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Major ISPs Help Fund BitTorrent User Tracking Research
An anonymous reader writes "I was scanning conference proceedings to come up with ideas for a reading group I run at my workplace, and I noticed an interesting paper from the new IEEE WIFS forensics conference. Researchers from the University of Colorado have published a technique for tracking BitTorrent users (PDF) by joining and actively probing torrent swarms using low-cost cloud computing services. They claim their methods allowed them to monitor the entire Pirate Bay torrent set for as little as $13/mo using EC2. But that's not even the interesting part. Their work appears to have been 'funded in part through gifts from PolyCipher' — a broadband ISP consortium. That's right; three major national ISPs funded this round of BitTorrent tracking research, not the MPAA/RIAA. Could this be evidence of ISP support for ACTA and a global three-strikes law?"
ISPs could simply be looking for ways to find heavy bittorrent users, provide proof of the fact that they're using a lot of bandwidth to download copyrighted content, and to throttle them down or to block this traffic entirely.
ISPs have a strong incentive to reduce heavy bittorrent traffic on their networks so they don't have to upgrade as often. If they can delay these upgrades under the guise of supporting intellectual property rights, it's a win win for them. I'm not saying I support this kind of thing, but it makes business sense.
Facts have a liberal bias.
90% of the traffic by a relatively small subset of the consumers. They hates it.
It could be evidence of ISPs wanting to reduce unwanted BitTorrent traffic by taking a pro-active stance against piracy. BitTorrent eats up a lot of bandwidth and has been targeted for throttling for a while now. Why only throttle it if you can kill it outright?
"Give a man fire, and he'll be warm for a day; set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life
Bittorrent makes users demand more bandwidth, which is good for ISPs I guess, someone has to pay for the network improvements.
So ISPs should solve equal or fair speed distribution among users (so that bittorrent users don't block others), rather than hunt the clients that use the service to its full extent.
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
All they want are honest numbers. We know we cannot trust MPAA/RIAA for those.
I'm not saying we can trust the numbers or have any idea how ISP's will use the results. But they will be more informed when they decided to support or fight ACTA.
Im a gamer, not a grammer major. This post is full of spelling and grammer mistakes.
As cable company researchers, their goal is to maximize profits for the cable industry. This includes: reducing (and delaying) the need to invest in new cable-modem equipment, reducing the size of the Internet transit circuits that they must purchase from real IP backbone providers, reducing the quantity of TV channels they must give-up to make room for DOCSIS (cable modem) channels, reducing any competition for video services from (non-cable-company) Internet-video sources, and so on. Cable company executives care about MPAA/RIAA only so far as it affects the size of their bonus checks. It is always about the money.
Let's hope the fiber-based operators kick their sorry coax ass. (And let us be vigilant that the fiber operators don't become similarly arrogant and unresponsive once they assume the throne of dominant last-mile provider.)
Really? An interested party funding research that could that affects their business model? This seems to be a non-story, unless this is the first time these financial ties have been revealed between bit torrent researchers and ISPs.
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
As more people and organizations do vast amounts of computing on cheap clouds, eventually clouds are going to stop being almost free. Sure, the servers are being used in a very efficient way, but more and more servers are going to have to be purchased.
"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro" -- HST
I remember reading about some of this papers references last year. I found it interesting as at the time I was working for a company that had been data mining, advertising and "other" activities over P2P networks for several years. Working there made me feel kinda sleazy, but it was a paycheck when I needed it, at least until the investors got spooked and stopped writing pay checks...
If a pirate stops being a pirate then they stop needing the (expensive) super fast broadband and will happily settle for a budget connection. ISP's thinking a bit too much in the short term here?
for as little as $13/mo
My eyes somehow jumped to that part first. At first, looks kinda like an ad, doesn't it?
Monitor Pirate Bay torrents TODAY, for only $13/month!
There is a very real possibility that ISP's will be required to enforce copyright laws in the same way that convenience stores are required to enforce age limits for alcohol and tobacco. ISP's might also lose the "safe harbor" provisions and become "accessories" to the actions of their users.
If either of these possibilities becomes law the ISP's will be required to shut down IP infringing traffic. So it could be evidence that ISP's are looking for a way to comply with such laws should they be passed.
It would not be the first time that the U.S. Congress has put a deadline on a technology which did not exist yet.
"No man's life, liberty or property is safe when congress is in session."
Since they are in the US and actually download a chunk from each peer, doesn't that make them liable for literally billions of dollars in damages? After all, they obtained copyrighted works without permission.
Simple solution: hidden honeypot torrents on the tracker. Anybody who scrapes them is IP-banned for a week. For bonus points, is added to every torrent's peer list to cause an "accidental" DDOS.
Nastier solution: independent artist puts up a work on TPB, with a license proviso that it's not available to this software. Seed, wait, sue - after all, even 16 kB is (according to the RIAA) enough to net a $250k fine per instance...
"Could this be evidence of ISP support for ACTA and a global three-strikes law?"
For some reason, I just got an image in my head. It's a mat with different conclusions on it that you can jump to.
More likely this would be more useful for them to justify jacking up the rates for those who use such a "bandwidth intensive" application. Besides, I assumed the **AA was already doing this, compiling vast amounts of evidence. Once they get their first "win" in a p2p trial, they'll upend the dumptruck and start up ye olde legal proceedings. Of course for a "win" they need the public to be on their side, and suing the pants off some single mother for doing "what everyone does" isn't a good start.
Shift happens. Fire it up.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9920665-7.html :)
"So far, investigators have recorded more than 642,000 "unique serial numbers" that can be traced to the United States and another 650,000
of them that cannot be traced to a particular country, with the number of unique serial numbers rising steadily
each month since "widespread capturing" of the details began in October 2005.
So they bought up computers, join the networks and map them out
What have the discovered?
The shock of people using the pipes they paid for ?
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
So the government can't do this, but private corporations can. Then, those private corporations turn around and give said information to the government without probable cause (just a sticky note).
'Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.' - Mao Tse-tung
If a pirate stops being a pirate then they stop needing the (expensive) super fast broadband and will happily settle for a budget connection. ISP's thinking a bit too much in the short term here?
There are the Netflix, Amazon, and other video on demand folks who need the fast connections. P2P can disappear and it would have a negligible affect on our business.
The internet is quickly turning everything we consume into data. Cable companies want to fragment what being on the internet means, and then charge you extra for wanting to use port 25 or have the "privilege" of using bittorrent. They want you to pay for cable TV even if you can get everything off of hulu or directly from nbc.com.
If they can use technology to kick off high bandwidth users or force them to pay more without having to expand infrastructure, that's a hell of a lot better than expanding infrastructure. More short term profit. Higher stock price.
Being someone that works for a major ISP in the department in which we receive and act on copyright complaints, I can tell you... we hate it. Think of it this way, when the DMCA was passed we suddenly had to create an entire department that produced no profits. In fact, it sometimes forces us to disconnect customers and LOSE money. I know that managent rutinely goes to our legal department to find out if they can just stop enforcing DMCA all together. Now, throttling the bandwidth of torrent users? Yea... they're all over that. What ISPs want are little old ladies paying $100/month for 10MB service and only using it to check their mail once a day.
I'm saying it usually isn't. This is based on my observation of torrent users. Now I'm not talking about the person who uses it to get patches for a game and doesn't know it, or the guy who downloads a Linux ISO for work or something. The ISPs have no problem with them, their bandwidth usage is fairly normal. The people I'm talking about are the torrent head types. Generally they are downloading copyrighted content, though not always. They just go crazy, they download tons and tons and tons of stuff, since it costs nothing. They have downloads going in the background, all the time. They are the ones who use tons, who cause problems. They just queue things up when they finish what they are getting now.
Fact is, bandwidth ain't free.
ISPs need to implement hard bandwidth caps (say, 100GB per month or whatever number makes sense depending on the plan you are on). If you exceed the usage caps, you have to pay extra (and/or your connection is dropped to slow speeds for the rest of the billing cycle)
Hard bandwidth caps combined with an easy to use usage meter to tell exactly how much you have left solve the problem. If someone wants to use their whole 100GB in the first few days sucking down globs of content from BitTorrent, so be it.
Properly implemented, bandwidth caps (especially if they are broken up into peak and off-peak to encourage large downloading to be done in the off-peak period when most users who want email, web etc are not using the net) eliminate the need for any kind of BitTorrent specific measures.
Any ISP that implemented bandwidth caps and found they still had problems with BitTorrent users would need to:
A.Charge more for their service (and use that money to buy more upstream to solve the problem)
B.Decrease the bandwidth caps (to reduce the amount of heavy downloading going on)
or C.Implement better QoS to send BitTorrent packets to the "back of the queue" when another protocol wants to use the network links.
Even a perfectly neutral ISP rightly should have a love hate relationship with bit torrent. Bit torrent can be a good thing if most of the peers are local connections. And they espeically should like peer groups that dont' exit or enter their network.
And if an ISP were really savvy about the network topology they could strategically place their own seeds to create local peering groups. But they could not do that without having a way to track the torrent topology on their network.
So maybe they are good people that are looking at this as a way to optmize local torrent networks for everyone's benefit including their own?
However that reasoning assumes that with or without bit torrent the same amount of data transfers would be made. Local bit torrents thus are beneficial. But if you take the assumption that without bit torrent not as many data transfers would be made, but people would still be willing to pay the same for their service, then the ISP would love to squish bit torrent completely.
Moreover if they have content to sell then any bit torrent use is competition for the bandwidht they want to sell high QOS content over (including voip content).
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I think you're forgetting in the torrent protocol when someone has a fast enough connection they get promoted to being a supernode.
Anyone else notice that the CEO of Polycipher actually works for Colorado University...conflict on interest much?
The Wood Engineer
I honestly don't care if it's the ISPs deciding what is and isn't permissible communication, or if it's the government, or the copyright protection organizations. .00000001% of people who make their millions from their personal art.
An entity with broad control of what people can and can't communicate is more frightening to me than losing the
"That was disturbingly easy to translate...."
Disturbingly bad too. All you can eat restaurants have a built in limit. How much any average person can physically eat in a given amount of time. What Sycraft-fu is talking about is best understood by asking yourself, what is the built in limit for the average internet connected computer?
So, it's a group of national-level ISPs? The links says that two of them are Comcast and Time-Warner.
Comcast being the future owners of NBC, and a "content" company regardless.
Time-Warner being a content company too.
Why do we think it's not the normal content-publishers trying to screw people over?
cant their ip addresses just be added to a popular blacklist like bluetack, i-blocklist etc?
http://www.i2p2.de
Proof positive that money can buy scientific results?
Funniest comment that I've seen here in months.
I did not notice anyone commenting on the actual paper. Maybe I am wrong but all the are doing is probing a peers to establish whether they respond to protocol and actually have parts of the file. This means that to prevent this from working one only needs to run PeerBlock or similar software and block amazon cloud and similar services. If their idea catches on, I am certain that it will be rendered void by proper block list in no time. As various papers correctly stated - "if you are running bit torrent client and not running any filtering software you are an idiot".
There will be made lists of IP adresses which are monitoring, so you can block them. Problem solved.(for pirates)
First, we have a large media industry which is going to lobby to protect its revenue stream.
Second, we have people who want the content, but don't value it at the prices the media corps charge.
Third, we have the whole "web 2.0" revolution - streaming video is a massive bandwidth hog - the ISPs either have to upgrade, which has a cost transferred to the user, or they have to free up bandwidth from file sharers to allow Joe User to watch streaming Hi-Def.
The media companies won't stop their lobbying. If there is a technical solution to mass copyright infringement on BitTorrent, a few things will happen.
First, bandwidth will be freed for other users: ISPs and customers are happy.
Second, those who consume material from BT will have to decide whether to pay for it. The prices are too high, so people will either consume less or stop altogether.
In the latter case, a lot of people will have free time to do something productive to improve self and others, rather than constantly consuming all of this media, which does nothing but pass the time and further inculcate mass media ideas which are generally not to the benefit of the individual.
Further, with the mass copyright infringement curbed to an acceptable degree, there is less incentive for Big Media to lobby for increased control of computers and the Internet, with attendant invasions of privacy. Big Government wants to do this anyway, but it is likely to meet more opposition if the costs are collected from the tax payer, rather than the deep pockets of the media industry who see the effort to develop all this tracking nonsense as a legitimate revenue protection strategy.
I feel the same as most people regarding the prices charged for media, and the fact that where prices are set unacceptably high, people who can't download for free wouldn't purchase all the content at full price.
The outcome of this could be more bandwidth for the end users to watch their video on demand, download, etc, less copyright infringement, and less overall media consumed, whether purchased or "pirated".
Win - win? Ultimately what the media companies do not realise is that the "content" they produce has very little intellectual or artistic value. It is a time-passer for the masses. In the end people will buy a small amount - the odd film or box set of a favourite series, and not much else. It is better for the individual to consume less of the same repetitive media drivel, instead being restricted by price to consume only what they most enjoy. The genuine film and TV buffs will consume as much as ever, but will pay for it, and the rest will find something better to do with their time - perhaps charity, self improvement, or even more time in the bar with friends.
There has to be a solution eventually, and I won't shed too many tears if the whole "piracy" gig eventually diminishes to hardcore geeks only, with the rest of the people paying a token amount to consume only some media. The reduction in consumption will reduce the market for a lot of drivel, with products with genuine entertainment value or artistic innovation in demand, with the rest of the recycled concepts on the shelf.
Better for artistic value, better for the individual, better for the media firms and ISPs, and some of the incentive for draconian government interference in public communications under the guise of "protecting intellectual property" removed.
Thoughts?
Come on people, we all know it's all about money and deep effing you in the ass as much as they can teaming up with the enemy if they need to....
about the cap on valume... I don't see why I should accept a limit on a service I paid for... if I subscribe for a 3Mbps connection I should be able to use it at full speed 24/7 if I want to... like someone said don't sell what you can't provide...
Heck at 40 bucks I should have a 20Mbps ADSL connection with a free landline phone connection with free local calls and discounted international calls and free digital TV plus a back up dial up offer in case the ADSL crashes... what I use to have in a different country and still no cap
BitTorrent and copyright infringement is a complete non issue for ISPs and bandwidth issue.... I'm streaming 4Hrs in my household of video just on netflix every day in HD.... Hulu youtube and other legal networks are used daily too, demos or content is downloaded daily on the XBox, video conferencing regularly etc.... my bandwidth consumption actually went up according to my counter since I legally download.... and I was busting 100Gb in less than a 2 weeks before.... and I'm far from being an marginal household...
that said upload might be the issue then again most bittorrent common users put cap on the upload check your peer lists how many do actually share at max capacity not a tenth of them....
we all know bandwidth is going to be exponentially required.... every single media or content will soon be exclusively broadcast through internet for convenient reason, speed of distribution cost efficiency and ecological reasons.... the cloud is coming, they should call it skynet :D
Those encryption protocols for us heavy torrent users.
I'd like to seed out a 6 gig file of nothing but text that repeats the phrase "MY ISP SUCKS ASS", see if they get a kick out of that.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
$13/mon will get you approximately 15 days of CPU time from AWS. I don't get how they come up with these numbers? And that's not even including bandwidth. Granted, it probably doesn't require a lot of bandwidth to run a tracker or two, but I can't see these numbers being correct - there has to be zero or two missing.
http://www.multichannel.com/blog/BIT_RATE/30860-Cable_Ops_Didn_t_Fund_Research_Into_BitTorrent_Tracker.php Speaks for itself