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

P2P Polluter Shuts Down...

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess this is one big step closer to reversing global warming... oh wait...

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.

Sound deterioration

[rolypolyman]

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.

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.

[StrongAxe]

The IP blocks they use are widely known and have become ineffective against savvy filesharers.

The real problem isn't from savvy file sharers, but rather clueless ones who download the files, don't care that they are corrupted (or more likely, just download them and never actually listen to them), and keep sharing them forever.

Re:Morphing and going into hiding, more likely.

[ScrewMaster]

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.

More likely it was just a simple business decision because Overpeer just hasn't really done anything to justify the money spent on it, much less in terms of reducing P2P activity. Oh sure, providing demographic data by monitoring filesharing is one thing, but all network poisoning does is generate more bad press for the media companies. Maybe somebody upstairs realized that a. it was a stupid idea to begin with, and b. wasn't working anyway.

Re:Morphing and going into hiding, more likely.

[Blkdeath]

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!

Re:Morphing and going into hiding, more likely.

[archeopterix]

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 wonder what the next move of the P2P community will be. My bet is on some kind of social filtering - prefer files that are checked by your buddies, slightly less those preferred by their buddies and so on. A decent protocol could do this without compromising anonymity - you only know your direct connections, but not their connections. The centuries old conspiracy model alive and well in the modern technology environment.

Btw, I hardly use any P2P. Most of the files on my disk come from people I know who wanted to share some music they find interesting.

Re:Morphing and going into hiding, more likely.

[griffjon]

Maybe this was the real reason for Sony's rootkit -- backdoor into computers, then zombie out through them. Then the Sober worm could counteract it... we're getting closer and closer to blanu's Curious Yellow scenario every day...

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:Morphing and going into hiding, more likely.

[Renesis]

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 :(

no point anyway

[joe 155]

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.

Re:no point anyway

[squiggleslash]

I'm sure that's true of the movie or song they're trying to download - you've set yourself a specific target, you're going to try and solve it, even if it takes you all day. The long term effect, though, is likely to be that people see the P2P network as less useful as a source of music.

Put it this way: you've just heard a song you like on the radio, and you want a copy. Do you, pre-polluter, go to Kazster, perform a quick search, look at the 17 rips available, download the 192kbps MP3, and five minutes later have the song, or do you go onto Amazon, search for the CD, add it to your shopping basket, check out, and 20 minutes later have an email confirming your order with the CD arriving 3 days-3 weeks later?

Now, post polluter, do you: go to Beartella, perform a quick search, look at the 48 rips available, pick one, knowing, in the gut of your stomach, it's likely to be bogus, download it, play it, it sucks, download next one, it sucks, download next one, won't start, download next one, is this a joke? Download the next one... and an hour or three later, have a 96kbps MP3 that happens to have the music and be what you're prepared to settle on because, damn it, you're not downloading any more tonight, or do you go to Amazon.com, search for the CD, add it to your shopping basket, check out, and 20 minutes later have an email confirming your order, with you sitting back and thinking "It's on the way!"?

In the latter scenario, you'd have to be increasingly desperate and/or cheap not to see Amazon.com (or equivalent) as a more enjoyable way of getting your music.

I'm not suggesting this company was particularly successful at making P2P networks like that, but the whole "Make P2P piracy a complete Pain in the Arse" scenario is one that could work if they put enough effort and resources into it. If I were evil, and I were head of the RIAA, I'd offer to knock down some of those fines I'm imposing on P2P pirates in exchange for them participating in a mass polluting.

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.

Not really a huge victory...

[One Childish N00b]

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...)

Re:Not really a huge victory...

[LiquidCoooled]

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.

Building relationships with potential customer...

[Chaffar]

Overpeer "intervenes on behalf of our clients to protect their content from piracy on P2P networks. And, in certain cases, we also may help them build relationships with potential customers who happen to be on the P2P site"

Really? I'd like to know how they went around to build these relationships:

[Music] Hit me baby one more time, oh baby baby...[/Music] fkshfkjcxxxx------... You are a pirate. We know who you are. When where you downloaded this song from. Purchase the CD from a retailer (no iTunes they're evil too) and we won't sue you. Your truly. Overpeer.

Tis the season for giving

[saskboy]

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...

What this really means

[tkrotchko]

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

Glad this does not affect eMule/Bittorrent

[Nichotin]

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.

Re:Glad this does not affect eMule/Bittorrent

[JFitzsimmons]

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.

Re:Glad this does not affect eMule/Bittorrent

[biraneto2]

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 ^_^

Credence for FileSharing without P2P Pollution...

[Timothy1965]

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.

Are they the ones..

[4D6963]

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?

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?

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.