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.'"

Comments

good

[know1]

it's just putting unneccesary strain on the network, packets that aren't needed clogging it up. fp?

And?

[garcia]

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?

Re:And?

[MasterPi]

For what its worth, sourceforge was blocked @ my school for a few days. That ticked me off. Not to mention any member sites as "freepages01". Yeah thats like 1/4 of all opensource stuff out there.

Morphing and going into hiding, more likely.

[Ph33r th3 g(O)at]

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.

Re:Morphing and going into hiding, more likely.

[ScrewMaster]

I know what he meant, it's just that nothing really precludes them from using a zombie army to perform the same task. Spammers use them, and for the most part are getting away with it! It would be tons cheaper, and hey, you'd be hitting the problem at the source. Just degrade the user's uploads on-the-fly using your rootkit-based zombie MP3 zapper. Suppose Sony and their protection system suppliers had been a bit more subtle, and rather than trying to protect the CD itself (and using a rootkit, which is really what got Russinovich interested) had simply installed a packet sniffer? Oops! Britney Spears going out ... Shazaam! white noise. Ha ha. The dude running the P2P program would have no idea he was transmitting crap, and if you aren't using a peer-to-peer program you'd never know.

Unless you believe that the people running Overpeer and big media companies like, oh, I don't know ... Sony, have some intrinsic ethical constraint against it, this will happen, or something equally nasty. Sure, Sony got dinged pretty hard this time around, but given the billions of dollars at stake here I wouldn't expect this to be the last time they try something.

Any consumer-grade ISP that gets caught officially supporting such activity would find itself in hot water, both legally and with its own customer base. I live in a broadband-competitive area: just how long do you think I'd stick with Comcast if I thought for one second they were contributing to this? Speakeasy, here I come. Actually, I'll probably be switching to Speakeasy since I'm tired of a 30K cap on my backchannel. Besides, Comcast is making a fortune in selling broadband to people that want to use peer-to-peer, deliberately permitting their services to be used to degrade such services would impact their bottom line.

But yeah, I agree ... if you keep damaged files in your upload folder you're not helping matters one bit.

Re:P2P Polluter Shuts Down...

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed. Well its about the only US company that is clearly committed to clamping down on pollution and other harmful emissions! ;)

Where do these numbers come from?

[ScrewMaster]

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?

Re:no point anyway

[Paraplex]

When Fahrenheit 911 came out Michael Moore told me to download it off the net, but the copy was Alex someoneorother who is a michael moore rip off guy. He finds non issues and harasses bottom level employees and yells at old men (apparently all of the US national parks are owned by nasa or nazis or or smurfs or something)

Anyway, this had about 900 times the number of seeders on limewire than the real fahrenheit 911, and subsequently appeard to be more "legit" so more people downloaded it thus feeding the illusion of legitimacy. (and making it harder to get the legit copy because all your potential seeders are leeching the wrong file)

It was no more than a simple clumsy loophole the company was trying to exploit - where files are identified by file name only. Nowadays humans rating a files legitimacy or quality (never seen a dodgy file on e-mule for example)

Its a nice story.

They are only improving P2P

[4Dmonkey]

Polluting is a short term solution, on the lines of - if you can't stop them, annoy them.

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 .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.

-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.