Meeow – I Didn’t Download That – It Was the Cat

A report from the Independent tells of a fella in Florida who reckons the suspect imagery found on his computer is due to his cat’s interference whilst downloading music files.

Outrage is vented “clear the cat” and “liar liar pants on fire” the accusations fly that this fella is out of order for trying to blame his cat for adding dubious content to his laptop.

Regrettably, things are not that simple. It is indeed possible to “stumble upon” dubious content, if one’s a bit careless.

Now, I happen to be an average numpty when it comes to computers and the ‘net. I’m lucky that I have a “go-to-guy” when my computer is plagued by any number of afflictions. The following observations are based on real-life experience, not on what one might read in the papers (online or offline) or see on the telly.

Have you ever used e-mule or similar p2p (peer to peer) programs?

Many people use these programs, mostly to download music and movies. Ok, I know downloading copyrighted material is illegal, but this is besides the matter at hand.

Due to the dynamics of p2p these days, programs like e-mule are optimized for large files. Your average movie comes in at a gig or so, depending on quality. A single music track on the other hand is only a handful of megabytes. Nowadays, hardly anyone downloads (or shares) single tracks. Instead, people download entire albums or collections of albums – even if it’s only a few tracks they’re after. To facilitate this, the tracks that make up the album or collection are “packed” in a so-called “archive file”. You download the entire archive and “unpack” it when you’re done.

Now, one can label such an archive file in any way one wishes. The archive label (file name) might say “Britney_Spears_Greatest_Hits_mp3_256kbps_By_Da_Great_Pirate”. But that doesn’t necessarily mean the contents of the archive file are exactly that.
In fact, quite often one will find, upon unpacking the archive, that one has downloaded ordinary everyday dubious content instead of Britney Spears’ Greatest Hits.

It happens that dubious imagery such as found on this fellas computer is not only sold commercially. It is also swapped, just like any other type of content you might find on a p2p network. For obvious reasons, those who engage in swapping this kind of material over p2p want to make it look as ordinary and innocent as possible. Anyone equipped with a minimum quantity of functional neurons will have understood where I’m heading by now: In some cases, someone somewhere might be in for a nasty surprise when unpacking Britney Spears’ Greatest Hits.

Well-clued users of p2p programs know how to avoid these risks. But very few of those who operate computers in daily life are well-clued. So all sorts of little accidents do indeed happen. Including that which is stated as impossible: stumbling upon dubious images.

True story – courtesy of my “go-to-guy”
Once I was looking over the shoulder of a friend who was busy downloading music. I scanned the list of “downloads in progress” and there was one file that didn’t look right. The filesize was off. This is one subtle clue that the contents of a file may not correspond with what’s written on the label.

So, I took the mouse from my friend’s hand and selected the preview function. E-mule has this functionality, but very few people know. It allows you to see the (description of) the contents of a partially downloaded file, basically the names of the files contained in the archive. They weren’t audio files. They were jpegs (image files) and the filenames left nothing to the imagination. Before my friend could say “Wha…” I had cancelled the download, and deleted the partial file from the disk.

It didn’t end there: a particularly insidious trait of computer filesystems is that, when you delete a file, it is not actually deleted. The contents of the file still sits on the disk and can be read by specialized software. The only thing the filesystem does is remove the filename’s entry from the file allocation table and flag the space occupied by the deleted file as “available”. But until the data gets overwritten, it won’t be gone. The only way to be sure the file is well and truly gone is to “wipe” it, which means you overwrite the file with random “garbage”.

Also, computer operating systems have a habit of creating temporary files on disk while performing certain operations. E-mule’s “preview” function may well use such temporary files. It deletes them when it’s done, but you’d have to wipe those to. End of story: In order to be absolutely sure the offending content was indeed gone, a pretty meticulous clean-up operation had to be performed.

The chap had just dodged a serious bullet. But not every careless p2p user has the luxury of a guardian angel looking over his/her shoulder.

Tin foil hat note: I would not put it past certain people to “inject” dubious content into p2p networks in order to scare people away from using p2p networks i.e. sharing copyrighted content. That would be pretty cynical, but we live in a pretty cynical world.