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Microsoft RickRolls Wi-Fi Network Leechers

Posted by samzenpus on from the never-gonna-tell-a-lie-and-hurt-you dept.

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."

5 of 165 comments (clear)

  1. It could have been worse... by Mattskimo · · Score: 5, Funny

    At least it wasn't Soulja Boy.

  2. Evil by DeBaas · · Score: 5, Funny

    Rick Rolling, told you Microsoft is evil ;-)

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    1. Re:Evil by The+Mighty+Buzzard · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Network admins are evil by default, Microsoft or not. Most of them aren't nearly as creatively hilarious as this though.

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      Violence is like duct tape. If it doesn't solve the problem, you didn't use enough.
  3. TBF with a big bucket by jamesh · · Score: 5, Informative

    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 :)

    1. Re:TBF with a big bucket by David+M.+Andersen · · Score: 5, Informative

      It's actually pretty easy in linux. http://lartc.org/howto/lartc.qdisc.classless.html#AEN691 In fact, http://lartc.org/ has loads of good stuff.