Over the weekend, Revision3 suffered an illegal and illegitimate denial of service attack for running a valid bittorrent tracker they use to distribute their own content.
At what point does the MPAA/RIAA simply go to far? This seems to have been an illegal attack by a company hired by the MPAA/RIAA to take down illegal bittorrent tracking sites. However, it looks like they focused their DoS servers at a legitimate site that ended up costing Revision traffic (i.e. $$$$).
As someone that has been responsible for running some popular public sites, it is difficult enough to fend off all of the spammers and botnet attacks. It is considerably more difficult to fend off a well funded company designed for just such attacks, with the technical wherewithal to make it hurt.
I hope Revision3 gets some satisfaction out of this incident, and this sort of practice remains in the realm of illegal activities, no matter who is controlling the purse strings and lawyers.
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Looks like the BitTorrent folks are at it again and have developed a workaround to blocking by Comcast. This is the same old story that always has the exact same ending, you can’t beat the hackers. Period. Be it Comcast, Microsoft, DirectTV or any large company that attempts to create technology to keep people out, there will always be many more people trying to get in..and frankly, some of them are, and always will be, smarter and more resourceful than your people.
From the blog posting:
BitTorrent throttling is not a new phenomenon, ISPs have been doing it for years. When the first ISPs started to throttle BitTorrent traffic most BitTorrent clients introduced a countermeasure, namely, protocol header encryption. This was the beginning of an ongoing cat and mouse game between ISPs and BitTorrent client developers, which is about to enter new level.
Unfortunately, protocol header encryption doesn’t help against more aggressive forms of BitTorrent interference, like the Sandvine application used by Comcast. A new extension to the BitTorrent protocol is needed to stay ahead of the ISPs, and that is exactly what is happening right now.
In the immortal words of David Byrne of The Talking Heads.. “Same as it ever was…”
As someone who tries to take full advantage of the many new, better and legal ways to download electronic content from the industry, there is still much that is not available. This is extremely frustrating. However, the industry needs to focus attention on making content more readily available, with healthy competition to keep prices in check. The ISP’s (i.e. Comcast) need to focus on keeping their tubes big enough to cover what they have advertised and sold to us in the first place. Marketing types need to fully comprehend the meaning of the word unlimited and throughput before they are allowed to willy nilly advertise such silliness at what now is claimed to be unsustainable pricing.
Frankly, it sounds more like building shareholder value to me, but I’ve been called cynical for less.
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