approval from:
redleaf 
| well lets see... first of all i'm news editor for methlabs.org
i'm not paid - none of us are - we work for free
some people have suggested that we might be selling PG, so are conning people. this is not true, the program is available from »peerguardian.sourceforge.net
some people have suggested we might be bundling spyware with pg, but we never have. the application is open source, and the sourcecode available from »peerguardian.sourceforge.net
a company DID bundle spyware with our pg1 builds, but we released info to the press and made a page methlabs.org/howtotell to warn people about which builds were infected.
now as for the blocklists - its all a matter of relative security, there is not 100% security from using blocklists, simply because we cannot be 100% sure where BayTSP (and it is usually them) are connecting from.
however, they AREN'T connecting from home DSL addresses, this has been proven countless times. how? well when BayTSP or someone send you a letter they are required to give a time that the infringement occured. now all you have to do is compare your firewall logs with the time on the letter and whois the ranges within a reasonable range of this and.... wow! its a range labled "BayTSP"!
people don't believe its that easy, but it really is - the companies are NOT trying to catch peerguardian users, they are trying to catch less experienced users and make an example of them. going to extreme lengths to capture 0.01% of people (pg users) simply is not feasable, and BayTSP are a COMMERCIAL "detective" company - they're going to do things as cheaply as possible to keep their profits high.
now others have said "but its easy to get your IP off the tracker or some website logs (eg lokitorrent)"
this data would not stand up in court - logs can be faked, and walking into a court and saying "we have his ip address" is not sufficiant proof of anything!
to sucessfully sue you must receive data from the person and proove that it is copyright infringing
this means that if you can block the IP address of the corp trying to get data from you then they have no proof. the sytem is 99% automated anyway, so it will just go and try someone else if it cant get anything from you - the cheapest way, remember?
other ways of getting the evil ppl are to scan for popular songs etc and find the fake files. what RIAA do other than try to capture people is that they attempt to flood p2p networks with fake files
blocking a few IP ranges with peerguardian can massively reduce the amount of fake files you find on some networks
an MIT paper was written on this subject:
»web.mit.edu/patil/Public/805project/
and a news article about it:
»www.dmeurope.com/default.asp?fro···eID=2016
"Indeed, Akshay Patil, a student at MIT, whose paper, Identifying Sources of Spoof Files and Limiting Their Impact in the FastTrack Network, discusses the phenomenon, notes that spoofing has become a considerable problem for the FastTrack network - the network used by Kazaa - with downloaders of popular songs finding a spoof rate of 50 per cent of tracks." ....
"As the spoof files come from a fairly small set of IP addresses (the record companies or anti-piracy firms, obviously), a filter that blocks files from these addresses produces, according to Patil, a *75 per cent reduction* in spoof files. PeerGuardian is a small firewall application available for download that blocks and logs connections to these addresses. The block list is maintained by users and updated daily."
now this paper is very out of date now, and all the addresses in there have long since been improved in accordance with his findings, so one thing pg DOES do is block fake files
now the final points is that the blocklist is a bit messy at the moment, we haven't been maintaining it for a while (other people have) and we think it needs a cleanup
this is why we made blocklist.org, still under construction to let people view the database and report bad and eroneous ranges, and submit new ones that they may have found
Sound ok?
We never said it was 100% but 75%+ (we've improved a lot since 2003) reduction is pretty good, no?
If anyone has any problems please come on IRC and myself of someone else will be glad to talk to you!
irc.methlabs.org (port 6667)
#methlabs
thanks a lot!
Joseph Farthing
News Editor
Methlabs.org |
