The Poisoning of BitTorrent

O’Reilly Radar is report­ing that HBO is “poisoning” Bit­Tor­rent down­loads of their hour-​long drama Rome:

HBO is now obstruct­ing the down­loads offered by other people. Bit­Tor­rent down­loads are peer-to-peer, but the peers are intro­duced to each other by a tracker (“you’re look­ing for Rome Season 1 Episode 2, talk to 127.0.0.1″). HBO runs peers that tell the tracker they have all the chunks of the show, but then send garbage data when a down­loader requests a chunk. The down­load­ing client can detect that it’s garbage and will try another peer for the chunk, but the end result is that it takes much much longer to down­load shows.

I would care more if I didn’t have TiVo.