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Reputation System Fights P2P Junk

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the and-not-every-country-song-is-johnny-cash dept.

yeejiun writes "Many of the files that are shared on p2p networks tend to be junk. Organizations such as the RIAA and music labels regularly pollute these networks with nonsense files masquerading as real music/video files. These junk files make it difficult for users to find what they want on such p2p networks. Some researchers at Cornell University have developed a reputation system called Credence, that works on the Gnutella network, allowing users to tell the good files from the bad ones."

6 of 338 comments (clear)

  1. better answer by eight+and+a+quarter · · Score: 4, Insightful

    quit downloading crap off of kazaa/grokster/morpheous/etc. dont trust brittneyspearsporno.avi.mpeg.exe

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    lameness filter thwarted.
  2. Here's a simpler idea... by lightspawn · · Score: 4, Insightful

    If a file appears to by RIAA-affiliated music, treat it as a junk file.

    Why bother with music the artist doesn't want you to have? Just forget about it altogether and discover new music, even new types of music that you'd never realize existed, much less that you could enjoy.

  3. Re:One problem with this Credence system: by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I think the main insight and contribution of the system is that the reputation of a peer according to you is determined by whether he/she votes in a similar manner as you.

    So if the RIAA starts spamming Gnutella with lots of junk stuff, you will never vote in the same way as the RIAA dummy accounts, and you don't take their votes into account.

    In fact, it seems the system is even smarter than that - it can take votes from people that are strongly uncorrelated with you and use that as negative information. So anything these people vote as valid files, you can treat as garbage as their definition of good/bad files is completely opposite to yours. And assuming you trust your own judgement, that means those files must be bogus.

    Reminds me a lot of the google pagerank system, but with explicit learning/training instead of using back-links for determining correlation.

  4. Huh by TCM · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Who actually searches for files in the P2P client? Normally you visit some site where the releaser himself posted a torrent or an ed2k link and you download that.

    I can't remember the last time I actually searched in eMule.

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  5. Re:Self-policing is needed by EvanED · · Score: 4, Insightful

    But what the parent is saying (and which is a very legit argument if you ask me) is that if you're looking for a Debian repository, you're almost certainly not going to find a fake file!

    If you want to be sure, you can compare the file size to the official one. If it matches, you can be all but completely confidant that it's real.

    After all, there are probably far fewer people trying to flood P2P with bogus files just for the hell of it then there are trying to flood P2P with bogus files in an attempt to protect copyright.

  6. Re:Torrents can be bogus too. by Spudds · · Score: 4, Insightful

    And I don't see why they'd bother, when a threatening letter is all it usually takes to take a torrent site down

    That's not really true. Depending on where the site is hosted, legal threats could be more humerous than scarry.

        Case in point.

          Btw, if you've got a few minutes to kill, you should really check out some of the emails to and responses from thepiratebay.com. They are hilarious!