I know that these fake files are returned by automated replies, that match any query, not only the queries that contain some porn keyword (although a number of automatic repliers are only targetting porn keywords to send their fakes, exactly like what happens in newsgroups whos name contain some porn keyword, and that are targetted automatically by robots. This is less a question of copyright infringement than a question of abusive advertizing (spamming), something that webmasters of porn sites are used to do since long...

Now that nearly nobody looks for porn messages in newsgroups because of these spams that fill them completely, and that email filtering is becoming more and more effective, I do think that these spammers are trying other popular networks (and Gnutella is one of these)...

We are only at the beginning of such attacks, so the current filters implemented in servents as well as limitating usage policies may soon become ineffective to protect the network from such spammers.

The copyright holders use other strategies: they want you to download some non-deceptive content, but that use file formats containing active scripting and links which, when activated, will monitor and limit your ability to download possibly copyrighted materials. Some of them include some active components, which are not technically spywares, but profit from the P2P network to build a parallel topology that allows copyright holders to inspect easily the content of the network.

The focus of these components is not to monitor your search activity directly but to build an efficient search topology reaching rapidly the copyrighted materials, so that they will be able to list their ffective sources, even if these sources are proxied through other servents: these parallel network build a topology that can bypass these proxies, because they behave themselves as proxies on which those wanting to hide themselves will connect without knowledge. For now they will attack sources, rather than downloaders.

A counter-measure for this kind of indirect monitoring is to really make Gnutella share only fragments of files, and to accelerate the adoption of swarming downloads from multiple sources, so that no one shares completely a single file, but some fragments. This could be done by offering, like on Freenet, a spare space into which random file fragments will be cached when downloaded directly or proxied for someone else. (Freenet goes a little further, by encrypting this spare space, so that even the user owning that cache in its PC can't know what is in this space where the cached and fragmented content is only indexed by blind URNs, without identifying information).

I don't think we need encryption for this space, which could be feeded only when the content is proxied for someone else, and not directly for downloads. This space would be found on the network through Alt Locations with HUGE, or by active searches for URNs (when this will work someday if we later find a scalable DHT to manage them), but not directly through Gnutella searches by query strings.

__________________
LimeWire is international. Help translate LimeWire to your own language.
Visit: http://www.limewire.org/translate.shtml