Microsoft Funded Startup Aims to Kill BitTorrent Traffic

http://torrentfreak.com/microsoft-funded-startup-aims-to-kill-bittorrent-traffic-120513/

by Uncle_Sam • 14 years ago

88 134 14 years ago

FuzzyDunlop2• 14 years 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• 14 years 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• 14 years ago

Well, noone who wants to be paid for their work can compete against piracy.

citricsquid5• 14 years 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.

charliesome• 14 years 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.

batista5• 14 years 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• 14 years 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.

moe6• 14 years 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/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.

muuh-gnu• 14 years ago

> and most of the people will give up.

And start doing what? Buying all the stuff they were just hoarding because it was "free" and they never were able to afford in the first place? I don't think so. If the effort to get stuff increases above the value of the stuff, they'll simply wait until somebody solves the problem and decreases the effort, so the stuff becomes "free" again.

b0rsuk• 14 years ago

Why make piracy inconvenient ? Why not make legal purchases more convenient instead ?

soup104• 14 years ago

There's no way to stop piracy, everyone knows this. The key is too slow it down and make it more troublesome. Just like there's no such thing as a safe that can't be broken into, that's not the point of anti-piracy measures.

Piracy is a problem because it requires minimal effort and is far too easy these days, often easier than obtaining the content legitimately. If the copyright holders could just occasionally shutdown whatever the most popular site is at the time, and force people to smaller sites. Far less people would be pirating.

The crux of the problem is that it is incredibly easy to pirate things, and even a token/whack-a-mole effort would dissuade most people.

Look at web-advertising. If browsers came pre-installed with adblock google would have to find a new business model. But such a small thing like not making it the default, has huge effects. Similarly having to find a new public website every month to download things is going to dissuade a big percentage of people.

slowpoke4• 14 years ago

I find it hugely amusing how people still make out piracy as the problem.

It isn't. It never was. The problem is the insistence of an industry on their business model in face of a technology that made them obsolete. Their continued, stubborn refusal to accept reality. Their audaciousness to demand that this very technology be regulated to fit their business model again (which is both technically impossible as well as undesirable on a scale of "impediment to the entirety of mankind").

Piracy - or, how it actually should be called, Free (as in Speech) sharing of art, culture and technology - is probably mankind's biggest achievement. And here we are, arguing over an irrelevant industry that thinks it's entitled to a working business model for all eternity, and happens to excel at loudly crying at the shoulders of politicians and lie like a whole regiment of troopers.

We should embrace free and unlimited sharing of what amounts to a non-scarce resource, instead of buckling down to the prolonged sissy fit of a child that doesn't get what it wants anymore. It makes no fucking sense, both economically as well as logically, to limit something that is infinitely available.

I'm positive we'll be past this farce in about a decade, with the pirates ultimately emerging as the victors, because it's impossible to halt progress forever, even for the copyright industry. The more they entrench themselves in their vain fight, the more satisfying it will be to see them crash down.

guard-of-terra19• 14 years 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.

kika8• 14 years 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-terra19• 14 years 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.

guard-of-terra19• 14 years 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.

kika8• 14 years 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 :-)

haliax2• 14 years ago

Can you share some technical details/details of your conversations with this guy please?

kika8• 14 years 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.

kika8• 14 years ago

Or you're interested in our implementation?

_exec• 14 years ago

If I may ask, what was the name of your company / product? Is it still alive? I must say I'm highly intrigued by the idea of carrier-grade BitTorrent.

kika8• 14 years ago

It's on ice. Not alive, not dead either. I'm chasing another opportunity now, but keep this one still in mind. I guess my email should be visible in the profile, feel free to contact me.

lunarscape2• 14 years 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?

kika8• 14 years ago

In Russia they're breaking the laws too.

lunarscape2• 14 years 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• 14 years ago

Sounds like network traffic intefering to me. Which is illegal at least in Finland.

skymt• 14 years 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• 14 years 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• 14 years ago

Couldn't they stamp RST packets with the IP addresses of other file sharers? That would reset the connections with those nodes.

wmf• 14 years ago

To reset a connection you have to know the entire 5-tuple, which they don't.

hasker• 14 years ago

I think that would be illegal, as in the type of illegal that is much more serious than piracy.

ajross• 14 years ago

How is this possibly legal? Interfering with someone else's computer system without permission is criminal (!) behavior pretty much everywhere.

wpietri• 14 years ago

But 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• 14 years 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.

DanBC2• 14 years 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• 14 years ago

The first hit in bing for “Vysotsky. Thanks to God, I’m alive" is a link to http://www.visotsky-film.ru/ which seems relevant. Its probably google personalizing your search result to exclude a russian film

socksy• 14 years 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.

eps2• 14 years ago

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.

DanBC2• 14 years ago

Yes, I do.

You can say that no-one is interested in Japanese horror or Hong Kong crime or etc etc.

guard-of-terra19• 14 years ago

In fact your main problem would not be the copyright protection, rather than that you will have hard time finding subtitles or translation for it.

pimeys• 14 years 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• 14 years 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• 14 years 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.

micheljansen• 14 years 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• 14 years 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• 14 years 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• 14 years 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• 14 years 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• 14 years 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• 14 years 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.

haberman5• 14 years 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• 14 years 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.

icebraining7• 14 years 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...

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?

haberman5• 14 years ago

> They're probably less than you think.

What evidence do you have for this? Every time I want to believe this is true, I meet someone (IRL) who says something completely blatant like "I just discovered BitTorrent, which is great because now I don't have to pay for movies any more.". (that is a direct quote from someone I met yesterday). Anecdotes aren't data, but where's your non-anecdotal data?

InclinedPlane2• 14 years ago

This is a vast oversimplification of the problem. Sharing is not always piracy. People tend to recognize sharing on a small scale (of movies, books, music, etc.) as on balance a good thing, and overall functionally promotional for the artists and makers who are having their work shared. The truth is that the same mechanism exists even on a larger, less personal scale. Unfortunately, the debate has been so polluted by vitriol and misrepresentation that this gets labelled as "piracy" and "theft".

Yes, there are some people who feel entitled to consume an arbitrary amount of music/movies without paying for it. But this is not "a corner", it is not the norm for people who "pirate" or "share". The average person who downloads movies off of bit torrent is someone who does so as part of a larger set of media consuming behaviors which includes paying for cable, buying movies on disc, and seeing movies in theaters. Also, current evidence tends to lead toward the conclusion that engaging in "piracy" on balance results in more support for artists, not less.

On the whole I very much agree with Jonathan Coulton's stance on piracy (http://www.jonathancoulton.com/2012/01/21/megaupload/), make good stuff and make it easy to buy it. I've never seen a case where that has failed to reward the artists.

haberman5• 14 years ago

> Sharing is not always piracy.

Didn't say it was. Actually I didn't use the word "piracy" at all (except in reference to the content industry and their perception of what "piracy" is). You're preaching the party line without reading what I've written.

For example, I have no problem with someone using BitTorrent to download something they already bought once, but that they can't use on a new device because of unreasonable DRM. I only have a problem with people who are not paying creators at all, or justify a large amount of copying because of a small/moderate amount of legitimate purchases.

I also agree that a limited amount of free sharing between friends is totally reasonable.

mratzloff• 14 years 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• 14 years ago

How is this not a computer crime?

dkulchenko• 14 years 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

silentscope• 14 years ago

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

WiseWeasel2• 14 years 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• 14 years 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).

WiseWeasel2• 14 years 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

Microsoft Funded Startup Aims to Kill BitTorrent Traffic

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