Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

P2P Polluter Shuts Down

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the nice-tries dept.

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.'"

8 of 90 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Not really a huge victory... by LiquidCoooled · · Score: 3, Informative

    I never understand the mentality of sharing your downloads folder.
    At the places (dare I say hubs) that I frequent, sharing incomplete or multiple corrupted files gains you an instant ban.
    This seems to work, because in all the years I have been around I've only ever had 2 misidentied files (and one of them was just my fault - red eye 2005 korea version).

    Verify your shares folks.

    --
    liqbase :: faster than paper
  2. Glad this does not affect eMule/Bittorrent by Nichotin · · Score: 2, Informative

    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
    1. Re:Glad this does not affect eMule/Bittorrent by JFitzsimmons · · Score: 3, Informative

      Not exactly, but close enough.

      The file is split into logical chunks, and the hash of each chunk is taken when a torrent file is created. When the client downloads, it checks each chunk, as soon as it finishes, against the hash provided for that chunk in the torrent file. I'm not actually sure what kind of particular hashing algorithm it uses, and I honestly don't care.

      --
      Beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master. -Anonymous
    2. Re:Glad this does not affect eMule/Bittorrent by biraneto2 · · Score: 2, Informative

      That is not true. In emule there is a simple tatic that is pretty effective. The company create fake clients... Now this clients accepts everyone's request for file parts and start sending bad blocks. It would be fine, since the integrity is checked... but this clients transmit the blocks to you at the minimum speed possible. Like 3 b/s. You take a long time to realize the block is bad and have to start it over. It caused about 1 Gb of corrupted download parts on a single night. A friend of mine told me that since I don't download piracy... really ^_^

  3. Credence for FileSharing without P2P Pollution... by Timothy1965 · · Score: 5, Informative
    I use Credence-LimeWire for downloading songs. About five days after voting on some files, it built a decent trust network for me so the top items in my searches are items that other people have voted on as being clean.

    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.

  4. Re:Morphing and going into hiding, more likely. by Blkdeath · · Score: 3, Informative
    They try sourcing bandwidth from my cable modem and they'll get to know the dark side of my attorney, I can tell you that.

    Pssst; I think he meant using cable modem accounts to hide amongst the masses.

    BTW - if you (the general 'you') don't check your downloads and automatically share them out again you are donating your bandwidth to their efforts. Clean up the P2P - stage and scan your downloads!

    --
    BD Phone Home!

    Shameless plug. Like you weren't expecting it.

  5. Re:Morphing and going into hiding, more likely. by Renesis · · Score: 2, Informative

    No, very likely they're really closing down. I was in some of the first meetings between Overpeer and Loudeye back in the early days long before the buyout. The record labels were paying Overpeer to seed the main networks with 30 second samples of all the tracks, made to look like the full-length versions. In fairness their tech guys had good answers about where they were going to continue to get IP blocks from as they were found out.

    I suspect Overpeer just aren't relevant anymore - the core P2P networks have pretty much imploded on themselves, and any consumers using them are just going to get raped by all the spyware they'll end up with. The hardcore downloaders know where to get the music anyway, and Overpeer was useless against Torrents which are generally "moderated" against poisons by the community.

    I feel bad for my Loudeye shares though :(

  6. Re:Where do these numbers come from? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    All of that sounds quite reasonable, and it's all valid English... So, any misunderstanding is clearly YOUR fault.

    P2P nodes rarely exceed a few hundred thousand peers, that's where the hundred thousand comes from. He isn't saying you need a hundred thousand servers in your cluster so you can spam pirates--google would die from envy. He says you need a metric assload (10,000, for you SAE people) files in distrubution to make an impact on what people download. That also sounds reasonable. People download the files that are most widely spread, because they think they're authentic since everyone else also has it!

    What the fuck was so hard to understand about that?