Overpeer Spewing Bogus Files on P2P Networks

nimec writes "Zeropaid.com has posted news of a company called Overpeer which is the source of all the bogus mp3 files that are popping up on the various P2P networks. Zeropaid, in the news article, said: 'If you've encountered the "loop" files, in which a section of the chorus or hook is repeated over and over, you've been tricked by OVERPEER. OVERPEER are doing this with the full knowlege and consent of Interscope and Universal Music, in fact they are under contract to Universal and other major record labels, and will be doing a LOT MORE of this type of "interdiction" in the near future.' Right now this doesn't bother me because these bogus files are few, very spread out and it is easy spot them. I'm just afraid that over time people will keep downloading these bogus mp3s and become too lazy to delete them, like they are when it comes to incomplete songs."

Anybody have a link to overpeer's site?

[TechnoLust]

We could /. them and use up all their bandwith so they can't cause trouble. :-)

Actually, if you are downloading files that they are doing this to, just look for someone with a low bandwidth and download from them overnight, unless they have downloaded from overpeer, you'll be fine. Or use the preview feature of your P2P.

This disgusts me.

[Warmth Is Life]

There's nothing more annoying than finding a brand new album in a high quality bitrate and then finding out it's nothing but a loop of two seconds. There's nothing more annoying than finding a brand new album in a high quality bitrate and then finding out it's nothing but a loop of two seconds. There's nothing more annoying than finding a brand new album in a high quality bitrate and then finding out it's nothing but a loop of two seconds.

Re:So?

[Magila]

On the other hand, however, couldn't these DoS attacks be considered illegal, or hacking, or terrorist acts by already too broad US legislation???

Probably not considering the activity they're DoSing is already illegal, it would be like sueing a jewlry store for not letting the men with the ski masks in.

Re:This disgusts me.

[PacoTaco]

I hope they don't use the same technique with Slashdot discussions! By the way, did you know BSD is dying?

Repetition isn't necessarily a bug...

[devphil]

but a song with a repeated segment would likely have repeated data in it, or else the filesize would be too small to be a valid mp3 (if the data looped, for instance), so could this be detected and flagged as a possible bogus file?

So... the artists can't ever play the same sequence of music more than two or three times before it gets flagged as bogus?

That check would instantly trigger on pretty much every soft-pop-dance track that I currently spend most of my radio-listening time trying to avoid. Cool. :-)

Re:Ah, the BBS days...

[AndroidCat]

No, they just ran a program to insert their BBS advert into the zip file which said that they'd checked it.