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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.
Rick Rolling, told you Microsoft is evil ;-)
---
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".
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
Public performance of an artist's work without paying the lawers, er I mean the artist! Suing time
That's OK, Microsoft is so eeeevil, they'll just buy it. No, not the song, I mean they'll buy Rick.
Anybody know what he's up to these days, I mean besides being the "who the hell is this?!?" guy to a whole new generation...
They couldn't had technically change the files being downloaded, so they probably just put a rickroll video on the actual bittorrent websites.
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/
according to VH1's top 1 hit wonders witch had the now infamous song he still sings and is enjoying his new found fame and still makes new songs
why would they buy Rick he doesn't hold the copyright? his studios own those copyrights along with his soul and all of his loans, including credit cards,
it is the catch 22 of the music industry that is never really talked about.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
"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?
"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
The "Catch-22" is that you have to *gasp* assign your rights to someone in exchange for money?! What has this world come to?!
Let me be the first to tell you that copyright law actually had the artists' backs on this one. In order to allow artists to recover their early works that they may have assigned the rights to for far less than they're worth now (an economically suitable amount at the time given the risk to the buyer), copyright law allows the artists to cancel the assignment after some time. The right is inalienable.
It's a really long time, something like 40 years I think, but it's still something unique to what many people incorrectly think is a scam for artists.
No. If you RTFA you will see that they actually set their DNS to point to a "fake" tracker that was hosted locally and served up a rick astley video .torrent regardless of the .torrent requested.
So the client would request say, the mininova tracker and would be returned an IP by the DNS. The IP was actually the local spoof server. The spoof server would receive the request for (insert random torrent file here).torrent from the torrent client but would actually return "rick_roll_video.torrent" renamed to whatever the client was actually requesting.
The problem with doing it this way is that the fake torrent would fail the hash check, causing the client to re-request over and over and never actually download the "Rick roll". Of course, in the end the Admin got what they wanted; A reduction in traffic from torrenters. Personally I think they would have been better served to simply null route the IPs of any and all known trackers, but that doesn't have the poetic justice and sheer fun of a Rick roll.
It's a creative and funny (if ultimately pointless) way to deal with someone being an asshole and sucking up gratis bandwidth at a learning function with bit-torrent.
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
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
No. As I understand it, those who are rickrolled basically get a customized DNS response that points all page requests to a local server with one web page and a blind redirect to that web page. That single web page has an embedded rickroll video.
Somewhat similar to how airports on a pay-for connection, or hotel connections work. Try to go to any website, and you get redirected to a login or purchase page.
Presumably any other connections not on port 80 (torrent, FTP, etc) are dropped.
So if you're surfing the web while torrenting, you'll get the rickroll video on the next page you load after you are detected, and you'll find that all of your torrents suddenly stop connecting.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
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
Well, making the downloads fail is a bit dumb, they should just intercept the HTTP-download request for the original torrent file, parse the file, and serve up the rick_roll.avi.torrent with the filename replaced with the file the downloader wanted (so it'll be called family.guy.s8e12.avi, but only 50MB big and contain Rick Astley). And maybe a readme.txt if you want to scare them...
What time is it/will be over there? Check with my iPhone app!
MS addressed a problem by combining clever sleuthing with some humor.
This tells me that MS is getting a pulse.
A right the RIAA and MPAA have all but destroyed for any work created after 1980
I think you are misunderstanding. We aren't talking about the initial download of the .torrent file. We are talking about an already active torrent client running. So there is no http-download request, that was already done.
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
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.
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.
Got it. Makes perfect sense. I'll get to work on adapting to your way of thinking.
Look, the guy was an asshole plain and simple in his choice of words. I just get sick of everyone frothing at the mouth every time some artist (like you and me, dude) wants to be able to make some money for something they've done. I'm not advocating this monopolistic type scenario that you're trying to pin on me, I'm simply saying that while this particular case is a little unsavory in parts, it has some implications that could very easily apply to you and me.
I don't think you're out of line for wanting to have the choice to make some money off of your flick, regardless of how you choose to do it. I also don't have any problem if you choose to offer it for free (i.e. Creative Commons or something to that effect). I also don't think I'm out of order for wanting the choice to do the same with my work. I often offer my work for free in other people's productions, but it's my discretion. If, on the other hand, I feel that someone using my work should compensate and credit me for it, that too should be my choice, I made it.
Now, if we're done fighting with each other, do you need some music for your horror film? I have a few tracks that I could offer you, in exchange for credit of course.
;-)
FWIW -- that quote is misattributed to Antoinette. It was written by Jean-Jacques Russeau, and it is unknown whether it is an actual quote or a fabrication by Russeau. Many historians believe it was uttered by the wife of Loius XIV (a hundred years prior), not by Marie Antoinette. At any rate, Rousseau used the phrase in a letter some 18 years prior to Marie Antoinette's birth.
Not that this is on-topic or anything... but it's ironic to me that a post referencing the cluelessness of someone has such an error.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
"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
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
I wonder if Rick Astley's lawyer uses scripts to trigger the sending of DMCA takedown notices.
Requiem for the American Dream
Quite a straw man. I movie no one wants to see makes no profit. No one's forced to see a movie.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
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
The funny thing is that he had a second hit song on his next album, which shows how dumb VH1 really is.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
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...