Comment by sil3ntmac
15 years ago
Are the mp3s going to be in the cloud? Or on my hard drive?
... because it seems like it would be trivial to "spoof" an mp3 for downloading (take a random mp3, perhaps cut to the correct length, add the correct id3 tags and tell iTunes Match to download it).
I'm guessing that they're going to use an audio hash to look at the file and determine what song it is. It's probably more reliable than using ID3 tags which might get mixed up (especially around remixes, live versions, or just generally missing information).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hash_function#Finding_similar_r...
If the audio hash & protocol gets reverse-engineered, though, it'll make filesharing very quick--- instead of having to trade mp3s, you can just email your friend a list of hashes.
I'm not sure how that would work, for the hash to be the same you would need the original song right? If they use sha1 or something like that how are you going to go from hash to song?
2 replies →
I think the real point here is that won't really matter, because those friends will be Match subscribers so the royalties will be attributed when they're either added to match or streamed/downloaded (I'm guessing the latter).
This could get exploited so hard. I'm sure there must be a catch somewhere in the service.
Ah, right, that makes sense. Well then someone should put together a rainbow table of collisions with actual songs, haha.