p2pnet.net News View:- We recently ran an item pointing out that a free host site with a page put up by a pro-Qaeda group featuring awful videos of hostages having their heads cut off had been hacked.

Here’s an excellent Reader’s Write submission – unsigned, unfortunately – on the subject of p2p and horror sites.

Read on >>>>>>>>>>>>>

The copyrighted media industry, which includes movies and music and even porn, has long maintained that P2P is used almost exclusively to illegally distribute copyrighted files. However, there has been a genre of non-copyrighted content that has recently become a most sought-after commodity: images and video of wartime atrocities such as beheadings.

An article in Newsweek states:

"The terrorists sent reports of the deaths – and grisly footage of the beheadings – to Islamic web sites … Those videos quickly migrated to Internet nodes more trafficked by Westerners – peer-to-peer sites like Kazaa and Grokster, where anyone can post or download videos anonymously"

A recent Washington Post story detailed how some of these hostage-taking cutthroats are getting their videos distributed, utilizing some of the same peer-to-peer methods that the file-sharing community has relied on to release movies, music, and software. YouSendIt, a free service that allows a person to upload any file of up to 1gig onto their servers, and then send or post download links that can be used by recipients to download the file up to 25 times per file. Since Al-Jazeera stopped broadcasting these hostage-beheading videos, p2p seems to have become one of the primary means for the terrorists to spread their savage propaganda to like-minded compatriots.

Since these images are self-censored from mainstream media, p2p may have also become the method of choice for Westerners obtaining downloads of these macabre scenes.

Starting with the Daniel Pearl execution in Pakistan two years ago, p2p has been at times probably the easiest method of obtaining such footage, unless one can read Arabic and is quick enough to locate a hosting website before it gets shut down. Ogrish.com seems to be the biggest and most well known site specializing in this perverse morbidity – at least to the English speaking world.

On Alexa.com Ogrish was ranked in the top 2000 (and sometimes much higher) of the web’s most visited sites. The Pearl video was for a time only available on p2p, as the very few websites that hosted it removed the file under legal threat.

The current situation has changed, however, and it seems that a multitude of websites now specialize in providing this gorey entertainment which the producers are more than happy to generously supply free of charge and without copyright, tapping into that same perverse curiosity that so often tempts motorists to slow down and stare at a road accident.

Although the Roman Colosseum is long gone, even "civilized" humans of the modern age have still never fully outgrown that barbaric lust for blood-sport.

Western Governments attempt to stamp out any emergence of consumer interest in viewing any kind of morbid cruelty. State-sponsored executions take place safely out of view of the public. Dogfights, cockfights, even bullfights are banned in the USA. Scenes from livestock slaughterhouses are never shown on public TV, let alone on the can of corned beef that results from such slaughter. In contrast, many other countries are not so skittish about death. Saudi Arabia regularly conducts public executions, and most any Mexican/Spanish language news stand is sure to be filled with magazines showing photographs of grisly crime scenes.

During the recent Iraq invasion, the US press took meticulous care to ensure that neither US troop casualties nor the multitudes of eviscerated corpses of Iraqis – both soldier and civilian – that lined the streets ever showed up on TV news reports – as if to present war as some kind of giant paintball match.

The Arab Al-Jareera network chose to show all those graphic images of dead babies – despite the ongoing threat of their press headquarters being bombed – for the second time – by US warplanes. (Not surprising, Al Jazeera is now kicked out of Iraq.) Ironically, gore-filled horror movies and even the blood-spattered ‘Passion of the Christ’ are hugely popular in the USA. Perhaps knowing that "it’s only fake" makes all the difference in public acceptability.

I started up Filetopia, a p2p that I hadn’t used in a long time. One of the chatrooms I went to, a popular movie channel, boldly stated on its frontpage: "NO PORN … NO BEHEADINGS". Since Filetopia has a reputation of being a rather G-rated p2p network as well as most users preferring to disable network searching, I searched for "beheading" on the edonkey network and found results on just one server numbering in the hundreds. While certainly not as high as the latest blockbuster movie would return, this was clearly a popular genre of shared files. It’s my guess, however, that as more and more websites start openly offering this fare and their notoriety grows, there will be less incentive for people to seek out p2p – with its reputation of long queues, fake files and irregular quality – for their grisly entertainment fix.

The developers of p2p applications have always desired that they can show "substantial non-infringing uses" of their product, although the idea of users swapping uncopyrighted beheading videos is probably unlikely to be what they had in mind.

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See:-

awful videos – ‘Beheading’ site hacked, p2pnet, September 28, 2004

grisly footage – Inside the Dark Corners of the Net, MSNBC News, September 24, 2004

cutthroats – Area technology used to distribute terror videos, The Washington Post, October 3, 2004

This entry was posted on Friday, October 8th, 2004 at 6:15 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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