Interesting idea for internet security?

[Technical Ben]

Use a DOS attack to take out those labelled criminals.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/05/13/pirate_pay_dos_against_torrents/

I wonder how long it will be before we get people posting on here because Microsoft/Disney/etc have blocked the wrong person or connection with a DOS attack. 

[edit]
Oh, and I mean "labelled criminals" because there is no hint of legal or police action here. It's one company taking payments to DOS users computers at the request of another company. At no point does any company check if they have a legal right to. See ACS law for why this is such a bad start. That's before we even get any hint of check to make sure no false positives or innocent users are attacked! 

Interestingly, if someone was to literally steal from you, you would have no recompense to attack them or their property in a legal manner. Strange how that does not apply in all cases.

[D-Dan]

In fact, there's no suggestion that there even has to be suspected legal infringement about this technology. It blocks torrents, pure and simple, and whilst testing has been restricted to a single title, I would imagine that commercial deployment would be against the protocol in general.

This will, of course, impact on Linux distributions, and unsigned independent artists, musicians, filmmakers etc. who use BitTorrent to get their work heard/seen in the hope that the "right" people see it to enable them to monetise their efforts later. This being the case, any such DOS attack against BitTorrent would not only harm innocent users, but may actively cost honest content owners money.

EDIT: Hmm, it may actually be nice to see a small bedroom musician suing a large music label for loss of earnings, arbitrarily calculated on the basis of an unreasonable figure plucked out of the air and calculated ultimately to have cost them £10 Billion in lost sales.

[pctech]

there was an interesting experiment some time ago that launched DDOS attacks against spam hosts using a client that the user voluntarily installed, thus donatiing their CPU cycles and upstream bandwidth.

It was abandoned as it was flooding the major backbones with traffic and distabilising some of the routers.

[SSK]

In England and Wales such DOS attacks would probably be illegal.
The Police and JUstice Bill 2006 says:

34 Unauthorised acts with intent to impair operation of computer, etc
For section 3 of the 1990 Act (unauthorised modification of computer material)
there is substituted—
3 Unauthorised acts with intent to impair operation of computer, etc.
(1) A person is guilty of an offence if—
(a) he does any unauthorised act in relation to a computer; and
(b) at the time when he does the act he has the requisite intent and
the requisite knowledge.
(2) For the purposes of subsection (1)(b) above the requisite intent is an
intent to do the act in question and by so doing—
(a) to impair the operation of any computer,
(b) to prevent or hinder access to any program or data held in any
computer, or
(c) to impair the operation of any such program or the reliability of
any such data,
whether permanently or temporarily.
(3) The intent need not be directed at—
(a) any particular computer;
(b) any particular program or data; or
(c) a program or data of any particular kind.

Also, according to wikipedia
"Denial-of-service attacks are considered violations of the IAB's Internet proper use policy, and also violate the acceptable use policies of virtually all Internet service providers. They also commonly constitute violations of the laws of individual nations."