In the past we’ve reported on the P2P advertising attempts of MediaDefender, but they are not the only company trying to make money from ads on filesharing networks. Last month, P2Pwords launched their adwords service, and more recently, PeerMatrix launched another advertising application targeted at P2P users. Although there is doubt that this type of advertising can be very effective, it’s the ideal cash cow for malware peddlers.

According to a press release from last Friday, PeerMatrix uses a “…revolutionary technology that morphs the name of an ad file to match whatever a P2P user is searching for, thereby dramatically increasing the probability that your ad file will be downloaded and viewed”.

In other words, with this (patented) “revolutionary technology” advertisers will have the possibility to rename their Viagra advert to ‘The Dark Knight Trailer.avi’, if that’s what the user is searching for. Even worse, the advertiser can do this with every file type, including executable malware applications, or trojan horses. The opportunities to use this piece of software to pollute search results are endless.

Angel Leon, lead developer at FrostWire told TorrentFreak that he is not impressed by PeerMatrix’s marketing pitch. Instead, he is worried. “We wouldn’t call this a “revolutionary technology,” he told us. “This is nothing but good old fake search results, otherwise known as spam, and it’s always been in the interest of the community to remove these results.”

PeerMatrix offers their application for free, and it runs on all recent Windows operating systems including Vista and XP. PeerMatrix’s business model is to make money by inserting a small percentage of their own ads along with the files that the ‘advertisers’ choose to spread.

We can’t help but see this application as the ultimate spamming tool. Luckily, most developers of Gnutella based filesharing applications agree with this view. “We’ll try our best to have FrostWire clients recognize these fakes and keep the experience clean, just the way it should be. If a search result doesn’t indicate in some way it’s an advertisement, it’s clearly a deceptive form of spam,” Leon said.

Bernard Trest, President of PeerMatrix disagrees with this description. “YouTube has also been experimenting with overlays and many websites use a similar overlay concept,” he told us. “Essentially the person does not request ads on YouTube however they are forced to view the ad anyhow. If what we are doing is “spam” then Google, Yahoo, and even YouTube are spamming.”

The problem with PeerMatrix, however, is that there is no control over the content that the advertisers put on the P2P networks, even executable files are not a problem. In addition, Trest admitted to us that the ads inserted by their software are not listed as ads in the search results. “The advertising, whether targeted or untargeted, is not designated as advertising,” he said.

If this isn’t the ultimate spamming tool, then what is? We sincerely hope that the developers of filesharing applications will keep a close eye on this new spamming tool, and filter it from the results wherever possible. If that proves to be a problem, many P2P users might have to switch to BitTorrent.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

I work at [an Apple service provider]. Today we saw [multiple] iTunes libraries completely corrupted; looks like the culprit was Limewire not playing well with the newest version of iTunes.

All had just updated to the new version of iTunes and all had Limewire set to automatically update their iTunes library with new songs. One [library] was not salvageable, though the other two were (after much pain and suffering).

It’s believed the tip is related to the Mac versions of the software. The situation on Windows versions is unclear.

TUAW points to two threads on the Apple support forum as a starting point for concerned users 1 2

LimeWire users with difficulties can find support on the Gnutella forum.

According to a recent NPD Group report, Limewire users took a 62 percent share of p2p music downloads in 2006, with the average user downloading 309 tracks.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

the entire concept of the show is for fans to share with all of their friends using any means they wanted, so DRM would be counterproductive.

This is not the first time CocaCola is involved in a free TV-show. They’re also sponsoring the comedy “marcus hates his job“, created by the makers of the popular “the scene” show.

Stageside

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.