5 ms·
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 sea
by 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 agoAlternatively, 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 agoCouldn't they stamp RST packets with the IP addresses of other file sharers? That would reset the connections with those nodes.
- wmf 14y agoTo reset a connection you have to know the entire 5-tuple, which they don't.
- rwmj 14y agoDon'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.
- hasker 14y agoI think that would be illegal, as in the type of illegal that is much more serious than piracy.
- ajross 14y agoHow is this possibly legal? Interfering with someone else's computer system without permission is criminal (!) behavior pretty much everywhere.
- wpietri 14y agoBut as the article states, the head of Microsoft Russia likes it! Both Microsoft and Russia are known for probity, respect for the law, and supporting the little guy. And when you combine the two, it should be double the respect for democracy. I'm sure it must be legal.
- kamaal 14y ago>>Interfering with someone else's computer system without permission is criminal Not when you ask for waiver, and put such a clause in 'Terms and Conditions', People go ahead and click on 'I agree' anyway.