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PC Mag Reviews Mercora P2P Radio
prostoalex writes "PC Magazine reviews Mercora peer-to-peer streaming radio. It's not a service which allows anyone to download songs, however you can listen to any of the top 20 million plus songs available on the network from more than 2000 private radiostations. Mercora supports keyword search by genre, song name or artist name, but does not allow to listen to more than four songs from the same artist to avoid copyright issues. Any Mercora user automatically becomes a broadcaster, when the app scans the drive for digital music and then suggests creating an ad-hoc Internet radiostation."
I don't see the difference between offering an MP3 or offering a stream to allow instant realtime listening.
Technically it is the same thing from the sender's point of view. It sends out bytes of copyrighted material. Just because the client software isn't saving those by default (think hacks, direct recording...) doesn't mean it isn't possible.
This software will probably result in new laws which will trouble normal webradios...
MPAA will get their share after Mercora has collected information on all the mp3's the users share + their IP adresses and forwarded this information to the hordes of lawyers that MPAA has harnessed for their newest try on busting mp3 distributors. You have been warned!
So basically we can now choose between 3000 random users random 10-song playlists streamed over inadequate bandwidth without the ability to find any songs beyond the typical top-40 songs, or to save them. Add to that weird claims of legality, and privacy concerns from the scanning of the harddrive, and it suddenly doesn't sound so nice anymore. Not that it did sound any nicer in the first place. Most p2p apps already suck, making it even more artificially restricted doesn't really help.
Seems like more than one /.er has reported spyware being bundled (specifically Grokster), contrary to the PC Mag reports. Whether or not the spyware was intentionally bundled, this type of technology creates many security issues.
Desktop search apps have recently been under much scrutiny for privacy issues, such that the content read by the apps could be revealed to outside sources. However, desktop searches could theoretically operate without a connection to the internet, which means that a simple block of the program's access to external IPs should be able to prevent this from happening.
The whole basis of Mercora, on the other hand, is that it automatically searches the hard drive and streams the content to a public network. First off, I don't understand the business model of distributing free software to the public and then offering to pay royalties on every song broadcasted. No revenues & high costs = doom. Therefore, it appears likely that the company is operating on the premises of bundled spyware, as reported by some users. Needless to say, spyware itself creates enough privacy and security issues, but that is not even the worst of it.
Say some kiddie hacker reverse-engineers the technology and uses it to create a worm that searches computers for sensitive document formats (e.g. *.doc, *.xls, *.pdf come to mind) and broadcasts them to the public domain? Will Mercora's parent company pay for the damages done with this kind of scenario?
I am deeply disappointed that a reputable source like PC Mag gave this a 4/5 rating without alerting the public of the possible security issues with this technology.
h-t-t-p-colon-slash-slash-slash-dot-dot-org
Microsoft Antispyware flagged
MS Antispyware isn't ready for prime time yet, it gives false positives (it also flags the open-source P2P program Shareaza, which perhaps coincidently was written by the same guy as Mercora). Could it be MS just doesn't like P2P? (Pest Patrol is another that thinks all P2P programs are spyware.)