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BitTorrent and End to End Encryption

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the end-runs-and-other-oddities dept.

An anonymous reader writes "As ISPs like Shaw and Rogers throttle their bandwidth to counter the growth of BitTorrent, BitTorrent developers are fighting back with end to end encryption. Oddly enough, Bram Cohen, the original brains behind BitTorrent, doesn't support this direction. Is there really anything he can do about it?"

6 of 494 comments (clear)

  1. Re:What are ISPs selling? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Troll

    * You want to $40/Mbps per month measured by 95th-percentile?

    Take all the network you need or want subject to minimal terms & conditions and comes with a robust SLA you can hold me to.

    * You want $30/month for "unlimited" broadband?

    That comes with a very restrictive AUP (no servers, no P2P) and I'll get around to fixing an outage when the mood hits.

    * Oh, you ignored/violated the AUP?

    Tough. You're disconnected and here's a bill for early termination.

    There's no such thing as a free lunch. Grow up.

  2. In Soviet Russia ... by SamoVasGledamo · · Score: 0, Troll

    Torrents encrypt YOU!

  3. Re:BitTorrent and Who? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    shut up

  4. Argh by Sloppy · · Score: -1, Troll
    I generally support encryption, but the problem with this, is that the ideal system for spreading popular content would not encrypt, because you want all the in-between systems to be able to see what you're doing. Why? So they can serve you from a cache.

    Bittorrent sucks. People should just use the web (yes, the web!), with a hierarchy of transparent caches. That would eliminate so much inefficiency.

    "Waah! But I want bittorrent, so 'they' can't track me down and hold me accountable for copyright infringement." Yeah, right, "they" can't see where packets are coming from when they request a file. Sheesh, you pirates are all such morons.

    --
    As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
  5. Packet *HEADER* by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    It's the header that's encrypted. This will be throttled really fucking quick, because "normal" HTTP/HTTPS/FTP packets don't have encrypted headers. Internet service providers will cut this shit off at the dick. It'll be a broke-dick bittorrent client and tracker.

    What they've got to do is reformat this into encrypted http traffic. If you're an Islamic terrorist son-of-a-bitch, you've got to masquerade as a pregnant lady. Same thing applies to bittorrent. If you're a rebel socalist Che-Guevera-mp3-downloading-son-of-a-bitch, you've got to make your traffic look like regular old http/pop granny-checking-her-email.

    If you obfuscate the traffic, you will get real-life old grannies calling the god damn cable company, wondering why her fucking email takes so long to send pictures of the grandkids to all the other grannies. And upload digital photos to be printed and shipped to customers, and all kind of other average-joe-New-Yorker uploading traffic.

    Those grannies will show up on Jerry Springer and (eventually) Fox News, and ISP's stock prices will fucking plummet, and they'll stop shaping and start setting quotas.

    Just encrypting headers is a good start, but you've got to masquerade, too.

  6. Re:Encryption isn't the solution we need, or want. by Sithgunner · · Score: 0, Troll

    Why don't you people stop uploading/downloading illegaly obtained copyrighted material for good?