BitTorrent Servers Under DDoS Attacks

jZnat writes "CNet News.com reports that popular BitTorrent tracker hosts such as Suprnova and LokiTorrent underwent DDoS attacks on Wednesday (I'll bet you noticed). The culprits are primarily unknown, but these sites were flooded beyond control from the attack. This appears to be striking an interest in revising the BT protocol and Suprnova's interest in making their own protocol."

Come on

We all know it's the MPAA and RIAA.

Re:Come on

You may jest, but read some of the reports coming out of the current Kazza case in Australia.

For example [smh.com.au]:

The Federal Court heard yesterday that the major record labels are also engaged in a program of actively disrupting the file-sharing network by bombarding it with billions of decoys and spoofs that pose as song files.

On the bright side, the article also contains the following quote from the judge:

The judge said it was important that any legal remedy did not trespass on freedom of communication. "You are entitled to protect copyright. You are not entitled to control the internet," he said.

The list of suspects

...is longer than that. It could be an intriguing investigation...kind of like "who shot JR".

RIAA if I'm not mistaken lobbied (unsucdessfully thank goodness) to have legislation put in place to permit them to hack into suspect computers at their discretion if I recall, and MPAA is just another pea in that IP-hoarding pod.

Other suspects? There are too many to mention, but boradly speaking they might fall into one of several categories besides the above:

* Large closed source software vendors or someone connected to them (Microsoft, etc). They would be trying to shut down a big source of piracy. I doubt it is Microsoft, they are not that dumb. In any case suprnova et al are not the right target...that is shooting the messenger, not the perpetrators who make use of their resources.

* One of the above-mentioned perpetrators (copyright violators who up/download cracked software and movies). I've noticed that a sizeable minority of heavy BT users out there are immature and petty (probably teenagers sequestered in their basements). If they are knocked off suprnova or similar sites or are slagged in a community forum they get all out of joint and retaliate. The stupid turds brought it on themselves and such retaliation is not warranted.

* Some of the seedier on-line proprietors, such as those who run revenue generating sites imitating the free suprnova.org, because if the free sites go away it might steer more revenue to them. I wouldn't put it past them

* Commercial porno sites. P2P networks are full of porn (you don't even have to search on an obvious sexual keyword sometimes) and it is pretty much all ripped off of some pay site. Most (not all, but most) on-line porn businesses are run by people lacking morals and intelligence (witness the whining by one porno purveyor about Google caching thumbnail images and deep-linking into his site with regard to the latter). SO it is very likely a porn-vendor arranged the dDOS attacks.

Part of me hopes it really was RIAA or MPAA...they are cartels that are unhealthy for the industry and it would be cool if there was finally a reason to shut them down. However, I think it's one of the latter 3 groups I mentioned.

Re:The list of suspects

You mention all these people as if there has to be a motive other than "its a popular site." It was most likely a 13 year old.

Re:explain me ?

Can anyone explain the torrent principle ?

Suppose server X hosts a really popular large file of, say, 100MB in size. Suppose that server only has 1MB/sec upstream bandwith. Suppose users A and B both want the file. The server needs to send the file twice, once for A and once for B. Obviously, this takes twice as long as sending the file just once. And if there's two more people, C and D, also downloading the file, it needs to be sent four times and takes four times as long as sending it only once. In other words, the more people are downloading the file, the slower each download gets.

The torrent principle tries to solve this problem. The idea is that A and B start downloading different parts of the large file. For example, A could start downloading the first half and B the second half. Once A has downloaded some of the file, he starts sending it to B, and B does the same. Suppose, for the sake of simplicity, that both A and B have the same bandwith as the server, and that everyone has the same up- and downstream bandwith.

Now, A is getting the file from server X at 1/2 MB per second. A is also downloading the file from B at 1/2 MB per second, and thus is getting a combined speed of 1 MB/sec. The same goes for B.

This is the torrent principle: use the upstream bandwith of downloaders to help ease the load on server.

Now, A and B need to learn about each other's existence in order to cooperate in this way. In BitTorrent, this is done via a tracker. You download a small torrent file, which contains the address of the tracker, the names and sizes of the files in this torrent, and checksums for each part of the file (to prevent people from sending fake parts). Someone generated this torrent file from file(s) he had on his computer, uploaded it to a torrent tracker, and then launched BitTorrent. BitTorrent checks the files against the checksums, notices that there is no pieces missing, and thus doesn't try to download any - just upload (making it a so-called "seed"). It then connects to a tracker and lets it know that "I'm here". When someone else uses this torrent file, their BitTorrent client connects to the tracker, asks for addresses of peers, and starts downloading pieces from them (and uploading pieces to them - there is a simple "tit for tat" method that ensures that you serve best the nodes which upload to you, thus ensuring that everyone will indeed participate). Once a node gets all the file pieces and has thus finished the download, it becomes a "seed" and keeps on uploading untill the user terminates it.

So, the trackers are absolutely vital for BitTorrent; without them, the clients can not learn about each other, and thus can't connect to each other and up- and download.

Re:explain me ?

Suppose, for the sake of simplicity, that both A and B have the same bandwith as the server, and that everyone has the same up- and downstream bandwith.

Of course, we all know that's never true which is the problem with other P2P software. ADSL and cable modems unfairly favor downloading (consuming) content rather than uploading (serving). This is just another example of the corporate world trying to control the dissemination of information. There's no good technical reason they couldn't run a symmetrical DSL signal over your voice line like they do ADSL, they just don't want to. It's the same reason many of these ISPs still require you to login via PPPoE and get a dynamic IP for your "always on, high speed dedicated connection". They're stuck in a 1995 mentality of dialup users consuming content rather than sharing information. Dynamic IPs on cable and DSL really bug me. You can get one plan with dynamic IP and PPPoE from SBC for $29/month, but add in a static IP and suddenly you're looking at $75/month. WTF? You need to account for that customer using an IP address whether you assign it dynamically or whether it is static... why the rape on static prices?

Re:explain me ?

The corporate world isn't trying to control the dissemination of information. They are protecting their profits. It's not necessary for them to have symetric lines for most DSL customers as their downloading habits are very much skewed towards the download bandwidth. It's also cheaper for them to provide aDSL service then it is to provide sDSL. Upload bandwidth I beleive is more expensive, bit for bit, then the download. There is also distance limitations on the speeds available. sDSL may work well at relative slow speeds, but once you get to faster speeds, the upload speeds greatly reduce. Verizon offers download speeds between 768kbit@18,000 feet and and 7.1mbit@9,000 feet. There is no way that they can provide 7.1mbit upload speeds@9,000 feet.

Dynamic IP addresses are used for several reasons. The first is that it discourages customers from running servers. It doesn't eliminate it, but it makes it more of an inconvienence.

Those that truly need static addresses typically are willing to pay a premium for it. Business customers for instance. They can't afford to have e-mail not delivered or their website unavailable during that short period when an IP address may be updated. In this case, it is about the $$$. Most ISPs will renew a lease so in effect your dynamic address is typically static, but it's not guaranteed though.

Dynamic addresses are also cheaper for the ISP. In many cases the addresses aren't actually owned by the ISP but instead "leased" to them. The ISP ends up paying for each one of them. If they give everyone static, they need to have 1 or more addresses per customer. If they hand them out on a as-needed basis, they can save money as not everyone needs one at all times. At most they would need the same number of addresses as what they would need with static. At the least, they would need 1 per active customer. As leases expire the addresses can be reused, reducing the total number of addresses needed over the long term.

PPPoE is used because it can simplify the back end support and accounting process for the ISP as they can use essentially the same system for both dialup and DSL customers. If everyone is essentially treated as a PPP customer, regardless of the actual connection method, the same authenticaion servers can be used, the same tracking/billing servers, etc. ISPs didn't have to get another set of conectivity to migrate dialup users over to DSL.

Stinks of RIAA

RIAA adopting Lycos's tactics?

Some possibilities to check out

You know, I have 5 moderator points, and I just couldn't find a single good post to mod up, here. So I'll say what I think needs saying.

How do you know that the Lycos spam-DDoS screen saver *isn't* what is taking out bittorrent?

I can think of a number of possibilities, any of which might be worth investigation.

(1) - As was mentioned elsewhere, it *could* be that lycos is leasing its services out to the RIAA.

(2) - It could be that the spammers are using Bittorrent servers

(3) - It could be that the spammers have hijacked the bittorrent servers (as I understand, a lot of bittorrent hijacking has come from China. Perhaps not coincidentally, a lot of spammers use servers in China to host their activities.)

(4) - It could be that the spammers have somehow masked their servers' real identities to look like bittorrent servers.

There are a few possibilities that might be worth checking out. Anyhow, I'll hold onto my 5 points, I guess. Shoot, I might just deposit them in the bank and wait till inflation takes em out.

Slashdot just ain't what it used to be (as you can tell by looking at my low slashdot ID number).

Re:Some possibilities to check out

I must be a long-time member. I don't think I've ever been able to respond to a "low slashdot ID" comment with "that's not low, you nube".

To add insult to injury...

As if that weren't enough, now they'll most certainly feel some variant of the Slashdot effect as people try to check it out. Way to go!

Re:To add insult to injury...

As if that weren't enough, now they'll most certainly feel some variant of the Slashdot effect

No linky in the blerb. Most of slashdot has adopted the custom of simply middle-clicking a link to a new tab and then avoiding all forms of digesting information from that opened link (it's what's fashionable now). I seriously doubt the average Slashdot reader will take the time to resort to the arcane practice of TYPING URLs simply to simulate the view of smoldering server ashes. They'll wait until IBM releases the their next voice-to-text software program ("UNCLE SPEAK & SPELL, ENTERPRISE EDITION") for that.

Although I was hoping for a link in the blerb. Maybe that would induct "Best Gang-Raping of a Server" into the awards section.

Flaw in your logic

You have a fatal flaw in your logic. You are assuming that people will read the article.

I can see it now...

Future Slashdot headline: Lycos apologizes for wrongly targeted DDoS attacks

Re:I can see it now...

Suprnova traffics in torrent files, not copyrighted material. Of the content represented by those torrents, pretty much all of it is legal in some parts of the world.

suprnova.com and .net

I would like to know whether suprnova.com and suprnova.net were hit by the DDoS attacks. They try and maky money of the popularity of suprnova.org and there are a number of people that actually get suckered into paying those sites.

So it's time to...

So it's time to switch to a serverless network under an open-source project? You mean something like Kademlia in the eMule [emule-project.net]?

Next-gen P2P?

So it's time to switch to a serverless network under an open-source project?

A network with no central servers or even 'supernodes' reduces the effect of DoS-attacks, and leaves no single person or company to attack with a lawsuit. But that alone isn't enough. Other problems remain, like the privacy issue. Many P2P networks reveal IP addresses of nodes on 'the other end'. Thus, after retrieval of a file, you know from what IP address(es) the file came from. That leaves the network vulnerable for attacks or legal steps against individual users.

To prevent this, it must be impossible to find out who/where a retrieved file (or search query) actually came from (IP, geographical location or otherwise).

Besides the well known Freenet [freenetproject.org], there's another promising one called ANts [sourceforge.net]. From what I can tell, it works by passing data between nodes, without passing info on the endpoints where data is coming from/going to. Each node passes data on, but doesn't know if the next node will keep it, or in turn pass it on to yet another node in a path. IP addresses are replaced with a virtual 'network ID' (regularly discarded), and combined with encryption, a single node can't tell what it's passing on, where it came from, or where it's going. IP addresses are only known for a few neighbours it contacts directly. For an analogy, think anonymous remailers. The project page also mentions something similar called MUTE [sourceforge.net]. I guess you could call projects like this 3rd generation P2P networks. Looking forward to it! (and please add if you know more like these)

Re:Next-gen P2P?

There's also GNUnet [ovmj.org], which is similar to Freenet but with files broken up into equal-sized chunks to allow parallel downloads. All these systems are fine for avoiding an adversary like the RIAA that has limited powers and only wants to collect a few IP addresses for lawsuits, but they shouldn't be considered anonymous or censorship-resistant in any strong sense. Freenet, MUTE and JetiAnts can be DOSed pretty easily and GNUnet's anonymity can be undermined [ovmj.org]. I'm researching censorship-resistant communication for my PhD so I've got a literature review [ucl.ac.uk] and bibliography [ucl.ac.uk] online if you're interested.

bad guys

Whoever was responsible, it surely isn't one of the many-many, oh yes, and many other :) people, who use bittorent regularly to fetch stuff. That is, we all have some hunch who might be the bad guy: a). those who oppose all forms of sharing (won't name them, you know those bad, bad, bad guys in associations :) needn't have been themselves personally, but you know this alright b). somebody who just has something against suprnova or the others.

Re:bad guys

The sad thing is that it probably wasn't the MPAA or the RIAA. I've seen this over and over on several IRC networks (dalnet especially). Some idiot gets banned from their favorite channel, and instead of taking it like a man or going home and crying themselves to sleep, they get pissed off and start DDoSing the entire network. Since they got kicked, they have to ruin the fun for everyone.

I'm sure that in the end it will be something along these lines: someone in the forum started flaming, words were exchanged, feelings were hurt, and some pimply-faced 14 year old decided to get even.

Own protocol?

Suprnova's interest in making their own protocol.

I am all up for new protocols, but there is a reason why we do not have:

http, httmyp, tthpp, hhtp, mshttp [I wouldnt doubt], SCOhttp, HPhttp

Don't fragment the issues, work on a common protocol, if we can uncouple protocol and application (which has happened in all major networks I think) then good.

Go for it supe..r..pr..nva...! but make it open.

I kinda knew bit torrents would be attacked, can't they just publish the ip's that are attacking them, and get us to click on them a bit?

teardrop attack?

Fracturing is inevitable...

...there's just too many variables that are directly opposing.

Central vs decentral
Peers vs supernodes vs superservers vs tracker
Anonymity vs speed
Integrity vs fuzzy search
Search by content vs by index vs by hash vs...
Routing vs direct links
Indexing vs index poisoning
Trust vs anonymity
Leeching vs control

It is impossible to create a network that can achieve all of them at once.

Http is by comparison a trivial protocol. It involves only the connection between two hosts. Creating a virtual network of P2P clients is more like reimplementing the whole of layers 3 (IP), 4 (TCP), 5 (sessions) in the OSI model.

Kjella

Dammit!

I knew I shouldn't have installed that new screensaver from the MPAA.

Who's to say

That some Hollywood company didn't just wait for the Lycos thing to set a precedent? What's good for the goose is good for the gander in their book.

I hope they do make their own protocol

I've used bittorrent a fair bit for downloading and upload large files which either I own the copyright to, or the person distributing them does.

It's very good indeed when you want to distribute something from a slowish adsl line to maybe 30 or 40 people.

I was somewhat dismayed when I first found out anout these bittorrent file sharing sites because they are leading to bittorrent being considered a tool for "illegal" file sharing when it's clearly a very useful general tool too.

Of course I'm not happy thay they be DDOSed but it would be nice if they did invent their own protocol and leave bittorrent to those who don;t want to use it for possibly "illegal" activities.

A perfect example

This is a perfect example of why it's not quite right to take the law into your own hands against someone who you **feel** is wrong.
I have had my site targeted before, and I run a completely legit, whitehat site. Just because someone thinks they're better off financially without a competitor does not mean he's justified to try to take me down.

The culprit

Lets see now....

I would be interested in doing a DDoS attack like this...

1. If I was a rival service trying to kill these guys.
2. If I were MPAA and wanted to kill these buggers off Blaster style.
3. If I were some dumb script kiddie trying to make a statement because of want of attention.

Point 1 doesnt make sense because it would make more sense for my service to figure out a way to plug into the rival network and siphon off they're shares. It would get me more notice and wont get me noticed as a nasty SOB.

Point 2 is unlikely because though these agencies are a mean litigating bunch, they are unlikely to condone something like this. More so that *if* they were discovered, they would be in a LOT of trouble (read : law suits galore!)

Point 3 seems more likely. Some guys just can't get enough attention. Downing the SCO site has been done already and people seem to be running out of ripe juicy targets that'll get them noticed.

Small-timers get it too

I ran a very small BitTorrent tracker for distributing our videos. (2 torrents, very few clients)

A few weeks ago we started receiving a massive attack, mostly from client addresses in Asia.

The attack wasn't a DDoS per se - they were just "hijacking" my tracker by using it for their own torrents. But the volume of traffic (>100 requests/sec) had the effect of a DoS attack.

I was surprised that the standard BitTorrent server does not have some way to prevent unwanted torrents from appearing on your tracker. I was also surprised that my "small-time" tracker (only named by via 1 web page) attracted such a hijacking.

I will not run a tracker without the ability to deny usage to unwanted torrents. Although I'm uncertain about running any tracker at all now, since the hijack basically killed our internet connection.

At the very least, do not run a BitTorrent tracker on a critical DNS name like your primary web site. The attacking clients in my case were all performing DNS lookups. (I could tell they were attacking a DNS name, not an IP address, by changing my DNS entries). Luckily I had used a separate DNS entry for the tracker, so I just pointed it to 127.0.0.1 to stop the attack. But if I had used my primary web server's address, I'd be in real trouble.

Re:Small-timers get it too

I was surprised that the standard BitTorrent server does not have some way to prevent unwanted torrents from appearing on your tracker.

Of course BitTorrent has a way to restrict the torrents a tracker will serve.

You set --allowed_dir and point it at a directory containing the torrents you want to allow.

I know it's been supported since 3.4.1a at the latest.

Re:Small-timers get it too

I had a look at 127.0.0.1 to see what "videos" you are talking about. There's some really kinky videos there - pervert.

Re:Small-timers get it too

It's a good point about using an alternate address for your tracker - or even using an alternate static IP for that box if you have one available.

Most (all?) torrent servers offer an option to reject unauthorized external torrents though. I personally use Azureus, which is a great bittorrent client, as well as a server. There's an option in there to reject serving torrents that aren't authorized by the admin.

N.

How much is left?

Hrm, okay...

%35 of all traffic is Bittorrent [slashdot.org]

Now there's enough traffic out there to DDoS it. Networks are usually "congested" at 60%. 60% of 35 is 21. That means another 21% if "all traffic" is being used up.

~56% of the Internet is being used both for and against Bittorrent.

So we only have 4% of the Internet left before it, too, becomes congested?

I wonder how much of that 4% /. gets allocated? Although, if there are no websites left to /., will getting /.'d even matter anymore?

Huh?

I don't know what the hell your statistics prove,or even if they're right, but I do know that, wherever he or she is, your high school mathematics teacher would be proud of you.

Have you given serious thought to a career in marketing or PR? With that kind of commitment to mumbo jumbo and ridiculous statistics you'd be a natural.

Supernova is up

Supernova is up as of a few minutes ago but I can't get to Lokitorrent.

Loki's dead right now...

As of right now (0047 : 03/12/2004 GMT-8) Loki Torrent seems to be dead... Slashdot effect? or another DDos ? (or is there a difference?)

ouch..

I'm not sure who is going to give sn.org/lt.com any sympathy over this, they are just glorified warez sites, after all.

Although this DoS does highlight the largest problem with BitTorrent - it still relies on a central(tracker) server to operate.

I believe it's that specific "function" of BT that got me one of those nifty letters [dslreports.com] in the mail. I can't see any kind of a workable solution to this problem, everything that has to do with file trading has an entry point somewhere along the line.

Can someone please explain to me

Why we need another one? I mean besides the web links (which emule provides for)the reason Bittorrent has become so popular is for it's centralized nature. Not 30 thousand random files we search though, but picked files, somewhat filtered though for quality. I can't see how this is going to replicate that experiance and be decentralized. What is significantly different?

is it just me, or is there an echo?

First two flickr stories very close to each other. Now two Bit Torrent stories very close together. Ricola (Ricola) Ricola (Ricola)

Suprnova is down anyway

How is this different from how Suprnova.org has behaved lately? For the past ten days or so, they have been down more than they have been up. Either DDoS attacks have started long before Wednesday as reported, or they really are as incompetent as I thought they are when it comes to administering a web server.

(Disclaimer: I suck at Apache)

New protocols are not an answer

I find it interesting that the focus with regards to DDoS attacks that I have read about is not on proper security and precautions, but rather the client/server applications being attacked. Because your Apache server is DDoS'd, does that mean you distribute your website through ftp? Of course not, you take further security precautions and strengthen your protection against DDoS attacks. Why then should there be a need to "create a new protocol" to "protect" from attacks?

Protocols in and of themselves do not inherently have protection from these kinds of attacks. That is not the purpose of a protocol. The purpose of a protocol is to establish an agreed method of communications between two or more identified systems in a connection. This is where the problem persists: identification.

DDoS is not successful because it overrides the buffers or socket space for connections to a server. It is successful because these sockets are kept open longer than they should be.

What a server needs is not a "secure" protocol, because any protocol (method of communication) can be compromised so long as the attacker can make the protocol believe that an identified, valid entitiy has made a connection and intends to communicate.

Instead, system administrators need to strengthen the rules in their firewalling and subsystem (kernel) to improve the latency of the socket states so that the system will not fail when attacked. I believe GNU/Linux has many tools available as well as kernel modules already available in order to accomplish much of this already.

Rather than wasting time in creating YAP (Yet Another Protocol), the time and effort may be better utilized creating the system and firewalling tools needed to combat DDoS at its root.

This brings it even further to the point of not necessarily even having to reconfigure and install and reconfigure again the varied tools needed for server-side protection, but even look as close as the router itself and the built-in firewalls there.

I believe even Cisco has given some hardware advice for DDoS here [cisco.com].

We don't necessarily need to be creating so much as we should be perfecting and improving.

A DDoS is not the only reason

The best answer to a distributed attack is a distributed network. If no node in the network is essential to its operation, such an attack isn't possible.

suprnova.org probably doesn't want to be the world's supplier of content, even without the DDoS part. I find your reasoning completely backwards. Why should your Apache server be the only server?

If you had a dozen mirrors hosted around the world, it'd be much harder to take down. With web pages, you can do that. With trackers, you can not. Not yet. Because the protocol doesn't support it.

Kjella

Maybe a government...

... that is testing out the stability of the BitTorrent network. Perhaps one which has something to gain by disrupting internet traffic in general, and BitTorrent seems to make up about a third of it by recent estimates.

A Little correction....

Suprnova isn't a tracker :) If you want to put something up on it you have to find your own tracker first!

Oh great

Great, that's all we need .. now for the "bittorrent is dying" trolls !

Shonkey provider alert

The culprits are primarily unknown, but these sites were flooded beyond control from the attack.

'flooded beyond control' indeed - 'beyond control of the group monkeys pretending to be network administrators' might be a more accurate summary.

My advice is to get a better provider, one with Arbor's [arbor.net] Peakflow or similar home grown solution in place, for example.

Netcraft confirms it:

It is official; Netcraft confirms: Bittorrent is dying.

One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Bittorrent community when IDC confirmed that Bittorrent market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all P2P services. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that Bittorrent has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Bittorrent is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last [samag.com] in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.

You don't need to be a Kreskin [amdest.com] to predict Bittorrent's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Bittorrent faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Bittorrent because Bittorrent is dying. Things are looking very bad for Bittorrent. As many of us are already aware, Bittorrent continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.

Azureus is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time Azureus developers Bob Wentz and J.D. Stone only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: Azureus is dying.

Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.

BitTornado leader TheShad0w that there are 7000 users of BitTornado. How many users of burst! are there? Let's see. The number of BitTornado versus burst! posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 BitTornado users. Bittorrent posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of BitTornado posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.

Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.

All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dbblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.

Fact: *BSD is dying

Jesus Christ this trolling shit is hard to do. I know I left the other half with BSD :(

Re:Netcraft confirms it:

You can tell slashdot culture is going down the drain when even the trolls can't be bothered to send in a properly updated post.

Not just you, but the old people in Korea and Soviet Russia are absent as well. And who's imagining beowulf clusters of bittorrent sites these days, even if it's in Japan?

The ./ posts confirm it: trolling is dying!

Why do you keep mentioning SUPRnova damn it

STOP MENTIONING SUPRNOVA .. you're ruining it for everyone who actually knows what the hell it is... please stop!!!

Re:Why do you keep mentioning SUPRnova damn it

Just to clarify, the site he is talking about is this one [suprnova.org]. What he is trying to say is this: if the bad guys ever find out about it [suprnova.org], they might try to do something stupid and most likely illegal such as performing a DDOS. And we really don't want it [suprnova.org] to go down, since it is a most excellent source for TV shows, movies, games, and music.

I guess the first rule of www.suprnova.org [suprnova.org] is: don't talk about www.suprnova.org [suprnova.org].

This happened not even a week ago to eMule's IRC

Almost a week ago, eMule's [emule-project.net] default IRC network (LiquidIRC) was DDoS'ed and Floodbot'ed [emule-project.net]. LiquidIRC has been taken down for an unknown amount of time due to the attacks..

Related?

This could be more widespread than these two sites

While these two sites may be the biggest sites that we know of under DDoS attacks to me it seems to be more widespread. I am a moderator of a small Mazda enthusiast forum and we underwent a variety of DDoS attacks pretty much all night from varying addresses. I have no clue why someone would want to DDoS a small non-profit forum (we have our own server) but seems to me like Suprnova.org and the other BitTorrent sites are just collateral in a much larger game.

Luckily for us, we have a very good admin and he was updating the firewall rules pretty much left and right. Site never went down but at least we weren't posted on the front page of Slashdot either... then things would have been a bit different.

Lossless

Not too big a loss when you consider that they are torrent-stealing sites anyways.

first the spammers

and no one spoke out.
then it was bittorrent, and no one spoke up.
then its your own connection...

Still down?

lokitorrent [lokitorrent.com] is still down as of Friday morning... ouch.

Cunning spammers?

Perhaps the spam sites that are being DDOSed by Lycos include these sites, either because the DB of spam sites is wrong, or the spammers have re-directed (perhaps at DNS level) the traffic....

Semi OT: Casey & Andy

http://www.galactanet.com/comic/index.htm/ [galactanet.com] ;) Regards, Denis

RIAA as a suspect - Seriously!

While many other posters have jokingly suggested that the RIAA is culpable, and have been modded' funny', the knee jerk reaction to laugh is troublesome. I would not put it above the RIAA to carry out this sort of activity.

For example, when downloading from the Kazaa network (I still use it occasionally), the majority of 'popular' music postings up there are put up there by the RIAA and consist of nothing but static/hissing or the music intersperesed with horrid screeching noises.

This would be a legitimate tactic for the RIAA to employ, would it not, given that the RIAA could simply claim to be attacking an illegal company? Or am I simply wrapped up in conspiracy theories?

wrapping trackers into clients is a bad, bad idea

Following up on the previous story about suprnova's new client... for sites like theirs I can understand the impulse -- move the trackers off the site (and its seeders) to decrease liability.

But one of the best things about bittorrent is that it's port agnostic. The torrent file can specify the tracker on whatever port, so it's tough for industry to IP-scan for torrents. If you create a client with automatic trackers, that won't be the case, and BT traffic will be easily tracked and blocked.

bad idea!

adding the slashdot effect to a crippled net

Heisenberg would be proud.

Happens all the time

The tracker for EFNet's #tvtorrents (now at www.tvtorrents.net) seems to move every 3-4 months due to someone DDoSing the tracker.

tvtorrents.com basically died as a result of frequent DDoSing. It's still up, but only a fraction of the people that used it still do because there was a point in time where the site would be down for 1-2 weeks at a time. Too bad, tvtorrents.com's ratio enforcement resulted in really nice download rates, typically 4-5 times faster than #tvtorrents' tracker, and FAR better than Suprnova (I've only encountered ONE torrent on Suprnova so far that actually worked.)

It may *NOT* have been DDoS'd

Did anyone think about the impact that the new World of Warcraft may have had on these networks? The patch distribution is all done via Torrent effect. I am uncertain where the tracker server is located for WoW though.

MPAA, RIAA, SuprNova or KazaA?

It's gotta be either the MPAA / RIAA.

It could be SuprNova trying to make a point that they need to be decentralised!

Or the KazaA guys trying to make more people download KazaA3+Skype.

Nostalgic

Well, I have a story from 1995 in Japan when I started one of the first couple of ISPs in Japan. One guy who didn't understand the net came into our tiny humming office and said he wanted us to build a "missile" that he could use to shoot at other people (well I guess computers) through the net. I gave up talking to him and showed him the door. Is Tenet asking for manufacturers to voluntarily provide the keys and a blind eye to give the government the ability to do this sort of thing? Say to shut down a spam zombie computer or to get the street address of any node on the net? Well.. aside from that anecdote I think this calls for the following analysis.

In the following excerpt by the past head of the CIA,

line 1 is either (a) silly, (b) evil, or (c) intelligent depending on your point of view. Silly because it sounds like sticking your finger in a hole in a dike; evil because it could mean anything draconian; intelligent in case it happens to be only talking about companies running critical infrastructure, who would maybe have to take rigorous security audits or not be allowed to have those facilities online. (c) makes sense but is the lowest probability, since the talk was made intentionally very vague and without press.

Line 2 similarly is (a) silly or (b) evil if talking about anybody not running sensitive infrastructure, and (c) intelligent if talking about the critical facilities. Line 3 sounds like he wants software companies to be more careful about security. Sounds like a good thing but then again what the CIA calls security is smoke and mirrors for ulterior motives, control, and punitive damage (until recently only outside U.S. borders), whereas most other people would call building strong personal firewalls and encryption security because it keeps the individual owner safe. No stomach for multiple choice here. Perhaps he has an occupational disease which prevents him from saying anything clearly and putting himself on the line? No chance of rehabilitation for this guy. Even if he was I guess the successor of the President's father or something like that. Maybe he should take up skydiving?

My analysis is that this is a retired professional scary guy trying to be relevant but incapable of doing anything but sounding silly or scary to anyone with a brain. People without brains generally think he's smart, etc. Which is too bad because if he could learn to speak more clearly he would be more effective and might have something useful to say about dealing with cyber-security threats (though I'd rather hear from the NSA's linux team about it than from a failed spymaster). This is why businesspeople in the real world never listen to government types. They can never say anything useful about anything directly, it is always vague scariness about vapor policies with a hint of powerplay behind it. BORING 90s SHIT!

Access to networks like the World Wide Web might need to be limited to those who can show they take security seriously, he said.

Mr. Tenet called for industry to lead the way by "establishing and enforcing" security standards.

Products need to be delivered to government and private-sector customers "with a new level of security and risk management already built in."

Re:That's fine

it is more like shooting a guy because he wears a gun on the street
because we know most guns are used to kill peoples
self justice is wrong .. no matter what
think about the federal police agents burned in mexico while protecting the school from drug dealers

Re:That's fine

Indeed this is a striking comparison to the previous story about spam sites suffering drom a DDoS attack. I for one had quite different reactions to them. Perhaps this shows that I am a hypocrite. However there is another component. Spammers target individuals, infact the maority of individuals. Corperations however are not people, despite how they may be treated by the law, and I think that Bittorrent is by far less damaging to corperations than spam is to the productivity of people (not to mention their happyness). SO perhaps I do have some justification for my differnt reactions to these articles.

Re:That's fine

Please speak for yourself. The fact that you're living in a country with strict file copying/distribution laws doesn't mean this is the same in the rest of the world. At least here in the most countries of Europe there's nothing wrong with distributing copies of music, video and software.

Re:That's fine

The key word in my message is "distributing". I doubt that distributing an album to 300 people through bittorrent falls under non-commercial personal use copies

Re:That's fine

The key word in my message is "distributing". I doubt that distributing an album to 300 people through bittorrent falls under non-commercial personal use copies

And I'm sure the people distributing those copies don't believe that 70 years after the death of the artists counts as the "limited time" granted in the constitution... go figure.

Parent is a troll

google "Parallel RSync". This guy is spouting nonsense. I'd call him a karma whore, but he posed AC.

Re:That's fine

There is a slight difference in the 2 cases you're comparing. Even entirely glossing over the fact of your blantant trolling with a statement such as: "After all most bit-torrents are illegal and we all know that Dos attacks on people who break the law is fine."

In the case of spamming, millions of email accounts are sent enormous volumes of unsolicited trash, daily by both "legitimate" as well as outright fraudulent purveyors of crap.

They are spamming with the intent to profit. In the case of bittorrent not only is their content only provided when you intentionally seek it out, but there is no profit, or scamming involved.

You must be one of "those" who thinks that companies actually lose a sale when their "copyrights" are infringed.

Dilemma

I use suprnova essentially for time-shifting tv shows. For example, as I was away for thanksgiving, I missed Enterprise last Friday, and the Saturday repeat, so I downloaded it on Sunday, watched it and deleted it.

So, um, am I breaking any laws here, or what?

Re:uh?

Because Joe Blow pirates software too.

Re:That's fine

How many cars have you bought without test driving first?

Why shouldn't we have software libraries, a la public libraries containing books and sometimes music and movies?

An unfortunate reality with most available commercial software is that you have to install the software (read: the software copies itself to your computer) in order to use it. So, is this a legal grey area? Is it ok for the software to copy itself where it is not ok for you to copy the software *for* yourself?

Re:That's fine

His argument is stupid anyway. Example exploiting the stupidity of his logic:

You like when criminals are imprisioned, but would you like it if you were imprisioned?