared than good ones. If a files has fewer sources, its more likely to be fake.

Re:Hashing

[ciroknight]

problem: hash injection. write a program that, when ran, virally or not, would replace the hash tables within the client with bad hashes. this instantly stops the client from accepting any files except bad files. even in a system where the hashes arent held by the user, but the user can vote on good or bad hashes, these kinds of p2p viruses can really cause some serious damnage to the network.

One good think kazaa implemented (and was instantly client hacked for) was that sharers got higher precedence in downloading. They really should take the next step to sharers of good files get precedence. But then you have hacks like botvoting, and simply reverse engineering the protocol used and setting the variable in memory to whatever the top limit is. That's the problem with most p2p systems.

but...

[AnonymousCowheart]

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...

Re:but...

[ticktockticktock]

You are forgetting that peers are generating the results and relaying results from other peers. Nothing stops a rogue person from modifying a gnutella client to look for certain searches and then prevent them from going beyond their peer and simply send back garbage results with hundreds/thousands of fake sources for the fake file.

Usenet newdgroups, anyone?

[Cryofan]

I do not use kazaa because of the RIAA lawsuits. But Usenet seems perfectly useful to me....

Good news for subscription services?

[SoLoatWork]

No, good news for Direct Connect.

Re:This technique won't work

[DaHat]

True, but that assumes that you check each file when it's done.

I know plenty of people that will queue up many things at a time and check in on them in a day or two, during that time most if not all of the files would be completed and the good ones along with the bad would be available to the system.

The only way to 'beat' this system would be to check each of your files before they get shared.

P2P spam

[whovian]

From the article It's like looking for a needle in a haystack.

Much like legitimate email in our inboxes.

Re:P2P spam

[incom]

I just hope they don't start making fake songs containing spam adverts, and spreading them on the p2p networks.

When will they get it?

[HolyCoitus]

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.

Re:When will they get it?

[JasonEngel]

My god, you just don't get it.

Stupid Stupid Stupid.

Did you stop to think about this patent for a moment? Having the patent means they can now PREVENT anyone else from flooding P2P networks with false files.

Re:When will they get it?

[HolyCoitus]

Do you really think that will be the outcome? This will be used to market towards companies and individuals to prevent file sharing, and will help it become main stream. Otherwise it will have no effect at all. There is a slight chance they would sue and try and prevent others from doing this, but there are so many that have done it before that there is no way the patent would hold up in court. It's useless legally, and is merely so that they can market as the true, legal implementation.

Just because they can do something doesn't mean they will do something. In this situation anyhow, it would be very unlikely if they could to begin with.

Re:When will they get it?

[The Evil Couch]

they'd have to threaten the corps that are doing it with litigation for that to work.

considering that the "inventors" are a professor and a student, I think it's safe to say they lack the financial resources to battle it out in court with them, even if it is a guaranteed win.

Re:When will they get it?

[unixbugs]

If they want to put a barrier between me and their product, I won't waste my time or money on it.

not to mention the fact that alot of their product SUCKS. media hyped, filled with innuendos and subliminal bullshit to make people buy crap they dont need and behave like robots... sorry, that one hit a nerve.

Re:When will they get it?

[Lehk228]

If slashdot starts a collection, everyone puts in $5 and OSDN buys the patent, then sue the RIAA for putting out fake files

Re:When will they get it?

[HolyCoitus]

No, in other words if the individual or organization providing what I am interested in does not take legal action against groups or prevent me from watching or listening to what I purchase, then I have no problem in buying something from them.

The music I have bought lately has been non-riaa recordings of various classical composers, as the rest of my music library is already robust enough for me not to care about purchasing anything more.

Why are you accepting that someone should be allowed to attack my rights? I'll download a song and I should be able to send it to someone as well. A good portion of the music I am listening to I would have never even cared for without file sharing, since I don't listen to the radio or watch TV.

Why does not supporting a corporation have anything to do with me wanting everything handed to me for free? I don't even take my open source software for free... I contribute back by downloading on bittorrent and trying to do the odd IRC support jobs and helping other people that I know personally. I'm not at the level of coding to be able to contribute back that way (working on it) but I would be doing that as well.

I don't agree with the system of everything needing to be owned by and forcing money to exchange hands. What's wrong with supporting the people who are willing to support me? Things can be a community instead of a war zone. I know it's hard for someone like to imagine.

Re:When will they get it?

[HolyCoitus]

Well, in my opinion that should be a given. Hehe. If the product sucks, it generally doesn't even get close to being a part of my life or thoughts, so it doesn't even approach anything close to having an effect on me or having me consider wasting a resource on it.

People these days put up with too much... I was talking with a professor from my class and another student last night, and we discussed how little spine most of America has. Discussed times and places where rights were protected even when those rights didn't effect them. Nice to hear stories of people helping other people for nothing in return.

Re:When will they get it?

[HolyCoitus]

Organizing it would be an issue, and it would require help from those in charge. Also, another issue would be that patent most likely would not hold up in court and even if it did it would later be appealed.

Re:When will they get it?

[cft_128]

considering that the "inventors" are a professor and a student, I think it's safe to say they lack the financial resources to battle it out in court with them, even if it is a guaranteed win.

That all depends on the University of Tusla. Many universities just love to enforce their patents, particularly the ones that have law schools.

Strange conduct...

[Yaa 101]

This implies that with a licence from the professor i am allowed to twart their(users of this tech) future p2p networks too. Because at some point in time everybody uses p2p networks.

So basically they patented spam?

[cowscows]

This is basically a patent on the reality of spam. A bunch of noise that makes email/IM/p2p such a mess that it's hard to find anything that you want.

If only someone held a patent on spam, maybe that'd lower the volume of it somewhat.

Re:So basically they patented spam?

[CodeBuster]

It wouldn't matter one bit the small time spammers are too difficult to track down and the larger ones will simply license the patent

Re:So basically they patented spam?

[AnotherBlackHat]

This is basically a patent on the reality of spam.

Actually, I think it's a patent on crap flooding.

There's certainly plenty of prior art to defeat this, but who really cares?
Crap flooding doesn't work anymore, we've already evolved defenses for it.

-- sheesh, it's like they'll let anybody on the internet these days.

Spam flooding is patentable?

[Moderation abuser]

Damn, why didn't I think of that? All those usenet trolls would owe me a fortune...

Though couldn't hipcrime be considered prior art?

Re:This technique won't work

[discdog]

Not really true. Before spamming was allowed on kazaa etc:

1. download files
2. burn to cd
3. listen freely

now:
1. download files
2. sort through 10 files for every song and delete bogus ones. repeat step 1 if no true files
3. listen freely.

BIG difference in time required.

Artists who want to share wouldn't be affected?

[LordFoo]

From the article:

Artists who want to share their music on P2P networks wouldn't be affected, he said. The content owners could designate only particular files for spoofing.

Even if one could be convinced that using such deceptive (and bandwidth wasteful) techniques to protect one's content was acceptable -- there is absolutely no guarantee that a tool like this would be used in a "responsible manner" (i.e. only by the content owner).

Contrary to the claim made in the article, it would seem that someone with an ulterior motive could easily disturb the distribution of a competitor's content.

How can they call themselves a student?!

[jals]

I hope that "student" gets a punch from each of his fellow students. A student attempting to stop filesharing? What is the world coming to.

Re:How can they call themselves a student?!

[aurelito]

this 'method' of drowning valuables in shit is a microcosm of the decay of the internet. i'm all for this venerable professor getting a taste of his own medicine -- say, encouraging people & spambots to tell him just what we think of his philanthropic contribution to mankind / sell him viagra. john-hale@utulsa.edu

Good for people sued by the RIAA

[Music To Eat]

This is good news for anyone that gets sued by the RIAA. How can they prove that you actually downloaded their IP, if there are a bunch of fake files with the same length and size as the real thing? Anyone who gets sued can just say that the file they downloaded contained white noise so no copyright infringement took place.

Re:Good for people sued by the RIAA

[Jayfar]

Well, the cops can make drug trafficking charges stick when you sell a packet of backing soda or oregano to the friendly undercover narc, at least in most states. Then again, the criminal laws have generally been rewritten within recent years to make look-alike drugs count as the real thing. If the copyright laws don't have those kind of provisions yet, patience, they will.

This is already a problem..

[Caedar]

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.

file sharing

[ajs318]

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.

Re:file sharing

[MachDelta]

He never said they were illegal files. Who knows, maybe he's got a server filled with MP3s of himself singing in the shower?

Re:When will this end?

[aardvarkjoe]

Do you mean the people illegally distributing music or the people trying to kill P2P?

In either case, the answer is no.

MD5

[Izago909]

Enough said.
Now the patent is over-priced rectum cleaning material.
What the hell is the point of paying for a patent when the circumvetion techniques outdate the technology itself?

Right

[M3wThr33]

Sure, like P2P apps haven't had difficulty with this before.

Magnet links send you right to the file without neeeding to search.

You can check for files with lots of sources AND different IPS with a file that ISN'T rated 0 with a FAKE comment attached to it.

IP Bans, file size checks, sample checking, file hashing.

There's too many ways to block fake files.

Re:Right

[PureFiction]

There are also much more effective ways.

IP bans are easily circumvented, and a ban is individual per user. every user would need to get burned, then ban the IP, etc, etc. Very inefficient and a hassle.

File size checks and hashing means you download all or a good portion of the file only to find out it is crap. Still inefficient and a hassle. (And even worse, some clients leave partially completed downloads available for re-sharing)

The "check for files with lots of sources AND different IPS with a file that ISN'T rated 0 with a FAKE comment attached to it" method is a step improved, nearing a metric style evaluation of offered resources.

This is still a very manual and tedious process in most clients, so automating this kind of robust checking is a must.

And even better you can move towards a system that implements actual reputation and trust in a decentralized manner so that these unknown spammers will never make it into your peer group in the first place.

There are indeed many ways to block fake files; right now most of them suck.

[P.S. The RIAA does use valid lead-in's in fake's, and other techniques, like rapidly decreased quality, etc, so that listening to the beginning of a song or playing the first few minutes of a movie are not guarantee's of validity]

Re:Right

[julesh]

File size checks and hashing means you download all or a good portion of the file only to find out it is crap. Still inefficient and a hassle. (And even worse, some clients leave partially completed downloads available for re-sharing)

Many modern P2P clients (specifically gnutella and gnutella2 clients) implement a system called 'tiger tree hashing' which hashes the file in small blocks, in order to allow you to determine which parts of a file you have downloaded are valid quickly and easily before resharing, and allowing you to keep valid portions but discard corrupted ones.

Even older systems like edonkey2000 hash the file in blocks (in that case of around 10Mb) so you don't have to wait until you get the entire file before validating it.

and again...

[Transcendent]

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.

Re:and again...

[PseudoThink]

Hmm, but what if this is an attempt to patent something that they don't want companies/entities doing? Could be good for all P2P users...

Re:and again...

[timmyf2371]

What if Amazon's one-click patent is to stop other companies from doing the same? Could be good for all Amazon shareholders...

Like a patent on a flaming bag of dog crap

[Secrity]

Patnets are getting even sillier. The patent office had the right idea when they required the inventer to provide an example or model of the invention. I wonder if the USPTO will allow a patent for the process of placing a flaming bag of dog crap on somebody's doorstep.

Re:When will this end?

[JasonEngel]

You think this is a bad thing? Now that this pair has a patent on the concept, maybe the patent can be used AGAINST those people who flood P2P networks with false files. In order to do so now, they have to license the concept from this Prof/Student duo or face litigation.

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?

Confused

[glass_window]

I thought the original problem with P2P in universities was the high bandwidth consumption. So why how does this fix the problem? Discourage them? I'm sure most of them will just look harder.

Dangerous...

[DuSTman31]

So, I note that a lot of the time, recently, when downloading music files, some of the hosts have the correct version and others the decoy.

This is dangerous, though, because it exposes the possibility of distribution of other types of file (eg application binaries) with shady bits from crackers inserted.

Peer-to-peer networks should look at this as a significant security risk and devise ways around it.. I think bittorrent could be made the most resistant, as there's generally a progenitor host that chunks could be validated from.

How is this fundamentall different from...

[mark-t]

... from, say, simply increasing the noise level on some system to such a high level that the likelihood of getting useful information from that system approaches zero.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that pretty much the same as what's involved in jamming radar or radio signals?

I'd say that there's prior art on this one.

Re:This can only be good news for fileswappers. Ma

[LilGuy]

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!

Hmm... This could be use to clean things up

[MysticalMatt517]

Used right this patent could be a *Very* good thing. If it is enforced against the companies / individuals who are doing this already, but the owners choose not to fill the networks with crap themselves this could seriously clean up the mess that's been created on P2P networks!

Lame!

[Imidazole]

So, basically they were awarded a patent for being lame.

We're all in violation of that patent at least once every now and then!

It does come down to month

[Orion Blastar]

the Cuckoo's Egg project released the first egg in June 10, 2000, but the idea for that egg must have been thought of long before that.

Notice that the article does not tell the month, should it be July 2000, then the patent is false.

What makes this patent different from all the other false patents? Oh yeah, right, there was one-click ordering before Amazon.com first came online, etc. Apparently liars can file a patent before the originatior of the idea does and then sue them for it.

Alexander Gram Bell invented the telephone, right? Wrong! There was one invented before Bell did and another one. Many people still credit Bell for the invention of the telephone. IP Theives apparently can cash in on patents if they can file them quick enough.

Re:It does come down to month

[sydb]

From the first article you link:

He explained, "Nearly all inventions are developments of existing ideas, taking them just a bit further."

The idea that an inventor creates in a vacuum is ridiculous. The whole of science, and the principles behind Free Software, demonstrate that things are not invented, they are developed from things that came before.

It's only the patent system that makes this "theft". Now, I know patents have to have an inventive step which should not be present in prior art; so if Bell had no inventive step then he didn't deserve the patent.

But it's the patent system itself that encourages this kind of land grab. Calling Bell a thief seems a bit much.

Re:It does come down to month

[Zeinfeld]

the Cuckoo's Egg project released the first egg in June 10, 2000, but the idea for that egg must have been thought of long before that. Notice that the article does not tell the month, should it be July 2000, then the patent is false.

In the US a patent inventor can claim the date of 'invention' to be a year before filing. So to definitely bust the patent you have to have prior art from 1999.

Oh and applicants are not even required to give the purported date of invention when they file. Yep, the USPTO is a racket.

Fortunately the patent is probably not half as broad as is being claimed. The invention is probably a particular way of introducing fake files.

Between the P2P companies who are the main vectors for spyware, the users who blindly claim that stealling is not stealling and the RIAA I don't know which group I am more disgusted at.

Oh yeah, those utter moorons in Iraq who ordered the use of the techniques taught in R21 "resistance to interrogation" on prisoners. They are the ones that disgust me, and all their appologists.

They invent...

[Kjella]

...and others invent counter-measures. Previews? MD5 sums? Digital signatures? Web of trust? I predict that in 5 years, they will have lost the copyright battle. By then we will have an anonymous, well-organized (like newsgroups tree) network with trust metrics, integrity checking, digital signatures, floodprotection (hashcash rate limiting?), the works.

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:

• Slander
  
• Fraud
  
• Pump & dump stock scams
  
• Hate speech
  
• Threats
  
• Private information forever public if leaked
  
• Illegal pornography (yes, you know what kind)
  

...and a whole host of other things that we would like to control. This is like antibiotics. You know why they're careful in issuing them, and want you to take the dosage out? So the diseases don't get resistance, and finally even immunity against them.

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

Why?

[0x0d0a]

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.

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-attacker 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.

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. :-)

Re:Why?

[Mike Hawk]

Of course, if all this run-around has turned off enough users there will be an insignificant few actually doing the sharing on future P2P app #20. And just wait until the user's hardware is watching them as well! The goal for the copyright holder's side has never really been to eliminate the violations, but to eliminate them "enough."

The genie is indeed going back in the bottle.

Prior art...

[sadler121]

Like this patent will hold up. the **AA's have been doing this for years. Just one more example of how our IP laws our SEVERLY broken.

social discovery

[PureFiction]

I've always preferred social discovery in peer networks because it avoids the weaknesses that automated systems and spammers in general can exploit to subvert search results.

Social discovery, reputation and trust metrics, and feedback to close the loop will all become bigger and bigger concerns in partially or fully decentralized peer networks as a natural consequence of attacks and exploits like these.

The incentives for groups and individuals (even government) to try and subvert these systems is growing by the day. These networks will either adapt and improve their resilience against these activies, or their users will depart to other networks that do.

Ponder this quote....

[koa]

"The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." John Gilmore (EFF).

I think this quote reveals alot. It is one of the inescapable facts about the Internet.

There will always be something that fills a gap left by something else. Using technology that is described above only has a limited life-span.

Someone somewhere will devise a better system.

It will eventually equalize down to the lowest common denominator of this simple fact, from this point forward digital entertainment will have to be sold to people for a reasonable price. And putting a false scarcity on digital entertainment for the short-term greed of mega-corporations isnt the business model that can work in the long-term.

Re:Ponder this quote....

[Minna Kirai]

I think this quote reveals alot. It is one of the inescapable facts about the Internet.

No, that quote is false. It is only an observation of past performance, not a guarantee of future safety.

In his book Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, Prof Lessig demolishes that aphorism quite thoroughly.

In brief: the internet is artificial, not natural. What man created, man can control- or destroy if it refuses control. With sufficient motivation, the government can and will crack down on undesirable internet traffic. The reason the net has appeared immune to censorship so far is that the authorities' motivation to control it was low.

I won't comment on the rest of your post, because that quote was actually irrelevant to it...

You Don't

[benna]

"If you have a secret that gets out there, how do you get the genie back in the bottle?" Hale said.

You don't.

Not the law

[werdna]

Even assuming the Cuckoo Egg Project was sufficient subject matter to invalidate the claim, it is not necessarily prior art. June 10, 2000 would not be a bar date for an application filed in August, 2000, provided that the inventor can file an affidavit alleging possession of the invention prior to that date.

Re:Not the law

[hak1du]

In that case, the inventors of the Cuckoo Egg Project might also file an affidavit alleging possession of the invention priort to that date--they probably also talked about it for a while before implementing it.

If first to invent counts for competing patents, it should also count for unpatented but published prior art.

Re:Not the law

[werdna]

As reasonable as that might seem, it would have no bearing on the case.

either they convince these folks to license this

[way2trivial]

"they convince these folks to license this technology or they'll probably face a lawsuit

you don't see a third option? they refuse to license the technology, and sue the pants off anyone who uses it? thereby enabling filesharing?

Survival of the fittest...

[bergeron76]

Only the "fittest" files will survive on these networks. As a result, it amuses me to see these guys try and put bogus files out there. They almost instantly die in the wild when people rank them as bogus.

When will they learn?

Re:Survival of the fittest...

[ashot]

this used to be true, but not anymore. Now that Bob has a 120GB hard drive he just downloads 50 led zepplin songs to his shared folder and doesn't listen to them.

Re:either they convince these folks to license thi

[sydb]

That was the "lawsuit" part of your parent post. He agrees with you.

Re:This technique won't work

[benna]

I have never downloaded a fake music file. I don't know what all the fuss is about.

Why this will have little or no effect

[Killswitch1968]

Flooding a network with bogus files is nothing new, if anyone remembers Madonna's attempt to distribute a fake single. Fasttrack (the network Kazaa uses) is loaded with fake files and viruses already, and it's decline is already evident in its dropping from the number 1 most downladed software on cnet.

The next generation of file sharing software is already here. For movies, apps, and games, BitTorrent and eDonkey provide a realiable means to transfer the file. Unless they've found a way to get through MD5 fingerprinting of files, 'flooding' BitTorrent with fakes will do absolutely nothing.

As for music/mp3s, fingerprinting files is not common simply because there are way too many mp3s to catalogue, except for the odd pop-album. What is becoming successful are private hubs and chatrooms you find on DirectConnect and IRC. Spread fakes there and you'll be banned very quickly.
Even conventional search-download p2p apps have security features which block IP addresses like Overnet from spreading fakes.

I don't know what the solution to file sharing is, but bogus files are simply not it unless you're dealing with antiquated networks like Fast Track.

...how is this different from spam?

[DroopyStonx]

Because we're talking about P2P, it's okay to crapflood the networks with this shit? Who the hell do these guys think they are?

That's bullshit hypocrisy right there. Because you don't like something, that gives you every right to destroy/break it?

Yeah, smart thinking there. Ruin P2P because it's a medium used to share copyrighted material. While you're at it, crapflood IRC, Newsgroups, Instant Messaging protcols, and email because they could be used to send others copyrighted material.

These dickheads need to mind their own business.

Re:...how is this different from spam?

[servoled]

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.

Re:When will this end?

[J'raxis]

Read the article; they're already "working with the university to commercialize the invention and market it to record labels, movie studios and software companies." No, these two belong up against the wall along with the rest of the IP cartel.

so what?

[unixbugs]

people keep asking about whether or not these "inventors" will sue various organizations for infringement. the article seems very ambiguous about their intentions, but it seems logical that they will attempt lawsuits, otherwise they wouldn't have bothered with the patent to begin with.

i just want to say that i am particularly fond of rare unreleased versions of songs that you simply cannot buy anywhere - that is to say i cant complain about what they are doing except to say that bandwidth is expensive and id rather be able to find what i like in an environment free of punitive repercussions by vengeful record labels. i dont see anything wrong with downloading these files because its my belief that the artists wouldn't perform if they didn't want the world to hear it - they would just package up canned recordings and never set foot on stage.

you wont find me having to wade through gobs and gobs of b.s. files because all i want to hear is "ratm - killing in the name of - live in amsterdam with tool and NiN.mp3" and the like. the nsync cucoo files wont affect me not only because the word "nsync" will never make the search box on my copy of gnutella, but because if it did it would be in the context of a much more affinitive and personal search.

so have at it, pricks. send your dummy files all day long, but start your own damn p2p to do it on. IMHO the *AA's of the world are on the wrong track so to speak. look at MS and all the problems they have with pissed off worm authors gifted enough to bring down power grids. once they get bored with trashing an operating system thats allready crippled out of the box, they might turn towards more entertaining endeavors.

ok so maybe im the kind of person the laws are out to get, but i can say that i own alot of CD's and a large percentage of the songs in my rare and live collections have a canned counterpart somewhere in here haha...

No use.

[flaXen_5]

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.

Re:either they convince these folks to license thi

[way2trivial]

no, he says, they license it, or get sued for using the technology (without paying)
I suggest, they refuse to license it, and sue people for using it, (without permission-which a patent holder does not have to grant)

This is nothing new

[THE ROCK]

This kind of thing has been happening for a long time now. I've seen this on the kazaa networks for the last couple of years, usually with newly released songs.

To be honest, I get a kick out of it...I derive an amount of satisfaction after I find a "good" version of a song that somebody went through the trouble of making and distributing a decoy of, knowing that they FAILED in their attempt to stop me from downloading. Once you've had it happen to you enough times, it isn't all that hard to pick out the good versions of a song and ignore the messed up ones (I started calling them riaa bombs, since I figured they are probably behind it.)

This issue underscores one of the problems with p2p networks...if you want to get your music this way you have to remember its a crapshoot. You might get an intentionally messed up song like this, you might get an mp3 that was encoded by an idiot (full of pops and scratches, dropouts, terrible sound, joint stereo, low bitrate, came from the radio or analog tape, etc) who either doesn't bother or care to check his work; or you might get a nice well made music file.

It also seems like a lot of people download bad versions of songs like this, and never bother to check them...so their spread is helped. In fact this can help you spot bad files on kazaa, when 50 sources show up for one file there's a good chance its one of these.

not just illegal files

[townmouse]

The article says that this technique can be used to thwart illegal file sharing, but it will work equally against legally shared files. The technology could be used to suppress a rival's freely-distributed music (a subtler trick would be to flood the network with plausible-sounding but inferior copies).

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.

Re:not just illegal files

[unixbugs]

so i get a "0". what for? saying bad words? go tell on me lol.

P2P trust is possible, here is how:

[jetmarc]

> 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.

Re:P2P trust is possible, here is how:

[mrogers]

That's such a great idea I might have to steal it. :-) You could do it with partial hash collisions: each vote consists of the hash of the file, the rating (say 0-5 stars for the content and 0-5 stars for the encoding, to stop people from voting down well-encoded songs because they don't like the song), a random string to distinguish between votes, and an authentication string. The hash of the authentication string must match the hash of the rest of the vote in a certain number of bits.

Because each vote contains the hash of the file, votes can be distributed independently of files: if you find ten peers with the same file, you can download and combine the votes from all of them even if you only download the file from one. You can share votes that you agree with to make them more easily available, but equally you can't stop other people from sharing votes that disagree with yours.

Re:either they convince these folks to license thi

[nacturation]

Yes and no. I read it as the lawsuit would be to force the companies to license their IP or else refrain from using it. Missing was the option where there is no intent to offer licenses in the first place and only have a lawsuit to prevent them from using it at all.

One word: SHA1

[teutonic_leech]

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.

Re:One word: SHA1

[PureFiction]

You are missing the point.

The problem is not identifying content, it's determing who's opinion to trust when they say "this file is good" or "this file is bogus".

If you go by votes alone, the RIAA will have lots of drones ranking down the legitimate content, and ranking up their crap.

Figuring out an effective way to determine quality, regardless of how you identify the files is the difficult aspect of these systems.

Re:One word: SHA1

[PureFiction]

sweet. you want to write the RFC? :-)

Re:When will this end?

[Gortbusters.org]

These people must suffer discommondation.... they will have to fight the RIAA using a batleth to regain their honor.

Re:This can only be good news for fileswappers. Ma

[chgros]

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.
The difference, in this case, would be that the patent is worth going to court for (which means someone else is officially interested in the technology)

And they patent this?

[Phidoux]

Hang on! I just want to go dig through my trash to see if I can find anything to patent.

2nd hand condom - Patent No. 87628476 Stale bread - Patent No. 9374784 Empty tin can - Patent No. 98724877

How is this possible?

[Jugalator]

For me to be fooled when downloading, many people need to share the same file. If it's a bogus file, users usually delete it from their hard drive. Also, modern P2P networks build file identities on file hashes, not "similarity" in size, name, or even sound. Two slightly different versions of the same information will look entirely different to the P2P clients.

I fail myself

[way2trivial]

no, he says, they license it, or get sued for using the technology (sued to pay for a license)

I suggest, they refuse to license it, and sue people for using it, (sued for damages and an order to stop using the technology)

Prior art found

[Aim Here]

Well the good news is anyone can cite "Madonna - American Life.mp3" as prior art and nullify the patent, so it should end up as one less patent in the world....

Re:This technique won't work

[jlaxson]

It's not illegal to download a fake file, and if the RIAA wants to sue you for it, what are they going to claim as damages?

Re:When will this end?

[nolife]

Regardless of anyones opinion on valid uses of P2P, what is considered a copyright violation, your attitude toward the RIAA and entertainment industry in general, fair use and whatever thoughts you may have on the subject, the point is..

How can the RIAA justify sueing someone based on a list of file names when everyone already knows bogus files are out there and the RIAA will potentially be adding some themselves. The RIAA's evidence of an IP address and a list file names is not going to stand up in a real court.

Ahh, brings back memories of Burpster

[SnappingTurtle]

Back during the original incarnation of Napster, I found an MP3 that consisted of 5 minutes of people burping. Then I put copies of that file in my Napster directory using the names of various popular songs and artists. I giggled myself silly every time I noticed someone downloading it. Ah, hours of geek fun.

I remember thinking I could really increase downloads by writing a script to publish the file under many, many names and Napster ID's. It even struck me as a plausible business model: get record companies to hire me to piss in the pool, so to speak.

Unfortunately, I decided to pursue a more mundane line of work: writing boring database code. It didn't work out. Maybe I shoulda gone with the Burpster concept. I mighta made a small fortune before Napster went Nopester.

Your sig

[base3]

Translating "all your base are belong to us" into Latin is surely some kind of punishable crime :).

Re:Your sig

[TheOnlyCoolTim]

It's pretty inaccurate. I think a literal English translation would be: All your of base are being held to us.

Tim

Re:Your sig

[base3]

My reading is more like "Your all of base is held by us." ("is held" because habetur is 3rd person singular passive voice) Sufficiently ungrammatical to have been translated into Latin from Japanese :).

Nobis can be either dative or ablative, so "to us" would also be an accurate translation.

Why, yes, I do have a life! Why do you ask?

Madonna has prior art?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does the Modonna p2p file that is blank except "What the fuck do you think you're doing" count as prior art.

The application date doesn't matter in the US

[moeymo]

In the US, patents are awarded based on (among other things) the date of invention, not the date of the application. So, in this case, it will come down to who can prove they had it first.

That's why US corporations are big on leaving a paper trail in their R&D departments. They want to prove in court they invented something first.

In most other countries a patent is awarded based on the application date.

This raises the question..

[yoshi_mon]

Does this kid have *any* friends at all?

Surprising they dare

[Flyboy Connor]

I would be very wary of patenting something that might tick off a big party. Either they will ignore the patent, or, even worse, they'll drag you to court to get the patent invalidated. And if they get nasty, they will unleash their patent machine onto you. As a computer scientist, I can only hope the big ones will never see me as a danger, or they can bloody well kill off my profession.

Re:In reply to your sig ...

[nacturation]

that says, post humously != post humorously, you do realize that posthumously means after death? As in, a way of retaining even more than AC-level anonymity?

I think I need my humor checked.

Yeah, I realize what it means. In fact, I might even work in a pun about being Buddhist/Hindu or whatever and gaining karma or something. It's not meant to be knee-slapping, pee-in-your-pants hi-larious. But at best maybe it'll elicit a chuckle from those who actually get it. Judging from the number of people who reply AC and tell me to learn to effin spell... there's quite a few of them who don't.

Re:This can only be good news for fileswappers. Ma

[cpt kangarooski]

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 is nothing new!

[Anonymous Coward]

flooding the network with bogus files that look like pirated music

People have been doing this for years now.
Britney, Justin, Christina, they've all been making bogus files that look like music and getting them spread on the P2P networks.

It probably won't work

[Alioth]

Why will it probably not work?

On the P2P networks, there's a Darwinian natural selection going on - of information, rather than life forms (although, if you think about it, life forms are really just information carriers through their DNA. Perhaps one day, like life forms, digital information will be able to replicate the machinery needed to copy itself, but this is a digression).

The valid music will be selected for - it'll get replicated by many peers and be kept by the peers. The bogus files will be selected against - whilst some will undoubtedly be around, there will be a strong selective pressure against them as they are "killed" on the P2P nodes. For the bogus files to survive they must successfully be able to inhabit many nodes in the P2P network, and it's a reasonable assumption that most of the nodes will be the "pirate" nodes favouring the real music instead of the "poisoning" nodes favouring the bogus files. The P2P networks themselves will evolve to defeat the "poisoning" nodes just as spam techniques have evolved to get around SpamAssassin.

"buddy lists"

[nutznboltz]

How do you identify someone to compare them to what's on your black list? IP address? Good luck cause you have to deal with DHCP and NAT. Use a token instead? What's to keep them from using a new token whenever they like?

Its easy to say, just use a list but it's not easy to do that.

A white list setup leaves you with a WASTE-like network not an anonymous one.

Re:"buddy lists"

[Khazunga]

As always: PGP signatures. You must sign your own kick...

Re:"buddy lists"

[kubrick]

What's to stop spammers continually generating new PGP keys, and thus always being zero on a +/- scale?

Re:"buddy lists"

[kubrick]

Nothing is to stop them however they'd always start at zero. Once the networks of those having greater than zero valuations exist those who have zero valuations will simply be ignored as background noise unless someone take the time to evaluate them and increase their rating.

This is fine, as long as the feedback mechanism is compulsory and evenly applied -- this would have to be designed in from the start.

I'm sure many people who moderate use their points to push a +3 to a +4, and aren't browsing at -1 as recommended... I've seen may good 0-rated posts I haven't had the power to up-rate.

Otherwise you end up with hundreds or thousands of spam postings for every 'legitimate' one, and there's little incentive for people to go hunting among the non-verified files, and little incentive for people to join the network if they can't be 'heard' above the 'noise level' when they join.

Re:"buddy lists"

[bourne]

Use a token instead? What's to keep them from using a new token whenever they like?

Nothing - but by doing so, they'll drop down to the unknown/untrusted level, which should damage their impact.

Like browsing with no ACs on /., regular users can filter out people who do that.

Re:"buddy lists"

[Khazunga]

The same thing that stops trolls from continuosly opening accounts on /.. Zero is no good, when people are filtering by 4+.

Re:"buddy lists"

[Dashing Leech]

(Like this post for example starting out at zero unless the moderators see some merit in it.)

Hmm, I guess not. (Watch some moderator increase your points just to make me look like an idiot.)

You missed point 3

[nutznboltz]

The product becomes obsolete

as in "nobody does P2P that way anymore"

Which do you use more these days BT or Kazza?

The patent on a useless technology does not lead to

5. Profit

Not enough brainpower

[Benderu desu]

Geniuses are borned not trained, those university computerstudents and professors whill never beat the smarts out of real hackers. By trying to flood the internet with (more) worthless junk their only wasting their own time and money. The people want entertainment not rules and laws. Yes if no one purchased the entertainment industrys movie tickets and DVDs they whould go bankrupt ! But thats just isnt the case, is it now ? Absolutly not, there are still people (like myself for instance) who rather see movies worth seeing on the big screen made of silk. And there whill still be people who whill buy the DVD-box just for the covers sake. But dont get me wrong. I dont blame them for trying, i blame them for their methods as someone already said in this thread this is SPAM. And folowing the new laws agaist corporations SPAMING the entire world with pills and erection pumps or whatever, this whill send the message that spaming is legal as long as its goverment led or protected under a patent law can only get things worse. This was round one, lets hope "the good people" dont deliver ALL their punches under the belt in the secound.

A patent for being a jerk?

[nurb432]

What is this world coming too. Will they demand payments for all those idiot drivers out on the roads ?

And i thought there was prior art for being a jerk....

A project for sound geeks

[Julian Morrison]

...find a way to checksum, not merely the data, but the sound of a music file. Something conceptually similar to what a "soundex" is for text.

This has three immediate uses

1. Anti-garble for P2P
2. Detect accidental/incidental damage to sound quality
3. Classify music. Sort songs by their "musicex" and they'll be grouped by similarity

Re:A project for sound geeks

[Coke in a Can]

IIRC this has been done before, Napster did it after mere filename filters were bypassed through intentional typos and the like, and they needed something stronger. I wonder if their solution compared the full file or just a portion of it, though - that might screw it up for our uses.

Food for thought.

Prior Art in Suck.com

[Rudolfo]

This method was talked about in a Suck.com column four years ago:

http://www.suck.com/daily/2000/03/24/nc_index4.htm l

The author's suggestion: register thousands of accounts Napster with hundreds of song titles. Each song is actually "Achy-Breaky Heart"

Turing Test

[grooveFX]

I wonder if someone could incorporate a turin test into a P2P program, to prevent automated systems from displaying files. Could improve the quality of p2p.

Good news for subscription services?

[Nom du Keyboard]

Maybe not. How long before someone gets angry and floods the net with bogus subscription services?

Uh

[bonch]

Are you saying it's bad to combat P2P piracy? Slashdotters shouldn't care, right--after all, they don't illegally pirate. Right?

I've been buying from the iTunes store since it came out. There is no valid reason whatsoever to pirate an artists' works on Kazaa and eMule. Slashdotters have yet to legally or morally justify ripping off an artist's stuff.

Re:Uh

[TheLoneDanger]

Are you saying it's bad to combat P2P piracy? Slashdotters shouldn't care, right--after all, they don't illegally pirate. Right?

I've been buying from the iTunes store since it came out. There is no valid reason whatsoever to pirate an artists' works on Kazaa and eMule. Slashdotters have yet to legally or morally justify ripping off an artist's stuff.

How about that P2P networks aren't just restricted to the US?

Here in Canada, the music industry called for a levy on CD-Rs and MP3 players and they got it, but now we've got the right to download and share files as a result. They wanted the levy, they've got it. Now as part of the bargain, I get to download all of their music I want. If they get in the way of that, I want to know what the consequence for them will be, because I was/am paying them money for something I never did in the first place (copying and distributing music CDs on CD-Rs).

Re:Uh

[Hatta]

Slashdotters have yet to legally or morally justify ripping off an artist's stuff.

Nothing is immoral unless it materially harms someone. The only way copying a song can harm an artist is that it deprives him of a sale. Since I spend all I can afford to on music and concerts already, downloading beyond that cannot deprive anyone of anything. Therefore, it is not immoral. QED.

As for legality, it can of course not be justified. But since legality and morality are frequently in opposition, this means nothing to me.

Re:Uh

[merlin_jim]

Are you saying it's bad to combat P2P piracy? Slashdotters shouldn't care, right--after all, they don't illegally pirate. Right?

My position, and I'm presuming that of many slashdotters, is that there are legal non-infringing uses of P2P, and technologies meant to combat P2P piracy should focus solely on piracy, not on the P2P network itself.

I've been buying from the iTunes store since it came out. There is no valid reason whatsoever to pirate an artists' works on Kazaa and eMule. Slashdotters have yet to legally or morally justify ripping off an artist's stuff.

I've heard the argument "I own the CD, it's faster to download than to rip however"... I don't know if I buy that or not.

However, there are artists that do P2P releases. Small, underground, indie bands use P2P for distribution. I've even had bands tell me just to download their stuff from Kazaa, because they don't make any extra money on CD sales because of the terms of their contract...

There are also big bands that do fan releases using P2P as their primary distribution method...

p2p is NOT illegal, again

[_aa_]

Again I have to state that filesharing is not illegal. Violating copyrights, sex laws, and liscense agreements is illegal. People who produce CDRs etc, are not responsible for what I choose to do with them. If I produce a copy of a copyrighted product and give it to a friend, then I, not the CDR manufacturer, have committed a crime against the copyright holder. Therefore, when I make my mp3 collection available to the public via a p2p or ANY filesharing method, I commit the crime, not the people who offer the p2p service.

As much as I despise record companies, and the artists who whore their artform for profit, they have every right to copyright their material. That being said, I don't however think they have the right to take the law into their own hands. I don't agree that this tactic of, for the lack of a better anology, throwing thousands of baseballs into the air so noone knows which ball is in play, is neccesarily fair, and I question it's legality. But I would LOVE to see one p2p service, any of them, be completely free of pirated materials. Just imagine how usefull that service would be! It would be like the world wide web, only with a centralized searching system, and no slashdot effect.

Some laws are unjust and they are right to be broken. Copyright law is in a grey area at best and is far from the most unjust law I can think of. Music, film, and yes even porn lovers should be at the forefront of those fighting to get pirated materials out of p2p, because when legitimized, p2p could be the greatest part of the internet since the www.

In the mean time, try to avoid pirating copyrighted materials. If you're cheap, there's plenty of free stuff out there that will keep you busy.

Prior art

[Deadstick]

#include

How could they proceed against a P2P service already using the technique? If the patent holder claimed that an operation in existence before his filing date was using his method, he'd be asserting the existence of prior art and denying the validity of his own patent.

rj

Re:This can only be good news for fileswappers. Ma

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Damn right!

[grepistan]

Mod parent up!

I think the trojan defense has significant merit. After all, RIAA lawsuits are not designed to actually win at law, they are simply a strongarm tactic aimed at scaring other filesharers out of their habits. Kinda like certain overly-litigious software companies ;o)

Shame depends on intent...

[raehl]

What if their intent in getting this patent was to prevent anyone from flooding P2P networks with imposter files by suing them into oblivion if they did it?

One thing you can do with a patent is prevent anyone at all from using the patented method.

WTF?

[Raven42rac]

One of the major reasons to thwart file-sharing on your network is traffic. So they are just doubling their traffic? To do what, protect the RIAA's monopoly? I did not RTFA, so disregard this if the article answered it.

Garbage data is patentable?

[msobkow]

Really, this whole thing is focused on flooding a system with enough garbage data to make it useless.

If this is a patentable "idea", then I've got a few dozen systems to fix over the years which prove prior art. They were quite happy to corrupt themselves when fed bad data.

In fact, they were much more advanced than this attack, because they would actually corrupt existing data when fed garbage!

Yes, I'm sure there is something special that means it's more than a garbage data flood, but that's just legalese to try and make it special. The basic approach has been around as long as humans have punched data errors.

New method of protecting illegal activities

[cgenman]

This raises a very interesting point. If one were to start a service that would be borderline legal, the best way to protect the profitable, questionably legal portions would be to patent every method of attack. As you are the one designing the system, you have a good chance of seeing its weaknesses first.

In this way, you use the patent system to shield illegal activity. If one could find a way to wrap a DMCA encryption layer into the process, one would have lots of ammunition against those companies that are attempting to vigilante your semi-illicit activities.

Re:New method of protecting illegal activities

[nsd20463]

Heh, that's the macrovision way of protecting yourself. Macrovision patented all the obvious ways of breaking their "security" in order to have a legal weapon against potential anti-macrovision devices.

-nsd

No Violation

[svenvder]

If the bigwigs in music continue to flood p2p sites and are sued for breach of the patent it wouldn't stand up in court. The simple reason is that if the people who were awarded the patent base there program off the music industries current program then the music industry will win. The simple reason for this is because all the Music industry has to do is too appeal on the basis that the patent was awarded to somebody when there was already prior "public knowledge." If this happens then the patent is nullified. So therefore the music industry won't be in violation of patent law even if the code these people come up with is exactly the same.

A logic flaw...

[Maljin Jolt]

This raises the question of whether or not companies that are already using such techniques are in violation of the new patent.

If somebody is already using such techniques there is a prior art, invalidating such patent.

Arguably...

[Kjella]

...a P2P network without files is nothing. It is an attack that can be applied not only by the copyright holder, but to any file being exchanged. Thus, it is an attack against the network and something they should strive to develop counter-measures for. Since a considerable number of people seem to be vandals and asshats (or simply idiots), I don't find that unreasonable either.

Come back when you have designed a power that can only be exercised by the copyright holder or their designated agents. Then there might be a point here, but I don't quite see it now.

Kjella

Re:Arguably...

[servoled]

It is an attack that can be applied not only by the copyright holder

The key word here is can. Just because something can be used against all copyrighted and noncopyrighted files does not mean that it has to be used against both kinds of files.

a P2P network without files is nothing

I was unaware the definition of a network required the presence of files. Besides, the creators of the P2P software are in no way providing garunteed access to content of any kind, they are simply providing the network and client systems in which any content can be transmitted. Why should the burden of verifying the content fall on them? If anything they should develop counter-measures for traditional DDOS and other TCP/IP type networking attacks to secure the network and leave the content up to the users.

Re:This can only be good news for fileswappers. Ma

[FuzzyBad-Mofo]

Kazaa? Get a real P2P program..

Invalid patent

[j.leidner]

If for a patent it can be shown that prior art has existed at the time when the patent application was filed, then to the best of my knowledge the patent is invalid (at least in Europe). The prior art check is performed by the patent office, but a "no prior art found" verdict is not binding, so if it is later discovered prior art had existed at the initial application date, the patent can be re-examined.

In Germany publication before patent application also destroys the eligibility to file a patent.

Thank you

[Orion Blastar]

an even earlier work that shows someone else had the idea before the people who filed for the patent.

Very simple

[Orion Blastar]

you create bogus web sites that have HTML descriptions of the file and link to the files for download that are Cuckoo Egg files. Then submit those web sites to search engines.

Re:Very simple

[servoled]

And this exists in the prior art where exactly? You can't just make things up and call them prior art, you need proof. So where is it?

What you don't understand

[Orion Blastar]

is that two wrongs do not make a right.

If you fraudelently file a patent to prevent someone else from doing wrong, you are still doing wrong.

Besides in a way, this promotes piracy of MP3 files, by trying to take away a method meant to discourage it. I am not saying that method is right, just that neither method is right if something wrong is being done on both parts.

"Gnutella2" is neither gnutella nor an upgrade

[kkirk007]

Some guy hijacked the "gnutella2" name and website, and capitalized on the existing gnutella name to publicize his protocol.

The Gnutella2 protocol has nothing in common with the free and open gnutella protocol, which is developed by a group of volunteers.

It'd be like AMD releasing the "Pentium 5", except that in the business world it's illegal as trademark dilution, whereas in the P2P world it's scummy and wrong, but I don't believe it's illegal.

So...

[Lord Kano]

Can I get a patent for my method of weeding out bogus files so that people can pirate the right files?

LK

This definately *IS* good news for file swapping

[tyler_larson]

Has everybody missed what this story is about? These people haven't destroyed file sharing, they've saved it. They didn't come up with a way of poisoning p2p networks, the've PATENTED the only effective method out there.

Patenting a method doesn't make it popular, it makes the method expensive (or even illegal). This means that now whenever the RIAA tries to destory p2p network with fake content (which they currently do), they'll have to pay this kid royalties--how ever much the kid wants--or they're not allowed to do it.

This opens up all sorts of new doors for us. Doesn't anybody see the implications here? We can actually use the patent system we've argued against so vehemently to our advantage. The ability to patent is the ability to write law. You can use patents to make almost any unwanted behavior illegal.

Take a page out of Microsoft's book--don't try to patent overly general techniques--pick very specific things you don't other people to do, and patent it:

• Patent #3234732223134: "A method for preventing software piracy of office suite and operating system components by configuring the client to periodically report back to the authoring company"
• Patent #3234732223135: "A method for preventing the unauthorized duplication of copyrighted material by only allowing such material to be played using pre-certified devices"

You can then use your shiny new patents to either (A) fund your organization's fight against patents, or (B) simply make the patented behavior illegal.

The key that we've learned from past patent suits is that if you make your patent specific enough to your targeted application, you won't have to worry about prior art. ("Sure, they may have done something like this before, but they didn't do it with web browsers"). You really can patent just about anything, we've seen more than enough absurd patents to know that. You just have to beat the bad guys to it: patent it before they get a chance to put their plans into effect.

And the end result? Perhaps the business disruption created by these crazy patents will spur a reformation of the patent system, or perhaps angry consumers will continue to be able to write their own laws to fight unwanted business practices. Who cares? Either way we win, as long as we're the ones getting the patents.

Now, go to, and make it happen!

In related news...

[linuxhansl]

The MIT was awarded a patent for "thwarting filesharing by confiscating infringing machines". The FBI and other law-enforcement agencies already started intense negotiations.

Come one. How many lame patent do we have to see until the system breaks down. I can write some software like that in 5 mins.

Granted, this maybe an attempt to stop these decoying tactics by requiring a license fee for such tactics. Still I can't agree with it.

Re:One problem with this

[I(rispee_I(reme]

Kazaa is the only popular filesharing protocol that does incomplete hashes. Emule and G2 both do complete hashes, and take much longer to hash your shared folder.

Isn't this illegal, anyway?

[Distortal]

I recall reading an article about how Madonna technically broke the law by releasing dummy tracks to p*ss off filesharers. She (or her agency) released a track that comprised the first few seconds of the actual song, followed by Madge saying "What the f*ck to you think you are doing?" over and over.

Turns out this is technically illegal because it can be considered an unfair trade practice. To quote from the above: "the FTC has general jurisdiction over fraud, false statements, fraudulent pretexts, hucksters, con-artists, and most things deceptive"

In retaliation, her site was hacked. Heh.

Re:This can only be good news for fileswappers. Ma

[FurryFeet]

I don't think he was talking about morality.
I think he was talking about prior art.

Re:This can only be good news for fileswappers. Ma

[FurryFeet]

Wow. Mr. Gatling and Mr. Winchester are in for a surprise too. Not to mention Mr. Oppenheimer and Mr. Einstein.

Someone else thought of it

[Orion Blastar]

http://www.student.gsu.edu/~anishica1/microfilm.sc an.tif it is a Microfilm article of an April 13, 2000 printed statement that describes how to foil MP3 sharing networks. It was in the Chicago Tribune.

The Cuckoo Egg method, while it does not say to put Cuckoo Eggs on web sites, that would be the next logical step. However, one has to use their brain to figure that out.

Face it, two methods were thought of before the patent was filed. The patent is false, why can't you accept that? Unless you can show evidence that these people who filed the patent had the idea before the other two, I am going to stick with my theory that their patent is false.

Re:Someone else thought of it

[servoled]

back to the claim language:

evaluating the effectiveness of said shared decoy media file in inhibiting the identification and retrieval of proprietary media via said automated search engines; and

interactively modifying process configuration parameters to influence the effectiveness of inhibiting said identification and retrieval of proprietary media via said automated search engines.

I still see no step of identifying the efectiveness of the fake file and modifying the process configuration parameters to influence the effectiveness. Perhaps you could point out the exact lines in that article that has them? The problem with your and every other analyisis of prior art that I have seen on slashdot is that it does not adress the claim language, only the basic idea of the patent. The problem with this is that the basic idea of the patent and the claim language are often two very different things, but since you never bother to read the claims you never notice this.

That is because

[Orion Blastar]

it takes critical thinking skills to see them. Skills that apparently you lack.

evaluating the effectiveness of said shared decoy media file in inhibiting the identification and retrieval of proprietary media via said automated search engines; and

Fancy talk for creating web pages and submitting them to web sites. Spammers have done this for as long as the WWW existed. How can you patent something like that?

interactively modifying process configuration parameters to influence the effectiveness of inhibiting said identification and retrieval of proprietary media via said automated search engines

Increasing one's rank in a search engine is nothing new either. Also Spammers have used these techquies since search engines existed. Again nothing new.

What these paragraphs that you keep quoting tell me, is that the patent is 100% pure BS. They can reword it all they want, it is still 100% pure BS and based on technquies and ideas that others have used since before the patent was filed.

Let me put it in words your feeble mind can comprehend:

If I file a patent for combining a virus with a spamming program to create a zombie network for sending out spam, it is a false patent. Even if nobody filed for it before, it has been in use before I filed it. I can use legalise and any other rewording that I like to use, but it is still 100% pure BS.

End of discussion.

Re:That is because

[servoled]

Fancy talk for creating web pages and submitting them to web sites. Spammers have done this for as long as the WWW existed. How can you patent something like that?

Increasing one's rank in a search engine is nothing new either. Also Spammers have used these techquies since search engines existed. Again nothing new.

That is all well and good for a web page search engine, but this is a p2p network. Why would I bother submitting a file to a website in the context of a p2p network? And for that matter, why would I bother trying to increase my rank in a p2p network?

What you are trying to cite is called non-analogous art, and it has been repeatedly thrown out in countless numbers of court cases and patent appeal board decisions. Unless you can provide valid motivation directly from the prior art with proof to back it up, then you have no reason to combine these two practices. You can not invent your own reasons or cite reasons which are solely supported by the patent application, doing so is called hindsight. The reasons must be supported by the prior art.

Also you are doing piecemeal analysis of the claims which generally doesn't get you very far either. Just because individual parts exist in the prior art does not mean there is reason to combine them into a single system.

However, considering your complete lack of knowledge in patent law, you have done a better job than most people here on slashdot and for that I congratulate you. However, you still need to do a good bit of reading before you even understand the problems with your reasoning in citing prior art rejections such as this.

In that case...

[bonch]

When you get right down to it, your argument boils down to "YOU'RE NOT PAYING THE ARTIFICIAL RENT I HAVE IMPOSED UPON YOU! THEIF! THEIF!"

By your logic, the GPL doesn't exist. It's just an "artificial construct we've created!"

Re:This can only be good news for fileswappers. Ma

[syukton]

reputation tracking, not file rating. The parent poster is talking about the reputation of the user in the network, not the reputation of the files.

If a user has a surplus of bad files, he gets a bad rep and nobody downloads from him. simple as that, really.