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HBO Attacking BitTorrent
DIY News writes "HBO is actively poisoning the BitTorrent downloads of the new show Rome. In addition to an older tactic of offering bogus downloads that never complete, HBO is now obstructing the downloads offered by other people. HBO runs peers that tell the tracker they have all the chunks of the show, but then send garbage data when a downloader requests a chunk. While the bogus peers can be detected, it will take much longer to download shows."
Most modern Bittorrent clients will recognize that a peer is spewing garbage chunks, and snub them. Usually the trigger to snub is as little as 3 bad chunks.
So the whole idea that this will significantly increase download times is complete BullShit!
A Fatal OE Exception has occurred, Sig will now reboot.
azereus has this nifty little feature that blocks the IP of any client that sends more than 2 or 3 corrupt blocks of info.
HBO is not attacking BitTorrent the program, they're attacking people misusing BitTorrent to share copyrighted material illegally.
I've got fully legit paid for HBO but lately I've been too busy to watch Rome so I've just been d/l-ing them. I wonder how that falls under fair-use?
According to HBO's copyright protection rules, which you enter into agreement with when you sign up for their service, you CAN create a single copy of the show for yourself but NOT distribute it to others. For bittorrent to work though, you have to upload as well as download, thereby breaking your service agreement with HBO regarding not distributing your copy to others.
Last time I checked, my BT client watches for bogus peers and bans anyone who sends too much garbage. I think it's something low like 10 packets or so. HBO is just wasting bandwidth like a mothercluck, because the junk packets fail the hash check and are dropped automatically. Yes, it wastes time, but it doesn't corrupt the file unlike Kazaa spoofs.
;)
It's a double-edged sword really. If the programming were better I might actually want to get the extra channels, but on the other hand if their programming turns to even worse puke, people won't bother sharing the videos. Tough decision
-Billco, Fnarg.com
If one were really obnoxious, one could send fan mail to Mr. Weaver, but I don't know why one would.
I am not a crackpot.
But there was a time when HBO showed movies. Several "movie" channels actually showed movies 24 hours a day with only previews for movies between them. Then HBO started showing a lot of crap like Rome and this new channel came along called... "The MOVIE Channel (TMC)" and they showed movies- just movies. One month they showed almost 500 unique movies (including the old Boston Blackies!). I know it's hard to believe these days but it's true!
... GET THIS... MTV only showed music videos 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Get out of town!
And
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Your IP and upload/download rations are all recorded by the tracker anyway. All the registration does is lets the operator weed out undesireables easier.
BitTorrent isn't even vaguely anonymous.
HBO didn't start poisoning torrents with "Rome". It started with season 5 of "Six Feet Under". I live in Australia, where SFU is shown - eventually - on free-to-air television, but it's shown months after my friends watch it in the US, so I tend to grab the episodes off the torrent as they're shown on HBO. With the beginning of series 5, I noted that I was getting 2x the hash errors than I was receiving good chunks. I knew that it must be HBO "poisoning" the torrent.
Whether it's good or bad, it's certainly within their capabilities to do so. The danger for HBO is that it is forcing BT clients to evolve in interesting ways to avoid this kind of manipulation. SafePeer anyone?
The raw, honest truth is that anything that is broadcast - via airwaves or cable - is up for grabs. HBO doesn't yet understand that the real money is to be made in licensing - DVDs, soundtracks, decorative "Rome" wall hangings, what have you. That's where they'll need to earn back the $100M they spent on the series, because it's growing increasingly impossible to force people to watch something through a proscribed channel once it has been broadcast through _any_ channel.
Azureus has a bad data kicker built in. Combine it with Peer Guardian and the likelihood of accepting bad connections does drop somewhat.
It's called implied consent. Unless you were under duress, when you asked for the service, you agreed to the terms of the service provider. I used to work for a satellite provider here in Canada, and we actually had a hardcopy terms of service we could send out on request, as well as packing them in with our hardware. If you chose not to read the terms, didn't matter. You asked for the service, that bound you to its terms. Works the same for cable TV.
Check out my foes list to see who is so retarded that they can't use the signature line!!!
you are fully justified in hampering someones efforts to break into your car, you can let the air out of the tyres, cover the handles in grease, empty the tank, install an alarm, leave a rabid dog inside etc. HBO are doing the same, they are not coming round to your house and beating you up for downloading anything.
for at least the last 3 or 4 years, a company called overpeer has been doing this for hire in the music industry. labels would pay them a fee, and they would get a few hundred (or thousand) hosts on all of the p2p networks that claimed:
:) they used to have a large presence in some of the northeast datacenters, but since they got aquired by loudeye, they seem to have moved some gear around.
- high bitrates
- high bandwidth
- full artist catalogs
except all of they files they offered had been re-sampled like 10x, so the music was equivalent to about 24kbps...
More correctly, people who want the content without paying the price HBO is asking! I'm not saying downloading Rome is right, just that HBO might more effectively spend their money finding a way to make the show available at a price and via a medium that the current pirates would buy.
HBO costs like $6 or $7 a month (on top of normal cable/satellite service, obviously). The current season of Rome is 12 episodes. That's three months, or roughly $20 for 12 episodes. That's less than $2 per episode. Is that not cheap enough for you?
And to make the deal even sweeter, they give you something like six additional channels that play movies nonstop. If you so much as watch one or two movies per month, HBO has already paid for itself (assuming you watch movies, of course -- $6 or $7 would cover one movie ticket or one or two rentals).