The Gobbles security advisory about the RIAA was a hoax, but that doesn't mean they aren't messing with you:

For two years Warne worked for the global version of the RIAA, the IFPI which represents 1500 labels in 76 countries, with headquarters in London. The IFPI's primary mission is to "fight music piracy", and Warne worked with the RIAA and the biggest labels in implementing technologies to document and thwart file sharing. The IPFI co-ordinated efforts to glean detailed information about who was sharing what, and where. The organization, backed by the labels, was responsible for providing detailed evidence to the legal teams fighting Napster, Aimster and mined information about the burgeoning peer to peer networks, such as Gnutella. IPFI is responsible for trawling the world's web, ftp and irc channels and runs the automated system that sends warning letters to ISPs and webmasters.

...."The RIAA were very precise about what they wanted," says Warne. When Napster said it couldn't say what was on its network, the IPFI were able to provide file names. When users scrambled the names (using the pig encoder) and Napster said these were too hard to decipher, the IPFI was able to provide the real names.

....The technologies he worked on stayed on the right side of the law - just about - but Warne's most interesting claim to fame is that he suggested that the networks "poison" the emerging p2p networks with trash.

"I was one of the people who suggested the 'rogue file' scheme on the file sharing services," he told us.

"I suggested that they should put out files with legitimate titles - and put inside them silence or random noise - and saturate the file sharing networks with those files. That did start the poisoning." [The Register]