Institute For The Future

Guerilla Media Wars

In 2006, we published a Ten Year Forecast perspective called "Dark Mobs". Among other things, that piece argued that repeated top-down efforts to squelch file sharing actually created powerful incentives that drove the technology towards more distributed, secure architecture. The media giants, by killing Napster and Gnutella created the need for something as difficult to control as BitTorrent.

 

Well, it turns out that there is a thriving industry of consultants who get paid to disrupt BitTorrent networks, among other things by illegally launching denial-of-service attacks on the one centralized piece of infrastructure in the BitTorrent framework, the trackers that manage pointers to the file-sharing swarms.

 

Revision3 has a great post detailing the highly illegal (under at least 3 and possibly 12 federal statures) activities of these consultants to big media.