An up-and-coming Russian tech startup gained financial backing from Microsoft for developing a new technology that claims to shut down illegal downloads through torrents.
Pirate Pay (a homage to the prominent file-sharing site The Pirate Bay) has apparently stopped thousands of illegal downloads during a project carried out with big-time producers.
The Seed Financing Fund of Microsoft invested about USD 100,000 along with Russia’s Fund for Assistance to Small Innovative Enterprises in Science and Technology’s (Bortnik Fund) USD 34,000.
The founding team responsible for the project is composed of three Russian programmers — brothers Alexei and Andrei Klimenko together with Dmitry Shuvaev. Initially, they planned to build a program that could handle traffic management for file-sharing. But they soon realized that it could have other useful applications.
Pirate Pay CEO Andrei told Norton Scientific Journal, “After creating the prototype, we realised we could more generally prevent files from being downloaded, which meant that the program had great promise in combating the spread of pirated content.”
Pirate Pay would not really say how the system works but it is widely speculated that it floods torrent servers with bogus requests until they get warnings and terminate communication. This is because in order to download a file using torrent, one must need to know the IP address of another PC that has the file.
“We used a number of servers to make a connection to each and every P2P client that distributed this film. Then Pirate Pay sent specific traffic to confuse these clients about the real IP addresses of other clients and to make them disconnect from each other.”
Though not all the goals were accomplished, almost 50,000 users were not able to finish their downloads.
“It was not so hard to do from inside an ISP’s network. But to turn the technology into global service, we had to convince all ISPs to acquire our solution. That is what some could call mission impossible. So to create a global service, we had to find the way to do it from the cloud. So we needed money for development.” Andrei added.
He confirmed that high-level backing indeed permits their firm to turn its concepts into a profitable business.
They said that the service might cost customers from USD 12,000 to USD 50,000 but it still depends on the level of defense required. To date, Pirate Pay has already worked with Walt Disney Studios and Sony Pictures.
The U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation has been hearing submissions regarding NASA's 2013 budget request and on the priorities, plans and progress of the U.S. space program.
Witnesses appearing before the Committee on March 7 included Charles F Bolden Jr, NASA's Administrator, and Dr Neil deGrasse Tyson, an astrophysicist and well known commentator on space exploration.
Bolden, who flew on four space shuttle missions after a career in the Marine Corps, was appointed to lead NASA in 2009 after being nominated by President Obama. Administrator Bolden outlined the space agency's achievements in 2011 and updated the Committee on the status of current missions. His statement outlined how the requested budget of $17.7 billion for 2013 would be allocated and concluded by stating:
"NASA's FY 2013 budget request of $17.7 billion represents a substantial investment in a balanced program of science, exploration, technology and aeronautics research. Despite the constrained budget environment facing the Nation, this request supports a robust space program that keeps us on a path to achieving a truly audacious set of goals. NASA is working to send humans to an asteroid and ultimately to Mars, to observe the first galaxies form, and to expand the productivity of humanity's only permanently-crewed space station. We are making air travel safer and more efficient, learning to live and work in space, and developing the critical technologies to achieve these goals. The coming year will include the first commercial cargo flights to the ISS, a nuclear powered robot the size of a small car landing on the surface of Mars, and the launch of the Nation's next land observing satellite. We have spacecraft studying the Sun, circling Mercury, cruising to Pluto and investigating almost everything inbetween. In the face of very difficult times, the American p