Discordia Takes Over 'Lphant' P2P Domain; Now Owns Shareaza, BearShare, Lphant &iMesh

[anon]

Anti-P2P group Discordia Ltd., who made headlines in late 2007 with the controversial commandeering of Shareaza's official domain, has now surreptitiously acquired Lphant. Discordia began with takeovers of BearShare.com & iMesh.com - and most notably Shareaza.com - evidently their slick tactics are again at work with the recent acquisition of Lphant.com.

While the Lphant peer-to-peer program was never a well-known client among giants such as BearShare, Shareaza and even iMesh - but by right it certainly has (or had) its own userbase. Obviously this conquest comes at little cost to Discordia for a domain of such little importance nowadays; perhaps the point is irrelevant. For years now, peer-to-peer users have been shying away from these all-in-one applications in favor of a more efficient, trustworthy distributed network known as BitTorrent.

Discordia Takes Over ‘Lphant’ P2P Domain; Now Owns Shareaza, BearShare, Lphant & iMesh.com | THE source for BitTorrent & P2P Tips, Tricks and Info. | FileShareFreak

Beware, people. These are the same scammers that stole the shareaza.com domain and started hosting an spyware-filled program that has nothing to do with the real Shareaza

[splicer]

Just read this; dirty tactics. Most companies should embrace P2P, such as Blizzard, instead of trying to fight it and catch "pirates".

[anon]

The funniest thing is that through domain theft they're just ruining the reputation of the "legal P2P" software they spam about for people to download - which was already deemed crap, as files are DRMed and you can't share videos longer than 50MB or 15 minutes.

[splicer]

Just about to login to TL, and guess what the Captcha is? Discordia. God damn it. I hate coincidences; they make life seem planned, but I guess it's because it's in our heads that we really notice it. Back on topic now.

[slikrapid]

this shows that anti-p2p companies with enough money can use it to effectively buy p2p sites/developers/domains and create a confusion (or worse) among users

there was a site that monitored real/fake sharing tools/sites in order to warn users and give them links to trusted software/sites, but i can't remember the link, anyone?

@ splicer: hopefully you didn't login to TL using this captcha

[anon]

this shows that anti-p2p companies with enough money can use it to effectively buy p2p sites/developers/domains and create a confusion (or worse) among users

Yes, that's exactly what they want - a confusion to their advantage. I wonder if it's even actually legal to take over a domain, and offer software that maliciously identifies itself as another filesharing program of the same name in order to trick users into downloading it.

there was a site that monitored real/fake sharing tools/sites in order to warn users and give them links to trusted software/sites, but i can't remember the link, anyone?

Perhaps you mean FileShareFreak? Their "Bad P2P" category includes articles on malware-infested filesharing programs and scam sites to avoid.

[slikrapid]

I wonder if it's even actually legal to take over a domain, and offer software that maliciously identifies itself as another filesharing program of the same name in order to trick users into downloading it.

it probably isn't but the anti-p2p organizations are the ones that sue, we are still waiting who's gonna (seriously) sue back
not sure if a company has to protect its product (patent?) to have a solid ground for a lawsuit against fakers/impostors

Perhaps you mean FileShareFreak? Their ... category includes articles on malware-infested filesharing programs and scam sites to avoid.

don't think so, as i remember it had lots of links and warnings/reasons in it, the one you mentioned is on the same path

[anon]

not sure if a company has to protect its product (patent?) to have a solid ground for a lawsuit against fakers/impostors

You have a point there - since Shareaza's name, for example, wasn't patented, those AP2Pers most likely found a loophole allowing them to take over the name and domain.

The truth is, the Shareaza homepage didn't host any copyright infringing material, and the P2P client itself isn't illegal - it's what you download that can make you break the law or not.

This isn't a concern for the anti-P2P groups' dubious evidence collection tactics (which, according MediaDefender, they don't need anyway) - they'll just keep their private IP harvesters running, and come back the following day to see a huge list of addresses, regardless of if the network equipment they got assigned to actually downloaded or uploaded copyrighted material. For example, if you leave uTorrent running without any torrents loaded but DHT turned on, you'll be a DHT node reachable by others. Your client could be storing or spreading the IP address(es) of someone that is indeed spreading infringing files, without you doing so or having any other kind of contact with it - but their private tools don't care.

[slikrapid]

they'll just keep their private IP harvesters running, and come back the following day to see a huge list of addresses, regardless of if the network equipment they got assigned to actually downloaded or uploaded copyrighted material. For example, if you leave uTorrent running without any torrents loaded but DHT turned on, you'll be a DHT node reachable by others. Your client could be storing or spreading the IP address(es) of someone that is indeed spreading infringing files, without you doing so or having any other kind of contact with it - but their private tools don't care.

so it looks like their methods have serious flaws considering reliability of the harvested results, which should be a good point of defense in a court even though it might be a problem to explain this to a less technically informed jury/judge