P2P researchers: use a blocklist or you will be tracked… 100% of the time

Straight from Ars Technia: “The old cliché “You’re not paranoid if they really are out to get you” turns out to apply quite nicely to the world of P2P file-sharing. A trio of intrepid researchers from the University of California-Riverside decided to see just how often a P2P user might be tracked by content owners. Their startling conclusion: “naive” users will exchange data with such ”fake users” 100 percent of the time. Anirban Banerjee, Michalis Faloutsos, and Laxmi Bhuyan collected more than 100GB of TCP header information from P2P networks back in early 2006 using a specially-doctored client. The goal of the research was a simple one: to determine “how likely is it that a user will run into such a ‘fake user’ and thus run the risk of a lawsuit?” The results are outlined in a recent paper (PDF), “P2P: Is Big Brother Watching You?”

For years, P2P communities have suspected that affiliates of the RIAA, the MPAA, and others have been haunting P2P networks to look for those who might be swapping copyrighted files. It’s more than a hunch; it’s well documented that companies like SafeNet (formerly Media Sentry) engage in this sort of work, and that their testimony is routinely produced at trials. It helped to bring down Jammie Thomas, in fact.

But identifying these organizations is hard. The nature of their business is to remain shadowy, but P2P advocates have spent years compiling “blocklists” of IP ranges that are suspected of belonging to such companies. Connect to a “user” who has an IP address in one of the blocklists and bam: you’ve just been tracked swapping a file.”

Copy Protection Backfires on Blu-ray

Like anyone needed another reason to hate Sony…

Straight from Slashdot: “The first two Blu-ray releases to hit the market encrypted with BD+ (an extra layer of protection designed to stave off hackers) are wreaking havoc on innocent consumers. As High-Def Digest reports, this week’s Blu-ray releases of ‘Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer’ and ‘The Day After Tomorrow’ won’t play back at all on at least two Blu-ray players, while load times on other players (including the PS3) are delayed by up to two minutes. ‘The most severe problems have been reported on Samsung’s BDP-1200 and LG’s BH100, which are both said to be incapable of playing back the discs at all. Less catastrophic issues (error messages and playback stutter) have been reported for Samsung’s BDP-1000. The discs appear to play back fine on all other Blu-ray players … Calls placed to both Samsung and LG customer support revealed that both manufacturers are aware of the issue, and that both are working on firmware updates to correct it. Samsung promised a firmware update within ‘a couple’ weeks, while LG said an update is expected in 3-4 days.’”

Do the right thing and boycott Sony.