Well when I started this thread I thought I might be seeing evidence of Gnutella virus, but then when I found out what it really was, I called it a Gnutella spam. You said it's "not a Gnutella anything" and "please don't think of these things as of the Gnutella Network".

That's what I disagree with. This is a new kind of spam (or spam-like activity) that is ONLY spread via the Gnutella network and couldn't exist WITHOUT the Gnutella network.

Uhhh- I'm not sure where you're coming from with this one. I don't think your state of mind or the thing you're searching for really has much to do with it. I think the only thing that matters is whether one of these spambots is within your horizon when you do a search. If you're trying to say that it only kicks in when you do a porno search or something, well, I haven't found that to be the case. Why, I NEVER search for porn on Gnutella!

Not a big conspiracy, but how about a lot of little ones... Wouldn't that have the same effect? When you think about it, the whole concept of Gnutella is largely based on trust and goodwill. And the cretins who run these spambots are violating that spirit. They're in the same league as the jokers who purposely mis-label their files, only worse since they're doing it to turn a buck instead of just to be ornery. They are liars, and liars bug me, just on principle.

Sure, the tools they are using are crude enough now, and their tricks are mostly easy to ignore. But they add "noise" to the network and make it just a little harder to use. And you know they're not going to stop with these crude tools - they'll get more sophisticated, and Gnutella will suffer as a result.

Remember when pop-up ads were only used by porno sites? Now they're used by everybody who runs ads on the web - and web surfing is exponentially more annoying. How long until the noise overwhelms the "signal" in the Gnutella network? How long until somebody else uses this same tactic in a more aggressive fashion?

What if you did a search that returned 100 identical hits, yet 35 of them were actually spam in disguise? You'd stand a pretty good chance of getting a spam instead of the file you really wanted. Eventually, you'd start to download as many copies of each file as your bandwidth could handle, just to make sure you had at least one good copy in amongst the bogus ones. Multiply that increase by the number of users on the network, and you've got a pretty big bandwidth hit.

Not to mention what a pain it would be sorting out the fakes from the real files. Suppose RIAA started balsting out thousands of files that contained the first 45 seconds of a song, then switched over to a recorded announcement about file sharing being stealing?

I dunno. I'm not gonna cry all night over this or anything, it just ticks me off.

BTW - glad you like the nick!