29 replies to this topic

[nik louch]

Quote

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

Edited by _Heracles, 14 May 2012 - 03:36.

[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]

_Heracles, on 14 May 2012 - 03:35, said:

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?.

[QUAD2500K]

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.

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

[SPARTdAN]

Once again the rich attacking the not so.

[citan]

maybe if they made better products, less people would actually pirate them

[Osiris]

Yeah the news article telling me theres more anti-piracy ads on your dvds and blu ray now really motivate me to go purchase those >.>

[compl3x]

nik louch, on 14 May 2012 - 00:10, said:

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.

Seems they fail to do either:

1). No one thinks what they are doing will work. And historically never has.
2). People still pirate things when they are first released. Arguably, that might be the peak time when product x is pirated.

Offer competitive pricing, better distribution methods, DRM free...... Oh blah blah. they never listen.

[ExtremeG]

It's ironic that a Russian based company is now working with the Americans to try and stop piracy when the majority of illegal content comes from Russian based computers and servers anyway, one example was the website MP3skyline which was a Russian attempt at selling mp3's and claiming it was a legal operation when it was not, the mp3's being sold were all group scene rips downloaded from P2P networks.

Sounds like PsyOps.