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Poisoned Torrents Plague Mybittorrent
jambarama writes "One of the biggest problems with the Fasttrack network has been poisoning. This is the practice of sharing a file on a P2P network that looks like the real thing, but isn't. Bittorrent until recently has been largely immune to this. Now a new type of torrent is tricking bittorrent sites to rising to the top of the download lists." From the article: "According to Rex, about 50 new torrents have been released from what he calls "fake" trackers (~31 in total.) These trackers are seemingly part of an elaborate plot to infiltrate the BitTorrent community with intentionally corrupt files. These movie and film titles are specifically designed to report false information to trackers, thereby gaining artificially inflated popularity."
Theres already a plugin for Azureus that prevents it connecting to the IP addresses of known bad torrent seeders and goverment agencies using a regularly auto-updated list. I think its called 'Safepeer'.
To err is human. To forgive is not company policy.
the identified trackers ... all originate from the same IP address.
The solution suggests itself. Is PeerGuardian onto that IP address yet?
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
Bad news: You do break the law. Downloading is legal here, but uploading definitely is not. While you're downloading, you are feeding data to peers and that makes you an uploader. Also, if you leave the torrent open after downloading, you are seeding (which of course you should do, lest you be branded a leecher).