a movie-studio conspiracy ?
 

How easy would it be technically, for a movie-studio to have computers running xolox 24/7 - but only offering data-currupt versions of their blockbuster movies - made to look like the dvdrips out there ?

From a user, who think its strange how often, a movie have to redownload when finished, because of differences in the downloaded material.

It wasn't like this 3 months ago !

Conspiracy guy :- l

Agree, this could very easily happen, and probably will happen when the Net grows big enough.
The challenge is to develop clients that are resistent to "evil attacks" like this or other.
Stig

Al this does is make want to stick it to them even more!

Other dark ideas - hope they won't read...
 

Think about the following scenario:

Studios put up some machines to the Net, with high-bandwidth access, and with Xolox installed. Soon they'll be able to find their own movies shared. Create a crippled version of the movie that won't play properly, but make the first few minutes OK - for a short intro peek it will look all right. Exactly the same name and same length as the shared one they found, of course.

Xolox downloads files from many sites if found at more than one sites, based on an exact filename and file length matches. Soon the crippled file will provide download source for parts of downloads here and there. After a while pieces of the crippled file will appear in downloaded copies everywhere that will be shared again and downloaded along with the crippled part - and soon enough there'll be no proper copy of the file anywhere, or at least no one will be able to tell if it's a good one or has pieces of the crippled.
If Xolox does more matching than that, for example a CRC check to compare the identity of two files that looks similar (by name and length), then the above scheme will not work, thank God! If not, here's a place where it could be further developed for our good.

The Xolox community might have quite a hard time to find those hosts and disable access there, say, by a personal firewall. Also studios can easily change their IP... Personal firewalls could be used to control access that Xolox would be able to download only from specified sources, from those with certified good copies - but this requires exchange of this information by something like this Forum here. Anyway, this could give us quite some headache.

Nooneknowswho

I've thought about this myself. Flooding the network with garbage would be a bad thing, so surely it will be attempted by those who are against it. One way to ensure that people aren't fooled into downloading garbage is to introduce a rating system, which allows the public to rate the servers they download from. The ratings would be shared peer-to-peer instead of residing on a central server; it'd be like word of mouth. Not perfect, but it would help.

As for matching the file size and name, Xolox would still reject the fakes because the data itself wouldn't match the originals. Xolox does block checking, like most other servents.

Faked Ratings
 

Sorry, but I'm afraid that it would be relatively easy to fake some public rating system. I don't agree with some dedicated-server authentication method.
I think the only way to ensure the integrity of the downloaded file is by adding some CRC code to each file, so we can check the downloaded file as we usually do with ISO images or .zip ones.

-
 

another spammer ...

doesnt matter
 

The files use checksums, size wont matter..

XoloX already does check for accuracy in the partial files being downloaded and will DROP a partial file that doesn't match, so you are secure in that area.
The Gnutellanet as a whole is moving to standards of hashing which will improve accuracy network wide. But there will always be schemes for people to share files which claim to be one thing, but is something else.

Already happening
 

I have downloaded 5 avi files now one claimed to be divx5 but do you think any of them will play NO!