Busted: BitTorrent Pirates at Sony, Universal and Fox
torrentfreak.com
torrentfreak.com
>In a response [another copyright advocate caught 'stealing'] issued a press release stating that their IP-addresses were spoofed. A very unlikely scenario, but one that will be welcomed by BitTorrent pirates worldwide. In fact, we encourage Sony, Universal and Fox to say something similar. After all, if it’s so easy to spoof an IP-address, then accused file-sharers can use this same defense against copyright holders.
Could such a defense be expected to work ? Has it ever ?
Obviously the next step for the You Have Downloaded site is to track in real-time and say "This IP is currently downloading x,y,z."
The large-scale translators on the headends are the reality for quite a few service providers already.
So, the "IP address does not correspond to an individual" is not just a mere viewpoint gaining momentum, but an emerging hard technical fact. ;-)
As for unique ID - it's already doable and being done without any IPv6. Read up on evercookie. There was an article on HN a while ago about a bunch of advertisers doing just that.
This is worse than the government having it - not only it gets abused, but someone gets rich on this.
(source ip, source port, dest ip, dest port, protocol)
For protocols that don't have ports, then it is this tuple:
(source ip, dest ip, protocol)
that needs to be unique.
Openbsd's pf works that way, I'd be utterly shocked if any other linux or bsd kernel-integrated nat system worked any differently.
one-up-manship sucks, but correct information is beneficial. ;)
The problem with the term "NAT" as "Network Address Translation" is the term is often misused/incorrect; most all modern "NAT" implementations are actually "PNAT" ("Port and Network Address Translation") where the translator system modifies both the source address and source port rather than just modifying the source address.
For notes, the earliest translation implementations really were just address modification, and hence, really were plain "NAT," but the problem of conflicting port numbers is the reason why just about every implementation moved to PNAT.
When running a PNAT implementation, you can exhaust the number of available TCP ports with enough load from client systems. The number of available TCP ports is typically, but incorrectly, stated as 2^16 ports, but in practice, you can't use all of them.
Getting around the TCP port count limitation is entirely possible, and regularly done in large scale networks. The early implementations were standard "proxy systems/servers" (typically requiring client-side configuration like, address, port, user/pass, etc.). More modern implementations are "transparent proxies" and require no client-side configuration. Transparent proxy implementations (typically) count on PNAT in order to be "transparent" to the client systems and prevent the need for client-side configuration.
The mental leap one needs to make in order to understand how to get past the TCP port count limitation is, understanding that a single public IP address can be shared by multiple systems simultaneously without NAT/PNAT or proxies. There are many ways to do it from "load balancing appliances," to CARP (Common Address Resolution Protocol - free in OpenBSD), to VRRP (Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol - patented by Cisco), to other methods. This is often combined with multiple stateful firewalls where all of the firewalls share their state tables.
Similarly, pools of public IP addresses can also be shared amongst multiple systems simultaneously. Let's say your shared state table already has an entry with your source of "aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd port 1331", with a pool of address, you now have your choice of changing either the port number or the source address. --This isn't particularly precise, but it is a good way to reason through it.
AOL used to (and maybe still does?) run some humongous transparent proxies. If you search around, you'll find some (historic?) complaints from sites about not being able to block trolls or malicious traffic from jerks on AOL without blocking everyone on AOL. The only IP the site owners got was the from the small block dedicated to the AOL transparent proxies. I think this issue may have been resolved by the "proxy-for" header being added eventually (i.e. often called a "non-anonymous proxy"), but my recollection is a bit fuzzy.
The point to take away from this is, AOL, at its height, was able to stuff all of it's millions of users behind a couple dozen proxies/IP's, so the number of TCP ports is only a limitation in theory, but it's not a limitation in practice.
Yogi Beara once said, "In theory, practice and theory are the same, but in practice, they're not."
That's mainly why I wrote “at most” instead of trying to compute the exact available number, yes.
You don't even theoretically need application-layer gateways to multiply the effective number of ports by a large factor for common loads, of course, as I mentioned; I just erroneously thought such technique was not in common use, per my reply to eggnet.
For the reference to some of the port restricted NATs, take a look at http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-jennings-behave-test-result...
As for cultural expectation, yes, the port-restricted cone NATs are a pain.;-)
The best excuse is probably, "I installed some malware and I guess it turned my box into a torrent gateway".
Unless the law says that you are responsible for everything that happens on your internet connection. I don't know if or where this is the case, but it seems realistic and even reasonable.
Ignorance of the law isn't a plausible defense in the eyes of the law, but you when you have so many parties besides yourself involved, I would think it would be easier to claim it was something on their end.
* There are no mainstream TCP stacks that have the vulnerability you're alluding to (poorly randomized sequence numbers).
* Even during the Mitnick/Shimomura days, the attack only got you the transmit side, not the receive side; it was sufficient to push an RSH command, but not to dump a file.
* There are network-level controls that make this attack more difficult; for instance, ISPs increasingly do reverse path filtering to ensure they're only egressing traffic from their own ISP space (we'd watch this happen while monitoring DDoS attacks at Arbor, seeing "randomized" source addresses constrained to prefixes from specific ASNs).
There is still IP spoofing, but it's got dollar signs attached to it, significant enough to merit BGP tampering.
When laypersons claim to be victims of spoofing, they are overwhelmingly likely to be full of it.
I couldn't possibly be less interested in the politics of Bittorrent and labels ("Movie theater employees caught sneaking into shows without tickets --- FILM AT 11") and admit to reading this thread only out of masochism, but my nerd brain can't get past 'jrockway talking about IP spoofing; if it was anyone else, sure, but 'jrockway should know what he's talking about here. :)
I have no idea whether/how people spoofed IP addresses (across the wide-area Internet) in 1990.
What prevents a tracker to mix up some random IP. How do you know that it is not correct unless your torrent client tries to connect to it?
The stink of hypocrisy is to ask others to do what you are unwilling to do yourself.
I am sure all of the companies involved have a "no piracy" company policy on their books with severe penalties (probably reprimands leading to dismissal on repeated offenses). If they are unwilling to enforce their own policies on their own employees, they are being hypocrites, not leaders.
Even then, while downloading you're generally uploading as well, so you could still be charged with distribution.
Maybe I don't fully understand your comment but every tracker will tell you what IPs are currently connected. That is what trackers do, that is the very feature that make them trackers.
So, your disclaimer is reduced to "I am legally allowed to redistribute this media". Which is pointless. It's inherently implied by the fact that you are redistributing the work. Unless you are breaking the law - in which case, why would lying about it bother you?
Oh, yes, I am totally authorised to redistribute this media. And these genuine Rolex watches I am selling for $20 fell off the back of a truck. They are definitely not fakes infringing on trademarks, nor are they actual genuine articles which are stolen and being fenced, no siree!
Our lawyers told us it wasn't useful (and might have been harmful) to our case so we never did anything with the information.