21 ms·

Microsoft Funded Startup Aims to Kill BitTorrent Traffic

88 points by Uncle_Sam 14y ago

FuzzyDunlop 14y ago
"44,845 transfers" were 'successfully stopped', according to this article, at a cost of anywhere between $12-50k. Assuming $50k, that would put it at a cost of approx $1.10 per 'stopped' transfer. With the caveat that they've no idea if the 'stopped' transfers just resumed later on. That seems like wasted money. Now, it'd be interesting to see what they could do to get nearly fifty thousand extra sales at a similar or proportionate expense.
- dbcoops 14y ago
  This is what I don't understand about the anti-piracy interest group. Piracy is simply competition. These prevention tactics tell me, the consumer, that this company believes it cannot compete on any level with the ease and availability of pirating content. If they stop all pirating everywhere, will it force me to buy content through their (less than amazing services)? Maybe a little. Is it possible to stop all pirating everywhere? I doubt it. In other words, where is the "piracy killer" service that is so awesome, I give someone my money and stop pirating? Hulu? Load of crap. Netflix? It's okay, I guess. Steam? Ok, so there's one.
  - fromhet 14y ago
    Well, noone who wants to be paid for their work can compete against piracy.
    - ewillbefull 14y ago
      That's just not true. People who want to be paid for their work need to let go of the idea of selling copies and embrace the idea of servicing their media to the public. Every amount of friction between the consumer and the content is at play -- quality, morality, reliability, legality, and so on. Region locking your content, pumping it with unskippable ads and legal threats, releasing it arbitrarily in certain countries... are all practices which serve to alienate the consumer. These are pervasive in the content industry, and you couldn't honestly say they're even trying to compete with piracy with such stubbornness.
      - soup10 14y ago
        The idea that you should "compete" with pirates is absurd logic that is a product cognitive dissonance. I'm all for improving the quality of service that companies provide, but at the end of the day content is content, and must be paid for by consumers or advertisers or you would see a _drastic_ drop in the quantity and quality of content produced. If you defend a site like the pirate bay's right to enable the distribution of pirate content, then you are also defending their right to upgrade their service and make it just as good as Steam or Netflix or whatever... all things being equal, you can't compete with free.(the content industry understands this which is why they fight for measures that make piracy less convenient and constantly reminds you that piracy is "wrong".).
        guard-of-terra 14y ago
        What if we acknowledge this point but aren't afraid of consequences? Music quality fell sharp before the internet piracy; TV series quality stand high; movies are mixed bag but you have more luck with non-mainstream. I don't see how it would all suddently collapse and I'm willing to risk.
        ewillbefull 14y ago
        Competing with piracy is not exclusively about providing a cheaper service, but about providing a more valuable service. I don't understand why you think competing with piracy would be some tacit approval of commercial exploitation of piracy -- which is where the law should draw the line (for as long as practical). This hole in your logic underlies your entire retort. For instance: > but at the end of the day content is content, and must be paid for by consumers or advertisers or you would see a _drastic_ drop in the quantity and quality of content produced. Why do you assume providing a better service to your customers means handing out content for free? If pirates can provide a better service for free, why are you providing a worse service at all? If anything, you should be giving people their money's worth or better. This is my point: they are doing _nothing_ to drive customers away from piracy. I'm not even talking about lowering costs. In light of this, I found it hilarious for you to say: > (the content industry understands this which is why they fight for measures that make piracy less convenient and constantly reminds you that piracy is "wrong".). It is interesting that in your list of content industry "responses" you forgot to mention the things they do to make legitimately purchasing/enjoying their content less convenient. On the contrary, they have done little to make piracy less convenient. We're talking about stuff that has no effect on their profit margins or business model, that they do anyway. In that sense and context is where we state "compete", so no, it is not born out of cognitive dissonance. Replace that with desperation and you might be closer. In the end, competing with piracy as a service is only part of the battle. Alternative models for subsidizing content production will have to be embraced eventually, but I'll leave those discussions for a rainy day.
  - citricsquid 14y ago
    > These prevention tactics tell me, the consumer, that this company believes it cannot compete on any level with the ease and availability of pirating content of course they can't! Piracy has one major value to people that engage in piracy: it allows people to acquire content without abiding by the acquisition policy set out by the content distributors. It's "competition" in the same way that it's "competition" when 1 athlete in an Olympic running event is taking steroids and has jet boots on. You can't treat piracy as fair competition. Most people don't pirate out of a "It's too difficult for me to buy this song via itunes", they pirate because they don't want to spend money. Content distributors can't compete with that, even with services like Netflix and Hulu people still pirate because they don't like adverts. If they are unwilling to pay and unwilling to view adverts what other options are there besides just giving away content for free? People that pirate (in general) want content without compromising on the way they want it, while piracy exists these people will continue to pirate.
    - guard-of-terra 14y ago
      "Most people don't pirate out of a "It's too difficult for me to buy this song via itunes", they pirate because they don't want to spend money" Therefore, ad-supported streaming services exist. The only reason why ad-supported streaming services aren't the king is because they can't stream every content. That lands us back on availability problem. Copyright holders can not figure it out.
      - citricsquid 14y ago
        That's a nice cutesy view, but it's wrong. Lots of people refuse to use advert supported streaming services because they don't want to stream and they hate adverts. Content owners can't win. Just check reddit sometime, it's depressing how demanding people are.
        AnthonyMouse 14y ago
        Nobody is saying that there is one true model and all the others are wrong. That's kind of the point actually -- people turn to piracy for all different reasons. Some because they don't want to pay (so offer ad supported streaming), some because they don't like unskippable ads (so offer pay-to-download services with no ads), some because of availability (so make sure everything is available on both the ad supported streaming and pay-to-download services), etc. Complaining that customers are demanding is just sour grapes. Customers are always demanding; welcome to capitalism. You either provide what the market wants, or somebody else does.
charliesome 14y ago
> It was able to stop BitTorrent traffic if needed, which made the developers realize that they might have built the holy anti-piracy grail. That's flawed reasoning. Suppose their technology killed BitTorrent over night. Will it stop piracy? Of course not - we have a myriad of other technologies adept at transferring data from one host to another. Calling some protocol specific denial of service exploit the 'anti-piracy holy grail' seems out of touch to me.
- batista 14y ago
  >That's flawed reasoning. You don't say. >Suppose their technology killed BitTorrent over night. Will it stop piracy? Of course not - we have a myriad of other technologies adept at transferring data from one host to another. Yes, but it would be a very significant setback. Already the raids on DDL sites have had a large impact on the availability and easy access to pirated material. For example, they made 5 years worth of DDL links unreachable in one night. In the end, you don't have to kill piracy --you just have to make it inconvenient enough, and most of the people will give up.
  - jQueryIsAwesome 14y ago
    Google learns, so the amount of links from Megaupload or pages with Megaupload links in the search results is almost zero by now. And this guys are probably going to become the center of DDOS attacks and legal conflicts, making their business model even less profitable.
  - moe 14y ago
    you just have to make it inconvenient enough, and most of the people will give up. Let's verify that claim, shall we? 1. Fact: For the past 10 years the content industry has been doing everything in their power to make file-sharing as inconvenient as possible. 2. Result: http://disruptive-music.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/usmusicindustryevolution.jpg http://disruptive-music.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/201... I'll tell you where your (and their) mistake is. Instead of trying to make "illegal" sharing inconvenient, the focus should be on making "legal" consumption convenient. When the content is available immediately, everywhere, at good quality, for a reasonable price, then most people have no reason to consider other channels. The content industry has only themselves to blame for not providing that. Case in point: I'd like to watch avengers, on my flatscreen at home, asap. Chances are PirateBay will make that happen before iTunes, even though I would happily pay $10 for it, if they'd let me.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
guard-of-terra 14y ago
It is old news, and the technology revolves around extracting extra money from IP holders while disrupting a small number of transfers on selected files. Consider skipping.
- kika 14y ago
  Given how Russian internet is structured it may actually work. I mean the small number might become not so small. You can relatively easy (given the appropriate administrative support) break the download for 1M people at once (a whole city) from a single server. The upside of this is that you can easily get 20-30Mbit for $20-30/mo from 3-4 competing ISPs in a relatively large city.
  - guard-of-terra 14y ago
    It would not because users will immediately switch to ipv6, vpns, encryption, private trackers, other protocols. Sites that actually provide competitive service (like ivi.ru) pose much larger threat to piracy.
    - kika 14y ago
      All these sites (like IVI and the likes) share the same, very limited, library of content. It is like 10% of Netflix/Hulu, or even less. But potentially sure, I agree.
      - guard-of-terra 14y ago
        Of course they would never gather a decent library of rarer, older or foreign content. Just torrent that, nobody cares.
  - guard-of-terra 14y ago
    Also, given administrative support you can simply cap the outgoing traffic to one tenth of incoming. Nobody can seed efficiently any more, so the whole experience becomes suboptimal.
kika 14y ago
I've built a company a few years ago which competed with these guys in their previous market - bittorrent optimization for ISPs. We've built the product (sort of a bittorrent cache) and achieved some positive results on a few production installs but never hit the real mark. The optimization we provided for ISPs wasn't worth for them the cost of the service we were considering minimally acceptable. The 'long tail' was really longer than we anticipated and this long tail spoiled our cache. But we've developed the 'carrier grade bittorrent client', i.e. hundreds of thousand connections, tens of thousand downloads, millions of files. Erlang + C. Hack value was something to be proud of. The next attempt would be to convert it to this - spoil the downloads and charge the copyright owners. We discussed this many times within the company but finally decided to wind it down. I believe breaking the protocols is beyond the line and we're too old school to cross this line. I wouldn't have been hesitated to, like, chasing individual violators, given the proof of violation, or identifying child porn distributors or something along these lines, but not breaking the internets. I talked to this guy once, btw. They were quite behind us in terms of technology and I don't think they progressed much. Well, I'd like to think :-)
- haliax 14y ago
  Can you share some technical details/details of your conversations with this guy please?
  - kika 14y ago
    I don't think it's ethical. I clearly identified myself as a competitor and we were ahead of them technology wise so he had an incentive to talk to me and I shared a lot of our implementation details (not to give enough leverage, but enough to support an interesting conversation between hackers). I return he told me quite a lot about their implementation, but I don't think it's OK to share. I don't expect him to share what I told him as well. The dialogue was clearly off the record.
  - kika 14y ago
    Or you're interested in our implementation?
lunarscape 14y ago
If I'm reading this correctly the software attacks ordinary peoples PCs to prevent them seeding a specific file (by spoofing other peoples IPs?). Anybody want to guess how many laws they could potentially be breaking in Europe and the US?
- kika 14y ago
  In Russia they're breaking the laws too.
  - lunarscape 14y ago
    I wasn't suggesting Russia didn't have laws against cyber crime. I'm just not familiar with them. It'll be interesting what the legal ramifications will be be if this service gets more traction and customers.
- rapala 14y ago
  Sounds like network traffic intefering to me. Which is illegal at least in Finland.
skymt 14y ago
I'm less interested in the politics and more in the technical details. They seem to be keeping their secret sauce a secret. The best I could find in a brief search is this quote from the article: 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 I.P. addresses of other clients and to make them disconnect from each other. My guess: the software connects to seeds and floods them with peer-exchange messages containing fake peers. (Essentially it's a DoS attack.) If that's the trick, then disabling PEX would leave a seeder immune.
- archivator 14y ago
  Alternatively, the client could keep PEX and just wait for confirmation from other peers that the IPs are valid. Flooding then becomes linearly more difficult with the size of the swarm. If BitTorrent goes for something like the majority vote in Bitcoin, the effort would be exponential in the size of the swarm, making it relatively infeasible. Further, the swarm could start maintaining a blacklist and throw out the flooders. Bitcoin is a good start in this direction, hopefully the algorithms will trickle down to more common technologies like BitTorrent.
- fl3tch 14y ago
  Couldn't they stamp RST packets with the IP addresses of other file sharers? That would reset the connections with those nodes.
  - wmf 14y ago
    To reset a connection you have to know the entire 5-tuple, which they don't.
    - rwmj 14y ago
      Don't you also need to know the sequence number? That's why those "TCP killers" work as a MITM attack. The 5-tuple is probably guessable, since the peers talk to each other and the tracker.
  - 14y ago
DanBC 14y ago
A Google search for [“Vysotsky. Thanks to God, I’m alive”] returns 13 hits, all about this start-up. Searching for [“Vysotsky" Thanks to God, I’m alive] returns some more hits about the film, including some Youtube copy-vios. Searching for ["Vysotsky" amazon] returns a bunch of out-of-stock items. Sony - I want to pay for this. I want to give you my money. I want to buy this film. I want to buy many films, especially if they're not mindless blockbusters. You need to learn how to make search engines work and you need to make the official site have some kind of link to sales.
- awa 14y ago
  The first hit in bing for “Vysotsky. Thanks to God, I’m alive" is a link to http://www.visotsky-film.ru/ http://www.visotsky-film.ru/ which seems relevant. Its probably google personalizing your search result to exclude a russian film
- socksy 14y ago
  Worth wondering whether films that they protect using anti-pirating measures might take a hit on sales. Difficult to test, because if a film's likely to be successful, people are likely to find ways to pirate it successfully.
- eps 14y ago
  http://www.google.ca/search?q=высоцкий.+спасибо+что+живой http://www.google.ca/search?q=высоцкий.+спасибо+что+живой > I want to buy this film. No, you don't. It is of a very little interest to anyone outside of a Russian demographic circle.
  - DanBC 14y ago
    Yes, I do. You can say that no-one is interested in Japanese horror or Hong Kong crime or etc etc.
    - eps 14y ago
      "You" in a collective sense. There is no enough you/s for Sony to justify adapting the movie to the non-Russian markets.
pimeys 14y ago
Even if I couldn't download movies, I wouldn't buy blu-rays and I would continue watching movies in theaters only in some festivals like Berlinale or HIFF. Same losses for the industry. Money well spent.
darksaga 14y ago
Hardly the holy grail they're talking about. The fatal flaw is as soon as you close you one door, the pirates are already looking for 10 other ways to get around your technology. Case in point? Look at how many times they've tried to shut down Pirate Bay. They just keep re-tooling and continue on.
voidr 14y ago
I wonder how would this "wonderful" technology would perform in private torrent networks. Also I think it would be relatively easy to build protection against this kind of an attack also I wonder if doing this is legal in the first place... These studios should spend their money on competing with torrent networks rather than always trying to destroy them. Just create a descent media streaming service that makes accessing content easier and faster and most people will probably ditch torrent. To me my time is worth a lot, when I hunt down a movie on the internet it takes my time away and by extension my money(time = money) if the media companies would help me out with this, and offer a service where I could get anything in no time, I would gladly pay them for the time they saved me.
Porter_423 14y ago
That's an awfully hypocritical attitude as a bittorrent pirate. Technically one could claim that pirates abuse the bittorrent protocol to justify their means. At any rate, it's an example of technological innovation and should be respected for the efforts...unless you want to quash any technology which stands in the way of your established practices?
micheljansen 14y ago
Interestingly, if this would be widely deployed, it would probably result in adaptations to the BitTorrent protocol being developed to counteract this technique. Just look at the history of Distributed Hash Tables and Magnet links. Ironically, rather than stopping people from pirating content, they are actually spending money to make BitTorrent more resilient. While this will surely come in handy when SkyNet finally takes over, I'm sure the money would indeed be better spent on more competitive products and services.
mutantmonkey 14y ago
Based on the description of the product, it sounds like it performs man in the middle attacks on BitTorrent trackers or an attack on the Peer Exchange feature of some clients. I am willing to bet that either TLS-enabled trackers or disabling PEX would be all that are needed to get around this.
gouranga 14y ago
It's another whack-a-mole job. People will just tunnel a new internet through the old one based on peer trust and this is instantly no longer an issue.
- chucknthem 14y ago
  $100,000 of seed funding. I wonder what share of the company they gave up for this. Heavily funded anti-piracy agencies are almost guaranteed to make this a good investment.
ktizo 14y ago
This behaviour will push file sharing further into anonymised and encrypted networks, which will push down the statistics of files shared online as they are based on what can be measured. So the upshot will be that visible torrents will fall, allowing the company to claim success, even while they are making it harder for the people who are paying them to have any clue about the actual situation on the ground. If there wasn't a slew of technologies waiting in the wings as drop in replacements, this kind of approach would have some success, but there is, so it probably wont.
NHQ 14y ago
If I were trying to break a torrent, I'd put thousands of peers in the swarm and share bad data. I'm all for the culture spammers getting better at busting p2p, so p2p gets better and subverting the culture spammers.
- CraigRood 14y ago
  Sending bad data won't prevent anything either, It will merely slow down the peers by wasting bandwidth. Torrents by nature work against bad data being received by hash checking each chunk of data. (You can't trust anyone on the internet). Most clients would simply block each "bad" peer after several bad chunks.
haberman 14y ago
There are so many players in this overall story, and so few good guys. In one corner of the ring we have the content industry which seems to care far more about chasing pirates than with making life nice for the people who will actually pay them. Customers who play by the rules are "rewarded" with region coding, DRM, and lots of arbitrary restrictions. In the other corner are people who feel entitled to consume an arbitrary amount of music/movies without paying the creators anything. When confronted with with the moral/economic questionability of this approach, they have an extensive set of indignant rationalizations prepared; some of these are true but irrelevant to helping content creators get paid ("record companies are dinosaurs"), some of these are wishful thinking ("they can make money in other ways"), all of these are fronts for the fact that they just like getting things for free. In another corner are governments and law enforcement which are gung-ho about legislating against piracy and prosecuting it, without understanding or properly considering the ramifications (see SOPA). The good guys are: people who will pay a reasonable fee or watch a small/reasonable amount of advertising to consume the content they like, content creators who release their stuff in a convenient way without requiring an absurd amount of control, tech companies that are providing media services that strike a balance between creators and consumers (DRM-free Amazon, Google Play, Apple iTunes is getting better but is still pretty locked down). May the good guys eventually win.
- kiba 14y ago
  In the other corner are people who feel entitled to consume an arbitrary amount of music/movies without paying the creators anything. I don't feel entitled to anything and I never stole anything from the creators. If they wish to stop producing new stuff, that's fine with me. I have thousand of other ways to enjoy myself, some of which is forgotten public domain content. It's nice to feel moral outrage about people who "felt entitled", but it doesn't make you money. The good guys are: people who will pay a reasonable fee or watch a small/reasonable amount of advertising to consume the content they like, I want convenience and I gladly do pay for said convenience. The problem is the lack of convenient options and lot of missing titles.
- icebraining 14y ago
  In the other corner are people who feel entitled to consume an arbitrary amount of music/movies without paying the creators anything They're probably less than you think. Many "pirates" pay, and in fact pay more than the average person. some of these are wishful thinking ("they can make money in other ways") In the UK, and despite the lower income from album sales, the total income for artists has grown: http://www.hypebot.com/.a/6a00d83451b36c69e2012875f077e8970c-pi http://www.hypebot.com/.a/6a00d83451b36c69e2012875f077e8970c... Likewise, despite whining about piracy, the MPAA has had five years of record profits from 2005 to 2010. Maybe it's not so wishful thinking?
mratzloff 14y ago
Microsoft "investing" $100,000 is like you giving $1 (insert small denomination currency of your choice) to a beggar. They're not stupid. They know there is a relatively short expiration on this technology, so they probably reason they can make it difficult enough for maybe 500 people to pirate copies of Windows and Office that they'll buy them. They may not even think that, and this is the old Microsoft strategy of structuring a contract in such a way that they now secretly own all of your technology.
pmorici 14y ago
How is this not a computer crime?
- dkulchenko 14y ago
  I was thinking the same. How is this not a blatant violation of CFAA 1030(a)(5)?: (A) knowingly causes the transmission of a program, information, code, or command, and as a result of such conduct, intentionally causes damage without authorization, to a protected computer; http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1030#a_5 http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1030#a_5
silentscope 14y ago
smarter mousetrap, smarter mouse. it's pirate pay vs. the internet. man, I would not want to be them.
WiseWeasel 14y ago
Now if only there was an easy way for me to all but kill BT on my own LAN, so my roommates stop using up all my upstream bandwidth, and so I don't start getting nastygrams from my ISP because of them once they start doing that in July. As a network admin, BT sucks!
- mdaniel 14y ago
  Back a few years ago when I was the net admin for our small company, my boss asked me how to set up his home network so that his daughter could not access games or chat or whatever kids do that parents don't approve of. My answer to him is the same advice I offer to you: don't try to use technology to solve a social problem. In his case, I know for certain that his daughter has a lot more free time to think of ways to circumvent the restriction, and he has less time to think of, and then implement, new firewalls. I don't know your situation, but I would be willing to bet a compassionate plea to only torrent during off-peak hours, or to set the upstream throttle on their client would go a lot further than trying to "kill BT". Of course, having said all of that, controlling bandwidth usage is a slightly different use case than trying to prevent certain content from entering/exiting the network. If you are having a problem with one peer using too many resources, I would think IP throttling would solve that problem (presuming the softer social strategies didn't pan out).
  - WiseWeasel 14y ago
    The main problem is they can't be bothered to figure out how newsgroups work, or pay a little money for the privilege of using a less network-intensive protocol with better performance. BitTorrent is just a drain on the network, and makes things like gaming impractical no matter how much you throttle it (though it certainly helps a lot). And people often leave it running for long periods out of civic duty. IP throttling isn't specific enough. I don't need to throttle an HTTP download that's going to be done in a few minutes. I just want BT to die on my network, at least when I want the resources free for other use. /rant
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

88 points by Uncle_Sam 14y ago

"44,845 transfers" were 'successfully stopped', according to this article, at a cost of anywhere between $12-50k. Assuming $50k, that would put it at a cost of approx $1.10 per 'stopped' transfer. With the caveat that they've no idea if the 'stopped' transfers just resumed later on. That seems like wasted money. Now, it'd be interesting to see what they could do to get nearly fifty thousand extra sales at a similar or proportionate expense.

dbcoops 14y ago
This is what I don't understand about the anti-piracy interest group. Piracy is simply competition. These prevention tactics tell me, the consumer, that this company believes it cannot compete on any level with the ease and availability of pirating content. If they stop all pirating everywhere, will it force me to buy content through their (less than amazing services)? Maybe a little. Is it possible to stop all pirating everywhere? I doubt it. In other words, where is the "piracy killer" service that is so awesome, I give someone my money and stop pirating? Hulu? Load of crap. Netflix? It's okay, I guess. Steam? Ok, so there's one.
- fromhet 14y ago
  Well, noone who wants to be paid for their work can compete against piracy.
  - ewillbefull 14y ago
    That's just not true. People who want to be paid for their work need to let go of the idea of selling copies and embrace the idea of servicing their media to the public. Every amount of friction between the consumer and the content is at play -- quality, morality, reliability, legality, and so on. Region locking your content, pumping it with unskippable ads and legal threats, releasing it arbitrarily in certain countries... are all practices which serve to alienate the consumer. These are pervasive in the content industry, and you couldn't honestly say they're even trying to compete with piracy with such stubbornness.
    - soup10 14y ago
      The idea that you should "compete" with pirates is absurd logic that is a product cognitive dissonance. I'm all for improving the quality of service that companies provide, but at the end of the day content is content, and must be paid for by consumers or advertisers or you would see a _drastic_ drop in the quantity and quality of content produced. If you defend a site like the pirate bay's right to enable the distribution of pirate content, then you are also defending their right to upgrade their service and make it just as good as Steam or Netflix or whatever... all things being equal, you can't compete with free.(the content industry understands this which is why they fight for measures that make piracy less convenient and constantly reminds you that piracy is "wrong".).
      - guard-of-terra 14y ago
        What if we acknowledge this point but aren't afraid of consequences? Music quality fell sharp before the internet piracy; TV series quality stand high; movies are mixed bag but you have more luck with non-mainstream. I don't see how it would all suddently collapse and I'm willing to risk.
      - ewillbefull 14y ago
        Competing with piracy is not exclusively about providing a cheaper service, but about providing a more valuable service. I don't understand why you think competing with piracy would be some tacit approval of commercial exploitation of piracy -- which is where the law should draw the line (for as long as practical). This hole in your logic underlies your entire retort. For instance: > but at the end of the day content is content, and must be paid for by consumers or advertisers or you would see a _drastic_ drop in the quantity and quality of content produced. Why do you assume providing a better service to your customers means handing out content for free? If pirates can provide a better service for free, why are you providing a worse service at all? If anything, you should be giving people their money's worth or better. This is my point: they are doing _nothing_ to drive customers away from piracy. I'm not even talking about lowering costs. In light of this, I found it hilarious for you to say: > (the content industry understands this which is why they fight for measures that make piracy less convenient and constantly reminds you that piracy is "wrong".). It is interesting that in your list of content industry "responses" you forgot to mention the things they do to make legitimately purchasing/enjoying their content less convenient. On the contrary, they have done little to make piracy less convenient. We're talking about stuff that has no effect on their profit margins or business model, that they do anyway. In that sense and context is where we state "compete", so no, it is not born out of cognitive dissonance. Replace that with desperation and you might be closer. In the end, competing with piracy as a service is only part of the battle. Alternative models for subsidizing content production will have to be embraced eventually, but I'll leave those discussions for a rainy day.
- citricsquid 14y ago
  > These prevention tactics tell me, the consumer, that this company believes it cannot compete on any level with the ease and availability of pirating content of course they can't! Piracy has one major value to people that engage in piracy: it allows people to acquire content without abiding by the acquisition policy set out by the content distributors. It's "competition" in the same way that it's "competition" when 1 athlete in an Olympic running event is taking steroids and has jet boots on. You can't treat piracy as fair competition. Most people don't pirate out of a "It's too difficult for me to buy this song via itunes", they pirate because they don't want to spend money. Content distributors can't compete with that, even with services like Netflix and Hulu people still pirate because they don't like adverts. If they are unwilling to pay and unwilling to view adverts what other options are there besides just giving away content for free? People that pirate (in general) want content without compromising on the way they want it, while piracy exists these people will continue to pirate.
  - guard-of-terra 14y ago
    "Most people don't pirate out of a "It's too difficult for me to buy this song via itunes", they pirate because they don't want to spend money" Therefore, ad-supported streaming services exist. The only reason why ad-supported streaming services aren't the king is because they can't stream every content. That lands us back on availability problem. Copyright holders can not figure it out.
    - citricsquid 14y ago
      That's a nice cutesy view, but it's wrong. Lots of people refuse to use advert supported streaming services because they don't want to stream and they hate adverts. Content owners can't win. Just check reddit sometime, it's depressing how demanding people are.
      - AnthonyMouse 14y ago
        Nobody is saying that there is one true model and all the others are wrong. That's kind of the point actually -- people turn to piracy for all different reasons. Some because they don't want to pay (so offer ad supported streaming), some because they don't like unskippable ads (so offer pay-to-download services with no ads), some because of availability (so make sure everything is available on both the ad supported streaming and pay-to-download services), etc. Complaining that customers are demanding is just sour grapes. Customers are always demanding; welcome to capitalism. You either provide what the market wants, or somebody else does.

charliesome 14y ago

> It was able to stop BitTorrent traffic if needed, which made the developers realize that they might have built the holy anti-piracy grail. That's flawed reasoning. Suppose their technology killed BitTorrent over night. Will it stop piracy? Of course not - we have a myriad of other technologies adept at transferring data from one host to another. Calling some protocol specific denial of service exploit the 'anti-piracy holy grail' seems out of touch to me.

batista 14y ago
>That's flawed reasoning. You don't say. >Suppose their technology killed BitTorrent over night. Will it stop piracy? Of course not - we have a myriad of other technologies adept at transferring data from one host to another. Yes, but it would be a very significant setback. Already the raids on DDL sites have had a large impact on the availability and easy access to pirated material. For example, they made 5 years worth of DDL links unreachable in one night. In the end, you don't have to kill piracy --you just have to make it inconvenient enough, and most of the people will give up.
- jQueryIsAwesome 14y ago
  Google learns, so the amount of links from Megaupload or pages with Megaupload links in the search results is almost zero by now. And this guys are probably going to become the center of DDOS attacks and legal conflicts, making their business model even less profitable.
- moe 14y ago
  you just have to make it inconvenient enough, and most of the people will give up. Let's verify that claim, shall we? 1. Fact: For the past 10 years the content industry has been doing everything in their power to make file-sharing as inconvenient as possible. 2. Result: http://disruptive-music.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/usmusicindustryevolution.jpg http://disruptive-music.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/201... I'll tell you where your (and their) mistake is. Instead of trying to make "illegal" sharing inconvenient, the focus should be on making "legal" consumption convenient. When the content is available immediately, everywhere, at good quality, for a reasonable price, then most people have no reason to consider other channels. The content industry has only themselves to blame for not providing that. Case in point: I'd like to watch avengers, on my flatscreen at home, asap. Chances are PirateBay will make that happen before iTunes, even though I would happily pay $10 for it, if they'd let me.

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guard-of-terra 14y ago

It is old news, and the technology revolves around extracting extra money from IP holders while disrupting a small number of transfers on selected files. Consider skipping.

kika 14y ago
Given how Russian internet is structured it may actually work. I mean the small number might become not so small. You can relatively easy (given the appropriate administrative support) break the download for 1M people at once (a whole city) from a single server. The upside of this is that you can easily get 20-30Mbit for $20-30/mo from 3-4 competing ISPs in a relatively large city.
- guard-of-terra 14y ago
  It would not because users will immediately switch to ipv6, vpns, encryption, private trackers, other protocols. Sites that actually provide competitive service (like ivi.ru) pose much larger threat to piracy.
  - kika 14y ago
    All these sites (like IVI and the likes) share the same, very limited, library of content. It is like 10% of Netflix/Hulu, or even less. But potentially sure, I agree.
    - guard-of-terra 14y ago
      Of course they would never gather a decent library of rarer, older or foreign content. Just torrent that, nobody cares.
- guard-of-terra 14y ago
  Also, given administrative support you can simply cap the outgoing traffic to one tenth of incoming. Nobody can seed efficiently any more, so the whole experience becomes suboptimal.

kika 14y ago

I've built a company a few years ago which competed with these guys in their previous market - bittorrent optimization for ISPs. We've built the product (sort of a bittorrent cache) and achieved some positive results on a few production installs but never hit the real mark. The optimization we provided for ISPs wasn't worth for them the cost of the service we were considering minimally acceptable. The 'long tail' was really longer than we anticipated and this long tail spoiled our cache. But we've developed the 'carrier grade bittorrent client', i.e. hundreds of thousand connections, tens of thousand downloads, millions of files. Erlang + C. Hack value was something to be proud of. The next attempt would be to convert it to this - spoil the downloads and charge the copyright owners. We discussed this many times within the company but finally decided to wind it down. I believe breaking the protocols is beyond the line and we're too old school to cross this line. I wouldn't have been hesitated to, like, chasing individual violators, given the proof of violation, or identifying child porn distributors or something along these lines, but not breaking the internets. I talked to this guy once, btw. They were quite behind us in terms of technology and I don't think they progressed much. Well, I'd like to think :-)

haliax 14y ago
Can you share some technical details/details of your conversations with this guy please?
- kika 14y ago
  I don't think it's ethical. I clearly identified myself as a competitor and we were ahead of them technology wise so he had an incentive to talk to me and I shared a lot of our implementation details (not to give enough leverage, but enough to support an interesting conversation between hackers). I return he told me quite a lot about their implementation, but I don't think it's OK to share. I don't expect him to share what I told him as well. The dialogue was clearly off the record.
- kika 14y ago
  Or you're interested in our implementation?

lunarscape 14y ago

If I'm reading this correctly the software attacks ordinary peoples PCs to prevent them seeding a specific file (by spoofing other peoples IPs?). Anybody want to guess how many laws they could potentially be breaking in Europe and the US?

kika 14y ago
In Russia they're breaking the laws too.
- lunarscape 14y ago
  I wasn't suggesting Russia didn't have laws against cyber crime. I'm just not familiar with them. It'll be interesting what the legal ramifications will be be if this service gets more traction and customers.
rapala 14y ago
Sounds like network traffic intefering to me. Which is illegal at least in Finland.

skymt 14y ago

I'm less interested in the politics and more in the technical details. They seem to be keeping their secret sauce a secret. The best I could find in a brief search is this quote from the article: 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 I.P. addresses of other clients and to make them disconnect from each other. My guess: the software connects to seeds and floods them with peer-exchange messages containing fake peers. (Essentially it's a DoS attack.) If that's the trick, then disabling PEX would leave a seeder immune.

archivator 14y ago
Alternatively, the client could keep PEX and just wait for confirmation from other peers that the IPs are valid. Flooding then becomes linearly more difficult with the size of the swarm. If BitTorrent goes for something like the majority vote in Bitcoin, the effort would be exponential in the size of the swarm, making it relatively infeasible. Further, the swarm could start maintaining a blacklist and throw out the flooders. Bitcoin is a good start in this direction, hopefully the algorithms will trickle down to more common technologies like BitTorrent.
fl3tch 14y ago
Couldn't they stamp RST packets with the IP addresses of other file sharers? That would reset the connections with those nodes.
- wmf 14y ago
  To reset a connection you have to know the entire 5-tuple, which they don't.
  - rwmj 14y ago
    Don't you also need to know the sequence number? That's why those "TCP killers" work as a MITM attack. The 5-tuple is probably guessable, since the peers talk to each other and the tracker.
- 14y ago

DanBC 14y ago

A Google search for [“Vysotsky. Thanks to God, I’m alive”] returns 13 hits, all about this start-up. Searching for [“Vysotsky" Thanks to God, I’m alive] returns some more hits about the film, including some Youtube copy-vios. Searching for ["Vysotsky" amazon] returns a bunch of out-of-stock items. Sony - I want to pay for this. I want to give you my money. I want to buy this film. I want to buy many films, especially if they're not mindless blockbusters. You need to learn how to make search engines work and you need to make the official site have some kind of link to sales.

awa 14y ago
The first hit in bing for “Vysotsky. Thanks to God, I’m alive" is a link to http://www.visotsky-film.ru/ http://www.visotsky-film.ru/ which seems relevant. Its probably google personalizing your search result to exclude a russian film
socksy 14y ago
Worth wondering whether films that they protect using anti-pirating measures might take a hit on sales. Difficult to test, because if a film's likely to be successful, people are likely to find ways to pirate it successfully.
eps 14y ago
http://www.google.ca/search?q=высоцкий.+спасибо+что+живой http://www.google.ca/search?q=высоцкий.+спасибо+что+живой > I want to buy this film. No, you don't. It is of a very little interest to anyone outside of a Russian demographic circle.
- DanBC 14y ago
  Yes, I do. You can say that no-one is interested in Japanese horror or Hong Kong crime or etc etc.
  - eps 14y ago
    "You" in a collective sense. There is no enough you/s for Sony to justify adapting the movie to the non-Russian markets.

pimeys 14y ago

Even if I couldn't download movies, I wouldn't buy blu-rays and I would continue watching movies in theaters only in some festivals like Berlinale or HIFF. Same losses for the industry. Money well spent.

darksaga 14y ago

Hardly the holy grail they're talking about. The fatal flaw is as soon as you close you one door, the pirates are already looking for 10 other ways to get around your technology. Case in point? Look at how many times they've tried to shut down Pirate Bay. They just keep re-tooling and continue on.

voidr 14y ago

I wonder how would this "wonderful" technology would perform in private torrent networks. Also I think it would be relatively easy to build protection against this kind of an attack also I wonder if doing this is legal in the first place... These studios should spend their money on competing with torrent networks rather than always trying to destroy them. Just create a descent media streaming service that makes accessing content easier and faster and most people will probably ditch torrent. To me my time is worth a lot, when I hunt down a movie on the internet it takes my time away and by extension my money(time = money) if the media companies would help me out with this, and offer a service where I could get anything in no time, I would gladly pay them for the time they saved me.

Porter_423 14y ago

That's an awfully hypocritical attitude as a bittorrent pirate. Technically one could claim that pirates abuse the bittorrent protocol to justify their means. At any rate, it's an example of technological innovation and should be respected for the efforts...unless you want to quash any technology which stands in the way of your established practices?

micheljansen 14y ago

Interestingly, if this would be widely deployed, it would probably result in adaptations to the BitTorrent protocol being developed to counteract this technique. Just look at the history of Distributed Hash Tables and Magnet links. Ironically, rather than stopping people from pirating content, they are actually spending money to make BitTorrent more resilient. While this will surely come in handy when SkyNet finally takes over, I'm sure the money would indeed be better spent on more competitive products and services.

mutantmonkey 14y ago

Based on the description of the product, it sounds like it performs man in the middle attacks on BitTorrent trackers or an attack on the Peer Exchange feature of some clients. I am willing to bet that either TLS-enabled trackers or disabling PEX would be all that are needed to get around this.

gouranga 14y ago

It's another whack-a-mole job. People will just tunnel a new internet through the old one based on peer trust and this is instantly no longer an issue.

chucknthem 14y ago
$100,000 of seed funding. I wonder what share of the company they gave up for this. Heavily funded anti-piracy agencies are almost guaranteed to make this a good investment.

ktizo 14y ago

This behaviour will push file sharing further into anonymised and encrypted networks, which will push down the statistics of files shared online as they are based on what can be measured. So the upshot will be that visible torrents will fall, allowing the company to claim success, even while they are making it harder for the people who are paying them to have any clue about the actual situation on the ground. If there wasn't a slew of technologies waiting in the wings as drop in replacements, this kind of approach would have some success, but there is, so it probably wont.

NHQ 14y ago

If I were trying to break a torrent, I'd put thousands of peers in the swarm and share bad data. I'm all for the culture spammers getting better at busting p2p, so p2p gets better and subverting the culture spammers.

CraigRood 14y ago
Sending bad data won't prevent anything either, It will merely slow down the peers by wasting bandwidth. Torrents by nature work against bad data being received by hash checking each chunk of data. (You can't trust anyone on the internet). Most clients would simply block each "bad" peer after several bad chunks.

haberman 14y ago

There are so many players in this overall story, and so few good guys. In one corner of the ring we have the content industry which seems to care far more about chasing pirates than with making life nice for the people who will actually pay them. Customers who play by the rules are "rewarded" with region coding, DRM, and lots of arbitrary restrictions. In the other corner are people who feel entitled to consume an arbitrary amount of music/movies without paying the creators anything. When confronted with with the moral/economic questionability of this approach, they have an extensive set of indignant rationalizations prepared; some of these are true but irrelevant to helping content creators get paid ("record companies are dinosaurs"), some of these are wishful thinking ("they can make money in other ways"), all of these are fronts for the fact that they just like getting things for free. In another corner are governments and law enforcement which are gung-ho about legislating against piracy and prosecuting it, without understanding or properly considering the ramifications (see SOPA). The good guys are: people who will pay a reasonable fee or watch a small/reasonable amount of advertising to consume the content they like, content creators who release their stuff in a convenient way without requiring an absurd amount of control, tech companies that are providing media services that strike a balance between creators and consumers (DRM-free Amazon, Google Play, Apple iTunes is getting better but is still pretty locked down). May the good guys eventually win.

kiba 14y ago
In the other corner are people who feel entitled to consume an arbitrary amount of music/movies without paying the creators anything. I don't feel entitled to anything and I never stole anything from the creators. If they wish to stop producing new stuff, that's fine with me. I have thousand of other ways to enjoy myself, some of which is forgotten public domain content. It's nice to feel moral outrage about people who "felt entitled", but it doesn't make you money. The good guys are: people who will pay a reasonable fee or watch a small/reasonable amount of advertising to consume the content they like, I want convenience and I gladly do pay for said convenience. The problem is the lack of convenient options and lot of missing titles.
icebraining 14y ago
In the other corner are people who feel entitled to consume an arbitrary amount of music/movies without paying the creators anything They're probably less than you think. Many "pirates" pay, and in fact pay more than the average person. some of these are wishful thinking ("they can make money in other ways") In the UK, and despite the lower income from album sales, the total income for artists has grown: http://www.hypebot.com/.a/6a00d83451b36c69e2012875f077e8970c-pi http://www.hypebot.com/.a/6a00d83451b36c69e2012875f077e8970c... Likewise, despite whining about piracy, the MPAA has had five years of record profits from 2005 to 2010. Maybe it's not so wishful thinking?

mratzloff 14y ago

Microsoft "investing" $100,000 is like you giving $1 (insert small denomination currency of your choice) to a beggar. They're not stupid. They know there is a relatively short expiration on this technology, so they probably reason they can make it difficult enough for maybe 500 people to pirate copies of Windows and Office that they'll buy them. They may not even think that, and this is the old Microsoft strategy of structuring a contract in such a way that they now secretly own all of your technology.

pmorici 14y ago

How is this not a computer crime?

dkulchenko 14y ago
I was thinking the same. How is this not a blatant violation of CFAA 1030(a)(5)?: (A) knowingly causes the transmission of a program, information, code, or command, and as a result of such conduct, intentionally causes damage without authorization, to a protected computer; http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1030#a_5 http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1030#a_5

silentscope 14y ago

smarter mousetrap, smarter mouse. it's pirate pay vs. the internet. man, I would not want to be them.

WiseWeasel 14y ago

Now if only there was an easy way for me to all but kill BT on my own LAN, so my roommates stop using up all my upstream bandwidth, and so I don't start getting nastygrams from my ISP because of them once they start doing that in July. As a network admin, BT sucks!

mdaniel 14y ago
Back a few years ago when I was the net admin for our small company, my boss asked me how to set up his home network so that his daughter could not access games or chat or whatever kids do that parents don't approve of. My answer to him is the same advice I offer to you: don't try to use technology to solve a social problem. In his case, I know for certain that his daughter has a lot more free time to think of ways to circumvent the restriction, and he has less time to think of, and then implement, new firewalls. I don't know your situation, but I would be willing to bet a compassionate plea to only torrent during off-peak hours, or to set the upstream throttle on their client would go a lot further than trying to "kill BT". Of course, having said all of that, controlling bandwidth usage is a slightly different use case than trying to prevent certain content from entering/exiting the network. If you are having a problem with one peer using too many resources, I would think IP throttling would solve that problem (presuming the softer social strategies didn't pan out).
- WiseWeasel 14y ago
  The main problem is they can't be bothered to figure out how newsgroups work, or pay a little money for the privilege of using a less network-intensive protocol with better performance. BitTorrent is just a drain on the network, and makes things like gaming impractical no matter how much you throttle it (though it certainly helps a lot). And people often leave it running for long periods out of civic duty. IP throttling isn't specific enough. I don't need to throttle an HTTP download that's going to be done in a few minutes. I just want BT to die on my network, at least when I want the resources free for other use. /rant

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