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Game Publishers Using Stealth P2P Clients
An anonymous reader writes "TorrentFreak has shed some light on the dark practice of installing stealth-mode P2P clients during game downloads and using unsuspecting gamers' PCs as 'bandwidth slaves.' The clients operate in the background and largely go unnoticed until problems arise that are caused by overactive uploading/seeding. While the Akamai NetSession Interface and Pando Media Booster are specifically called out, there appear to be other offenders as indicated in the comments left by TorrentFreak readers. A publisher called Solid State Networks is putting out a call for an industry-wide 'best practices' effort to promote transparency, control and privacy on behalf of gamers who are otherwise being abused for their bandwidth without their consent."
Hai, I'm in your services stealing your bandwidths?
GENERATION 25: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation. Social exper
I wouldn't have a problem with this stuff if they didn't dumb it down to oblivion. If you're going to be having us as a torrent peer, we need to be able to CONFIGURE IT.
Thanks.
Despite the clever use of the misspelling "Hai", your grammar is obviously much too polished. You, sir, are no LOLcat. Buy your own damned cheeseburger.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Isn't this how Blizzard distributes updates for their games?
Data usage costs money. Anybody offering a server with "Unlimited" bandwidth on a web server is lying to you, and the more data transfer a plan allows, the more expensive the hosting gets. Exceed your transfer limit on a server, and expect to pay cell-phone like overage fees.
Right now, this isn't a big deal because what they're stealing from their users doesn't cost the user extra right now... but imagine if the GB they stole from you is the one that puts you over a Comcast-style cap. That would suck big.
The network operators have already been complaining about illegal torrents not just because they're illegal content sharing, but because having people uploading like crazy from the consumer side of their network just isn't what they designed it to handle. Now, what are they going to say when the content is legal, and the user got suckered into agreeing to allow it in a game's TOS?
Pando Media Booster = slows down your internet connection
Norton Antivirus = makes your computer vulnerable to hacking
Trusted Computing = you can't be sure if you have control of your computer
etc.
I reinstalled Dungeons and Dragons Online recently. The installer uses Pando. However, it wasn't very sneaky about it. It was in the install at some point.
It would have been nice if it had uninstalled itself after the several gigabyte download or if the installer had explained more about the consequences of leaving it installed. The information about Pando was easily available to me via a web search. Pando uninstalled without any problems from the Windows control panel.
I wouldn't worry about it fairly polite software like Pando too much. The kind of people who install everything without reading the dialog boxes or doing any research are going to end up with their computer stuffed full of malware in any case.
Now that's definitely an advantage of web games like Game!, there's no client to download in the first place!
Game! - Where the stick is mightier than the sword!
But if we're ALL using more bandwidth, shouldn't that bandwidth get cheaper? The laws of supply and demand apply here, do they not?
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
...but don't mind us as we steal your bandwidth. Oh but we *did* get your explicit permission. It was buried in that wall of text you agreed to that we could.
If we're all using more bandwidth, that's a demand increase, not a supply increase.
Okay sure. Well how about most places where you're on a capped bandwidth limit? Wonder what would happen if people started sending bills to the company who's sucking up all their bandwidth. It's sure not exactly cheap, some places have no cap on the amount they can charge you, and others cap at a max of $50/mo.
And no, ELUA's, walls of text, and so on are not binding everywhere. And where they are binding, many places require them to be plain declarations of intent(so people can understand them).
Om, nomnomnom...
As far as I can tell from any game I've seen, it only does it while patching. You download and upload while you get a patch. Any other time it isn't running. So how is that a big deal? All it does is help get patches out faster. Back in the old days of MMOs, patch day sucked. Everything ground to a halt as everyone hit the server at once. Game companies couldn't afford the massive network of servers like Microsoft has. P2P helps solve that. As more people download, more people upload and it stays more even.
So long as it is happening only when you are patching, I don't see any big deal. Now if they are trying to make you a server all the time in the background, then yes we'd have a problem but I have not observed that behaviour.
Pando Media Booster = slows down your internet connection
Norton Antivirus = makes your computer vulnerable to hacking
Trusted Computing = you can't be sure if you have control of your computer
etc.
Your contribution to this discussion is sort of depressing.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
You're thinking economies of scale, but as a finite resource increased bandwidth usage = increased demand. Increased demand = increased price.
I called them out for it and it fell on deaf ears.
It's not their bandwidth so they don't really care.
They are using Pando Media Booster... and it's so badly set up that it takes 4 times as long to download the game
because they saturate the upstream, causing issues.
In short, these game houses don't care because it's a reduced cost to them.
OK, I know that Blizzard uses BitTorrent, but they're fairly upfront about it.
Someone else has mentioned Dungeons and Dragons Online, but they again mention it.
I know for a fact that the Final Fantasy XIV Beta uses P2P but makes no mention of it (thanks, firewall!), but thanks to the NDA, I can't tell you about that. Or I could post AC.
So can we name names and make a list of companies that mislead customers about P2P and waste their bandwidth? We can start with:
SQUARE ENIX: Final Fantasy XIV (no indication)
Just had a similar problem with uploads sky rocketing, because a user installed Bittorrent while away, and had btdna.exe running in the background on their workstation...
http://www.bittorrent.com/dna
You're thinking economies of scale, but as a finite resource increased bandwidth usage = increased demand. Increased demand = increased price.
Wrong! Bandwidth does get a lot cheaper as quantity increases. While it isn't infinite it is almost. The only reason that it doesn't
seem to is that ISPs & mobile companies don't put enough investment into more bandwidth.
Just a heads up, but media streaming is also heading this way. The "OctoStream" plugin for streaming video (Major League Gaming stream, etc) is also a P2P streamer.
If *I* did that id be in jail. Why aren't they?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
If I remember right, World of Warcraft distributes their patches over a P2P system. Maybe it isn't Ironforge that always makes you laggy....
You're saying that the only reason we don't have more bandwidth is because companies don't spend enough money on it, and if companies spent more money on it, it would get cheaper because there would be more of it? Isn't that what 'economies of scale' means? You don't seem to have comprehended brainboyz point. He said, given that we have a fixed amount of bandwidth presently, increased demand now will mean increased prices now. To which you replied, yeah, but if we build more of it, it will get cheaper.
Not to be rude, but please go read an introductory book on economics.
thus cost will increase until supply catches up or users learn about firewalls.
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
stealing
Hey now, way too much of this word in this discussion thread. How can they be stealing? It's just bits on a wire!
This sounds like some kind of Windows thing; the normal world wouldn't stand for it, very long.
Consumer OSes might as well come with some sort of generic P2P interface (think /usr/bin/sendmail, which is just part of whatever mail package you happen to have installed), and then whether that happens to then run transmission-remote or a giFT client or screw-p2p-maybe-it's-just-wget-or-curl-or-maybe-even-rsync-or-git, the user can decide. And if for some weird reason the user wants to have the daemon not show up on "ps" that's their business (though it sounds like this Windows-services-are-invisible thing, is probably an OS bug). Games shouldn't come with this stuff; they should just use whatever's in the virtual download-a-bunch-of-shit slot. Otherwise people are going to have a different updater app running, and probably each with a variety of bugs, for every non-updater app that they have installed. That would be silly.
And if this all sounds naive but you can't figure out just how dumb I'm being, or maybe sarcastic but you can't figure out how insincerely I mean it, then I'll tell you: I'm serious, and it's actually good idea.
The average price of 1 GB of transferred data on CDN's is 10-15 cents. I'd be surprised if they don't get 10 cents from advertising by the time people do 1 GB worth of downloads. IMHO the companies are just abusing the people's bandwidth without caring about the consequences.
And just fyi, I can buy today a dedicated server with a 1gbps unmetered connection (guaranteed and tested) for about 600$ a month. That's 0.18 CENTS per GB of transferred data.
But CDNs and server farms are closer to the backbone providers than your home and office ever will be... and that's where the network planners are expecting content to come from. A $60 Comcast connection that can only handle 250 GB a billing cycle is 24 cents a GB... and that's 1500 times the cost of "doing it right" by paying for your CDN instead of trying to get your users to supply the uploads.
I don't get what you're trying to say.
You can't compare the quality bandwidth of a CDN (fast download speed, consistency, multiple points of presence close to users) at 10 cents a GB with an unreliable, poor quality, possibly throttled bandwidth home users who may turn off their computers at any time.
P2P connections are good as addition to good regular connections and good quality bandwidth becomes cheaper and cheaper so p2p in my oppinion should only be used as last measure.
Back to the original story, this games company is installing hidden P2P servers instead of paying a CDN... basically passing a cost they should pay for onto the users, who would rather see it included in the price of the game than forced onto them because their computers don't make good servers.
If you're running Windows 7 or Vista, the first thing you should install is the Network Meter (and All CPU Meter) gadget. If you suspect any unusual activity, you can quickly glance at your CPU and network resources being used.
You can get them at http://www.addgadget.com/
Life is not for the lazy.
I've been wondering for years why the tv networks and movie studios don't adopt this model for non-DRM video distribution but actually let you know what's going on.
Data usage doesn't cost THAT much.
We have electrical costs, technician costs, infrastructure equipment costs, fiber costs, licensing and incorporation costs, administration personnel costs, future R&D costs, government offset costs, and profit. Divide that sum over your time frame and number of customers and you have your monthly rate.
You're telling me data usage is the REAL expenditure here? Passing bits through the fiber is the least expensive item in the equation.
Cats don't use apostrophes on purpose.
If it's OK to do this with a game you like a lot, with terms hidden deep in the fine print of the EULA, then it's also OK for every cheesy browser plugin and toolbar extension and Java Applet.
Sure, you're OK with one hidden P2P client on your system. How would you feel about 175 of them?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
But doesn't blizzard do this??
Over here (Australia), we have metered bandwidth. Back in the day, it used to be metered downloads, and if you went over your limit, you were charged high overage fees. Dollars per megabyte. That was common... 8 years ago?
Until recently, most ISPs used metered downloads, with shaping instead of overage fees (stupidly labelled as "unlimited" by marketing departments, despite being nothing of the sort). Generally, you go over your quota, and your connection speed is reduced to approximately dial-up speeds.
Shaping really sucks - going from ~8Mbit/s to ~64Kbit/s is ridiculous, especially considering they usually implement shaping by simply dropping packets. It doesn't just slow things down - it makes it unreliable as well. It basically leaves you with an unusable internet connection for the remainder of the billing period.
There's no provision for adding more quota either. You could upgrade to the next highest plan (if you aren't on the maximum already - the highest most ISPs offered was around 100GB/month until the last month or so). Assuming they don't adjust the extra quota depending on the remaining time in the billing period. Mine does - if I upgraded to a plan with an additional 10GB/month, but only had 1 week remaining, I'd only get 2.5GB extra. I'd then be stuck on that plan, unless I wanted to pay a $20 downgrade fee.
The two largest ISPs also have metered uploads, and have done for years. The third largest ISP is introducing them as part of their recent plan upgrades. I expect others to follow, if they haven't already.
I see Blizzard uses basic bittorrent, a really old client code licensed which doesn't have any kind of encyription/security features.
So, if you are customer of an evil ISP which does packet inspection and shameless enough to conspire your connection with RSET, what happens when you update WoW and try to browse web same time?
As a side note, for OS X admins who may have heart attack, one of Akamai "P2P" frameworks on OS X is actually named "RSPlug". It is not the RSPlugin virus. Guess what it comes with? 2nd hand car priced Adobe suite, CS3 or CS4, not sure.
Well, World's most popular video streamer has "P2P" now, in Adobe fashion, you must pay extra money for server upgrades to enable it but it exists in Flash Player 10.1.
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/stratus/
I am sure everyone in industry is testing it in their intranets now as people really went crazy over resolution, they demand at least 720P, no matter what the content is.
Wonder what will they do about it, e.g. if Youtube enables it one day? As youtube isn't exactly piratebay, if you ban it, your customers ban you as soon as they figure their video isn't working.
I heard Windows has its own P2P framework to build applications and MS could use it for Windows Update anytime they wanted but they didn't enable it yet.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/network/bb545868.aspx
They also bought a relatively little known P2P company recently. I am almost sure they could be using same bandwidth as youtube for windows updates. Of course, youtube has ads, windows update hasn't.
If something like you suggest implemented on *NIX, OS level, recently tested rtorrent myself, on a 1.25 Ghz G4 Mac mini. It is absolutely the choice without question. I mean "libtorrent". 1% of CPU on full bandwidth, speechless.
Yes, but ISPs are currently busy demanding more and supplying less for it. That's how supply and demand works once regulatory capture sets in.
I have unlimited data transfer at 5Mbit/sec for $10/month. At least that's what I get from my ISP and they explicitly allow me to run any services I want (I just can't send mail through port 25 without making a phone call first and even that takes only a few minutes and it's a one-time activation). This is in Romania.
Yes, it's sarcasm. Deal with it!
No. This is a demand increase, and the laws of supply and demand say that price will rise to the point where it becomes attractive for more people to supply bandwidth to the market.
A lot of our current bandwidth comes from cables laid by companies that went bankrupt during the .com bubble, and the current owners got them from the liquidator for much less than it cost to lay them. If we were to increase bandwidth capacity, we would have to pay full price for those cables and that would mean a massive increase in bandwidth costs.
Mobile broadband for home use is quite popular too. Particularly those with less disposable income like to be on pay-as-you-go so they can simply not top up if they are short that month. Obviously anything which slyly sucks up your bandwidth is a big problem when you buy 1GB chunks of data.
It isn't just hidden P2P though, even Windows Update patches and anti-virus updates can quickly suck up your allowance. There needs to be a system that lets apps know when they are on a pay-per-meg connection and should refrain for any unnecessary network activity.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Start injecting bad data and inject crap so they will get bad PR from it and will stop this.
Can we piggy back on this and strat uploading PORN and music and then they will get so much attention they don't want.
The real kicker is that the ISP's would rather not have people tricked into P2P sharing either, and they also have a vested interest in seeing the demise of intentional P2P sharing as well.
Bittorrent especially is bad for ISP's because it is designed to fully saturate any endpoint they could dream up. No matter how much they invest in your local connection, bittorrent will saturate it, and by design it doesnt require the senders to have made the same sort of investment that was put into the receiving connection (my 6mbit cable is no match for a thousand disparate 56K modems all throwing data at me.)
It is no surprise that ISP's throttle P2P programs. It used to be that when a thousand machines all started sending data to the same address, we called it a Denial of Service Attack. Now we expect it as a "feature."
I like the idea of Bittorrent.. but I'm not an ISP. They don't like the idea of Bittorrent for obvious reasons.
"His name was James Damore."
so, the game companies LIKE torrent-like peer-to-peer networking when it saves THEM a buck or two, but when it comes to USERS trying to save a buck.....