ISPs Fight Against Encrypted BitTorrent Downloads

oglsmm writes to mention an Ars Technica article about a new product intended to detect and throttle encrypted BitTorrent traffic. When torrents first saw common use ISPs would throttle the bandwidth available to them, in order to ensure connectivity for everyone. Some clients began encrypting their data to get around this, and the company Allot Communications is now claiming their NetEnforcer product will return the advantage to the ISPs. From the article: "Certainly, increasing BitTorrent traffic is a concern for ISPs. In early 2004, torrents accounted for 35 percent of all traffic on the Internet. By the end of that year, this figure had almost doubled, and some estimate that in certain markets, such as Asia, torrent traffic uses as much as 80 percent of all bandwidth. However, BitTorrent is an extremely important tool that has many uses other than what everyone assumes it is good for, namely movie piracy."

Comments

Bit Torrent based persistant game world

[RingDev]

Kinda off topic, but I've been tossing around the idea of a BT based MMO. Uptime and seeding are used to determine property ownership. Higher up time on seeds would result in players owning buildings that they seed. Groups of players (or a single player with near 100% up time on the seed) could own land used to host other player's properties. No idea on what the point of the game would be, the danger is that the data is always going to be in the enemy's hands, so it would have to be socially based instead of competetively based.

Anyway, I just thought it could be a fun way to use existing technology for a legal purpose.

-Rick

Re:Many other uses

[eno2001]

I just like posting annoying comments to see how fast they get modded down or up. But I'm not a troll. ;P

Not a concern

[bberens]

Cisco stock was something like $150 in the late nineties to early 2ks during the dot boom. Guess what? All of those Cisco contracts are for 7 years. All of that old hardware is about to be replaced with more modern equipment. Cisco, and other hardware companies in that space, are about to see another boon. Buy some stock, CSCO is already at $22 up from a dismal $14 a few months ago. When this transition takes place our government will give all the telcos more truckloads of money and then some higher quality bandwidth will trickle down to us. You read it here first folks!