Corrupt MP3 File Conspiracy?
 

Something is very wrong with downloading music off gnuetella recently. There's been an increasing number of people, myself included, who have tried to download songs only to get one corrupted mp3 after another.

I looked into it and this is what I found:

The hosts "38.118.163.203" and "66.54.74.77" and most likely others are hosts for a large number of songs. They have numerous copies of the same song (varying by bitrate, slight alterations in song title, etc.) but ALL of these copies are corrupt. These hosts are extremely fast (we're talking commercial t-line or better) and the browse function of their library has been disabled.

This is VERY bad for those of us who like to download music and this is why:

If 1 person with a slow connection is sharing a corrupt song, then chances are, very few people will download the corrupt version. However, if a host with huge bandwith is sharing the corrupt song, then everyone trying to download it may get a piece of the corrupt song, thereby corrupting the entire song file.

This could very well be an isolated incident but I find it suspicious that songs from big label artists seem to be corrupted the most. It wouldn't suprised me at all if music companies attempted to corrupt songs on Gnutella to combat piracy.

-Just my paranoid perspective,

beat.

I don't think you're paranoid. This could very well be true and there is no way a computer non-whizz kid like me could figure out to verify if this were true.
I think that I read something about this here a while ago.
And to add to why it's bad, try thinking of all those people on dial up connections (poor LOTR for example) who patiently wait for the download to finish, only to discover that it's not even a good file. They would (rightfully so, IMO) get frustrated at this and decide, probably after many failed attempts, that it just isn't worth the pain and quit. Result? Less users=less stuff to dld=bad for the network. And don't even think that "Sure, but it's only the case of dial-up people, so it would only make the network faster, right?". Hell no. How many can afford a T1 line? And besides, even a fast Cable connection user would get frustrated if he couldn't get a decent file out of the network.
This is all RIAA-type organisations' plot to discourage people from sharing, if you ask me. And if you add to that people who just refuse to share because they (wrongly) think that it can cause them to catch RIAA's attention, then the network is good for the trash bin.
Anyway, just block these IP adresses through Options. Even if they weren't anti-filesharing organisations but simple users, then its good riddance to them. Serves them right for sharing such files.

Yes--there have been suspect and spam sources for a long time. Just right click (control-click) the host in the search column and choose "block host".