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Encrypted Torrents Growing Fast In the UK
angryphase writes "The British Phonographic Institute (the UK's RIAA) has noticed a significant increase in the amount of encrypted torrents — from 4% of torrent traffic a year ago to 40% today. Whether it follows a trend for hiding suspicious activities or an increased awareness of personal privacy is up for (weak) debate. Either way, this change of attitude is catching the eye of ISPs, music industry officials, and enforcement agencies. Matt Phillips, spokesman for the UK record industry trade association explains, 'Our internet investigations team, internet service providers and the police are well aware of encryption technology: it's been around for a long time and is commonplace in other areas of internet crime. It should come as no surprise that if people think they can hide illegal activity they will attempt to.'"
Torrent encryption was developed primarily to avoid traffic-shaping. E.g. a good percentage of those legitimately downloading Fedora 8 today via torrent will probably use encryption just to ensure a quicker download.
It's not for that.
Encryption prevents traffic analysis, which means that a router can't easily detect that something is a BitTorrent connection and throttle it.
Really this seems to be a case of "the more you tighten your grip, the more will slip through your fingers". The excessive amount of filtering first made sure that about everything learned to talk over port 80. Now they'll add encryption over that, so that ultimately a large percentage of traffic will be completely opaque and going through port 80, making it pretty much impossible to filter.
There might be a consequence for the RIAA though: It means that no traffic analysis will tell you what somebody is downloading. Sure you can see which computers and tracker are involved, but you don't know what's the file being transferred. So no way to tell anything by listening to traffic at strategic points, now you need to maintain a connection with a tracker for every file you want to monitor.
As an user this doesn't seem like such a bad thing, but as a sysadmin it has the potential of becoming quite annoying. Read on what it takes to stop Skype from working for a preview of what might become universal eventually.