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."

Comments

Just for fun

[Anonymous Coward]

Suggestions please for equivalent at Apple & Linux events?

Linux?

[muftak]

I bet they used Linux to do this... is it even possible to do something like this in windows?

Redirecting trackers

[threephaseboy]

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...

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.(...) These scripts output a list of bad MACs, that we then just dropped into a block list in the core switches.

Yeah, that might have been a little more helpful than redirecting a client (which will just use DHT instead to find peers)

it doesn't make sense to me

[circletimessquare]

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

Re:it doesn't make sense to me

[WCguru42]

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

What if I want to pretend that I believe this in the hopes that the RIAA will send it's dogs after Microsoft's (and maybe Google's) wolves and never come back. I feel fairly confident that Microsoft and Google have lawyers that would tear the RIAA apart in a real battle. There's a reason the RIAA hasn't taken strong tactics against them (specifically Google via YouTube) in the past.