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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."
Closed registration torrent sites will be able to weed out the poisoners.
I use torrents instead of the TiVo I don't own. 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?
Your CPU is not doing anything else, at least do something.
It might be worth noting that I was using Azureus and running PeerGuardian at the time of the download.
I'm running Azureus on a different computer now.
In Bittornado, and possibly other clients, there's an option you can check that will ban peers that do this.
prefs -> check [Kick/ban clients that send you bad data]
After at least one failed hash check, the client won't eat any more poison, so to speak.
That's pretty cute, the use of "obstructing" in the summary. Usually when I hear the word obstructing it is in phrases like "obstructing justice." Obstructing is usually something the criminals do. The word has picked up a pretty negative connotation.
But here, we have HBO obstructing the downloading of their copyrighted material. HBO is obstructing copyright violation. Would you say that a lock obstructs breaking and entering? Or that self defense obstructs assault? Perhaps good server administration obstructs the stealing of private data. Of course you wouldn't say that. It sounds silly. So why is HBO obstructing downloads?
are understandable since Rome is their big subscription pitch for the moment. If they can frustrate DLers enough to pay for a subscription, buy or rent the dvd, then they can profit. While many opinionated slashdotters will scoff and say people should boycott HBO, fact of the matter is most people's convictions aren't so strong that they will throw away the time invested in watching the earlier episode. On a positive note, the fact that HBO has some sense of what is going on technologically means that they are that much closer to offering download services of their own.
I started watching Rome after a friend got an unsolicited DVD from HBO in his mail that had the first episode of Rome. I really liked it and wanted to get into the series, but it's the kind of show where you have to watch the episodes in order. So I had no choice but to download the first five episodes from my commerical usenet feed :)
I did however watch the sixth episode "regularly" on HBO, so I guess their tactic gained them a viewer. Then I immediately downloaded that episode so I could have a complete collection. Next Sunday, I'll probably be on my couch watching the seventh episode as it airs. And then I'll download it, too.
I'm not sure what the moral of this post is. Perhaps that "pirates" and legitimate customers are more closely intertwined than the simplistic among us would like to admit.
Azureus also has a plugin called SafePeer that automagically downloads a list of 'bad' IPs. Currently there are about 117,000 banned IPs in my block list, and I get good solid download speeds. Could also just add the HBO range of IP address's to the block list, thus their clients will be ignored completely.
DSLIP Web Design and Content Management Australia.
What HBO is doing is what every business should be doing instead of taking the RIAA's route.
That's called "vigilante justice", and there are laws against it. Maybe HBO's particular denial of service attack on BitTorrent is both harmless and specific in this case, but the next attempt at vigilante justice may end up shutting down the OpenSuSE distribution as a side effect.
HBO's actions amount to computer hacking and denial of service, and they should be treated as such by the legal system. On the other hand, if HBO wishes to claim copyright infringement, they should bring legal cases; nobody other than a court of law can determine whether copyright infringement has taken place.
Does BitTorrent use MD5 or SHA1 for computing hashes? How computationally feasible would it be for an organisation on the scale of Time Warner to poison torrents with bogus chunks whose hashes check out correctly? (Could they do it with a few powerful machines? What about a SETI@Home-style distributed-computing application running in the background on all corporate desktops?) If they did that, downloaders would not find out that the file was bogus until they downloaded the whole thing; such a tactic could render BitTorrent unusable for poisoned shows.
I'm sure the executives at HBO are thinking the same thing about people who have the ability to pay for HBO yet won't.
They are probably thinking "Premium cable was a lot easier when all you had to worry about was Captain Midnight."