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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?"
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.
From my point of view, I'd hold bets that 9 out of 10 "heavy users" on the internet are not swapping P2P files but are infected by trojans spewing spam.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.
On the flip side, ISPs have a strong incentive to reduce heavy BitTorrent traffic that goes into or comes out of their networks far, far more than traffic within their network. If I were managing an ISP, I'd be analyzing BitTorrent traffic to find out how much of it is staying locally, and using that to decide whether it's worth looking for a way to extend the protocol to prefer nearby seeds by adding additional DHCP response fields, by doing something clever with mDNS, etc. Heck, if I were managing an ISP, I'd be contributing code to BitTorrent to allow ISPs to specify information about the IP ranges within our regional network and the cost of uploads/downloads through our various peer ISPs, thus allowing the P2P client to weight its traffic towards connecting to other P2P peers that are cheaper for the ISP if all other things are equal, and allowing the P2P client to more effectively use bandwidth by making sure that only one P2P client within the regional network pulls each chunk of a given file through the expensive upstream pipes, then seeds it to the other peers through the faster regional network. Performance should improve on the average *and* the cost to the ISPs would go down.
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