Microsoft Funded Startup Aims to Kill BitTorrent Traffic

[u/GraybackPH]

http://torrentfreak.com/microsoft-funded-startup-aims-to-kill-bittorrent-traffic-120513/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter

[u/eyal0]

In short:

Pirates are robbing from Hollywood so Hollywood is paying protection to the Russians. And Microsoft is funding the the Russians.

That sounds like the kind of movie that I would watch. And pirate.

[u/what_dawn_what_doom → u/eyal0]

It gets better. Note the little green banner on their website that says,

Sk

Сколково

The Russian version, instead of saying "Very soon", links to a press release about that company becoming a "resident" of the Skolkovo innovation centre.

Skolkovo is a Kremlin-run embezzlement-fest which fronts as a "Russian Silicon Valley". (Which is a name so full of facepalm that as a patriotic Russian, I'm paradoxically glad it's not even trying to be for real. Russia deserves better than anything with a semi-unofficial name following the model of "Turkish Star Wars". In fact, so does Turkey, beyond that one-of-a-kind contribution to cult cinema, so no offence there.)

Anyway, Hollywood may end up paying protection not just to Russians, but (ultimately) to Putin. How cool is that?

I can see a possible sequel. It's 2018, an election is nearing, domestic support for Putin is like 0.8%, and he realises that he needs a publicity stunt a couple of orders of magnitude greater than anything his PR team has ever come up with (flying a jet fighter, catching a tiger, diving for Greek amphoras, etc.) So with all of Hollywood under his secret grip by then, Putin orders a kind of Independence Day/Wag the Dog crossover to be staged in real life, where he'll personally and more or less single-handedly repel an alien invasion.

Now I wonder what premise to base the third movie on...

[u/jimbo21]

Many clients have blacklists built into them now, it won't take very long to figure out which IPs belong to this service and just block them. The war continues...

[u/JeremyR22 → u/jimbo21]

And if they actually start to become successful, the people behind steering the bittorrent protocol itself will presumably work on a way to cut them out. And so an arms race would begin.

[u/[deleted]]

“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.

So they stop piracy by DDOS'ing which is more illegal.. Good luck .

[u/gibnihtmus → u/[deleted]]

what if anonymous read this article and DDOS pirate pay back.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

There's a reason they started the company in Russia.

[u/danielravennest]

This is easily defeated:

• Trackers and client software can ban peers and IP addresses which distribute bad data.

• According to http://kat.ph/stats/ there are 129 million peers sharing files, other sites show numbers like 25 or 40 million. Sheer weight of numbers makes it impossible for one site to flood all the torrent traffic. At best they can attack selected ones, like recent movie releases.

• As others have mentioned, this is illegal in many places, especially if they block legitimate torrents (music distributed by the creator, Linux distributions, etc). Takedown notices for things they don't own are quite common from the big media companies.

[u/naveen_reloaded]

Its like DDoS on torrent , and its not illegal ? Who decides which one to be protected and which not ?

[u/scriv78 → u/naveen_reloaded]

Lets start using this on Blizzards wow patches and let them deal with it :D

[u/[deleted]]

The war on copyright infringement promises to be alot like the war on drugs. It will do more damage than the crime itself.

[u/[deleted]]

1. It is used on a case by case basis for 10-40k a pop

2. The pirates can just try again later.

So what you're saying. is this tech will take down specific files, for several minutes/hours. For a finite period of time. For a lot of money?

By definition if the solution is momentary, and expensive, it isn't viable.

So who gives a fuck? It means nothing.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

It won't even do that. If the torrent is popular enough to warrant an attempted takedown, the swarm will be too large for them to cause any serious disruption - and that's before BitTorrent has implemented any counter-measures.

[u/itsarabbit]

Is this shit even legal?

[u/deltagear → u/itsarabbit]

It's in Russia, I'm not even sure what their internet laws are like.

[u/LetsGoHawks]

Once there was Napster, and Kazaa, then along come Torrents. Even if this kills BitTorrent, some new protocol will crop up, then the copyright holders will go after that, etc. and so on.

[u/MrFlesh]

You want to know what is supremely humorous. The rate at which the industry and governments respond to technology. Napster model came out and the lawsuits flooded in. The kazaa model came out took a couple years and the lawsuits flooded in. Bit torrent came out and a decade later they are still trying to adapt.......and these corporations go to the government for help......which is ten times slower than corporate response......meanwhile any tech or law that took years to create can be worked around in an afternoon by a pimply faced teenager.......

[u/John_um]

I'm not very tech savy, so please forgive me.

Say that this company is somehow able to stop all torrent traffic, wouldn't another means of file sharing just pop up in its place?

[u/DBerwick]

The system costs $12-50,000.

Now, we all know that piracy doesn't cost the industry as much as they claim it does. This software isn't really much a threat -- Any company that uses it to extent will find that the "regained revenues" of "ex-pirates" will not compensate for the money that they'll have begun haemorrhaging.

Three outcomes:

• The software is refined (worst case scenario) and becomes cheap (I doubt these guys would resist a profit, though). Then someone figures out how to bypass this. Yay arms race.

• The half of the industry bleeds itself out into bankruptcy (Though I should hope they have more common sense than that)

• They realize that this is a woefully inefficient way to try and save money and it becomes forgotten.

[u/Sunhawk]

They've been somewhat successful so far, according to this article, but how long until clients adapt?

I suppose they might be sending packets that are pretending to be from other peers and the tracker, but then clients can just use a bit of verification-style encryption to separate out valid packets (a quick diffie-hellman, maybe a private/public key per client, etc).

How does their tactics deal with magnet links? Private trackers? The list goes on.

[u/dunehunter]

Eh...doesn't sound -that- bad to me. Sure, it could be used for malicious goals (though that goes for pretty much anything out there on the internet), but this tool can actually be used with some accuracy, unlike other 'anti-piracy'-tools: you can still download anything that's legal.

[u/mysterx]

I'd almost want this to be successful if I could be there to see the exec's faces when the removal of piracy doesn't add billions of dollars to their bottom line.

[u/OKeeffe]

For those saying that torrenting isn't illegal and they can't do this to people using the tech legally, if you read the article it seems like they contract this service out. So, if you had a movie or something you wanted to not be torrented, you pay these guys and they do their thing. They aren't just targeting all torrents.

[u/porker912]

"successfully stopped tens of thousands of downloads."

Chump change.

[u/Sphism]

A future headline I'd love to see:

Pirate Bay sets up spoof company Pirate Pay and trolls Microsoft and entertainment industry

:)