G
George Macdonald
By the client application.
I suppose they could go so far as to try to create viruses, worms and
such to disrupt internet traffic in general, but I think that would be
too much even for the **AA organizations!
Just junk files pretending to be music with garbage content seems to work -
if it can be automatized by the new mechanism which triggered this
discussion, so much the better for them... and the worse for the rest of
us.
There is a certain degree of pollution in P2P networks in general,
that has been one of their on-going tactics for some time. This is
also the reason why some networks have kind of failed in favor of some
more robust networks. Here a lot of this pollution is filtered on the
server and superpeer side of things, normally hosted on rather
high-bandwidth links.
The **AA's pollution is being filtered now? Where do the signatures come
from? What makes them appear different from a valid music file to a
superpeer?
It would be a bit of an annoyance, but more a waste of resources for
them than for those downloading the files. Their garbage sources
could get filtered out on either the server or client end. Perhaps
it's fortunate for many P2P networks that they've already been forced
to build some such capabilities into their tools in order to prevent
viruses/worms and spammers from spreading too much crap.
Filtering at the client end still clogs the channels and there is the
question of a signature to differentiate the **AA generated pest from bona
fide content - at least with viruses there is a necessary consistency for
any given virus since it has to do something well defined by its perp -
just garbage is not so easy to categorize.