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P2P Polluter Shuts Down
Dotnaught writes "Loudeye Corp. said today it is closing its anti-piracy unit, Overpeer, Inc., in an effort to cut costs. Overpeer is best known for polluting P2P networks with garbled digital files. For what it's worth, the Internet filter at CMP Media, where I work, blocks Overpeer's site as 'spyware.'"
I guess this is one big step closer to reversing global warming... oh wait...
it's just putting unneccesary strain on the network, packets that aren't needed clogging it up. fp?
For what it's worth, the Internet filter at CMP Media, where I work, blocks Overpeer's site as 'spyware.'"
For what it's worth, a friend that works at Honeywell says that Bug Me Not's site is blocked as "hacking and subversion tools".
Yeah, exactly, so what?
One down ... who's next ? :D
The application ... describes the methodology ...
3) Edit illegally produced digital music file (damage sound quality).
Thank god... if I get another 64 kbps Wang Chung song I'm gonna give up on this P2P crap and go back to using Hotline.
The IP blocks they use are widely known and have become ineffective against savvy filesharers. More likely, they're going to go under deeper cover, sourcing bandwidth from consumer sources like cable modem and DSL providers to spy on file sharers and pollute the networks. I'm surprised it's taken this long.
I too have felt the cold finger of injustice.
Whilst I see the logic behind hiring companies like this; I don't think it would do anything to prevent piracy, at best it will make people who want to download films etc. spend longer doing it if they get a bad one, but it doesn't take that much effort to get another copy. It ends up being a way for companies to lose even more money and nothing more.
*''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
Not really a huge victory, because the polluted files are still out there - you'd be surprised how many dumbasses don't delete fake files from their directories, and that means all their pollutants out there for the time they've been operating are still floating around, being downloaded and annoying more people - Kazaa and it's network are likely to remain entirely unusable for a long time thanks to this, and what better division to shut down than one that has done it's job, and creating an almost self-perpetuating state of pollution?
I guess the good thing is that now the jackasses that worked for these people are now unemployed - while I largely disagree with illegal P2P filesharing, I can see that it's a symptom of overpriced and 'evil' cartels and hate the fact that they employ shitheads like this, who's sole buisness is rooted firmly into the 'annoy as many people as we can for fun and profit' business model, rather than realising they'd get far more sales (and thus more profit) if they lowered their damn profit margin on every disc
(then again, they'd also save money if they signed good, existing, unsigned bands instead of manufacturing cookie-cutter Britney pop and having to pay songwriters, etc hundreds of thousands of dollars rather than getting the whole thing in one package by signing up real bands, but I can't see that happening any time soon...)
Dealing with lawyers would be a lot less tedious if they all looked like Casey Novak.
Really? I'd like to know how they went around to build these relationships:
It is Christmas, that time of year when people are reminded to do special things for their fellow humans. God bless them, every one.
-/Fires up Shareaza in the spirit of Christmas...
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
It means either:
a) The record companies didn't find this type of disruption cost-effective
or
b) Somebody else can do it better/cheaper
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
... he was one word short of the 30 word minimum for Slashdot articles.
Well, apart from poisoned clients, I am glad noone is screwing up eMule and Bittorrent like they managed to screw up kazaa. Probably because there is a broader culture for file integrity and scene releases on BT/ed2k.
Dvorak on Doomtech
Well ... they probably should have used the expression "build abusive relationships with potential customers".
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
By the way, OverPeer is by no means the only polluter out there. There are spammers who serve the same iPod ad under every conceivable name. Credence marks those as crap and moves them to the bottom of the list, once someone else has voted on them.
Previous Slashdot discussion on Credence is here.
Kids, remember: anti-piracy just doesn't pay.
Are they the ones polluting P2P networks with fake .wmv porn movies usually less than 20 MB that give some weird colorfull shit when you open it?
You just got troll'd!
To make a spoofed file "persistent," that is, omnipresent on a P2P network, requires 10,000 copies of the file, Goodman said. Additionally, since P2P networks are set up in clusters of 100,000 machines, a professional spoofer needs enough always-on servers to connect with each of a P2P network's clusters.
What the hell does that mean? I agree with the man that spoofing won't stop file sharing (it hasn't yet, anyway) but from what part of his anatomy did he pull those numbers?
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
The press release is beautifully vague on the subject.
Reading between the lines, note that it's not the RIAA deciding not to hire these guys any more. They're simply stopping the service. "Effective immediately" is usually code for "Man, we're so screwed up that it's not even worth the effort to pretend." They're not selling the sub-company, or finishing out the month. It's the most undignified way to close out a company.
Basically, that smacks of bad management to me. Maybe they were being effective, maybe not, but they're spending $1.6 million a year doing it. I think somebody from the top said, "We're pulling the plug on this. Write the shortest conceivable press release and we'll pretend it never happened."
did anyone else read that as over pee-er?
HA HA!
It's true no man is an island, but if you take a bunch of dead guys and tie 'em together, they make a good raft.
...maybe they can start doing something about the air?
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
"cutting down costs" heh. More than likely Overpeer was tired of getting anonymous letters from the RIAA bots threatening to sue their asses off, even though they were on the same side.
as a long time p2p music/software/video/etc. downloader, I must say Overpeer's methods (even though not a solid roadblock to piracy but more a deterrent) was the only one that ever annoyed me and actually worked. I can't even spent the amount of time I spent downloading songs only to find out they were five second loops over and over for for minutes lol. And then the time cleaning my shared files to ensure I wasn't passing those crap files on to othre file sharers. Seems Loudeye only made it easier for me to download stuff lol
why I just downloaded three C++ tutorials and got three porn videos.....errr, but I don't have a problem with that. Thanks Overpeer!
Polluting is a short term solution, on the lines of - if you can't stop them, annoy them.
.Polluters can keep the starting part of a file good while messing the rest of it, so preview statring from any random place in the file can be implemented.
It will only result in more sophisticated clients. Some features which may circumvent this method are -
-Rating : polluters can also artificially rate their files high, but assuming that pirates outnumber them by thousands, its highly useful.
-Hashing : polluters can easily create and hash their files, but this will stop them from polluting existing stuff.
-Preview : preview-before-download is most effective way of checking if a file is valid
-Blocking : autoblocking a user if he has a lot of wrong files.
-Chat : asking the user about the file's quality. You cant expect a polluter to sit 24x7 in front of his servers chatting with millions.
-Voice and music recognition : the s/w may evolve so much that it will recognize any speech and music information present in the file and will warn if not found. Same can be done with images.
-Encryption : a trusted network can start encrypting the files, if client provides such a feature.
-Redundancy : a p2p network can have dedicated servers to copy bits of files and place them on client machines. A million copies can beat a few polluted ones.
God created man in his own image, but somehow he evolved into a hairless monkey.
I remember when I started to see files like this with kazaa lite.
It was one of the reasons I dropped k-lite and started using direct connect (or more accurately, returned to DC++ after 3 years or so.)
The setup of a DC hub effectively NULLIFIED people (and companies, someone actually got paid to do this???...whatever) who spread junk files like this. If you download a crap file, you simply notify an op, and if the offending share isn't cleaned up, that user is simply kicked and banned from the hub. All you have left are users with legitimate files and the RIAA fanboys are locked out, relegated to attempted DoSsing and other acts of true cyberterrorism.
The community effectively polices itself. Problem solved.