Microsoft's War Against BitTorrent Ends In a RickRoll

Posted 02/20/2010 at 12:19pm | by Justin Kerr

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It's hard to condone the act of RickRolling, but desperate times call for desperate measures. In a recent blog post by Wi-Fi convention provider Codify, excessive BitTorrent traffic at last year's Tech.Ed conference in Australia forced them to take drastic action against anyone trying to file share. The cruel, yet effective weapon of choice was Rick Astley, and his now infamous song "Never Gonna Give You Up" .  

According to Codify the problem with BitTorrent users on a public Wi-Fi network isn't bandwidth, but excessive port usage. “At this point you have to remember that we have a heap of bandwidth available. Some clients chomping through a lot of bandwidth isn’t a problem and running BitTorrent isn’t a problem per se,” said  Codify’s David Connor. Several options were considered to restrict traffic, but in the end it was determined nothing short of Rick Astley could save the day. “….we implemented certain, ahem, ‘interim countermeasures’,” wrote Connor. “We quickly built a list of all of the top torrent trackers around and got the nod from Jorke [Odolphi, Web Platform Architect Evangelist for Microsoft Australia] to add them all to the local DNS resolver and point them at a local web server containing some RickRoll scripts.”

Microsoft has collected the MAC address's of offending users, but is planning on enforcing a mandatory registration process prior to the next event to help identify users on the network. My guess is that this is to prevent any lawsuits for cruel and unusual punishment due to accidental Rickroll exposure.

Does the punishment fit the crime? If you can correctly answer the question pictured above, you have my sympathies.