Bastards!
I can see it now in the not-too-distant future. Some candidate for office is going to be struck down because somebody will discover they illegally downloaded music or movies.
Is NetFlix really so expensive that people screw around downloading Harry Potter or whatever, and risk losing their ISP service?
I recently got a nastygram from my ISP about someone downloading an HBO movie from my IP address. I knew it wasn’t me, because I already owned a purchased copy of the movie in question. I tracked the problem down to someone piggybacking onto the wireless signal from my ISP provided router. My only actual wireless device is an HP printer. The ISP’s WiFi used only WEP security; easily crackable, I now find out, with any of several free downloadable WEP-cracker programs in 3 minutes or less. I wound up disabling the router’s wireless feature and purchased a much more secure wireless access point that uses WPA2 encryption so that I could still use the printer.
All this will do is shift the bandwidth thief to one of the other wifi networks in ny neighborhood.
Now, if there were only some way of tracking down the piggybacker.
I read one idea that would essentially make everyone on the system into a pirate, sort of.
The idea takes the concept of distributed computing further, by using the most available asset of most users, some of their empty hard disk space, say 1GB per user.
Before they start swapping files, they download most of a GB of *pieces* of file content, with massive redundancy of pieces by users. A user might have the equivalent of pieces of a thousand different movies on his system, without a single whole movie. If he gets more than a certain number of pieces from the same movie, his system discards some of them.
But a user would have no idea what was in his 1GB.
To get an entire movie, a lot of time would be spent looking for related hash strings. Otherwise, it would be a constant transition of file pieces flowing hither and yon, and hard to tell who was collecting a particular file from the flow.
“”If the content was in the top 100 it was monitored within hours,” he said. “Someone will notice and it will be recorded.”
Less popular content was also monitored although less frequently, the study indicated.”
Thanks for the tip!
