HBO is blocking BitTorrent downloads of the new show Rome by obstructing the downloads offered by other people.

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. This isn’t the first time when HBO wants to stop online distribution of video materials but it’s the most effective until now.

The downloaders don’t just stay, they fight back with systems like Peer Guardian that let them manage blacklists of fake peers. The program also lets them to autodetect new fake peers. This situation makes us think that this types of successes as HBO had, won’t have such a long life. Peer Guardian is only the beginning, and let’s hope that we won’t see distributed blacklists with a reputation system managing the blacklists like those used for spam.