Macrovision p2p brainfart
p2p news / p2pnet:- They’re calling it ‘Hawkeye,’ They being Macrovision and It being a tacky system purpose-designed to flood p2p file-sharing networks with “fake search results and bogus files”.
Once tracks are uploaded to file-sharing networks, “they can replicate exponentially,” the company promises.
“At the recent Entertainment Media Expo, Macrovision representatives gave us an up-close look at their new ‘Hawkeye’ system, which floods file-sharing networks with fake search results and bogus files, says tom’s hardware guide, going on:
“Hawkeye tries to slow down piracy by flooding the networks with bogus information. The approach is not completely new and has been used by the Recording Industry Association Artists and even artists such as Madonna in the past. Macrovision, however, adds another twist: Hawkeye either causes file transfers to hang or downloads audio or video data that simply contain silence or noise.”
Macrovision is already selling (or trying to sell) DRM applications such as Ripguard to entertainment industry marks and now, “Content owners can order Hawkeye ‘protection’ for their content by directly calling Macrovision or filling out a form on the firm’s website,” says the story.
“Todd Dalke, a sales engineer for Macrovision, demonstrated Hawkeye to us by implementing a protection order for a Brittany Spears video. He targeted the FastTrack network, which is the technology behind the Kazaa program.
“Hawkeye contacted all the supernodes on the FastTrack network and inserted fake filenames resembling Brittany Spears video files. In our demonstration, Dalke added in a bunch of X’s and Y’s to the end of the filenames so we could easily see the results. After just about three minutes several dozens of the fake files came up in searches for the Brittany Spears video. According to Dalke, Macrovision typically uses bogus metadata to attract downloaders.”
“We make it look good,” Dalke is quoted as proudly saying.
What happens if someone tries to download a Macrovision fake?
It, “injects two types of files into the P2P network,” says tom’s hardware guide. The first, called a ’sinkhole,’ will look like an actual file, but will never start to download and simply hang when the user tries to download it. The second file type will download and but contain only useless content data – such as noise. Dalke explained that Hawkeye aims to ‘frustrate the downloader into giving up’ his research for content. According to Macrovision, 100 bogus files may have to be downloaded before catching a file the user is actually looking for – making the search for audio and video as much fun as looking for a needle in a haystack.”
Will the world’s ISPs soon start suing Macrovision for sucking up their bandwidth with floods of fake files, do you think?
Stay tuned.
If there’s something you think we should know, tips[at]p2pnet.net
See:-
tom’s hardware guide – Macrovision floods P2P networks with bogus files to battle piracy, September 1, 2005
Ripguard – Macrovision ‘back-end-load’, May 4, 2005
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First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win – Mohandas Gandhi
September 3rd, 2005 at 3:50 pm
well im sure that will be the end of p2p as we know it – not – hahahahahahaha what a stupid idea do these assholes possess a brain hahahahahaha
September 3rd, 2005 at 4:25 pm
And this is new HOW ?
Laughing my ass off right now …
September 3rd, 2005 at 6:41 pm
Seems to me, this is a clear case of large scale spam on these networks.
Now what happends when individuals/companies send spam email? simple they are procecuted. Now clearly this company is flaunting it’s spamming practises, so why can’t it be held accountable under the criminal law?
September 3rd, 2005 at 7:35 pm
WinMX How To Avoid Downloading Fake Files
http://www.vladd44.com/mx/fake.php
Robin of Sherwood addon
http://sherwood.sh.funpic.org/phpBB2/viewforum.php?f=1
Recognising fake files on the Winmx Peer Network
http://www.geocities.com/anthony_beret/winmxfakefiles.html
September 3rd, 2005 at 7:46 pm
Avi Preview is an excellent tool for previewing video files. And makes rooting out fakes easy.
Also a tip to prevent identification by the mpaa/riaa on p2p networks:- There is a program called peer guardian, which blocks certain ip address ranges, very usefull.
If you want a copy for windows, heres a link for the download.
http://methlabs.org/projects/peerguardian-2-windows/
Generally, you should not block http. Just block the p2p related ip ranges. This should provide some protection on p2p networks like edonkey, fasttrack etc.
September 4th, 2005 at 2:43 am
Isn’t this really the same thing as a good old fashioned SYN flood in a fancy schmancy package so they can charge alot of money for it?
September 4th, 2005 at 2:59 am
Perhaps this will cause some frustration on direct download p2p networks, but this technique won’t have much impact in the BitTorrent community. That means that they would have to upload and seed a torrent of garbage. That torrent is going to die a quick death and then the admin of the tracker will likely ban that IP (or /24 or /20 or whatever) after two or three of these and that will be the end of that. Then those IPs will usually windup on the blocklist.org list and any filter using those lists won’t allow a connection to the banned IPs.
As far as individually trying to toss bad blocks or pieces into a torrent, most BT clients have an option to set a ban on a particular peer after they have sent ‘N’ (user selectable parameter) instances of bad data.
The usually manner of trying to disrupt torrents is to childishly flood the tracker with repeated requests. The recent developments is distributed tracking are going to render this technique ineffective because there will no longer be a single target to fire at. If they try to start flooding the distributed network, they will just get treated like they were sending bad data and get banned. Plus when there are 500,000+ peers connected in the distributed net, it’s going to be fairly difficult to slow more than 1% of them down significantly without the anti-P2P’s ISP getting a bit annoyed by the sudden flood of traffic.
They’d probably have more success with rocks and sharp sticks.
September 5th, 2005 at 7:45 am
I use LimeWire to fileshare. Although most of the content that I download is free, I still preview in order to make sure I not getting ipod spam or such. I also set LimeWire so that I will not share and files it has completed downloading. Once a file is verified, I will drag it into a shared folder. I also block ips afer I get a certain number of spam files. If everyone does this, then this particular for of DRM via spam will have little chance of being successful.