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Microsoft-Funded Startup Aims To Kill BitTorrent Traffic

TheGift73 writes "The Russian based 'Pirate Pay' startup is promising the entertainment industry a pirate-free future. With help from Microsoft, the developers have built a system that claims to track and shut down the distribution of copyrighted works on BitTorrent. Their first project, carried out in collaboration with Walt Disney Studios and Sony Pictures, successfully stopped tens of thousands of downloads. Hollywood, software giants and the major music labels see BitTorrent as one of the largest threats to their business. Billions in revenue are lost each year, they claim. But not for long if the Russian based startup 'Pirate Pay' has its way. The company has developed a technology which allows them to attack existing BitTorrent swarms, making it impossible for people to share files."

18 of 601 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Interesting technology by Ignacio · · Score: 5, Informative

    casual piracy really is hurting the industry.

    Lots of "people" say this, but the evidence is lacking.

  2. Re:blocking = NOT net neutrality by objective-c · · Score: 3, Informative

    Net neutrality only concerns ISP's, not service or third parties.

  3. Peer ban hammer by Rik+Sweeney · · Score: 5, Informative

    "The company doesnâ(TM)t reveal how it works, but they appear to be flooding clients with fake information, masquerading as legitimate peers."

    All it would take is for a client to verify to data in the chunk (probably by it's MD5 or SHA), and if it's busted then try and download it again from the same peer. If it fails the second time then just ban the peer.

    But I imagine they already do this, don't they?

    1. Re:Peer ban hammer by Bengie · · Score: 4, Informative

      Spoofed IPs will never get routed correctly. You can't hold a "conversation", which means you can't even create an encrypted connection.

  4. This is how Peerblock comes in handy by Cito · · Score: 5, Informative

    Downloaded the blocklists for Pirate Pay as well as the antip2p blocklists.

    I tested on a poisoned swarm that had listed 5000 seeders (which were mostly mediadefender and pirate pay poisoners)

    Peerblock dumped over 4500 of the poisoned seeds from the torrent by blocking them and my torrent speed went from 20K/s download to 2500-3000K/s download

    So for companies like this I highly recommend picking up Peerblock and getting some blocklists, especially the antip2p blocklists.

    http://www.peerblock.com/

    Never ever again have problem with companies like Mediadefender or PiratePay and their ilk.

    1. Re:This is how Peerblock comes in handy by Cito · · Score: 3, Informative

      For those wanting the actual blocklists to use with their torrenet client, Peerblock, linux blocking program such as nfblock

      or whatever program you use

      here are some blocklists some updated multiple times per day unlike what trolls may say

      Go here: http://www.iblocklist.com/lists.php

      copy and paste the "Update URL" into your blocklist program of choice, Peerblock for windows, Nfblock for linux, or add them to your firewall, since it's a simple text based list of ip's updated throughout the day and at least daily.

      They do contain the PiratePay ip's and tons of other antip2p ip's since the ip blocks owned by all the companies are public information listed by Arin.net for the most part.

      So if you don't want to use peerblock but some other ip blocking program get all your blocklists here: http://www.iblocklist.com/lists.php

      And yes it blocks Pirate Pay and all torrent poisoning companies, you will see poisoned torrents seeders drop from astronomical 2000+ seeds (mostly poisoners) down to the real numbers and your torrent speeds will increase since your client is no longer trying to download from poisoners.

    2. Re:This is how Peerblock comes in handy by emt377 · · Score: 4, Informative

      The way poison seeders work is they will happily provide you 97% of the files. The remaining 3% you never get, and your client has a great preference built up for the seeders that got you to 97%. It will occasionally give one the boot and replace it, but with thousands of poison seeders your chances of getting a good one are very poor.

      At least one popular client is smart enough to use block lists selectively. It happily downloads from the poison seeders, until they get slow to respond. Then it imposes the block list, kicks any peer on the block list, and rebuilds the peer table with non-blocked peers.

  5. Re:Protocol encryption? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    This service doesn't appear to be listening into BT chat between two parties. It is joining existing swarms and spreading misinformation to the swarm to confuse clients into halting their downloads.

  6. Legal? by Zaphod+The+42nd · · Score: 4, Informative

    “We used a number of servers to make a connection to each and every P2P client that distributed this film. Then Pirate Pay sent specific traffic to confuse these clients about the real IP-addresses of other clients and to make them disconnect from each other,” Andrei Klimenko says.

    If they're attacking computers without authorization, they're in breach of all kinds of criminal law. It doesn't matter if those computers are participating in infringing or not. Sounds all kinds of illegal, at least in the US.

    --
    GCS/MU/P d- s:- a-- C++++$ UL++ P+ L++ E+ W++ N o K- w--- O M+ V- PS+++ PE Y+ PGP t+ 5- X R++ tv+ b++ DI++ D++ G+ e++ h-
  7. I don't even watch anymore. by jimmyfrank · · Score: 4, Informative

    I use to watch lots of movies using Amazon, Netflix, buy my own, and other sources. Now I just don't watch movies. Netflix stinks and when I want to watch something on Amazon it's usually a 48hour pre-release rental. Ugh, no, I'd like to watch it now, thanks. I decided the easiest thing to do was just not watch anymore. I listen to lots of music and purchase lots of music because Google Play makes it friction-less. I also read a ton now. I doubt that's the goal of the MPAA but they make it to damn difficult.

  8. Suckers born every minute by J'raxis · · Score: 4, Informative

    The BitTorrent protocol will be reworked to neutralize this crap, but in the meantime someone gets to make an awful lot of money selling ultimately worthless software to the *AA clowns. BitTorrent is made stronger, the MafIAA has a little less money, and someone else profits handsomely at their expense.

    Win-win all around.

  9. Re:Interesting technology by Mista2 · · Score: 5, Informative

    1: use encrypted peers
    2: use a block list to avoid contacting known tainted peers.
    3: if the torrents go down, resume downloading via usenet binary forums
    4: continual attacks on the open Internet will just drive it into a new darknet.
    The signal wants to be free 8)
    And I 100% agree with the oatmeal. If they would sell it to me DRM free, I'd buy it.

  10. Re:Interesting technology by icebraining · · Score: 4, Informative

    The MPAA's five years of consecutive record profits don't help with the evidence either.

  11. Re:**AA, always taking the hard road by hairyfeet · · Score: 4, Informative

    Actually playsforsure (or PFS) worked quite well and was VERY popular, especially with the "all you can eat" style music sites where you would often get 10 to 15 downloads plus access to the entire catalog for $10 a month. simply plug in your device once a month and load up, hell most even had lists based on genre so that you could catch up on the latest tunes of your favorite style or hear artists you may not have heard in your area.

    The problem with PFS is that Steve Ballmer is a MASSIVE dipshit and makes the Pepsi guy at Apple look like Steve Jobs so he said "Herp Derp, apple has a player and controls their market so WE must have a player and control OUR market! Ask Toshiba how much they want for the gigabeat, and can they make it shit brown?" and thus the Zune was born and completely killed all the work that had gone into PFS and the large communities that had sprung up around it, thus proving it is ALWAYS possible to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

    So personally I'm all for totally retarded dumbshit moves like this, because when Win 8 becomes such a billion dollar failwhale it gets added to that list with the CueCat and Realplayer as a "WTF were they smoking?" even being gates little buddy hopefully won't save him and they'll punt his stupid ass like a 30 yard field return. Remember this is the dumbass that gave us Zune, Kin, X360 rushed out with a fatal hardware flaw, GFLW, WinCE, paying an insane amount of Yahoo Search, paying ANOTHER insane amount to Nokia only to hang them out to dry with WinPhone 7 not having an upgrade path to Win 8, hell the man's resume is one failure after another.

    if anyone needed proof that a piss poor CEO could run even the largest corp right off the cliff look no further, here is Steve Ballmer. stupid shit like TFA has been part and parcel of Ballmer's reign at MSFT and I have NO doubt that history will look at him as one of the worst CEOs, right up there with Mcbride and the retard at HP that spent all that money for WebOS.

    --
    ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
  12. Re:Interesting technology by TheRealMindChild · · Score: 3, Informative

    filestube is more or less a "parked domain" style aggregating site, providing search results from out of their ass straight to places that will infect you with malware disguised as legitimate products.

    --

    "When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
  13. Re:Protocol encryption? by jo_ham · · Score: 4, Informative

    That already happens - if a peer is found to be sending frequent chunks that fail the hash then the client automatically blocks it and knows it is unreliable. The BT protocol is already pretty good at detecting and routing around poisoned seeds/peers.

    Assuming that there's at least one good seed in the swarm, all this will do is slow down the time it takes to complete a file and more wasted chunks/more hashfails.

    The movie industry could take a page from the music industry's book. All of that poisoning of p2p networks did nothing to slow down music piracy. What really made a difference was offering a product that people wanted to buy at a reasonable price: DRM-free tracks in good quality for a sensible price. Give people what they want and they will buy it, even in the presence of "free". The music industry learnt this (albeit by being dragged kicking and screaming into the future) and are now reaping the benefits. The movie industry is not there yet - the difference between the two sides of the iTunes store, for example, is quite telling. Enormously expensive DRM-crippled videos on one side, that are not even price competitive with DVD and BluRays in stores, vs cheap, DRM-free, high quality music files on the other that are selling like hot cakes.

  14. Re:Umm, wait till the shooting stops. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    And yet, you would be wrong. At least in Texas.

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Horn_shooting_controversy

  15. Re:Interesting technology by Linzer · · Score: 4, Informative

    The arguments for a very short copyright were all out there in 1841, in a powerful speech to the British House of Commons by Thomas Babington Macaulay:
    http://www.baen.com/library/palaver4.htm

    Every single argument is still valid today.

    --
    Gravitation is a theory, not a fact.