Kazaa and Peer-to-Peer: Washington Post today

Washington Post ^ | Dec 21, 2002 | Ariana Eunjung Cha

[shroudie]

From the article: "Kazaa has become so popular so fast that a coalition of entertainment companies has filed suit in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, seeking to shut it down. The coalition says the service has become a "candy store of infringement," where millions of pirated copies of songs, writings, TV shows and motion pictures are available to anyone, free."

[shroudie]

The writer missed the big story. Oh, well, its the Washington Post.

There is a moral issue in the sharing of music and videos. But there is another problem that is often overlooked. We trapped queries on some of these peer-to-peer networks, flowing through my home computer, and found that 44 percent of the queries in one hour were for pornography and that a significant percentage were for children’s pornography. The way it works is that my computer, in my home, was playing an active role in helping pedophiles find their stuff. Every P2P computer is an active participant.

Children of all ages are also discovering that these peer-to-peer networks are the best place to access every imaginable type of pornography. They may do so, at first, simply out of curiosity. Or they may trip over it by mistake. Pornography on peer-to-peer networks is free and easy to access and virtually impossible to filter. No attempt is made to determine a user's age. Much of it is child pornography, bestiality, and intensely graphic scenes of brutality and rape. Even in trying to avoid it, children will encounter significant amounts of pornography while only looking for music. Some of it is maliciously disguised as popular music videos. If you don’t believe me try entering Britney Spears or Mariah Carey as a search.

What parents don’t know is that most peer-to-peer pornography is delivered from other home computers, somewhere down the street, across town, or halfway around the world. If you or your child have installed one of these file swapping programs (you may not know it) it is quite possible that other children are getting pornography directly from your computer without your knowledge. It works that way. That is what file sharing is all about. You share what you download not what you choose to share unless you go to pains to find it on your hard drive and erase it. On the web, the most sensational pornography often requires a credit card and distributors can be traced. Peer-to-peer material, however, is virtually untraceable, is completely free, and can be obtained anonymously by children of all ages. Even if you and your children are careful to avoid pornography when downloading music, these file sharing programs are using your computer is actively help others distribute illegal or pornographic content. That is also the way it works. You unavoidably become part of a network to promulgate queries for pornography even if you don’t want it or use it. It is a haven for pedophiles.

It is interesting to note that Optimum Online (Cable Vision) has just advised its customers that it is a violation of their terms of service to share any content via peer-to-peer to peer networks such as Kazaa. They say, in effect, go ahead and download but don’t participate in sharing. They make it quite clear that they will terminate a users ISP account if they share anything off of their hard drive with any of these peer-to-peer networks.

What the industry could do would be to pay a few thousand people to run spoofers. That is easy stuff. One runs a clone of, say Kazaa, and the clone scrambles the queries. Chaos would fill the Kazaa network in minutes. Would the folks from Kazaa try to sue the music industry in the American courts and argue that they really didn’t mean it when they said no one can be held accountable for what happens on their P2P network?

[Woodman]

Some good information there. I have refused to do P2P since it first appeared because of the issue of not really knowing what was going on or over your PC. Although I am hardly a high-tech Ludite, there are certain things that are just not a good idea.

[shroudie]

Part of the problem is that many children use this software without parental consent or knowledge. In fact, Kazaa is used in some public schools. And these children are often not going to the trouble of specifying which folders to share.

The filters in Kazaa are marginally effective, at best. A disguised video is virtually impossible to trap. And, the filters do not filter the promulgation of queries. Therefore, if you are on the network, and someone is looking for child pornography, you will allow your computer to help him find it by promulgating the query.

[Tax-chick]

My husband did a home network for friends of ours, and discovered they had a dozen viruses that they had picked up from Kazaa and P2P. Their kids had turned off the anti-virus software because it interfered with the downloads!

He fixed them up with working security, but I understand they disabled it again ...

My kids don't know the screen-saver password on our computer!

[TruthShallSetYouFree]

Kazaa has become so popular so fast that a coalition of entertainment companies has filed suit in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, seeking to shut it down.

I think it is racist and unfair to deprive African-Americans of their own holiday. The Christians have Christmas, the Jews have Channukah, the Muslims have Rama-lama-ding-dong. Why can't we just leave Kwanzaa alone?

[buffyt]

My kids download music and video clips from tv shows and movies all the time on KAZAA. My kids are 18, 19, and 21. If they want porn it is already on the WWW. But the porn we have seen on the internet is UGLY people you don't want to see naked. We don't look for it, but have accidentally come upon it by typing www.whitehouse.com instead of www.whitehouse.org. Or when I was surfing the net for furniture stores and searching for Fingers Furniture store I checked out www.finger.com and it was a porn site. These people on the porn sites are not pretty people, they are not movie stars. They are gross and ugly and I would pay them to put clothes ON.

[Tax-chick]

Funny! But Drive-By Records and that ilk don't like file-sharing any more than the White Capitalist Oppressors.

[buffyt]

I told my kids that they WILL get viruses on KAZAA. My oldest son who is 21 got a bad one recently and had to reformat his brand new computer. My husband's college roommate in San Diego's daughter installed KAZAA and they got a bad virus so he wanted her to take KAZAA off his computer and they can't get all of it off. I told my kids NOT to use KAZAA on MY computer!

[philo]

In fact, Kazaa is used in some public schools. And these children are often not going to the trouble of specifying which folders to share.

Public schools? I doubt this. If I'm wrong could you please send the names of the schools who are using this and under what courses of study they integrate it with.

A file sharing program lets the user save these images to your HD. A kid can just type in "nude" on Yahoo and see this kind of stuff.

[DAnconia55]

on peer-to-peer networks is free and easy to access and virtually impossible to filter. No attempt is made to determine a user's age.

There thousands of free porn web sites, no credit card, no age check. And the kids already know how to find them.

So your objection is a nonissue on this count. On the web, the most sensational pornography often requires a credit card and distributors can be traced.

Not true at all. Could provide you links for proof, but won't.

Of course theft of copyrighted works is actually a crime, as opposed to viewing porn... but nevermind that.

[Bloody Sam Roberts]

Pornography on peer-to-peer networks is free and easy to access and virtually impossible to filter. No attempt is made to determine a user's age.

Kazaa has filters that work extremely well and has password protection. It is up to the parents to "determine a user's age". Not Kazaa.

If you have a problem with the availability of smut through Kazaa, then I suggest you learn how to use your software properly. In the mean time, shut off the computer.

[shroudie]

Let me try to explain promulgation: As soon as you start a P2P program, like Kazaa, you join a P2P network. This means that your IP address (the address of your computer) becomes known on the network and the software becomes aware of some other IP addresses. This may take a couple of minutes but generally it happens very quickly. As soon as your IP address is known to others you will start to receive messages. You don’t see these but the software does. Let us imagine that there is a query that comes into your computer that, in effect, asks if you have a picture of a naked 10 year old boy. You don’t, of course. (If you did, the software would send back a message with your IP address and the name of the file on your hard drive – which is an implied invitation to download it from your machine). Because you don’t have the sought picture, you automatically pass on the message to several other IP addresses. Like the tower of Hanoi, this query message looking for the picture of the naked boy gets across the network very fast. There are limits established as to how many IP’s a query can go and how many times it can be repeated and multiplied (jumps) to keep a hopeless query from overloading the network. This is promulgation of queries. On a cable connection, I was, with special tracing software, counting about ninety queries per minute and at least 350 people knew my IP address during a one hour period.

There is an implied agreement when you use P2P software and it is that you will pass on all queries (responses with some software work the same way – in other words you participate in telling a pedophile where to find a picture). Filters in the P2P software DO NOT filter promulgated queries.

I should point out that as soon as my IP address was known on the network I started receiving attempts to find open ports on my computer. These are usually advertising (many) or malicious (seldom) attacks. You should never use P2P without port-blocking firewalls. The attacks continue for several hours after you shut down the P2P software.

[Bloody Sam Roberts]

My kids don't know the screen-saver password on our computer!

There is a better way. Do a Goggle search for "Parents Friend". It is a shareware program that costs $5 to register. This software is so robust it's not funny. I could go on for paragraphs about what you can do with it.

It has a keystroke logger, (see what they're typing in and in what program) it allows you to password protect specific executable programs, it allows you to specify during what times of day a specific program (or the internet) can be accessed and for how long, it can launch a password protected screensaver immediately upon Windows startup, it can protect your registry settings, it can password protect specific folders, AND...for you home network users like me...it can be set to not allow the "Click Cancel" to bypass the user login screen...no password, no access. Period. The whole thing runs invisibly in the background and a Shift-F7 stroke brings up the password access box to get into the control center.

It was all written by a guy in Germany named Michael Muller and he is a very nice guy who personally configured my copy to work on my PC when I had a problem with the license key being recognized. 2 or 3 emails and it was fixed.

I could go on for hours listing all the neat stuff this program does. Suffice to say that I have complete and total control of all PCs on my network and my kids respect that and know that I and Parents Friend are watching. I've limited them to 30 minutes of AOL Instant Messanger per day...when 30 minutes is up, a message comes up and tells them the program will be terminated in 1 minute and then...*poof*...time to go read a book kiddies!

Download it and give it a try. It has really been a boon for me.

[Bloody Sam Roberts]

Of course Goggle=Google. Sorry.

Here's a link to Parents Friend.

[proxy_user]

I'm sure this works well with unsophisticated little kids. However, this type of program can be easily defeated by a skilled teenage hacker. So don't count on it too much when they get older. Win95/98/ME basically has NO security.

[Bloody Sam Roberts]

However, this type of program can be easily defeated by a skilled teenage hacker.

Perhaps. But the software isn't designed to withstand a intensive dedicated attack by some 16 year old who has unlimited time to work at cracking it. Besides, if I had one of those living in my house, I'd have SunBlades.

It is, after all, called "Parents Friend"...not "Parents Replacement"

[Tennessee_Bob]

However, this type of program can be easily defeated by a skilled teenage hacker.

Well, if you have one of those in your household, then it's up to you as a parent to take stronger steps to prevent them from getting into the system.

[shroudie]

I agree with you on that. My point was, however, that many parents have no idea what goes on with P2P programs such as Kazaa even if they are doing the right parent thing.

Nor am I suggesting that anyone's use of the Internet should be controlled. But, again, this software -- which was designed to skirt the law -- skirts the intention of its users if they don't know what is going on. And many don't.