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FireFish

old fashioned p2p programs... your thoughts ?

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I still remember the time years ago where everybody knew somebody using
p2p programs like limewire, emule, bearshare, en others...

But i have not touched such things in more than 8 years, and when i recently and out of pure curiosity checked one of the oldies connecting to kad and older networks and entered some puberal searches out of fun..
I almost got scared by the filenames it spewed at me, it is insane and mind bothering, if not destroying, what it was insinuating...

i feel these old things are becoming dangerous for young people getting their hands on it before they have common sense.

So i am curious if any doomworlder also feels that these old neworks should be taken out of buisiness, or obliterated ?

or do you use the modern safe nets like bittorent for LEGAl downloads from trusted companies and organisations ?

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I'm not sure what examples you mean, but I remember a friend of mine telling me once that certain old services have tons of child pornography on them. If that truly is the case then I'm all for closing such sites and networks.

Of course, it would undoubtedly start some debate about freedom, personal rights etc. but in this case I think the means justify the ends.

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Patrol1985 said:

I'm not sure what examples you mean, but I remember a friend of mine telling me once that certain old services have tons of child pornography on them. If that truly is the case then I'm all for closing such sites and networks.

Of course, it would undoubtedly start some debate about freedom, personal rights etc. but in this case I think the means justify the ends.

HTTP is almost certainly being used for sharing child abuse images as well; better shut down the web too. The ends justify the means.

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Since truly P2P protocols with distributed nodes, obfuscation, encryption and lack of central servers were developed, "shutting down" any of those services is not really technically possible, as even if two users are left, the network is technically still active.

Sure, you can seek and target specific users that obviously generate a lot of suspicious traffic and share highly illegal material, but you can have no guarantee that whatever content they were distributing was not copied several billion times over, and is not travelling over other channels already.

The idea of being able to just "shut down a network" is rooted in book burning, witch hunting and political purges of the 20th century, that's how backwards it is, both morally, and technically. The first step to do that however, would be prohibiting using any protocols other than plaintext HTTP and maybe e-mail or FTP.

Using any other protocol, port number etc. would be regarded as "suspicious", as well as using any "non-trusted" application. This would also require controlling the platform (hardware and OS). This is not as far-fetched as you think: the "walled garden" app model is essentially a "soft" version of this. Imagine that but much more anal, with gov't scrutinized and backdoored apps. Generating any sort of "strange" behavior (on the terminal or the network) would immediately put someone on the "to watch" list.

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Let's do it for the children, you mean?

Nah, I'm good with the internet being what it is. We didn't ban VHS tapes when people started doing nasty shit with them. Sure, this makes access easier, but that has nothing to do with the protocol, just that people are pretty shitty. Seems to me like we should go after the cause rather than the symptoms.

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Those old p2p networks were always full of smut. So what? Smut is everywhere on the Internet - kids are gonna get ahold of it regardless, and it's not a case of, "Oh, but this makes it easier." The real concern for those old networks is that they tend to have tons of viruses spreading among them (but then, same could be said for any form of p2p network), and I believe they're fairly easy to trace for copyright trolls (don't get me wrong, I'm all for defending copyright, but going after some kid for thousands of dollars 'cause he downloaded a Linkin Park CD is just insane - besides, the CD is punishment enough - bazing!).

Anyway, the way I see it, p2p is just part of life. Life is full of unpleasantness. There are things that you don't want your kid to see, but then, there are things your kid is going to see regardless. Putting effort into convoluted systems to try to prevent that seems kinda futile, in my opinion. And the fact is, most kids'll turn out fine anyway - who among us wasn't exposed to at least something "adult" at a young age, and were any of us irreversibly scarred for it? Just being realistic here.

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The surprising thing for me is that after all the pains that P2P networks went through to become more secure (?) for their users, the good old concept of just downloading a file over plaintext, unencrypted HTTP took over, with all those file sharing services, and with the exception of Megaupload, little has been done to stop them other than taking down specific offending links one by one. It seems their legal disclaimers must be REALLY good. Remember, to bust the Megaupload guy they had to get to him through other means/charges, kinda like Al Capone ;-)

Torrents and "traditional" P2P are now only ever used for very rare content not found anywhere else, but for the rest file sharing services now account for most downloads, legal or illegal. And what to say about youtube? Want to watch a movie or find a rare song Don't even bother to pirate them or search through the darknets of P2P: in 90% of cases it will be on youtube, and in full/good quality, too. How's that for "hiding in plain view"?

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geekmarine said:

Those old p2p networks were always full of smut. So what? Smut is everywhere on the Internet - kids are gonna get ahold of it regardless, and it's not a case of, "Oh, but this makes it easier."

Except old p2p became federal honeypots. Most of that smut was just setup to entrap people.

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I used to use Shareaza... now its an app that figures out what song you're hearing.

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Patrol1985 said:

I'm not sure what examples you mean, but I remember a friend of mine telling me once that certain old services have tons of child pornography on them. If that truly is the case then I'm all for closing such sites and networks.

Of course, it would undoubtedly start some debate about freedom, personal rights etc. but in this case I think the means justify the ends.


Protect the children! Save their young minds from the evil that is... the internet?

If you're concerned about your child encountering taboo subject matter, buy a website/download blocker. Don't promote the idea that it's ok to shut down a network hundreds of others may be enjoying.

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fraggle said:

HTTP is almost certainly being used for sharing child abuse images as well; better shut down the web too. The ends justify the means.


HTTP is used for a wide array of stuff. Who the hell uses near dead networks and protocols for anything else than shady business?

RUSH said:

Protect the children! Save their young minds from the evil that is... the internet?

If you're concerned about your child encountering taboo subject matter, buy a website/download blocker. Don't promote the idea that it's ok to shut down a network hundreds of others may be enjoying.


I don't want to shut down the INTERNET. It's a similar case to megaupload.com which is used for sharing family pictures and wedding vide... BULLSHIT. We ALL know what it's for and we ALL know why people REALLY protested against the idea of shutting it down. You know as well as I do that some parts of Internet are used nearly solely for illegal / dangerous stuff. I don't see a reason for their continued existence. Don't worry, I don't support killing google's and yahoo's servers.

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fraggle said:

HTTP is almost certainly being used for sharing child abuse images as well; better shut down the web too. The ends justify the means.

I remember a bunch of SRS idiots lobbied to take down bitcoin because it was an efficient way to buy child porn.

Patrol1985 said:

Of course, it would undoubtedly start some debate about freedom, personal rights etc. but in this case I think the means justify the ends.

Oh these feels! Shut up and take my freedoms!

Patrol1985 said:

I don't want to shut down the INTERNET. It's a similar case to megaupload.com which is used for sharing family pictures and wedding vide... BULLSHIT. We ALL know what it's for and we ALL know why people REALLY protested against the idea of shutting it down. You know as well as I do that some parts of Internet are used nearly solely for illegal / dangerous stuff. I don't see a reason for their continued existence. Don't worry, I don't support killing google's and yahoo's servers.

Just fuck off already. Stop rallying against perfectly good services because a shady minority is abusing it.

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Technician said:

Just fuck off already.


Wow... haven't seen that one here in a long time... and there have been debates here with nazi references... are you a shareholder of those services or what?

Technician said:

Stop rallying against perfectly good services because a shady minority is abusing it.


Perfectly good for what? When was the last time you NEEDED kazzaa / bearshare / whatever?

And for the record - I'm playing a bit of a devil's advocate here. OF COURSE I don't want sites like megaupload.com to go down, where else would I get my portion of family pictures and wedding videos? ;) You know, stuff that is most commonly associated with such sites :P

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You REALLY don't understand what the p2p protocol is good for, do you?

There's a number of communities that use torrents for entirely legal downloads who would suffer because they can't manage the bandwidth from people downloading their game/album/movie/etc. Being a devil's advocate is not worth it when you really have nothing but "it's for the poor children!" on your side. Anyway, just what makes you think that eliminating the protocol would do anything?

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well the decentralized networks could at least get clients which automatically and unchangeable by the user would filter the highest and most illegal file names you could find, namely the 'go to jail as an extreme pervert' crap. i dont even want to name it.

These old protocols seem to be a hive of infernal crap.

But the LEGAL downloads trough bittorent are starting to appear in masses everywhere so there is a good side to this all.

I am not against good, stable internet systems, but i am against old hives of infernal dread where only the marginal jail inhabitants seem to go to anymore.

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FireFish said:

well the decentralized networks could at least get clients which automatically and unchangeable by the user would filter the highest and most illegal file names you could find, namely the 'go to jail as an extreme pervert' crap. i dont even want to name it.

These old protocols seem to be a hive of infernal crap.

But the LEGAL downloads trough bittorent are starting to appear in masses everywhere so there is a good side to this all.

I am not against good, stable internet systems, but i am against old hives of infernal dread where only the marginal jail inhabitants seem to go to anymore.


My thoughts exactly. I specifically named two old p2p programs (kazaa / bearshare) and I'm constantly being bashed for supposedly wanting to bring down the WHOLE Internet.

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I think that what he's trying to say is that these services are full of nothing but CP now. I used to use these programs to download music and the occasional movie but you'd still see these sorts of results pop up every now and then no matter what you searching up. I remember a few that didn't even try at all to hide what it was that was in the files at all. Some of that just made me want to vomit. My opinion is, fuck these services because they're basically dead now or just being used and abused by pedophiles for pedophile stuff, and why would anyone want to use them now anyway?

With services like Pandora or Spotify, people don't even really need to download music anymore. The latter program has been the reason I've procrastinated so hard from buying actual physical copies of the music I listen to anymore and as a music collector...that sucks. Even torrenting is a much more reliable resource than Limeware. Most of the programs you've mentioned if I'm not mistaken operate in a similar way that exit nodes do and if that's the case its just best to stay away from them anyway. If you want something similar without all of the bullshit, look up SoulseekQT. I mainly just use it for searching up the occasional rarity or bootleg stuff when I feel like doing so, but for those purposes its a good program.

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FireFish said:

But i have not touched such things in more than 8 years, and when i recently and out of pure curiosity checked one of the oldies connecting to kad and older networks and entered some puberal searches out of fun..
I almost got scared by the filenames it spewed at me, it is insane and mind bothering, if not destroying, what it was insinuating...

I used winmx back in the day and that nasty, virus laden shit was par for the course in 01-02ish. Said behavior isn't new or anything.

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StevieCybernetik said:

I think that what he's trying to say is that these services are full of nothing but CP now. I used to use these programs to download music and the occasional movie but you'd still see these sorts of results pop up every now and then no matter what you searching up. I remember a few that didn't even try at all to hide what it was that was in the files at all. Some of that just made me want to vomit. My opinion is, fuck these services because they're basically dead now or just being used and abused by pedophiles for pedophile stuff, and why would anyone want to use them now anyway?

Again, people, they're honeypots. They're obvious for a reason, to record IPs of dumb pedophiles. The remainder of p2p programs are just fed traps to catch/keep tabs on copyright infringers and pedophiles. Ironically shutting them down if doing your noble cause a disfavor.

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immoral, that is what i call it, if those are traps then those cops are as worse as the people who made those things. Anyways, over here cops are not legally allowed to provoke.

the tought which rises here, is that they then catalog the videos, watch them more than once, and then upload them into the wide net and eventually losing control over it and releasing it yet again into the wild.

bad plan, bad morale, just plain wrong.

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FireFish said:

immoral, that is what i call it, if those are traps then those cops are as worse as the people who made those things. Anyways, over here cops are not legally allowed to provoke.

Yeah, I'd argue it could be seen as entrapment. I heard one case some dude downloaded a LotR movie but ended up downloading a CP trap. Take that story with little regard, though.

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One thing that hasn't been mentioned is that someone (probably the RIAA or MPAA) figured out how to obfuscate the search results of the Gnutella based P2P services (and possibly others).

I don't know exactly how these services worked, but from what I remember the user's machine would send out search requests to other machines it was communicating with on the decentralized network. Those machines would send back any matching results to the originating user, as well as forward the request to any other machines they were connected with, which would then repeat the cycle. The search request had some sort of decay counter to ensure that it wouldn't circulate across the network forever.

What someone must have figured out was that you could take these search requests and spoof a filename or description based on the search, and furthermore you could then have this spoof machine direct its search request to other spoof machines (or simulate other spoof machines), thus clogging the search results with garbage files. Thus originating user gets flooded with spoofed files and the service is essentially unusable. You can test this, just type in random text into your old p2p program's search function and watch as it retrieves thousands of examples of "sdkjfhskfjuhsr - GREATEST HIT."

Of course, the suits ended up screwing themselves because they drove the copyright infringement from the easily traceable p2p networks to anonymous filesharing websites. And shutting down those sites makes exterminating a roach infestation in Manaus, Brazil look easy in comparison.

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FWIW, the Kademlia network works pretty well, considering the "smut" and the honey traps that have rendered other networks nearly useless. Due to it being so decentralized, it's harder to set up honeypots, "super leafs" or deliberately corrupt servers.

Of course, the usual dangers of P2P still exist there: viruses, fake files (like e.g. a movie or zip filess which downloads WAY too fast....and turns out to be all zeroes), or fake files which turn out to be 100% binary noise. Fakes and mislabeled files are also common: I can't count how many times I downloaded unintentional pr0n (that taught me to double-check the filename, and check all alternative names the same content is known under).

In any case, there's little incentive to use P2P networks today. Want porn? It's in plain view in your browser. Want music or a movie? Again, chances are that it's in plain view on youtube or one of the many video and audio uploading services. Or just a couple of file sharing links away. TBQH this sounds like a very 90s, unsophisticated approach, and I'm surprised it "flies" at all. If the feds and the majors are SOOOOOOOO good at hunting down highly-cryptic P2P users, how come they can't combat such plain-view piracy over what's essentially Web 1.0 technology?

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I am surprised nobody ever started to Poison the hash and similar sums for all that ultra a-moral content, because there are multiple techniques to tackle such filth, decentralized or not.

anyways, i am not laying one finger on those programs anymore and the initial 8 years will be extended.

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What I remember about those programs was that they were often abused by people/organisations who would "listen" to your search strings, concoct file names that contained them, list the files and then hope you downloaded the files containing their malware, adverts or useless content.

Of course, with a bit of savvy, it was usually easy to set up filters, construct search strings and read the results in such a way as to make the scams obvious. However, such scams seemed to be very common and often crowded the results so much that the system became unusable.

There were suggestions that, sometimes, legitimate companies were behind such practices to deliberately put people off using P2P programs and increase the apparent attractiveness of buying the company's product instead of DLing it from Limewire or wherever.

I have no idea what these systems are like these days.

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