Thursday, April 21, 2005

Anti P2P tool..?

A Finnish company Viralg claims to have come up with the definitive anti-P2P tool. This report here has details.

Anyone who used Kazaa a few years ago, would know of the usual problem where people renamed and/or resized their files to look like other content. Result is that users on the network get files constructed from various sources, in which some of the sources maybe sharing something completely different - finally leading to corrupted files. This problem/frustration drove away a number of Kazaa users.

The solution that was devised was simple and obvious. To provide a hash of the file's contents and only use other download sources if the Hash matches.

Viralg seems to be using this exact same problem to render P2P sharing networks useless. They claim to have a patented algorithm which allows them to artificially spoof the hash values to make garbage files look like real content. If such files are shared long enough on a network, theoretically, they will be able to corrupt a lot of the files that they are spoofing hence, protecting content.

Their website has a link to a demonstration claiming/showing 100% success, but the demonstration isn't to be seen anywhere. I wonder if this turns out to be a hoax which got too much media attention too early.

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