Microsoft helping Russians to kill Bit Torrent
Russian BitTorrent-Killer project sponsored by Microsoft 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 from Microsoft’s seed investment fund, and another $US34,000 from the Bortnik Fund. The company they have founded, called Pirate Pay, also claims to have conducted successful proof-of-concept tests, blocking “50,000” downloads of the movie Vysotsky: Thanks go God I’m Alive in the month after its release. What’s not clear, either from the original story or the TorrentFreak follow-up , is exactly how the technology works. From the hints dropped by Andrei Klimenko, Pirate Pay operates what is essentially a BitTorrent-specific, cloud-based denial of service. “We used a numb...