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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."
no, what bittorrent needs to implement is some kind of encrypted protection or key for trackers so that any attempt to subvert them is a DMCA violation. turn their own weapon against them.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Show me a place I can buy, rent, watch or download the entire X-men oringal series cartoon and I will stop downloading it now and buy it.
In fact most of what I download are things that I simple cannot buy or or so expensive that I wouldn't ever consider paying that much money for it (would you pay £180 / $321 USD (£150 now) for My So Called Life which is only 19 episodes long and a one of my faviourate shows from when i was a kid, or would you download load it for free?).
If they would be reasonable about the whole thing I would be happy to pay for old shows and films, but this simply isn't the case.
"In a time of universal deceit - telling the truth is a revolutionary act." - George Orwell
OK, not trying to justify anything here, but where does all the law stand on an issue like this?
What if I were to download "The Simpsons" from last nights free broadcast? I'm not uploading anything, just downloading and watching it, then deleting it after I watch it. Can I be arrested for this or is it copyright violations? I'm not selling anything. I'm not causing the lost revinue from watching this. No, even though the commercials are not on the download, it still doesn't matter as I never watch commercials anyway. If I were to watch it on TV and don't watch the commercials, can I be arrested for that then? Is that copyright violation also? What if I were to tape the show with a VCR, but not the commercials...wouldn't this also be exactly like just downloading the show? I still have the end product. The Simpsons from last night. What if I were to record the show from last night and put it on my HD. Again, the exact same result. I would have the exact same show on my HD without commercials wither I downloaded it or taped it. And how could they prove it otherwise? Unless of course I were to take the show I recorded and then distributed it.
This is all a grey area here. Is this illegal like stealing a car and downloaders should go to jail, or is it copyright violation and downloaders should just be made to feel guilty (or go to jail) or is it really nothing? Again, I'm not trying to justify anything here...just want to know where the law stands on people that record a free show vs downloading the exact same free show...both WITHOUT commercials. If some say that the it's the commercials that make it a free show then I suppose I should be hauled off for jail for YEARS of not watching the commericals.
"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith
Well, I'm a Canadian. I break no laws when I download music on bittorrent... but these people are making it extremely difficult to download my music in peace.
Luring someone into engaging in some illegal activity and then suing or reporting it to law enforcement is considered a crime over here in Italy. Is it the same in the US? One thing is a police officer infiltrating a mob, another one is wiretapping a communication device without a judge's supervision by a private individual. On top of that, if the network sniffing is done by joining it and participating in the transmission of data, they are actively participating to the eventual crime.
Mi domando chi à il mandante di tutte le cazzate che faccio - Altan
I bought Photoshop CS. Photography is a hobby, but one I take seriously enough to be semi-pro at it with the occasional paid job. The product activation in PS CS turned out to be a real problem. Nearly every time I did a system restore, PS CS would deactivate, requiring I call Adobe to reactivate it. Windows being the way it is and me liking to tweak with my laptop, I had to restore a lot. It was getting beyond annoying and I was starting to worry about Adobe blacklisting my copy of PS CS. So I downloaded a pirated copy of it along with a key generator. I kept that on my hard drive and started reinstalling instead of having Adobe reactivate.
At the end of a trip to Europe, I was working at editing and printing a bunch of pictures I'd taken of an event. I needed to use a photo printer someone else provided. The printer driver install went awry and I had to do a system restore to fix it. Sure enough Photoshop deactivated itself. I was at a hostel in the mountains, about 12 hours before my departing flight, without any Internet access, at 4 am, with no idea what phone number I was supposed to call to reach Adobe tech support if they were even open at that time on a Sunday. So I uninstalled Photoshop, dug up the pirated copy, and installed that. Worked like a charm. I got the pictures edited and printed, the people at the event were happy, and I made my flight home.
When Photoshop CS2 came out, I bought that as well. And I downloaded a pirated copy of it off bittorrent. Of course the real irony is that if Adobe handn't put in product activation as an anti-piracy measure, I never would've needed to get the pirated version.
Define 'broken'. If a file is stored in a multi-part RAR Archive with passworded encryption, is it not broken? It is an absolutly useless packet of data to anyone without the password to extract it. And when its downloaded as a broken file collection, and then extracted and watched, where is the point at which it becomes illegal? Is it illegal to download the 'broken' file, or is it illegal to extract and watch it? And if it's only illegal to extract/watch the file, then is it not illegal to upload the 'broken' file?
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I am completely against sharing things illegally.
But that aside, technical solutions present themselves to me. Maybe they have not be investigated by others, so I give them here in the hope its helpful to those fighting the corruption of _legal_ shares.
As a file downloads, it typically contains sufficient information in parts to be understood without the entirity of the file.
For example, as a movie is downloaded in segments, segments themselves contain keyframes. By fast-forward playing the the movie as it arrives, skipping incomplete segments, in a small thumbnail, bad quality or fake torrents would be easily identifable.
Further statistical tools could measure such things as the rate the scene moves, so fake movies that contain promising keyframes but then garbage to obliterate the content might be tagged as suspicious long before the complete movie is downloaded and ready for viewing fullscreen etc.
If you have downloaded 99% of a movie, you ought to be able to play that 99%.
If someone harm you, and you fail to do anything about it for long enough, despite you being in communications with them, you can't sue them for damages. You must make some effort to migrate the damages beforehand.
Civil law is based on the idea of 'tort', that other people caused harm to you, and you can't let other people keep 'hurting' you and then sue them when you think they've racked up enough damages. You have to try to stop them at some point. Otherwise the court rightly supposes that you weren't really being harmed, or didn't mind the harm.
I.e., I can't let my next-door neighbor can't drive over a corner of my grass for ten years as he pulls into his driveway, keep track of how much grass he's killed, and then sue him for that amount. I have to actually have tried for stop him for the last ten years, via talking to him and even putting up a pole so he can't do that anymore. (And then I can sue him for the cost of the pole. ;) )
And you can't cause people to keep 'hurting' you and then sue them for it. That'll get you laughed out of court so fast it's not funny.
If the MPAA hands out a torrent into a network that is designed for end users to share the files, they can't complain when exactly that happens.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?