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."

Comments

Pure BS

[FS1]

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!

Re:Pure BS

[Orcish_Rodent]

False, as they are using a very large range of IP addresses the clients internal blocking will not help.

It seems to work based on haveing a lot of crap spitting clients connect to the tracker which claim 50-92% complete and then start spewing data to who ever they can. The connecting clients will receive data at about 1/2 kBps. Receiveing 3 bad chunks to ban a ip only to connect to another bad ip will slow you down considerably. Typical torrent has 5000-10000 chunks assumming they have 3000 ip's (easy) thats 9000 bad chunks of bad data they can send doubleing the download time. FYI all ips are in the range 70.85.*.*

azereus!

[blackomegax]

azereus has this nifty little feature that blocks the IP of any client that sends more than 2 or 3 corrupt blocks of info.

Headline misleading

[badboy_tw2002]

HBO is not attacking BitTorrent the program, they're attacking people misusing BitTorrent to share copyrighted material illegally.

Re:TiVo

[slashdotnickname]

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.

Re:Thankfully

[ferat]

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.

Re:Thankfully

[stx23]

Azureus has a bad data kicker built in. Combine it with Peer Guardian and the likelihood of accepting bad connections does drop somewhat.

Re:TiVo

[Deadguy2322]

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.