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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."
In addition to fooling unsuspecting users into downloading these broken torrents, it is likely that IP addresses were also harvested - potentially for future lawsuits. So BitTorrent clients will have to add/invent a trust systems for trackers now - not just for files.
--- Eat my sig.
Simple. Bittorrent needs an EULA so that people are forced to post legitimate pirated files. Damned liars - spoiling it for all us honest freeloaders.
Files that impersonate other files (e.g. get the latest britney spears song when it's really just static) tend to only impersonate files that people don't have permission to distribute (and are therefore breaking the law). Most files that are legally distributable tend to not suffer from having poisonous files out there, so therefore people that follow the law don't actually have a problem with them.
If the past is any indicator (and it normally is), the bittorrent poisonous files will mostly (if not only) be impersonating files that people aren't allowed to distribute. Your garage bands or Linux distributors that use bit-torrent, are most likely not going to have people impersonating their files out there (there may be a little bit of it, but chances are it'll be a very small amount).
So really, for people that follow the law, this isn't going to be a problem. For people breaking the law, you really have no reason to complain. However what can be a problem is when legit files falsely report information to increase their perceived popularity.
First of all, I cannot read the article because of the corporate proxy filter, so I'm talking "blind" here.
Ok, so what is the real problem with this???
If this is being done to prevent "ilicit" files from being spread, then I do not see what could be wrong with it. Some people are getting free stuff and then complaining the file is corrupted or it isn't what they expected to download???
Another matter would be for example contaminating "licit" files, but I'm sure that this is not the case (again, I couldn't read the article), which could be used from preventing downloading of some linux distros for example. That'd be something to worry about though.
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....
when the "poisoners" just tricked you by putting porn in place of the movie? that was always my favorite poison. that's why i drank a small dose of it everyday until i became immune.
Esepcially as from TFA:
Those who download these torrents are unable to complete a full download, as the file transfer stops at approximately 97%-98%.
Guess that would give plenty of time to harvest the IP, whilst the pirates end up with gigabytes of useless 1s & 0s....
I mean given the reported posioned torrents so far are:
"The Wedding Crashers"
"Charlie and the Chocolate Factory"
The first three episodes of "The O.C."
It seems unlikely that there is any legitimate use of these.
> Otherwise you'll turn it into "all your base" and we saw where that went.
To Us?
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
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 solution to this is simple: Moderation on the tracker sites. Let users report what torrents succed and what not. And release lists of poisoned torrents to be used on all sites.
If Microsoft was mass, stupidity would be gravity.
"Locks Plague Burglars"
"Mace Plagues Rapists"
"Speed Cameras Plague Speeding Motorists"
"Forensic Science Plagues Careless Criminals"
"Crazy Frog Ringtone Plagues Absolutely Everyone..."
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
It seems kind of stupid to try to get Them(tm) to break the law while trying to catch you (in general, not timmarhy personally) break the law, doesn't it? If you have a problem with the business and legal practices of the **AAs (or similar associations depending on your country) then the easiest way to deal with them is to not deal with them at all and not use their products.
Rather than turning their weapons against them, don't give them a reason to use their weapons. Go for the legal stuff. IMHO it tends to be very good anyway. Here is a good place to start:
LegalTorrents.com
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
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
If you use bittorrent, you are uploading, it's part of how the protocol works.
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.
Actually, yes, you are uploading it too. That's the way BitTorrent works - only one person needs to seed the original copy, but while people are downloading from the seed, they upload the chunks they have to other downloaders as well, so the original seeder doesn't get hammered.
Downloading via BitTorrent is equivalent to downloading with Kazaa and then placing the downloaded item in your shared folder. So, as far as the law stands, it's copyright infringement.
Giving away free copies once does not automatically put something into the public domain. The copyright holders still retain copyright.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
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
The odd thing is that you're not the customer of the Simpsons, you're the product. You're sold to advertisers with the promise that some of you might just possibly not skip their commercials or walk out of the room while their messages are broadcast.
By downloading the episode, you've broken that relationship. The media empires may just need to find a new business model. I do hope that whatever it is, it moves us back to a relationship where the content is the product and the viewer is the customer.
I think it's a great act of civil dissobedience. The public airwaves are overrun by television which I think is crap soley because of this messed up viewer-product relationship. :-)
IANAL, but I think you can be sued in a civil court for downloading your episodes. If a do-not-record flag is set, you can be hauled off to prison by the federal police for violating the DMCA.
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).
you may have received 98% of actually copyrighted data. So it's copyright infringement nonetheless even if the product turns out to be useless.
No, it's not actually copyright infringement.
When you download something from itunes, is it copyright infringement?
Why not? because it's not copyright infringement if you have permission from the copyright holder, right?
Now, here's where this example ties into this discussion:
If the copyright holder puts their work up on a P2P service, with full knowledge that the file will be downloaded and uploaded, how can they claim infringement? They know how the protocol works, they know that copying will occur. By putting the file up, with knowledge of how the protocol works, they are implicitly giving permission for the copying to take place.
It's not copyright infringement if you have permission.
Actually, most of the time there was neither. eg. Armour that was not invincible, and a weapon that was not unstoppable. The solution was, and still is to use combinations.
:) .
Example: My firewall will not stop viruses, but will stop most other intrusion attempts. Similarly, my antivirus program does not stop people portscanning my box, but can stop viruses reliably. A computer with one but not the other is vulnerable, a computer using both working together is far more secure. Similarly, most nations send in the troops with an assortment of weapons and tools, because they are more effective across a variety of situations than one weapon ever will be.
There will not be a protection mechanism for Bittorrent that cannot be broken, forged or otherwise avoided. Likewise, nothing the RIAA can throw at Bittorrent cannot be countered in some fashion. By using combinations of protection mechanisms, Bittorrent can be protected to a degree that attacks can be tolerated. The RIAA gets this, that's why they try many tactics, such as torrent poisoning, DRM, the DMCA, sending goons to street vendors, etc.
I'm not disagreeing with you, just tweaking your points a bit
The odd thing is that you're not the customer of the Simpsons, you're the product. You're sold to advertisers with the promise that some of you might just possibly not skip their commercials or walk out of the room while their messages are broadcast.
By downloading the episode, you've broken that relationship.
An important point to remember here is that you haven't broken any relationship. You never signed up to any of this. No one who watches TV signs an agreement guaranteeing that they will watch ads. No one.
If people stop watching ads, for whatever reason, they are certainly NOT "stealing" TV (a ridiculous concept). They may not be obeying time honored consumer models, but that is not, yet, a crime, or even morally ambiguous. It just is.
May the Maths Be with you!
Law Enforcement might be able to entrap people (undercover cops pretending to be hookers for example)
I think you're confused about what entrapment actually is. Entrapment is inducing someone to break the law, like if an undercover cop was luring ricers into racing him so his buddy down the road could bust them. Simply setting up a situation where people will get caught doing what they would be doing anyway is NOT entrapment.
Those prostitution stings are carefully arranged so that they aren't entrapment. The undercover cop doesn't go walking up to peoples cars and soliciting them. Instead, she just stands around looking like she might be a prostitute, and the johns approach her. It's still a honeytrap, but not entrapment, since the john walks into it entirely of his own accord.
And while we're on the subject, a civil case has a much lower bar for what's admissible as evidence than a criminal trial. Something that would be thrown out as entrapment in a criminal case could be perfectly acceptable in a civil one.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
So yes, I do feel entitled to the X-Men cartoon series, as well as any other media, because I actually am entitled to it! The Public Domain is the natural state of intellectual works. It is only by my (and every other American citizen's) good graces that artist have any monopoly at all.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
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?