Russian upstart claims BitTorrent-killer A team of Russian developers is touting a technology it says can kill off BitTorrent-based P2P file sharing – and says it has attracted investment from Microsoft. According to a story in Russia Beyond the Headlines, the technology developed by Andrei Klimenko, his brother Alexei, and Dmitry Shuvaev has attracted $US100,000 …
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"When TPB uses dodgy legal grey areas to give you free stuff, they're visionaries of freedom but when MS use similarly grey areas to fight back, they're evil?"
When Anon/etc. uses DDOS to drop Internet traffic, they're evil, etc.
Welcome to Hypocracity. Population: almost everyone.
(By the way, in Hypocracity, you buy the most recently built house that blocks the previous person's views of the countryside and then complain bitterly to stop the next person's house being built next to yours.)
That looks like spoofing and sending bogus data, not exactly overspamming DoS.
Unless it's a true DoS it can be easily circumvent - distributed block lists, signed packets, packet verification by random peers, etc. It looks like a FUD and badly invested money... at least to me and I am not even specialist at BitTorrent.
Without signing it could be rather difficult to block.
If P-Pay connect to a tracker and get the IPs of people seeding and peers downloading, they could spoof packet to either end which appear to come from the other.
I'm not familiar enough with the BT protocol to be able to work out how they kill the torrent, but I guess there could be a sign off "I've got it all now" message from a peer to a seed which they could spoof.
Or maybe just continually spoofing packets to ask for the same block over and over would be enough. It would certainly slow things down.
I would think, the way BitTorrent works, sending an "I've got it all now" message turns you from a Peer into a Seed, which means other peers will expect you to have all the pieces, which can then be verified by hash checks of the individual pieces. Plus, as others have said, IP blocklists have been used with other P2P systems, but perhaps the system is trying to spoof source IP lists to make them go to random locations which can't be blocked.
Actually, if the nodes pretend to be seeds, they can cause serious disruption. Consider this: A node advertises itself as a seed, and then tarpits all incoming connections (in the TCP sense, by responding to a SYN with a SYN,ACK and then dropping all further packets). It won't stop the sharing, but it will certainly slow it down.
Note that a TCP-level tarpit is not easy to work around. Even if you kill the application, the TCP stack on the requesting machine will still have the connection open until it times out (typically 10-20 minutes). The idea behind the attack is to use up all the TCP connections on the machine that initiates the connection (e.g. if somebody is port scanning you they will run out of TCP connections (depending on their OS' TCP stack implementation) pretty quickly).
I think from the article above, we don't know enough to say what this will or wont achieve. Your suggestion is very plausible and would have an effect. Like other suggestions here, there are ways to defend against it. But all the real ways to defend against what people have proposed as how this might work, come down to some sort of web of trust. You can have a P2P network that protects against all sorts of attacks, but it's very difficult if you trust anyone, rather than authenticate your peers by some sort of reputation system.
So in a way, even if BitTorrent finds counter-measures to this, if those counter-measures involve making it harder to become a trusted member of the group, this is a success for the attacker and pushes pirate networks back toward being an underground sort of thing.
Of course it's not a problem for legal torrenters. E.g. distributing Linux isos. It's just a problem for illegitimate ones.
"How would that work? You can have the hashes without the actual pieces. Genuine question in case I've missed something."
How would you know the hash of the pieces before you have the piece itself? It depends on the way the system works, I admit, but if you're forced to check back with a peer with the completed piece already to say whether or not the hash of a particular piece is pass/fail, you only know know the hash of the the piece when you have the completed piece, run a check, and get a pass, I would think (all of which should occur at the end of the connection that obtains the piece in the first place, so there should be a strong likelihood of being able to obtain a response).
Under normal BitTorrent, the hashes of the pieces are actually sent first. It's how you know when you've got the complete piece and that nothing has got garbled. Hashes are the parity checks of BitTorrent and everyone gets them at the start. You'd need some sort of meta-hash thing based around another key. And even then you'd only need one secret legitimate peer in the network that would give you the hashes so you could run your anti-BT tool from another machine. You could use some sort of Public-Private key system, but this starts closing down your network to outsiders, or else is useless.
>That looks like spoofing and sending bogus data, not exactly overspamming DoS.
"Denial of service" doesn't mean "overspamming". Denial of service, in both the technical and legal senses, means that there's a service, and you're denying that service's users from getting access to it. Flooding it with packets is one way to do that, but there are others, and they all still count as "denial of service". Sending it a single packet crasher, such as a ping-of-death or buffer overflow or land attack, still causes access to the service to be denied, and is absolutely what the term "Denial of Service" refers to.
"Denial of service" doesn't mean "overspamming".
Absolutely. You could also add a Slowloris-type attack to your list of possible DoS methods. You don't need huge amounts of traffic to effectively knock out a vulnerable server by starving it of file handles for handling legitimate connections.
You don't need huge amounts of traffic to effectively knock out a vulnerable server by starving it of file handles for handling legitimate connections.
it's a trivial attack and easy to fend off. Using a thread (or 2) per connection (i..e blocking mode) and not closing connection when the queue threshold/timeout is reach is just sloppy programming.
@AC - 14th May 2012 10:43 GMT
Of course if it prevents a service - it's a denial. The main difference to the spamming DoS is the ability to prevent it.
There is little to do vs the sheer brute force of DDoS, it's blunt and stupid, yet not much can be done against.
They seem to assume that once this 'service' starts to become a problem people will continue to use the same, unmodified BitTorrent clients which no longer work, and won't instead download new, improved clients which have been upgraded to be attack-resistant. Because that's how the internet works, right?
Perhaps they should try to sell the government a device for shooting down bi-planes. I'm sure it would be just as effective.
From the title my initial guess was that the Russians had created something vastly superior to BitTorrent. After all, that's the only way to actually make a technology go away. However, my initial response to that initial guess was that no one in their right minds would trust ANY Russian programmers these days. This is just one minor reason why spam is bad (and why I wish someone (NOT the Russians)) would provide really effective spam fighting tools. (Yes, I know SpamCop has a major new version rolling out this week, but they have no fire in the belly because they have the wrong economic model.)
When I read that Microsoft was involved, I knew it was very unlikely that it would be anything good. Yes, Microsoft has managed to become less evil in recent years, but given where they started, they have a LONG way to anything like "good". (Actually their upstream work against spammers is about the best thing they've ever done.) Whatever you can say about Microsoft, you have to admit that they have some good economic models, and vampire-like sucking of blood out of creativity has become the main theme of copyright and patent law now.
What I was actually hoping for (in my foolish optimistic way) was a P2P streaming BitTorrent-like video protocol. Basic idea should be localized and automated caching so that popular videos would flow through the system in waves. It should also have an option to prevent peer discovery so that the distributors and owners of the content could reasonably maintain reasonable control by managing the seeds on their website while also minimizing their bandwidth costs.
The current economic models for streaming video are just awesome in their wastefulness. There really is a problem to that could be productively addressed there, but this Russian idea is absolutely NOT the answer to any useful question.
Blitterbug wrote: "tldr"
You know, I disagree with several things the poster wrote, but I disagree with your joy in announcing you have ADHD worse. Seriously that medium length post was too much for you? Hold on, I think I have a Michael Bay film for you around here somewhere.
Even if it does work, who can doubt that BitTorrent can't be reasonably quickly made to work around it.
In the short term it could be interesting to see how the entertainment industry reacts when the Torrent seen is temporarily "shut down" and there is no noticeable effect on sales.
How do I get some of this magical Microsoft seed fund money? From the sounds of it, all I need to do is come up with a really stupid idea!
I know.... a tainted iPad app that has secrete dodgy code in it, that causes the iPad's power management circuits to malfunction resulting in the battery exploding! - it will be the ultimate iPad killer and just what MS needs for Windows 8 BS (or whatever its called) on ARM devices to be a success!
Either that or a new IDE interface with grey everything!
What's your gripe with Bittorrent exactly? Works fine for me and the other 150 million people using it to download Linux ISOs, among other things.
Napster's contemporaries (Gnutella, Freenet, eDonkey, Direct Connect, etc) are all defunct. Probably something to do with the ease with which viruses were distributed...
It sounds like it will be a server based denial system which would be stupidly easy to get rid of. Either you could block packets come from those servers (for example, Peer Guardian) or you will find that in the off chance it actually did any damage it would quickly be the victim of a major DDOS taking the servers effectively offline. Anonymous are willing to attack targets for much smaller crimes against the distribution of material, i.e. any ISP in the UK blocking Pirate Bay (even though they're only doing it because there is a court order telling them to!)
A way to block torrent traffic. Like that hasn't been tried 1,000,000 times before. I hope it can distinguish between legal and illegal torrents because I torrent a crap load of legal stuff (game updates etc)
I still don't get how the media industry can be so stupid though. The reason they aren't selling anything anymore is because its too expensive. I mean seriously, £8 for a cinema ticket so I can see the film on a giant screen with two annoying bastards infront of me playing with their mobile phones and two more annoying bastards behidn me talking.
A CD for £15, the same price as I can buy a DVD, a DVD for £15 when I can view sevearl movies one after the other via netflix for £5.
Not only that, half the shows I want to watch just aren't economical to buy. Getting an entire TV series I want to watch on DVD would set me back over £100 in most cases.
The media needs to wake up and realize people who pirate this stuff have no intention of buying it legally, ever. Or they aren't wiling to take the risk because lets face it, a lot of films recently have been utter shit. If they want to boost sales again then they need to lower their prices and adopt online sharing through services such as netflix or similar.
More music is sold now as single tracks over itunes than as CDs.
Maybe Netflix should have an addition to their service, the infinate streams for £5 a month, and then allow people to download the videos for an additional fee if they like them enough to warrant it.
It'd also be nice to see more studios add their libraries to netflix, so many outdated cartoons you'll never see again, or other TV series which could find a home for those nostalgic like myself.
"A CD for £15, the same price as I can buy a DVD, a DVD for £15 when I can view sevearl movies one after the other via netflix for £5."
This. £15 seems to be the magic number for an audio CD alright.
I realise that record companies are "adding value" to a penny's worth of polycarbonate, but £15 worth of "value" is probably a bit excessive.
I'd love to see a breakdown of the costs involved in getting an audio CD onto the shelf in HMV.
HMV are still trading, right?
HMV are great for picking up bargin DVD's,
wouldn't buy CD's, I just purchase track by track DRM Free online
IF I could pick up a film for £3-£5 online, DRM free, as I can buying a year old DVD from HMV, I would... But even then, the quality of these Digital copies pales to that of a blu ray rip, I keep mine at full quality (20gig each tho)
Was at the cinema at the weekend with a few mates.
The ticket cost £7.80. The prices seem to go up faster than petrol prices.
So for 4 of us total ticket price was £31.20. Then there's the extras (drinks, food, etc).
It's cheaper to wait for the DVD to come out then buy it, and get in pizza and beer.
Once you've done with it sell it on ebay and get some money back.
It's hard to say where a given theater will bite you--at the ticket stand (where you live) or at the concession stand (where I live). Where I live, even in 3D IMAX, ticket prices are rather lower (about US$9 a piece)--but try to buy a DRINK there ($3 for a small cup?). And no, they won't let you bring in outside stuff--health codes and all that stuff.
Err... you contradict your own arguement.
You complain prices are to high (BTW CD's haven't increased in price in the 2+ years I've been buying them), then go on to say "The media needs to wake up and realize people who pirate this stuff have no intention of buying it legally, ever"
So why lower them to £1 each when, as you state, they still won't buy them.
And from what I gather, from the general article, is to block specific files rather than global blocking, so surely it's better to block pirated material and allow the legal stuff through than global blocks currently being enforced around the world?
Admittedly, you didn't say whether CDs have gone down. Although, checking HMV, a new CD is now 9 quid. Definitely down from 13 quid a few years ago. That's why places such as Play.com and Amazon trumped up in sales as they could cut the middle man. Even so now, it's too little too late and consequently, no physical successor of CD has appeared like CD did for tapes. Actually, Minidisc should of dominated until Sony messed up digital MD by locking their systems up with lots of red tape.
The simple fact is media corps have not endorsed or adapted to new distribution technologies. They've always seen them as the devil, even back to the days of Napster where the Broadband revolution was jut starting. Rather collaborate with Napster or BitTorrent, Media wants to sue the hell out of everyone because no-one wanted to adapt. It's only taken Apple's power to convince record labels that DRM = pain in the arse for the general consumer.
This tech will only get side stepped by adding hashing or adapting the encryption already used by some Torrent clients. Anyway, it's against law unless all first world countries want to change their computing laws.
"The media needs to wake up and realize people who pirate this stuff have no intention of buying it legally, ever."
And yet these same people clearly feel a strong enough desire—and a clear belief in their entitlement to free entertainment made by others at great expense—to consume this stuff for free? Either it's shit and not worth paying for OR downloading, or it IS worth paying for, because you very clearly DO want it.
The media companies may not have the world's best brains in charge, but they DO have a perfectly valid right to be pissed. And no, whining about the high price of a cinema ticket is no argument; watching a movie in a cinema, on a massive screen, with full-on digital surround sound, (and, in some cases, 3D), is a collective audience experience. It's not the same experience you'll get from watching it on your own in a small, dark, room while eating a microwaved TV dinner.
As you point out yourself, if you don't want to pay that kind of money, you can just wait for the home video release instead. The media companies don't mind if you do that as at least they'll still get some money for the film. And with films now costing anywhere north of $200 million, you can't blame them for trying to make that money back as quickly as possible.
(For some bizarre reason, even if a film makes far more than its money back over a couple of years, Hollywood insist that only the theatrical release counts towards deciding whether a film was a success of a failure. Other markets don't count at all. They really have turned "short-termism" into an art form.)
But all this is only truly a problem if you're chronically impatient and can't wait a while for the film to appear in the bargain bin for a fiver, or even on the TV for free a year or so after that. Seriously: what's the almighty rush to have every new thing Right Now?
There's plenty of media available LEGALLY for free or cheap if you're willing to wait a bit. It's not that hard. I haven't even seen the inside of a cinema in nearly 10 years now and I can't say I've missed it.
That applies even to software. Save some money each month and you CAN pay for it. Or you could just buy a cheaper alternative. But no: you don't want to wait, so you just take it.
There really is no excuse for piracy. None. You can rationalise it away as much as you like, even trying to put the blame on the people making the stuff in the first place, but it ultimately boils down to: "I'm too impatient to wait; give it to me now! NOW! GIMME!"
I get what you mean, personally if I want to see something now, I buy it...
The problem is when you CAN'T buy it...
For example:
So your a fan of series XYZ, it is shown in the USA on a Friday, but take 4 weeks until that episode is shown in the UK..
As a member of fan blogs/clubs, your likely to read/see something about the episode before you get to watch it., spoiling your , OR you can torrent it and watch it and join in the discussions.
I am not saying torrenting is right, but it is the only way for that person to enjoy the series and the community around it..
A solution is needed, as it hurts advertising revenue, simply put the fan would watch it live, if it was within say 24 hours of it being broadcast first, and I suspect a decent subscription service that makes the show available after first broadcast would be very welcome!
>The media companies may not have the world's best brains in charge, but they DO have a perfectly valid right to be pissed.
But they do not have the right to put root kits on my computer or to get unconstitutional laws like the DMCA passed that serve only to prop up broken business models the market has rejected. The market is only mildly retarded though and eventually learns. Maybe that is why Sony has lost 6 billion in the last year and is now 1/5 the size it was in its heyday.
There is a reason this site says Sony has a %50 chance of bankruptcy. Because media studios and hardware companies under the same corporate name have all the synergy of turd in a punch bowl. Apple is only so rich because Sony's media side gimped their hardware side from releasing the iWalkman before the iPod and Apple filled the niche of innovated disruptor like Sony used too.
http://www.macroaxis.com/invest/ratio/SON1.DE--Probability_Of_Bankruptcy
And FYI Sony I am not leasing my PS3 and jailbreaking is not illegal (in US). Piracy is rightfully illegal but guess what all you corporate whores there is an awful lot of high quality software humanity owns and can use free of charge (they call dirty commieware). GNU\Linux has proven the tragedy of the commons has been proven to be bullshit in the digital world.
Although I did see the "troll" icon, and see it is a joke... this would make a great bit of sci-fi.
Say this happens, it's our moment of "suspension of disbelief" in our story. What would happen to the world? In a single SMS you could send the entire Disney catalogue to a friend to watch on their phone. Or perhaps the TV series you wanted.
How would people react and would it cause more bans or greater acceptance of sharing media?
Hooray!!!!! Piracy is now a thing of the past, no longer will starving executives musicians have to queue for social welfare, record companies will be able to output hundreds of millions new artists every year, world unemployment will end as the copyright mafiaa record companies employ tens of thousands of A&R men persons to sign all the new acts that will be making a living from selling records CDs downloads, the world's economies will recover, the recession is over, all the wealth that this economic activity will generate enough wealth in the world so that AIDs can be cured, famine in Africa will be eliminated, genetic research will mean that we will all live 250 years to enjoy the output of all the artists creating beautiful music.....
Ooops, sorry, got carried away a bit there....
I don't think so. In most jurisdictions disrupting communications in this way is illegal. It doesn't matter if the communications themselves are dodgy - only an organisation with proper legal authority should be able to do this, and then they should think long and hard about doing it across borders.
MS are very wrong to get involved.
There I was thinking that they had come up with a way to let people pay for the content that they are downloading...
But no, as usual they are just trying to magic away piracy and protect their walled garden.
Personally I tend to use BitTorrent when:
- I want to pay the full price for something (because it is good and/or I like the company) but the DRM they use makes the commercial version worthless to me (usually games)
- I want to pay the artist for their work, but the evil middlemen are taking almost all of my money, so it ends up overpriced for what it is
- I am unsure of the quality of the product and I would prefer to pay for it AFTER I have downloaded it.
The world desperately needs a system where people can download stuff but still pay the content creators IF THEY WANT TO. This would of course kill off all the middlemen (HMV, EA Games etc) which is why they are trying their best to make sure this never happens.
Yes of course this means that people COULD still download stuff for free, but I believe that most people would prefer to pay what they think is reasonable, and this is better than the current situation where people CANNOT pay for what they have downloaded outside of the distributor's intended business model.
TBH i think the whole notion that "nobody would pay if there was an option to have it for free" is just scaremongering perpetuated by these content cartels.
Bring back Share-Ware?
I liked the shareware model. It let me try software, and if it was good, I would buy it, if it was crap, I would delete it. There were some grey areas, where the SW was good, but the nags/limits were too restrictive for my tastes, and I'd nuke it. or if the free version did everything I wanted, then I may not buy it but continue to use the free version.
But then, there were some bits of SW out there that were so exactly suited to my desires that I not only bought the full version, but donated to the "cause."
I could get behind the concept of SW music. Free 1 minute clips (1 verse, chorus, and bridge?), and .99 for a track, CD bundle for for .80/track, perhaps.
Movies would be more difficult, as many of them are not worth re-watching. Although, a bad movie can often be identified by a small bit (about a minute longer than the trailer, usually), mediocrity is much harder to rule out.
So a Russian firm claims to be stopping a Russian film from being pirated. A film no one had heard of but all of sudden people might want to know what it's about and it it's any good.
So people will jump on the torrent and...
a) They pirate the film to death because the blocking method is all just BS designed to raise the profile of the movie house.
b) It's an RIAA sponsored honey-pot designed to catch BT users in the act.
...to the obstinacy and arrogance of these so called 'Mulit-Corporations' - yes Microshaft - I am looking at you too. But really you are just a useful idiot. A very well paid useful idiot though.
Develop a system like they dreamed about in science fiction days of yore - a Big Bugger of a Network where everything is connected to everything else. Wait a minute........
Then develop a distribution system (bit torrent on steroids). Give unequivocal access to this as a matter of course. Let the Martini effect take hold: Anytime, Anyplace, Anywhere, some bod can download wtf he likes. Charge a 'micro-payment'.
Now. I am not saying that the powers that be will still be so fat off the riches of the land, riding their big fat wobbly gravy boats down it's streams... But.....
They will get more than they are getting at the moment. And they sure as fuck are going to get more than they will at this rate.
People stop going to Cinema in protest (I know I do/don't)? No problem!
Just charge the suckers that do go double. In fact, double the profit on the popcorn too - they really will not know what hit them in their little wallets.
I work in this industry. I am hoping to make it big in this industry. I would like to get paid. I like to eat. Everything else is a bonus to the warm milk of kindness that is a payment for the appreciation of your efforts. But these idiots in power are truly making a right horses arse out of it all for everybody else when the technology is there, the will is there from people to pay a fair price for what they use. Not everyone I know. There always has been and always will be freetards. I don't mind them. They are a bit sad. But jeez Louise, there must be a way to circumvent these morons stealing, without the artists getting paid. I say - Let them steal, let the rest of us pay, let us live in a harmonious society. Their taking a 'copy' does not rob me of my 'copy'. It's on a couple of my hds THANK YOU very much.
And if anyone wants to vote me down, then please re-read the last couple of sentences. Coz you know, those vote downs cut me to the quick of my soul.
Before I protest too much, I shut up!
Happy day to you all.
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