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Finnish Firm Claims Fake P2P Hash Technology
An anonymous reader writes "As reported by The Inquirer, a Finnish company known as Viralg Oy claim to have developed software that can create a junk file with the same hash as a genuine p2p download. This, according to the company, can altogether stop the sharing of copywritten files by flooding p2p networks with corrupt/junk data, which then spreads through the network, causing less and less of the original file to be available. However, with the resolve of the p2p userbase, is this software really going to 'beat all Peer 2 Peer pirates at their own game,' or simply prove a minor annoyance?"
But BT can't tell they're corrupt, they match the hash that BT uses to determine if hte file is corrupt.
Also everyone downloading would be seeding the corrupt data. They don't need millions of fake uploads... they just need a few here and there, and before you know it everyone will be getting and sending chunks of bad files.
It's a good short term blast on BT, changing the hash will fix it. BT is still vulnerable though because of tracker websites being trivial to take down, and anonymity being nonexistant.
BT is an excellent legitimate distribution channel. It also makes watermarking impractical.