p2pnet - rss feed: Stop p2p spammers
p2pnet.net News:- Researchers who examined pollution in Kazaa estimate more than 50% of the copies of recent files are polluted, say software developers at Cornell University in New York.
“In addition, spammers have recently targeted P2P filesharing systems - for instance, every single image and movie query on the Gnutella network receives at least one false response (with the filename set to match the query, and the contents pushing for a ‘free iPod’) from a spammer (as of 3/10/2005),” they say.
So they wrote Credence to let users vote for files they believe have accurate descriptions, against files with inaccurate and misleading descriptions (spam).
Embedded in LimeWire, the appropriately named application computes the trustworthiness of files based on these votes to enable downloaders to select good files before downloading them, says Cornell.
How does it know who’s trustworthy and who’s a spammer ?
“Initially, it doesn’t,” says the FAQ.
“As you vote for files, it stores your votes and discovers the set of peers with whom your votes are correlated. It also communicates with peers to find out about other peers with whom they in turn are correlated. The outcome of this computation is a numerical value computed for each file appearing in query results that reflects the probability that the given file is trustworthy.
“If you vote thumbs-up for good files and thumbs-down for bad files, you will be grouped with the vast majority of people who also vote honestly. You will then compute a high trustworthiness metric for all files that this (potentially very large) group of users has ever voted on. If you vote inaccurately (i.e. you are a spammer), you will compute a low trustworthiness metric for other non-spam files, and honest users will compute a low trustworthiness coefficient for your opinion.
“It is thus in your best interest to vote honestly.”
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See:-
Credence - THWARTING P2P POLLUTION, March, 2005
March 22nd, 2005 at 1:58 pm
This is something that looks very useful. Another way to tell if a file is a spam is by looking at the file size. If you see a movie file that looks too small, then it is most likely a spam.