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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."
This is certainly interesting technology and Microsoft must see lots of potential in it. Good for them, as casual piracy really is hurting the industry. It wouldn't be so bad if it went back to the BBS secret ages, but now everyone is pirating.
Actually, this is good. Bittorrent is a great protocol, but it can be improved in many ways. Something like this is likely to fix that (legal attacks won't).
there fore it is illegal in most western nations
in canada it would be illegal to use this tech
And what about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent_protocol_encryption ? It is turnrd on by default in most bt clients and I seriously doubt they can detect what content is distributed over encrypted bt connection ...
"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?
Summation 2
By at least a few governments' definitions.
I assume this software is meant for use on ISP equipment, because otherwise what they're claiming seems totally impossible.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Which will result in increased private trackers, whichever flavor of megaupload is coming down the pipe, expanded usenet, encrypted file contents, etc etc. I have yet to see any attempt by content holders cause any more than a minor hiccup in the download stream. Oh, wait, I have seen one - I haven't downloaded a song since iTunes began allowing me to get DRM free songs through their service.
I thought using force to stop criminals was only the privilege of the police and similar state owned organizations.
This isn't the first time they've tried to disrupt file sharing. First, they added whitespace to music files. And that mostly killed Kaza. There has been file sharing since Kaza. Every time there's an iteration like this, the technology evolves, and the previous methods to stop illegal sharing are rendered useless. Honestly, I think this whole business is more of a fetish, or compulsive fascination with file sharing on the part of the old guard, than a solution to any actual problem.
This signature intentionally left blank.
Since most clients block an ip after consistently receiving bad data, it wouldn't be hard to spoof other people ip (from the list they got from the swarm/tracker) and constantly sent in bad data in the name of other people. Of course, encrypted connections would not be effected but it's currently not the norm.
As always, I'd imagine this would get work around fairly quickly if it starts to become a major problem.
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.
They will bring down piracy by abusing the take a penny, leave a penny dish. Really impressive.
They can spend lots and lots of $$$, effort, and time trying to make it harder to get access to content that people want... ... or, they could just make the content available for a reasonable price in a timely manner. But I guess that takes too many brain cells.
And why is MSFT so interested in making their platforms less useful for consumers? As a stockholder, I'd like to see them quietly funding 'legitimate' sharing sites to make the Windows OS the preferred content consumption platform, rather than keeping me from getting what I want.
http://theoatmeal.com/comics/game_of_thrones
#include "standard_disclaimer.h"
I don't pirate movies, music, or software, but I'd be more than happy to try and figure out how to stop this. I haven't looked into it much, but I will. I seriously doubt it'll be hard to combat them, but it'll be fun figuring it out.
"Ubuntu" -- an African word, meaning "Slackware is too hard for me". - stolen from Dan C alt.os.linux.slackware
Because, you know, it's not like any legitimate content is shared by BitTorrent.How nice of them to block WoW updates. And it sure gets rid of those pesky linix torrents--I can certainly see why Microsoft is backing this.
The internet sees censorship as damage, and routes around it.
Wonder how long their servers will stay up..
If this were instituted as a process on passing information through a controlled node then OK, you have that power. BUT if this were to go out and disrupt traffic which it itself was not carrying then it breaks many computer cracking laws in many countries. Also as a side note, how exactly are they going to tell the difference between a/ A copyrighted work shared illegally and,
b/ One shared under fair use or,
c/ One that triggers a false positive but is not matching.
Any single mistake in the above could be grounds for a suit under obstruction of free trade or even computer miss-use laws.
“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-
... the technologically illiterate fucks in the MAFIAA are still getting scammed. Shady no name outfit from Russia, for crying out loud, claims they can stop the planet exchanging ones and zeros using some magic technology they won't reveal to anyone. This is either outright snakeoil, or a one-trick job that will be effective for as long as it takes the clients to patch the vulnerability (by then, I suspect, our comrades will have done a disappearing act with whatever cash was thrown at them to continue developing this).
If riaa/mpaa whomever attempts this on torrents for my legitimate content, I'll track them down and file charges for denial of service.
Remind me again when performing DoS attacks against 3rd party servers became legal?
The assorted ISP-based 'filtering' stuff is obnoxious; but quite possibly legal under the 'we do whatever we want, cry about it' clause under which consumer ISPs customarily operate.
However, if the (rather vague) description provided by this startup outfit is to be believed they are spoofing bittorrent peers and sending some sort of specially crafted misinformation in order to bring communication between multiple 3rd-party systems to a halt. That certainly looks like a DoS attack, if probably a smarter-than-brute-force one. Even if there were actually some standard of proof being applied to determine that the target swarms are in fact 'infringing', vigilante justice is generally not all that legal. Without any such standard, this is a case of a couple of studios hiring some skeezy Russian outfit to perform denial of service attacks against who knows who in support of their bottom line.
I understand that the law isn't really supposed to apply to people who matter; but surely a felonies-for-hire business model presents some degree of risk to those who go shopping for their services, no?
An anti-piracy startup in Russia? Cue the sound of kneecaps being broken in 5...4...3...2...
Congratulations, Pirate Pay. You repurposed the same technology Low Orbit Ion Cannon offers so that it could target BitTorrent clients. Its a bit early to assume anyone will jump on this software, though. Fighting fire with fire and then complaining when down the road your network hosting this software is inevitably being DDoS'd by the clients it aggravated would come off as a bit hypocritical.
Although, I wonder if this targets specific torrents, or just any torrent downloading it detects on a network. I'd be rather ticked if I was in the middle of downloading a Debian DVD ISO and my download speeds dropped substantially because my system was being DDoS'd for using my download protocol of choice.
a new protocol -___-
These are awful business models. Their content is all available for free on Bitorrent. They can't possible expect people to pay for content they can get for free.
So they're all a dismal failure, right? Well no. They're actually doing pretty well. There is a simple way to reduce piracy, make the content available at a good price on demand so that it's just as wasy to get it legally. Most people don't actually mind paying for content, they just don't want to drive to the store to buy a disc to watch a film.
"XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, use more." - Anonymous Coward
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.
From the description, it appears to me that they are using spoofed IP addresses and other such means to "fake" the P2P data. What this amounts to is "jamming" the internet traffic, in much the same way a DDOS attack (or radio jammer, but more targeted) works.
If that is so, using this "technology" is probably very much against U.S. and international law.
You cannot stop piracy. You remove one source, and a few pop up to replace them. All they are doing is giving people more reasons to NOT BUY.
If microsoft tries something like this , you can bet they better have good legal advice .. the Patriot Act can be called on them . :)
before they actually encourage the practicOr even endorse a law breaking firm .
Cause beleive it or not
Lawsuits soon to follow . Very soon i should say.
My guess it that eventually the "tens of thousand blocked downloads" found their pirated content anyway by clicking the next result in their torrent search list.
In attacking BitTorrent, Microsoft is attacking a protocol, which may or may not contain something illegal. When they disrupt a valid download, it is they who will be in the wrong, and it is they who can potentially be the target of legal action (assuming they get caught). They are also attacking a group (hackers) known to fight back in ways that are difficult to detect.
If Microsoft can target BitTorrent downloads, then hackers can look for flags which indicate Internet traffic originated from a Microsoft program, and target it. If that happens, it won't be long before Microsoft products become known for their inability to function reliably over the Internet (some might argue that this is already true, but I'll ignore that possibility). Yet the individuals/groups Microsoft would have to identify are much harder to find, and thus much more difficult to prosecute or sue.
I believe this is a very foolish act, perhaps and act of despiration, on Microsoft's part. It doesn't appear likely to work very well, and is likely to make them a target.; Moral: don't start wars you aren't likely to win.
I propose an addition to bittorrent clients that detects this poisoning and floods the poisoner with packets. If all clients devoted some small percent of their bandwidth, say 10% to flooding poisoners it would DDOS them. I propose we call it 'ImRubberYoureGlue".
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
Most people don't actually mind paying for content, they just don't want to drive to the store to buy a disc to watch a film.
Not to mention paying a premium to get the film on BluRay only to be FORCED to watch 5-10 minutes of idiot pre-movie trailers and FBI warnings each time I insert the damn thing.
A downloaded movie actually provides me with a superior product, at a lower price.
That said, I love the easy apple TV movie store, and I pay for movies there. I would like to see competition however, to not get locked into one greedy provider.
This technical writer is instantly thinking of his experience to bacteriological medical pubs. The higher up you are in the food chain, the slower you are to adapt. The bacteria always out evolve our ability to treat them because they've nothing else to do. They always find ways to piggyback onto something, adapt, move or use other species to continue.
No lion has ever killed a bacterium. In principle, there are millions of ways to share files, practically there aren't that many; but if all you need to do is modify your behaviours so it's 'good enough' to stop the flavour of the week corporate sponsored anti-piracy tech, then good enough means what it says on the tin.
Diablo 3 wasn't downloading, stupid bit torrent being used for non piracy.
I'm so sick and tired of all these thieves, there I said it, THIEVES stealing other people work! "Oh it's not stealing it's copying, you don;t lose what you have..." no no, seriously, f-off with that. I CREATED something, I MADE IT, I am unwilling to just fork it over. You have to pay. I don;t care what you THINK it's worth, it's mine. If you made a program that can do something that people want, it's yours, you put the price on it and if people want it they have to pay that price. The market determines if it's worth it.
You bloody file-sharers are KILLING US! the industry is being crippled for the last couple of decades, again.
We (cumulatively) are losing hundreds of billions Every. Single. Year. Media companies are going bust, artists are living on the streets and musicians are forced to play live music again to earn a living - Seriously people WTF, OK? W. T. F.?!
It's about time a serious effort to combat piracy is made. We've shut down lycos mp3 search, shutdown napster, Kazaa, The Pirate Bay and Megaupload. You (copyright violator) better watch out cause you're next on the hit list!
The fact is, if this technology fails to stop rampant piracy, the next step is to take file sharers (Being the root of all evil), drag them naked in front of their families and have them shót, the footage of which shall be shared via torrent sites.
P.S.
Just wait until we DRM your dog. You will not be able to pet it unless it's in the right petting zone, you would not be able to let your neighbor look after it unless you bought a neighbor license, in fact you don;t even own that dog, it's a rental.
This is the illegal interception of traffic...send them to jail.
The problem being the actual content owners refusing to distribute their goods in a modern way without it being a backwards and abusive method to ensure as much forced advertisement-watching as possible while at the same time allowing them to know exactly what has been watched, where and when. Ideally segmenting the market into nice chunks so that they never compete against eachother or different versions of their own product and making sure their franchising merchandise is in the right shelves at the time of availability in every little slice of pie.
Again they embrace a way of attacking the actual network without discriminating between legal and illegal use of it.
Distributing copyrighted material via bittorrent is NOT a crime, assuming the content owner is doing it or in some way approves of it being done. It's no different from putting copies of your product on a truck, assuming again that you would want to.
I think we should start sending false traffic-announcements, swap roadsigns and pave false roads going to nowhere in an attempt of obfuscating the road network all over the entire world. This is ofcource to prevent thieves, smugglers of lewd and illegal goods as well as well as drunk-drivers and other highway-killers from reaching their homes, customers and/or victims. Since all highway killers (due to road accidents) are using the roads to do it, we can eliminate all these deaths by preventing everyone from using the roads. It has just as much merrit as other attacks on infrastructure, although not as clearly claimed cash proffit. (I say claimed cash proffit as any test with free candies outside a store will tell you that giving away 1000 free bonbons is not ammount to 1000 less sold in the store. Someone should really test this and I would encourage them to do so.)
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.
Liberty in your lifetime
This is nothing new : there are plenty of companies out there, with the soul purpose of poisoning torrents so they are harded to download.
Torrent clients are already smart enough to ban peers which are offering poisoned contents.
All it will do, is slow down traffic a bit, but you will never stop it.
Slipping shoelaces ?
doesn't mean it's right to illegally download a copy of him -- does it?!
And when they shut down all these torrents, and don't see an increase in quarterly revenues, what conclusion will they draw? That pirates have moved to other protocols and methods, all of which need to also be stopped.
Simple fact is, the media cartels WILL NOT move to a business model that isn't founded with their complete control. Stop bit-torrent today, whatever comes along tomorrow, they'll be right there waiting to target it. And in the interim, they'll be backing and pushing legislation like ACTA, CISPA, and every other multi-letter acronym can be mustered up that does nothing to address the real problem of all parties fair media distribution, but in practice stifles free speech online and legitimizes the sharing of personal information between Corporations and the Government.
Anyone who thinks that some kind of middle ground can be reached in all this, hasn't been paying attention. Remember when we thought DMCA was too far? The only thing that has changed since the DMCA was invoked, has been a wider adoption of bandwidth throughput, massive increase of people online, and easier means to share information. All of these are things that both the media cartels, and Government, feel need to be controlled and limited. Under the recommendations of monies from the former, to be enacted by the latter.
The only real way to fight all this, is to write your elected representatives, support bodies (EFF) and entities that are against such stifling online, and refuse to supplement the income of the media cartels. And when you think you've done you're part, do some more. This will not end for the foreseeable future.
"Billions in revenue are lost each year, they claim."
The keywords here, "they claim", there is no way to tell that everyone who pirated would've ever bought their movies.
Maybe they stopped putting tons of unskippable crap before the movie started for legitimate users, more people would be willing to pay for them, instead of just pirating to get a movie that plays instantly.
Sure it does.
No one is selling a new copy. You can't even give some excuse about how the creator loses royalty money, because THE CREATOR IS NOT SELLING THE THING AT ALL.
Dear anime publishers,
I'd like to give you my money, but you don't publish good series or want unrealistic high amounts of money. Please tell me when you've reached the up-to-dateness and price of common american shows, such as _two and a half men_. Until then I'm happy donate my money to subbing groups as they do a really good job. Thank you guys.
Regards,
Anonymous
P.S.: :/
I don't support torrenting of commercial movies and tv shows that are available to buy for a fair price. Unfortionately animes, and documentations, are not. Yet.
Only if you think in absolutes: right and wrong, verus less wrong and more right. Absolute thinking is what the law is about, but of course absolute thinking is also a sure sign of a deranged mind. Charging people a millions of dollars, extraditing them and throwing them in jail over a torrent is also not "right", especially when actual real "losses" can't be demonstrated.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Private swarms really don't do much for resolving the issues of trust on a large scale. Causing one's enemy to fragment is what the Russian technique does.
Well, on the bright side it means a bunch of Russian programmers get to pocket some money from clueless Americans and giggle as their efforts have zero impact on the situation.
This has been going on since Napster. The exact protocol or technology isn't the problem. If they kill bittorrent, which is unlikely, how many other competing systems are there in the wings that will fill the gap? I can think of five would be successors to bit torrent that would become a big thing overnight.
The problem isn't the presence of this technology its failing to offer viable video on demand services for your content online at reasonable rates.
Most people were used to not paying anything BEFORE piracy. What did people pay for television? Nothing. You ignored the ads and the tv was free. Even if you had cable which most didn't the cost was fairly nominal for the basic package. And as to DVDs, wake up... blockbuster and the other video rental stores have died. THAT should tell you something.
Accept it. The DVD is dead. Embrace video on demand and understand that you can't charge DVD prices for it.
Hulu was a great idea but you keep starving it. Put ALL your content on it. If you want to keep the brand new stuff off it, fine. But give it everything else and make the service ad supported.
If you can't make that work as a business model then your whole industry is doomed. Make it work.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Since the courts have upheld several times that torrents themselves are not inherently evil (it is only if they carry copyrighted information) and since this startup is apparently attacking torrents in general, I think they will swiftly find themselves on the wrong end of a lawsuit that they can't win.
Remind me again when performing DoS attacks against 3rd party servers became legal?
Hmmm, the Slashdot equivalent of the burglar complaining the homeowner shot at them while they were breaking in. Why do people do something illegal and then expect the law to come to their defense when they're prevented from continuing to do so?
Then we'll see if piracy was negatively or positively affecting their bottom lines after all.
Leela: "Is all the work done by children?" Alien: "No, not the whipping."
Excuse me? A private company which I have no business with is degrading the performance of my communications between myself and another party.
Aren't denial of service attacks like that illegal?
Microsoft helped write the DMCA (and similar laws in other countries) which makes this sort of thing a crime.
It is a crime to cause a system to behave in unauthorized ways, to interfere with the normal operation of a system or to impersonate other systems, services or users.
For example it would be illegal for somebody to pretend to be a DNS server when they are not or pretend to be Microsoft.com when they are not. There are no exceptions in the laws for Microsoft, the RIAA, the MPAA or other criminal organizations.
By the way, I'm sure that broke an unemployeed people around the world will race right out and pay $30 for terrible movies, corn syrup water and carcinogen laced popcorn while babies cry. Or maybe they would if their cars hadn't already been reposessed.
I remember this being done by HBO or an agent of HBO circa 2005 when I used to download Deadwood episodes. They would flood the swarms with bad data that would, of course, get rejected by the bittorrent client but it did cause havoc and did significantly increase the time to download. Shortly thereafter ip block lists began to circulate and these tactics ceased -- at least for those of us using blocklists. Once your IP got on a blocklist you were done causing havoc. Things must be calm in the bittorrent world because the blocklist I use hasn't been updated in more than a year. Perhaps that will change soon.
In this case, I can't see any victim from this illegal act, so I don't think it's wrong.
You're a temporary arrangement of matter sliding towards oblivion in a cold, uncaring universe
Not optimistic this will work, but I'll chuckle if it does. Oh the angst!
And until they do or show some proof of a succesful action, I remain sceptical.
If you screw with others connections without a court order, its a crime in many countries.
The people funding this should also be taken down.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
BitTorrent is about the most vulnerable network with regard to sabotage that is there. Filehosters and anonymous filesharing are ready, stable and available, but are a bit more effort for the user.
All these efforts are ultimately futile. The problem is the historic business model some organizations are trying to keep alive. That has never worked in the past and will not work this time.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
It will just build a more secure and resilient network for when we really need it.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I have lived all my life too!
No need to flaunt it—I spent 10 years of my life in a coma, you insensitive clod!
Massive fail of a program. It's supposedly open source but you need of all things MS Visual C++ 2008 (!) to get it to build. See the page on compiling the darn thing: http://www.peerblock.com/development/compiling
Does anyone remember Vista? Do we remember why it sucked so badly? I do. It had quite a bit to do with Microsoft trying to appease the demands of the music and movie industries. It resulted in a ridiculously slow and bloated OS that couldn't even run on the newest hardware.
And does anyone remember what Microsoft's vision did to Nokia? I do. Nokia is still in its death throes but it's dead. Microsoft still doesn't understand that the people don't love them... that, in fact, the people mock them and hate them. And Nokia was a respected and loved brand. Even though their own attempts at the smart phone were unsuccessful, they were inches from giving up and making an Android phone which would have been only as good as the others with the old, respected, Nokia brand. Microsoft combined Nokia's struggle with the hatred of the people to create a poison which has killed Nokia.
And now Microsoft wants to play with big entertainment AGAIN?! Really?!
Well, if we crave entertainment, I dare say we will have it... at Microsoft's expense. Even giants like Microsoft can die of a thousand cuts and failures.
you're not suppose to buy what YOU want, you're suppose to buy what THEY want to sell you. Economies of scale you see. It's much, much more profitable to sell 10 million copies of 1 Children's book than 1 million copies of 10 Children's books. Niche markets and choosey consumers are bad news for profits.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
In Soviet Russia, Microsoft pays pirates.
I have Amazon Prime, Netflix, iTunes with 10,000+ legally bought songs, and Spotify Premium; and I buy content all of these services. So I have no problems downloading something I can't find what I am looking for on them with bittorrent using the IPredator - VPN to protect my identity. It's only the poor kids who get caught bittorrenting.
When will these people get it the audiences there tring to prevent from downloading the movie will never buy it but they will stream it.
Simple math Stream + simple add = MONEY
I GET IT WILL THEY????
Every single game I play I could get easily on the Pirate bay, The reason I don't? Steam makes it way easier.
How about a simple change to eliminate distribution monopoly. Copyright holders, in order to sell their work, have to make their work available to all distributors at a fixed price. So if you write a book, yeah you could fix the price at some astronomical value and publish it yourself, but if you get someone else to publish it and they pay you $X per sale, then anyone else can publish it as well as long as they also pay you $X per sale. Then we could get away from the ridiculous balkanization that we have now. Kindle and Nook (and Sony!) readers would have every book, Netflix and Hulu would be worth watching and so on. In fact, you'd have a million such sites, all with better content then now, and all competing for eyeballs.
Play Command HQ online
I thought that they were going to try and offer an affordable alternative to pirating. Silly me
This is no different than dos'ing someones server/service/website with out the aid of authorities and a court order.
If MS came into my store which sells counterfeit MS games/systems and started trashing my property without a court order/warrant which is executed by authorities they'd be committing trespassing, vandalism, break and enter, etc....
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Considering how bittorrent traffic defecates on networking gear.
But then the movie industry is rather thuggish too.
The movie business has—yet again—run up record numbers at the box office. In 2010, theaters around the world reported a combined total revenue of $31.8 billion, up 8 percent from 2009. While the industry certainly has its share of piracy problems, they aren't affecting box office receipts.
http://www.the-numbers.com/market/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/02/piracy-once-again-fails-to-get-in-way-of-record-box-office/
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Blueray disc - a few years old can be bought at Frys, Target, Walmart for $5
So why bother download - just wait - and your fav show will be available for $5 - DTS 5.1 and 7.1 sound quality
Why bother download
...but of course absolute thinking is also a sure sign of a deranged mind.
Cognitive Dissonance. That is all.
For around a decade a new work was lost to a large part of the world after Disney got the rights. They bought it after the more Disney friendly "My Neighbour Totoro" but were not quite sure what to do with a movie containing things like former hookers with guns, so they very severely restricted the release (two sessions in Australia in a decade, then a few more after ten years). Since they had the rights they also blocked importation of the original.
Of course Disney live off old stories that are out of copyright and fence off the commons to try to prevent others from using them.
As has been the case the argument here is always built on a totally unsupportable foundation--that the industry is losing money from this.
The reality is that, as most of our parents taught us early on, it's not your money until it's in your pocket. When these industries can show me people actually stealing MONEY out of the coffers of these companies then they'll get my attention. Until then the impact of this is UNKNOWN.
Understand that I am not advocating piracy. I'm not one myself. I own over 3,000 physical CD's and just sold over 800 DVD's (I moved to Netflix/Amazon). I believe in paying for what I want but I still don't buy these arguments. In almost all the cases I see the people responsible weren't ever in the market for these "lost" items in the first place. Many are students without any disposable income. Remove bittorrent and the students simply stop watching. It's nothing but a lost viewer which is more damaging then the so-called lost revenue.
One friend has a hacked Kindle and she downloaded 40 books onto it that she got off IRC. I asked how many she's read. So far, 7 months after doing it, she's read all of four books on the Kindle and all four were books she bought that weren't available on Amazon. The others she thinks she MIGHT get to some day. That's the kind of story I hear about all the time. She absolutely wouldn't have bought those books and if she didn't have them she wouldn't miss them. That's not money stolen from the publishers. The publishers simply failed to reach her any other way.
Again, there's a MAJOR difference between having enough interest in something to care about to buy it and having enough interest in something to just experience it for free. It's like the difference between seeing a great movie at a theater or watching a Youtube video. The latter is free but if you had to pay, you wouldn't. Youtube would just vanish and they know it. No difference.
This is probably not going to see the light of a score (1) but hope somebody sees it and makes it visible.
I propose that the nodeID be generated from the public key , with a time-intensive hash function.
If encryption is required by default , a node won't be able to communicate unless it has the associated private key.
In essence it takes away the ability of a node to pick a nodeID close enough to an infohash and thereby reduces poisoning attempts.
I've made this a suggestion on the bittorent forums , would love it if it got implemented.
A challenger appears.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Most of the things I download I would not watch if I had to pay for them. So they're not losing any money from me :).
I really like how when a Microsoft-funded group does something with malicious it's legal but when a private individual or group of individual does something to show security weaknesses or support a political cause it lands them in prison.
For some anime I downloaded I had some IP from the US and from Russia getting a load of bad chunk, and it simply auto banned them. But I think it was more than 2 attempt, might have been 3 or 5. Although if they handle it properly, they could make the swarm slower. Certainly not stop it. I guess a way to bypass such attack, might be to communicate the ban list between peer, if somebody's ip is on the ban list, and they give you a single bad chunk, you simply auto ban them without waiting for a second abd chunk. Meh. That is considering that you want to do something against it , as chunk are so small it does not even look worth it.
You can try and poison a torrent, but you'll get blacklisted by other seed members once the checksums don't add up. With the current amount of IPv4 addresses in the state it is, you can't get unlimited addresses anymore, so it's only a matter of time before your netblocks will be globally blocked by bittorrent clients. Sure, it's an arms race, but one that will keep them very busy and with very limited results.
Mind you, that's with current technology already.Once BitTorrent clients will get exposed to poisoning more, I'm fairly certain mechanisms to mitigate that will become far more effective.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
The USA has a history of not stopping at it's own border to arrest "criminals" that were doing something that was illegal in the USA. However, in this case I think the US government will find it way too convenient that their campaign sponsors get "voluntary" help from "unidentified" individuals in Russia. Mind you, it'd be a totally different thing if some company was found to be funding illegal activities that were taking place outside of the USA, right?
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
the aim is to get mpaa to pay.. to.. chaching.. pirates. those who used to live counterfeit dvd sales.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Yeh very funny, but I've stopped making apps, after the last one was pirated and my sales dropped from $70/day to $2/day. It wasn't much but it paid my costs. I've tried advertising sponsored free apps and they don't work. Upgrades are negligible.
So hilarious and all that, but I'm not making apps anymore.
In sovjet Russia, files share YOU!
Such companies are pushing the evolution of BitTorrent and if they continue doing that, it won't take long before BitTorrent network turns into Skynet.
Doesn't anyone else see the double meaning in the name Pirate Pay? Given the long and glorious history of Russian/Ukrainian internet criminality, don't you think the RAHRCTEPOB would love to have a "trusted security" partner doing their packet sniffing for them?
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
Their first project, carried out in collaboration with Walt Disney Studios and Sony Pictures, successfully postponed tens of thousands of downloads.
fixed
If riaa/mpaa whomever attempts this on torrents for my legitimate content, I'll track them down
But how do you know that it's your legitimate content, as opposed to something from a major publisher that you accidentally copied into your own work? (For U.S. precedent regarding accidental infringement, see Bright Tunes v. Harrisongs.)
Just Imagine the telco companies (European monoplies, ATT, etc) would have funded internet companies that made impossible to use early Internet apps, by generating traffic, corrupting DNS servers, overloading servers, or any other dubious mean.
Bad, bad move. Bad to support things like this.
At one point I took a job with a company that did exactly that. We could intercept, analyze and interfere with nearly a any type of P2P and could even manipulate certain types of unencrypted streams.
The problem is that the movie and recording industries want their shit for free. They will not pay you to interfere with piracy. They will not pay you to swap out the pirated movie someone wanted to download with a trailer of your latest blockbusters. They don't want you to monitor P2P traffic and provide real time statistics on trends in what people are interested in. They don't even want you to insert ads into mp3s and take a cut of the advertising revenue. They want everything for nothing, and will not pay their bills.
doesn't mean it's right to illegally download a copy of him -- does it?!
LOL the other three replies to your comment ------ WHOOSH!
Sorry, but it probably won't fix anything. They're light on the details but it really looks like it's just a DoS attack which has to be launched against specific swarms. If the attacker doesn't know about a particular swarm, the attack probably doesn't do anything.
It's open season on the MPAA and RIAA. Every time they prove themselves to be gullible, more and more people come out of the woodwork to sell them snake oil. I think over the next coming years we're going to hear of lots more unethical scumbags taking innocent entertainment companies to the cleaners, all telling them "You can keep on saying No to customers, refuse their money, and use our product to somehow make a profit anyway. Just sign here and hand over your check."
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
...BitTorrent swarms YOU!
Actually the publisher loses money from the sale of "new" things because people are buying/copying the old. That's why libraries are evil.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
What "new" product would he have purchased for his son had he not downloaded this for him?
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
I seriously doubt the industry loses anywhere near what they claim to Bittorrent. I say that because there are a great many of us who quite using their products entirely when they resorted to heavy handed tactics. Much as I might like to have a song or movie if I can't copy it for back up after I've purchased it, I've decided I really don't need it. I have not purchased (or downloaded) a movie or song in years. I used to purchase a lot of CDs and have many hundreds of them which probably added up to over a $1000 a year. Since they came out with DRM and profaned the fair use/copyright act I've not purchased or downloaded a single song or movie.
He can still buy the "new" product as he still has the money.
You're a temporary arrangement of matter sliding towards oblivion in a cold, uncaring universe
He "could" but, having satisfied the need why would he "want" to?
If won a mint condition 1999 Ducati Monster in a poker game, how likely would you follow through with your original plans to buy a 2012 Yamaha Zuma?
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
Give me a game that fucking works and not some goddamn turd. I played about 20% throguh GTA IV on the PC this weekend. I realize the 14 GB of content should be paid for, but the game is buggy as fuck and not worth the money. Even after (what is it?) 7 patches???
Agree on the music, but software quality is going to have to improve. It's especially bad for games. Gamemaker is a good program. Ultrafractal is a good program. Paid for those. Fuck all else.
What microsoft pays people to do for millions. We do for free and fun.... :) thousands of us. Lol
"If it harms none do what you will" Yes it was right for him to download it....
Anyone want to take bets on how long this will last? I'm guessing some teenager will find a way to thwart these guys within a month. Fix your business model or people will keep stealing. If you just keep making locks, more people become locksmiths.
So they essentially DDoS?
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
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?
Yes, but I wonder what happens when a torrent with, say, 100 legitimate seeders suddenly becomes a torrent with 100 legitimate seeders and 100,000 fake/poisoned seeders.
Legit clients waste time and bandwidth rooting out the fake seeders...what ratio of fake/legit seeders is required to being the whole thing to it's knees (e.g. you waste 682GB of downstream bandwidth trying to download a 700MB movie and it takes 2 weeks)?
With the first link, the chain is forged.
There is already confirmations about Microsofts kill switches and remote uninstall technologies in Windows 8 - what would have been stopping them from pushing an update to what we already use?
let 'em go ahead and make bittorrent unusable (in spite of the fact that it's got plenty of legitimate uses). It'll only serve to make anonymous networks like Freenet all the more popular
the protocol is often used to download fully legal software that competes directly with Microsoft's products.
To which software are you referring? If Linux distributions, then I seem to remember well-publicized patent FUD against certain Linux distributions, making them not clearly "fully legal". Otherwise, Microsoft wouldn't have had grounds to sue TomTom.
THIEVES stealing other people work!
Did Walt Disney Pictures "steal" the work of the Grimms, H. C. Andersen, Carlo Collodi, Rudyard Kipling, etc.? How much should Disney have paid the estate of William Shakespeare for its animal fable adaptation of Shakespeare's play Hamlet, Prince of Denmark?
I CREATED something, I MADE IT
How do you know it's yours, and that you didn't accidentally copy your work from someone else's work? (e.g. Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music)
If you made a program that can do something that people want, it's yours
Is it still mine if it interoperates with the products of other authors? (e.g. Oracle v. Google and Blizzard v. bnetd)
you put the price on it and if people want it they have to pay that price.
How much should people expect to pay for a lawfully made copy of the film Song of the South?
Also, in a country where a new game costs about the fourth of minimum wage
Is that weekly, monthly, or annual? And why do games developed by residents of Slavic countries for residents of Slavic countries have to cost the same as games developed by residents of Japan, anglo- or francophone North America, and western Europe?
There's a system almost like that in the United States. If the infringement occurs after the copyright is registered, or if the copyright is registered within three months after a work's first publication, statutory damages become available to the plaintiff. Otherwise, only actual damages are available.
Do you realize how many copywritten works there are in a given year
Yes, there are a lot of advertisements containing text, and yes, they're born copyrighted.
PROTIP: The easiest way to tell that someone has never read the copyright statute is that one misspells "copyrighted" as "copywritten".
So, musicians who distribute their music only over the net
Could sell copies of their albums on CD-R through the mail. Plenty of musicians on the old MP3.com did this.
or game makers who sell only through steam or similar services
Could likewise sell discs directly to customers through the mail, as long as the games are for Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, Android, or another platform that doesn't charge an annual fee to jailbreak one's own device. No optical drive? No problem: blank SD cards have broken the $5 barrier.
If copyright were repealed, and someone were to take a GPL program and distribute a modified version without complete corresponding source code, you'd be completely within your rights to disassemble the modified version, heavily comment it, and distribute it yourself. In fact, some people are already doing that for classic video games, copyright be damned.
A lot of people aren't willing to pay for a $144 library on which iTunes depends: "The iTunes store does not work".
Are you just pointing out that under a Common Law derived legal regime nothing can ever be "fully legal", since the law itself is indeterminate?
I'm pointing out that Microsoft holds patents on certain technologies used in Linux, especially those used to interoperate with Microsoft products. For example, all file systems supported by Windows for USB flash drives and other non-optical removable media are patented. The way FAT stores long filenames is patented, and as far as I can tell, so are NTFS and ExFAT.
... and hackers probably calling themselves 'Pirate PayBack' will come up with a twist to BT or a new protocol all together that cant be attacked. Round and round we go.
You're still combining the worst possible elements of the current system with the worst elements of your own.
Your proposed system has no advantages over the current copyright system while in many ways being vastly worse.
Now any musicians have to handle manufacturing disks and distributing them. way to step back half a century and game makers have to do the same.
It's lovely that you think only the platforms you like should have copyright protection but you've given no reasons. you just keep making your proposal worse and worse.
It goes back to the definition of "copy" in U.S. copyright law, as a material object in which a work of authorship is fixed. Copyright grants specific protections to "the owner of a lawfully made copy" that do not apply to someone watching a "performance" (that is, a stream) of a work. Say a copyright owner makes a work available for performance on demand but does not offer to distribute copies of the work to the public. This means the copyright owner can arbitrarily withdraw the ability of users to make necessary backups (17 USC 117), to resell a particular copy (17 USC 109), or even to make use of a purchase after the copyright owner decides to "unpublish" the work. Having a copyright and working around the statutory limitations of copyright is like having one's cake and eating it too.
Isn't attacking a computer system illegal? I know they're based in Russia but since corporations here in the US are considered "individuals" as the law goes, and since they are funding this illegal activity, wouldn't they then be considered accomplices and therefore be eligible for prosecution under US laws? Since the board of directors and officers of the company represent the company, shouldn't it be all of them that end up in prison or breaking federal computer crime laws?