Petteri Pyyny
20 Feb 2003 12:43
A company called Audible Magic has launched a product to fight against illegal file-swapping in similiar manner that now-defunct Napster tried to implement in its final days.
Company develops a product that will sit in ISP's, school's or company's network and actually analyzes the P2P traffic that flows through the network, comparing the file details -- not just filenames, but the actual content of the files -- against a database that contains lists of illegal files and blocks the transfer if such file is found in the traffic flow.
Problems with this type of products are obvious: so-called "false positives" that mean that totally legal file has the same characteristics as the illegal file and can't therefor be transferred at all. Other problem is that if such mechanism will find its way to ISPs, it is 100% certain that P2P developers will start encrypting the files transferred in the P2P networks, making the product useless immediately.
Source: News.com