One of the things that has always bothered us with the way that many companies involved in the “war on piracy” behave is that while they talk about the amount of money they lose every year to piracy they are always willing to dump even more into schemes that have almost no chance of doing any real good. It also bothers us that many of these companies stretch the laws and legal guidelines (to put it mildly) to achieve their goals.It has been reported more than once that the MPAA and RIAA used questionable investigative techniques that even involved breaking through someone’s firewall (we call that hacking) to see what they had on their computer. Now we hear that Microsoft Russia has paid a company to disrupt user traffic to prevent torrent downloads.
The company is called Pirate Pay and after working on a system to manage traffic for internet service providers discovered that they might have found a way to actually attack the swarms that are used to download files. They details of how their new system works is being held closely as a trade secret, but outside observers seem to feel that they are using bogus connections to the P2P swarms. These connections send corrupted or incorrect data to “confuse” other P2P clients in the swarm so they did not know where to get the next piece of the puzzle.
Now the legality of allowing this type of attack (as that is what it really is) is another question and one that we are sure will get swept under the same rug that all of the other less-than-legal things the content companies do. Right now Pirate Pay claims they prevented almost 45,000 downloads of a Disney/Sony film “Vysotsky. Thanks to God, I’m alive,” They did not happen to mention the number of downloads that made it through, but we would not expect them to at this stage.
We have to wonder when this will make it to the US and if will be allowed since it has some pretty serious implications. We wonder what is to stop this new system from being used to deflect legitimate traffic from reaching its destination? After all looking at what the software is doing it sounds like a form of DDoS on the swarm (spoofed packets with a non-reachable return address).
Oh well, we are sure they will dump tons of money into this like they do with DRM systems that never do anything but hurt the people not pirating software and in turn end up making them more likely to download the next application, movie, or song they want. Maybe the content companies will dump some money into figuring out that what they need to do is improve the quality of their product and offer them at a REASONABLE price. We know this might mean some executives might make a few $100,000 less than they do now, but in the end it is all about the workers and creating/maintaining jobs right?
Source Torrent Freak
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