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HBO Attacking BitTorrent

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the hand-that-feeds dept.

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."

4 of 844 comments (clear)

  1. azereus! by blackomegax · · Score: 5, Informative

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

  2. Headline misleading by badboy_tw2002 · · Score: 5, Informative

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

  3. Re:Pure BS by Orcish_Rodent · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.*.*

  4. Re:Thankfully by ferat · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.