Protect Your P2P Privacy

BillGatesInABikini writes "APC Magazine has a short piece on protecting your privacy online while using P2P software with the likes of Peerguardian (Windows) and MoBlock (Linux). It's concise and to the point, and a real eye opener if you don't currently protect yourself while using P2P for transferring files, legitimate or otherwise."

Comments

WTF -- Are the editors retarded?

[FallLine]

Posting this article as if it were some brilliant nugget of wisdom is just plain retarded.

First, these tools truly do not anonymize your P2P activity. All they do is block whole groups of IP addresses. The blocked addresses are presumably the record labels and other alleged "bad actors".

Second, the assumption that this is an effective means of blocking the record labels or other entities from finding out what you are up to is seriously flawed. The breadth of the IP groups that these tools block are bound to yield many false positives (many innocent and unrelated sites get blocked). Additionally, they are fundamentally flawed because they presume that RIAA/MPAA/etc will confine their activity to obvious named entities and not one or several cable modems leased from comcast. Even when this monitorer has been active reporting copyright violations and such, there is generally no reliable means for these list-makers to establish which IP actually was responsible for the original observation/evidence gathering. Even if the list-makers could presumably establish that, they would need to ban whole blocks of IPs on dynamic networks (e.g., all of Comcast in LA) to just to block that one account...

Third, using these tools as akin to admitting you are committing piracy because the only concievable utility is to attempt to hide from industry. Though I personally believe that almost all of these P2P systems are used almost exclusively, in practice, for various forms of copyright infringement, with the exception of BitTorrent (which has clear legit uses), using these tools basically just reinforces that you are trying to hide your actions from a particular set of people, namely, RIAA, MPAA, and other related organizations that are trying to enforce copyright.

You might argue that the powers that be are misreporting violations, but I, for one, do not buy into the notion that users would go through the trouble of installing this tool (and all the pains that go with it) just to try to escape the very remote chance that RIAA/MPAA will falsely report your linux distro download as a piracy.

Re:Azureus plugin

[urbanriot]

I think you mean "safepeer" plugin for Azurues. I don't know how you could compare the two - Moblock runs on Linux using iptables, interfacing with the kernel whereas safepeer runs within Azureus. Personally I've had issues with the safepeer plugin in the past utilizing considerable resources and not responding after importing massive IP ranges but that may have changed in the last year or so.

Re:Interesting "fluff" article for the everyman.

[putch]

agreed. but from my experience these programs are more useful for stopping bad blocks. i started using Peer Guardian about a year ago. i was trying to get the latest ep of an HBO show and it kept failing. other people were commenting on the same torrent that it was legit. but after three tries it still wasn't working. PG gets updated from the community to block those known to be corrupting torrent networks. most torrent clients these days will auto block an ip after a certain number of bad blocks. but this will stop you from ever connecting to the ones that are already known.

will this stop me from getting sued? probably not. but, anecdotally at least, it helps speed up downloads.