Posts Tagged ‘P2P’

Network Programming in Python and Graphics

In this Tutorial I will try and explain simple Networking concepts in Python. Some things you will learn here are GUI programming, Networking, threading and hopefully enough understanding to be able to send binary data over the network.

from Tkinter import *
import socket
from threading import *
import cPickle


Our import statements you will notice we import our GUI modules, our socket modules, threading for keeping the GUI from freezing during connections. Finally cPickle his allows to send binary data over the network

CMD_MSG, CMD_LINE = range(2)


create some global variables

first we define our server function assign a port to listen to and bind it to our IP address


def server():
port = 9000
s = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_DGRAM)
s.bind((socket.gethostbyname(socket.gethostname()), int(port))) # bind to ip


next we create our loop
Read the rest of this entry »

The RIAA has acted like a drunken old man faced with a picture of Barack Obama for quite some time.  Now finally, someone must have cut grandpa off from his cough medicine since they’ve decided to stop their mass lawsuits against Internet users who share files online.

Instead, they plan on working through ISPs and notifying users through either sending letters or email to cease their illegal file sharing.

What I want to know is by what means does the RIAA monitor music piracy.  Does the RIAA own a bunch of botnets?  Or do they simply have a giant crack team of nerds who surf through torrent searches and gnutella networks looking for popular files?

The RIAA has in the past been accused of Peer-to-Peer Network Pollution, meaning they intentionally upload either low-quality or incorrectly labelled files into the stream, causing difficulties finding the files you’d want (and possibly explaining why I sometimes get porn instead of the files I search for on eMule).

For more information regarding the new RIAA strategy:  http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122966038836021137.html

For more information on P2P pollution, go to this interesting report:  http://iptps06.cs.ucsb.edu/papers/Lee-pollution06.pdf

eMule is a filesharing client that connects to the eDonkey network as well as the Kad network for searches and downloads.  Anyone familiar with eMule will know of the super-vast availability of files sadly trumped by the ridiculously-long queue lists and the sluggishly-slow download times.

Another disadvantage of eMule is sometimes the files themselves aren’t what they appear to be.

There would be times when I would download a RAR file, try to open it, only to see WinRAR tell me it’s “Corrupted or Invalid”.  It happened so often that I started archiving all those files in hopes that someday I’d download some kind of magical RAR file-fixer that could fix them.

One day I just happened to be viewing my downloads folder as thumbnails for some odd reason and in a perfectly timed stroke of luck I had just happened to have just recently downloaded one of those “corrupted” RAR files; it displayed a thumbnail that resembled a video file.

To test my observation, I renamed the extension from RAR to MPG and sure enough it was in fact a video file… a porn video file.  I repeated the process through my archive of “corrupted” downloads only to find they were all in fact full length porno movies.

My archived “corrupted” RAR file of miscellaneous wallpapers was “Exploited Black Teens”, my file of assorted ringtones was  “Milf’s Need Money”, and my 3D Screensavers Pack was some amateur Asian porn starring some Asian guy with a tiny wiener.

I had amassed an enormous collection of pornography, and, for the first time in American history, a man can honestly say it was completely accidental.  It was my enormous accidental pornography collection.

Chances are, when you download a file with a very high availability, it’s not the file you think it is.  There is one surefire way to verify a file’s contents, and that is to right-click on a file that is being downloaded, click on “Comments”, then click on the “Name” tab in the dialog box that pops up.  There you will see a list of names that this file goes by on other people’s computers.  Chances are you will just see some spelling corrections of more information about the file, sometimes you will see it with numerous filenames that have nothing to do with each other.

The latter example is how you know you have yourself a Surprise Porno.

I’ve never had to download porn, because even if I wanted it, I get tons of it accidentally and very frequently. Besides, everyone knows that looking for porn online is the digital non-social equivalent to actual sex: if you don’t know what you’re messing with, there’s a chance you could get infected with something you can’t get rid of.  I would have never expected to catch one of these elusive online STDs, so I would never have imagined I’d eventually catch the digital analog of the AIDS virus…..

The second learning experience I’ve had with eMule happened very recently, last night in fact, when I got myself my first undeniable virus.

I was looking for skins for a program called Atomic Alarm Clock when I saw a listing for what appeared to be a much newer copy than the one I had. I downloaded it without hesitation, not realizing that the availability of the file was strangely high, I was just hell-bent on keeping my files up-to-date. I wasn’t really worried about anything bad happening, since the only real tom-foolery I had ever encountered was my Surprise Porn files.

I attempted to access the file when I was bombarded with a barrage of beeps emitting from my internal PC speaker; my anti-virus software was engaged in battle with a vicious foreign enemy spawned by the worst of the world’s fat nerd populous. I scrambled to ctrl-alt-del only to find every process running appeared legit. I fired up my Process Explorer and found a program called hldrrr.exe that stood out among the others. I hopped on Yahoo and learned it’s a common name for a type of trojan that wipes out your anti-virus software, downloads pretty much whatever other programs or viruses it wants to from the Internet, and has it’s way with your computer worse than a drunk boyfriend on a Lifetime TV Movie.

It was a horrible ordeal, but I ended up getting it removed with ComboFix.   OTScanIt and ATF-Cleaner aided me in identifying rogue files and giving me piece of mind by removing temp files of various types.
I highly recommend these programs, especially to a frequent indiscriminate downloader.

Flyninja is soon going to feature a section devoted to all the free software out there that everyone should download and you’d better believe everything I’ve mentioned in this article will be featured there. In the mean time, the hyperlinks you see link to the programs so you can easily download them for yourself (except for the hldrr.exe link of course, that just takes you to a page describing it).

Until next time faithful readers, have fun, be safe, and enjoy your Surprise Porn.