Vista Beta torrent site ordered to cease and desist

[zachig]

This is what happens when you try to help Microsoft out...:wink:

A WINDOWS VISTA torrent tracker, which does not seem to have been involved in any illegal activity, was shut down after its owners received a Cease-and-Desist letter from the Vole.
"VistaTorrent.com" was set up by Chris Pirillo and Jack Ludington to help distribute Windows Vista Beta 2.
Chris and Jack thought that they were doing a good thing, especially after a spokesVole said, "Demand for Beta 2 has been huge - which was expected. But we are hitting ceilings on bandwidth. Right now we are serving out product keys 10x faster than we can serve the downloads. Already this is the biggest software download event in history. We are pumping out bits as fast as we can. If we pushed out bits any faster there would be a measureable impact for the Internet".

Go on reading HERE (http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=32462).

[Kougar]

Anyone in the know knew that MS publicly stated the primary reason they decided against using Bit-torrent for Vista distribution is because they couldn't guarantee the validity of the copy across the network. It'd make for a nice target for someone to slip anything they wanted into the install package, then seed it up there which would affect/infect the entire torrent in short order.

Even though torrents have hash checks to prevent this, it's still bypassible. I easily managed to unintentionally corrupt an entire torrent by seeding the original file, even though the hash set checked out for it before I began seeding.