Microsoft-Funded Startup To Kill BitTorrent

[simplezz]

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.

The idea started three years ago when the developers were building a traffic management solution for Internet providers. The technology worked well. It was able to stop BitTorrent traffic if needed, which made the developers realize that they might have built the holy anti-piracy grail. ?After creating the prototype, we realized we could more generally prevent files from being downloaded, which meant that the program had great promise in combating the spread of pirated content,? Pirate Pay CEO Andrei Klimenko says.

With this new business model in mind the company continued to develop their product, and it didn?t take long before an investor was willing to support it. Last year Pirate Pay received a $100,000 investment from the Microsoft Seed Financing Fund.

Microsoft Russia?s president praised the innovative idea, which his company would also be able to use in the future.

Source [TorrentFreak]

[Azusa]

Time to move on and evolve people.

[firey]

Time to move on and evolve people.

Move on and evolve to? Direct HTTP Piracy? Usenet Piracy? I mean.. piracy isn't goin to go anywhere...nor do I want it to.

[simplezz]

Time to move on and evolve people.

It might be possible to prevent this using the blocklist functionality present in many BT clients. Failing that, the protocol itself might need to tweaked.

[whitebread]

Disgusting!!!

[DPyro]

They are kidding themselves if they think they can stop pirates. Technology keeps changing and bitorrent could easily evolve to prevent any software that tries to stop it.

[Azusa]

Move on and evolve to? Direct HTTP Piracy? Usenet Piracy? I mean.. piracy isn't goin to go anywhere...nor do I want it to.

Decentralized P2P.

They are kidding themselves if they think they can stop pirates. Technology keeps changing and bitorrent could easily evolve to prevent any software that tries to stop it.

but why keep BT alive why not come up with something new and better?

[smooth_criminal1990]

They are kidding themselves if they think they can stop pirates. Technology keeps changing and bitorrent could easily evolve to prevent any software that tries to stop it.

Yup, and the figures from France with their strict policies aren't showing any massive leaps in profits for the industries, a fact which they all seem to be ignoring :|

[firey]

Decentralized P2P.

Is that not the point of Torrents? To decentralize? To have multiple trackers, to have user to user all over the world?

[Azusa]

Is that not the point of Torrents? To decentralize? To have multiple trackers, to have user to user all over the world?

I was thinking something along the lines of Perfect Dark

[epk]

It'll probably be just a cat and mouse game, like always, but good for them to try.

[ShMaunder]

Although I'm not a fan of piracy myself, I know it acts as a competitor and therefore gets these greedy fooks to embrace change (e.g. in the way of services like Spotify, Netflix, Steam, worldwide TV show streaming... etc. etc.). Also it keeps *some* product prices sensible.

[Detection]

I seriously doubt piracy affects sales much at all, at least not anywhere near what they claim to be losing due to piracy.

Two different worlds with two different types of people, 1. People who wouldn't buy it even if there was no way to pirate it, 2. People who will buy it.

100% kill piracy and I doubt there would be much more than 5-10% increase in sales at the most

[Phouchg]

It is not unique technology at all, it's a honey-coated sh*t. What it does - it attempts to DDoS the swarm with garbage data. Any kind of deliberate disruption of (internet) service is illegal in most countries. Unless, it seems, when it's being done for "lawful purposes", hurr durr.

Perhaps it will even be possible to isolate IP ranges, so clients with ipfilter enabled won't even attempt to connect.

[Noxa12]

There will always be a way to get round something, just a matter of time before the next stage kicks in.

[Dick Montage]

They are kidding themselves if they think they can stop pirates. Technology keeps changing and bitorrent could easily evolve to prevent any software that tries to stop it.

Sigh, when will people get it. The point is NOT to stop piracy. Piracy is accepted by the large companies, it factors into their estimates.

The point is twofold:

1) Be seen to be doing something.

2) Slow down piracy so at least the major revenue from the first x weeks sales are strong.

[bjoswald]

Another lead-footed attempt to win a war they have no chance of winning. It's like declaring war on jealousy; you will never, ever win.

[ArialBlue]

OOOO.... Here is an idea,

The problem with anonymity and torrents is that the trackers have all the IP addresses of the seeders and leechers for that specific file.

Instead, the tracker should contain NOT the IP addresses of the people sharing a specific file, but ALL the IP addresses of peers and seeds connected to the tracker (which can hold thousands of files...).

This should give more overhead to the tracker, but I think is feasible.

In such a network, all peers should have three functions,

1. Request data from tracker and receive that data from some relay, without knowledge of the origin

2. Send tracker requested data to a relay, without knowledge of end destination

3. Act as a relay and forward data as instructed, without knowledge of what the data is

[xeleraph]

Looks like people will argue that BitTorrent is useful for legal purposes, but will attack attempts to shut down unlawful BT use. Just weird.

[Azusa]

OOOO.... Here is an idea,

The problem with anonymity and torrents is that the trackers have all the IP addresses of the seeders and leechers for that specific file.

Instead, the tracker should contain NOT the IP addresses of the people sharing a specific file, but ALL the IP addresses of peers and seeds connected to the tracker (which can hold thousands of files...).

This should give more overhead to the tracker, but I think is feasible.

In such a network, all peers should have three functions,

1. Request data from tracker and receive that data from some relay, without knowledge of the origin

2. Send tracker requested data to a relay, without knowledge of end destination

3. Act as a relay and forward data as instructed, without knowledge of what the data is

Or just stop using torrents altogether and start to use applications like Perfect Dark.

[ThePitt]

Interesting. Why would I pay for an OS that potentially tell me what can or what I cant do??. 1st torrents and then what?.

[x-scratch]

it won't ever happen

[techbeck]

meh, something else will come along. no big deal. they cannot stop file sharing like this...only delay it a little.

[Vice]

The way this technology works is two fold.

1. Their servers enter a swarm and then send bad data to clients using fradulent IP's of other peers inside the swarm. Basic IP Spoofing + Bad Data - This causes the clients requesting the data to put the IP's sending bad data on a temporary bad-peer blacklist. All the normal BT clients include this feature by default and this company is abusing that feature for their goal.

2. Send thousands of packets from randomly generated IP's in to a swarm so that real peers looking for seeders can't decipher which peers are real and which are not causing the downloading to take forever and depending on the amount of peers they inject real peers could end up in swarms with nothing but fake peers who obviously have no data to share.

Both of these attacks are effective but they take a lot of resources. This company would need a lot of servers to cover multiple downloads at the same time. And there is a very easy way for both of these attacks to be stopped and that is simply by having the DHT swarms send an authentication packet to all the clients as they enter which is hashed. Then the client has to receive that packet, unhash its contents (which could be set at a complexity level that it would take 2-3 seconds of processing time) and then forward that hash back to the swarm before other clients are willing to interact. This hash could then be stored and re-sent with each chunk to verify its origin.

The reason this method works is because this companies servers are either creating fake IP's of peers that do not exist in the swarm and thus cannot receive these hash's or are spoofing the IP's of peers already in the swarm to send bad data to other peers in which case again they would not receive the hash to be able to have their own data verified and the real peers wouldn't get blacklisted.

Anyone that invests in this company would do so foolishly as their current methods will be broken in the next DHT protocol update and many clients will try to fix it sooner than that in their own ways.

[Obi-Wan Kenobi]

UDP traffic may be just that, User Datagrams that do not rely on the standard http headers, in other words, it may not care where you send packets....but the thing is, sending packets is sending packets....and if they truly are swarming torrent downloads with bogus packets with the same effect as someone committing a DOS or a DDOS....then it should be wrong, and I don't care how anyone looks at it....forget should be wrong, it IS wrong. At this particular moment, I don't know where I stand on this, but I tell you this much, I do NOT appreciate ANYONE doing any tinkering with the torrent protocol....because I use it for TONS of linux downloads....and whilst they may not block those particular downloads, it just makes me think, as an end user, that Big Brother is watching us...so maybe future Microsoft products are not for me. Not set in stone, as farther analysis will continue to emerge, but still...my ISP watches what I do enough, I didn't think it would ever come down to this. (N)

EDIT: @Vice ^ Very nice way to put it, you replied before I did, lol...didn't mean to rant, but DANG, what's the world turning into (read, world=microsoft)...china? O.o