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Third of Content On Popular BT Portals Are Fake
siliconbits writes "A study published by a group of researchers, most of them based in Europe, analysed the publishers of content on two major BitTorrent portals, Pirate Bay and MiniNova, and found out that almost a third of all files on the two sites were fake."
Same ratio /. has for how many stories are real.
One of the biggest benefits of torrents is that the fake crap gets weeded out quickly and the real torrents rise to the top with a high number of seeders. So it doesn't matter if its fake because it dies off quicker, than normal as people stop uploading it.
So I get sued for downloading / uploading a fake file can I beat it based on that they are calming that I downloading / uploading the real file?
Is this like that professor sued for haveing a mp3 file in name only?
Ultimately I don't have a problem with leaking fakes, so long as you're not intentionally trying to distribute viruses or anything like that.
Apparently Batman: Arkham Asylum had a leaked version that was basically a demo. There was a level you couldn't get past because of an intentionally crippled feature. When people were screaming and complaining about a "bug" in the product they purchased on the support forums, they were informed that "bug" was only present in an intentionally leaked version on torrent sites. They knew people were going to pirate their game, and they tried to get in front of it and turn it into a scenario where the pirated copy did act as a demo, perhaps convincing people to pay for the real thing.
But the bigger issue is that game studios, music companies and Hollywood still haven't seen the bigger picture.
It is to your benefit to pirate rather than deal with DRM nightmares. And corporate America is more focused on punishing their customers than trying to attract new ones.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
I've become so used to the alt.binaries being polluted with either passworded inner-rars or corrupt/scrambled files that I'm now used to just grabbing the first couple of rar's and extracting them just to make sure. I'm not too surprised to hear this. What does surprise me a little is the amount of people that continue seeding this crap on BT. Do they not open the damn files as they come down? If only for a cursory glance to confirm.
jaymz
Or you got a bot on your machine and you don't know it.
I saw an interesting talk on security/malware once. It had some screenshots of one of the top downloads from TPB (a Photoshop keygen or something). There were hundreds of comments saying it was clean, that the uploader was trusted etc. At time of release no virus scanners flagged it. In fact it uploaded all the passwords it could find on your computer to a machine in China and then generated a Photoshop key.
I walked away from that talk with the powerful impression that if you trust crap you get off piracy sites, you're asking to be owned.
That this research didn't involve taking a random sample, and working out that 1/3rd is fake.
The strength of Bittorrent is that if there are:
1. Low seeds
2. Bad comments
Then its fake.
If you have a file with a few thousand seeders, then you can be sure that its real. Nobody is going to continue to seed a fake/virus ridden file unless its on purpose - but that requires a ton of resources.
And most admins will take down any files reported in that manner.
I can understand someone creating spam pages for popular search terms but I've never understood quite how they manage to come up with really obscure shit, like if I type in "three inch frange demodulator" and there's the first hit proudly declaring "Internet's leader for three inch frange demodulators!" I just made that term up two seconds ago. How do they get that cached into google? A few years back they were doing that with porn text and it would be "'Harder!' she cried, and I thrust my three inch frange demodulator deep inside." I have two questions: how did they do that and is it even doing anything useful for them? Surely they couldn't generate real ad revenue off of banner cruft on that sort of page, right?
I'm not sure of the utility of the torrent spams, either. I know never to download video files that are compressed archives because it's just going to be a scam to get you to sign up for something or pay to get the password but those are few and far between. Pirate Bay and kickasstorrents are usually pretty good. It's the other oddball sites that don't even have the damn file you're looking for but give you a dozen "sponsored links" that pretend like they do and don't. Do they live off of money made from drive-by malware?
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
At some point isn't it easier to just buy the software?
Have you ever bought a SONY gadget on the internet?? How do you know it was not fake, inferior junk, knockoff from China? You do not, not unless you buy the product from an original, authorized seller. Deal with it.
Have you ever bought a SONY CD from an original, authorized seller, to discover that it's rootkitted your computer? Have you ever bought a digital picture frame at Target, to discover that the original-equipment virus lurking in it has infected your flash drives?
The fact is, buying original, genuine merchandise from reputable vendors does not in any way protect you from negligent (Target) or criminal (SONY) acts on the part of those in the manufacturing and distribution chain.
There is no honor among corporations, either.
Buying from an original, authorized seller does not protect you.
Deal with it.