Major record labels have launched an aggressive new guerrilla assault on the underground music networks, flooding online swapping services with bogus copies of popular songs. The online music sites know they're under attack. Darrell Smith, chief technical officer of StreamCast Networks, parent of the popular file-swapping service Morpheus, said he first noticed the practice about a year ago, but chalked it up to 'rogue teenage hackers just being obnoxious'.
Sources at three major labels admit they're deluging popular services like Morpheus, Kazaa and Grokster with thousands of decoy music files that look identical to a sought-after song, but are filled with long minutes of silence -- or 30-second loops of a song's chorus. Smith, from StreamCast, said the network is being flooded with bogus files -- all coming from sources that can marshal massive amounts of bandwidth and banks of computers occupying a narrow range of Internet addresses. It's clearly intended to disrupt the file-sharing network, he said. Source: BayArea.com
Sources at three major labels admit they're deluging popular services like Morpheus, Kazaa and Grokster with thousands of decoy music files that look identical to a sought-after song, but are filled with long minutes of silence -- or 30-second loops of a song's chorus. Smith, from StreamCast, said the network is being flooded with bogus files -- all coming from sources that can marshal massive amounts of bandwidth and banks of computers occupying a narrow range of Internet addresses. It's clearly intended to disrupt the file-sharing network, he said. Source: BayArea.com
