Every P2P network or file-sharing community has some degree of spam, corrupted files, viruses and other inconveniences. FastTrack is most notable for this, as nearly three years of neglect have taken its toll. Heavily developed networks such as Gnutella suffer to a much lesser degree.

The reasons for Gnutella’s relatively pristine landscape are up for debate. Some developers contend Limewire’s TigerTree hash has been very effective in preserving the integrity of in-transit downloads, while SHA-1 checks the overall integrity. Still others believe this is less significant than given credit for, and suggest Gnutella benefits from a lower profile.

Whichever reason, its clear Gnutella developers are maintaining a strong defense against enemy attacks. Although file hashing has been instrumental in the development of P2P networking, Limewire hopes its latest efforts are just as ground breaking. A result of the initial efforts of a Frostwire developer, Limewire has brought spam filtering to their latest public release.

The filter is designed to learn by storing information. When a search is conducted, the user can block certain results by key words, size, verified SHA-1 hashes and/or IP address. Taking this information, the filter will then begin to learn by creating spam profiles. If a future search result fits a malicious profile, the file is labled as spam.

From the user, the filter learns patterns of what the user marks junk and what the user marks not-junk. From the network, it learns about things that are often found together in search results. It puts these two types of patterns together in order to make guesses at what is junk and what is not.

By enabling the "junk rating" column, the filter can be seen in action. Each file is given a percent rating. The closer the filter believes a file is spam, the higher the percent. Over a certain threshold, the file is labeled as spam.

The project, which began public beta testing under version 4.9.38 (12/13/05), appears effective and public reception on Limewire’s forums seem favorable. This release does not contain the anticipated DRM-filter.

Frostwire anticipates a matching release by Christmas.

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