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Microsoft RickRolls Wi-Fi Network Leechers
An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft has revealed that it RickRolled users that were killing its TechEd conference Wi-Fi network last year by torrenting large files. Network administrators at the event quickly built a list of all of the top torrent trackers around and got the nod to add them all to the local DNS resolver and point them at a local Web server containing some Rick Roll scripts. According to the admin: 'It killed me that I didn't see anyone getting done by this first hand, but there were hundreds of impressions in the server logs containing the Rick Roll scripts so I did get a fair amount of satisfaction at least. It was the most evil of evil Rick Roll scripts too — worse than any that anyone has used to get me in the past.' Fun and games aside, it looks like the leechers will force quotas and traffic shaping for the first time in the event's history."
At least it wasn't Soulja Boy.
that whoever owns the rights to "Never Gonna Give You Up" is receiving royalties.
Public performance of an artist's work without paying the lawers, er I mean the artist! Suing time
Rick Rolling, told you Microsoft is evil ;-)
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Suggestions please for equivalent at Apple & Linux events?
Call the RIAA!
Just to get things rolling. Here is the tasteful mashup with Nirvana.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
Rick Rolling is so last year....
From TFA:
So we scheduled this script to run each minute to generate a list of offending MAC addresses.
We reasoned that if you had a lot of mappings, and that a large proportion of those mappings were to a lot of distinct remote hosts, and largely not idle, that you are probably a Torrenter. OTOH, if you had, say, 20 connections open to a single host or a low number of hosts then this is probably quite fine.
These scripts output a list of bad MACs, that we then just dropped into a block list in the core switches.
And there you have it. The culprits fingered and booted off the network. Of course, they then just changed their MAC addresses, in which case they were then re-identified as soon as their utilisation crept up, and the new MAC was banned.
This approach will work fine until one of the culprits decides to spoof the MAC address of your DNS servers (or whoever else they want to f*ck with) and gets them "booted off the network".
Can you change the content of a file while it is being downloaded.? I would expect the client to have some hash-keys to detect that. Is this just a question of modifying the contents of all downloaded torrent-files, so they point somewhere else?
When managing a resource such as CPU time, memory use or network traffic there should be ways to transparently mediate between users. You set some simple rules like "everybody gets a go" or "each host gets a slice of the network" and write some simple software to implement it.
Okay so thats traffic shaping and I know its not as simple as I make it out to be but the approach used here seems crude and a waste of man hours.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
It looks like the news link has been Slashdotted, Here's a mirror to the link
ic news story Microsoft
I bet they used Linux to do this... is it even possible to do something like this in windows?
So you redirect a BT client to a "rickroll" whenever it tries to get a list of peers, and this page is never seen by the end user.
You did a great job!
Oh wait...
Yeah, that might have been a little more helpful than redirecting a client (which will just use DHT instead to find peers)
.
I solved this problem at the local library's public access wireless with a linux router and a token bucket filter with a big bucket. Each IP address gets a 10MByte bucket that fills up at 256kbits/second. The bucket is big enough that they'll never know they are limited for normal browsing, but a torrent sucks it try really fast and drops down to a slow enough speed that it's not really worthwhile. And even if they do stick with it at least they aren't burning through tens of gigabytes per day. It beats any other filter i've ever tried.
I still fondly remember the howls of dismay from the leechers when I turned it... they just couldn't understand why their downloads start at 20mbits/second but slow down to a crawl almost straight away :)
because they dont have several websites that have huge amounts of hits (windows update, hotmail, etc) so they clearly couldnt know anything about networking.
http://xkcd.com/391/
At one point in space-time, Messysoft used to farm out their downloads to 3rd parties.
Possibly they've hired enough highly educated idjits to do it themselves by now.
"I still fondly remember the howls of dismay from the leechers when I turned it... they just couldn't understand why their downloads start at 20mbits/second but slow down to a crawl almost straight away :)"
You wouldn't happen to have an audio copy by any chance?
Can Microsoft be billed from the copyright holders for redirecting unsuspecting network users to "consume" someone else's intellectual property? Think of the artist's rights!
they had to write a utility to pull ip addresses from the NAT table, oddly enough the developer in India couldn't upload the fix because if *network problems*
they should of at least posted the binary to dump the contents from the ipnat.sys. it's probably some kind of RPC call.
"It was the most evil of evil Rick Roll scripts too -- worse than any that anyone has used to get me in the past."
correct me if i'm wrong, but rickrolling implies its just rick astley singing about how he won't let you down, right?
so what the heck is he referring to in the quote above? did they distribute 1080p video of ballmer in his underwear singing karaoke and throwing chairs?
speaking of which, a GIS for ballmer is not exactly flattering
http://images.google.com/images?q=ballmer
who would have guessed a GOOGLE image search wouldn't be flattering to steve ballmer?
i wonder what a bing image search for ballmer would... jesus what am i doing, better stop now before i run into rule 34
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I challenge thé, to setup a company, manage it to outperform Microsoft after you've modified a minimal "discarted" OS yourself and repackaged it to sell it as your own, with support and an agile development cycle, staying under a 2 percentile bugrate on all code in production while each "release" you have to think up something that seems to be "fresh" enough or an "improvement" over the last version in order to resell your updates while you grow to thousands of employees to work it all and above all, try to compete with Apple and make Linux look like a "hobby project" vs an industry standard for tooling (you cry, it's the truth.).
You get 5 years to success, starting in your garage. Success will be received by a strong handshake and respect, failure will just confirm expectations and will be smiled upon.
5,4,3,2,1... GO!
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
I understood from the article (I must be new here) that they went to the developers of ipnat.sys, the driver in windows itself. I suppose those know something about networking, especially their own code.
RogerWilco the Adventurous Janitor
on what morally or philosophically coherent grounds does it make any sense to you that a song from the 1987 should still be earning anyone any money?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
that this man thinks a song from 1987 should still be earning him money
yes, LEGALLY, he has a case, but morally and philosophically, he just seems like a giant asshole
fact: there are no morally or philosophically coherent grounds that a song from 1987 should anyone anything. really
and if you believe otherwise, you very much are a good definition of what is wrong with this world, in terms of a stunning display of greed backed up with force, overwhelming the common good
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
someone made money off a song from 1992. so what?
yes, in today's legal environment, this is possible. but it's not a defensible status quo
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Apparently their implementation of RRAS was insufficient for the size of their conference and the internet circa 2009.
MS addressed a problem by combining clever sleuthing with some humor.
This tells me that MS is getting a pulse.
Hmmmm... I thought the penalties for that were a big deal. MPAA, RIAA, where are you?
the quote/ bkr1'sr observation is spot on about the problem with those married to the pre-internet model of intellectual property
it's the equivalent of marie antoinette saying "let them eat cake" when told starving parisians don't have bread: the guy is so clueless as to real world labor, he actually and sincerely believes that not being paid for writing a song 23 years ago places him in the same category as modern slavery
off with her head, off with his head
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
what you say is exactly right: movies should only make money in theatres, and should be free online
i could put it on youtube, and get money from advertising clicks. or charge the odd bird who wants it on dvd $10. or i rent a theatre, take out advertising, and sell tickets. in other words, i make my money in theatres, or i make it via ancillary revenue streams. that's it. no enforcement, no policing, no legal force or warping of common sense/ how the internet functions need apply
you say this model doesn't support modern production costs?
oh yeah: how much did avatar cost to produce? and how much money has avatar made in theatres so far? pfffft
you say avatar isn't typical of revenue? ok, so then what are we paying for in the pre-internet model? we're supposed to give corporate welfare to moviemakers who make bad movies nobody wants to see?
howabout this crazy wacky "communist" thinking of mine: if the movie is good, producers recoup their investment in theatres. if the movie sucks, then they lose money. end of fucking story. the point is, what i am advocating is not some techno anarchist bullshit. what i'm advocating for is called PURE CAPITALISM. meanwhile, you are not defending capitalism from "information wants to be free man" technohippies. you are defending oligopolies and monopolies from pure capitalism, which is what i am advocating for. monopolies and oligopolies are just as poisonous to the free market as stalin and mao, friend. so fuck the studios and their crocodile tears over how the itnernet has killed their dvd aftermarket. boo fucking hoo. warner brothers needs to learn how to make movies like the actual warner brothers made movies in the silver screen era
there will be no dearth of movies or culture because of this "new" model... aka, how moviemaking functioned for decades before the age of the vhs tape. the vhs tape/ dvd which the movie industry fought. fought because this CASH COW they thought in the 1980s was going to destroy them: morons then, morons now about the internet
there will just be a dearth of bad movies. i did not know direct-to-dvd was a movie making model worth saving. here's my tiny violin for steven seagal and uwe boll. adios blockbuster video. boo fucking hoo
and you're absolutely right: some aesop's fable is in order here, for you and the mpaa/ riaa/ other ip assholes:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dog_and_the_Shadow
the world is changing friend. adapt. or die. your choice
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
after TWENTY THREE YEARS, the recording should be open to all by this point as well
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
"So it seems that you're OK with YOU making money off of your movie via advertising click, dvd reproduction or what have you, however this doesn't extend to everyone else."
what? of course it extends to everyone else
what doesn't extend to everyone else, nor to me, is that i have ANY say in how my movie is distributed once its out there on the internet
i don't understand why you are not seeing this point, or why you are confusing this point with some other point of argument that i am not defending/ advocating
perhaps its too subtle a point? i'm not slighting you, maybe the point really is too subtle. a lot of otherwise intelligent people really don't seem to get how fundamentally the internet has changed media distribution, ESPECIALLY in regards to what you cannot control anymore. all of intellectual property concerning distribution is predicated on dead models. the laws are toothless. because technological change has rendered them toothless, yet so many people are wedded to the old understanding of what they control they can't seem to grasp this truth
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Care to explain WHY? Or are you just trying to whore up some easy karma points by regurgitating the slashdotter's popular opinion you read somewhere . . . sometime . . . on the internet? You probably don't even have the brains to defend other people's^W^Wyour argument.
You really should learn to think for yourself.
But hey, whatever you think will justify your stunning display of greed backed up with force, overwhelming the common good^W^W^W^W^W^W^W^W^W^W^Wthievery, right?
Let's watch how quickly I get modded down because I don't share in the popular opinion. At least I have peace of mind.
howabout this crazy wacky "communist" thinking of mine: if the movie is good, producers recoup their investment in theatres. if the movie sucks, then they lose money. end of fucking story. the point is, what i am advocating is not some techno anarchist bullshit. what i'm advocating for is called PURE CAPITALISM. meanwhile, the current system is not defending itself from "information wants to be free man" technohippies. they are oligopolies and monopolies, using intellectual property law from before the internet, to defend themselves from pure capitalism. monopolies and oligopolies are just as poisonous to the free market as stalin and mao. so fuck the studios and their crocodile tears over how the internet has killed their dvd aftermarket. warner brothers needs to learn how to make movies like the actual warner brothers made movies in the silver screen era
movies should only make money in theatres, and should be free online. no enforcement, no policing, no legal force or warping of common sense/ how the internet functions need apply
you say this model doesn't support modern production costs?
oh yeah: how much did avatar cost to produce? and how much money has avatar made in theatres so far? pfffft
you say avatar isn't typical of revenue? ok, so then what are we paying for in the pre-internet model? we're supposed to give corporate welfare to moviemakers who make bad movies nobody wants to see?
there will be no dearth of movies or culture because of this "new" model... aka, how moviemaking functioned for decades before the age of the vhs tape. the vhs tape/ dvd which the movie industry fought. fought because this CASH COW they thought in the 1980s was going to destroy them: morons then, morons now about how the internet has destroyed intellectual property law's enforceability
i did not know direct-to-dvd was a movie making model worth saving. here's my tiny violin for steven seagal and uwe boll. adios blockbuster video. boo fucking hoo
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Wouldn't it be cool if any money you had in your savings account from 1987 back, your bank just made disappear using the same philosophy?
"why should your money from 1987 still be earning you interest"
Kein Wunder, aber bei Microsoft doch nur nette, schlanke Personen, während die Hacker mal wieder eklig fette Nerds sind. Den glibscht doch ständig das Laptop beim Wardriven aus der Hand. So kann das nichts werden. LOL!
I wonder if Rick Astley's lawyer uses scripts to trigger the sending of DMCA takedown notices.
Requiem for the American Dream
and besides, he's not asking for ad revenue, which he would deserve (in a sane time span)
he's asking for google to give him gobs of cash just because of something he wrote 23 years ago. hey, i helped build my neighbor's porch twenty three years ago. its my "intellectual property": i figure out the best way to plant the posts. i'll go over tomorrow and hit him up for $100 x 23 years. seems like a fair number to me. adjusted for how many parties he hosted on the deck, including all transfers along the chain of possible new ownership. i'll get my lawyers involved if he's not cooperative
pffffft
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I (and my father) are named Rick Roll!
Oh, and Microsoft has deep pockets... ....oooooo....chaching!
Seriously, I am so tired of these meme. I still have students coming up to me, read my name tag, and ask..."is that really your name?" and giggle incessantly...