Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
I'm curious. Do we all have a right (by DMCA in US) or otherwise to the encryption we put on our data? Does it take a court order or other legal instrument to lawfully break encryption? IANAL, but I would think that decrypting the traffic would be unreasonable search and invasion of privacy myself.
From my research into the daily actions of differing people I meet and know, I would say that legal actions are hidden more closely than illegal ones. I grew up in a "mob town" of Rosemont, Illinois, and saw that most illegal activity was out in the open, relatively known by common citizens and the police department (both corrupt and straight). In the town I live in today, the drug dealers, prostitutes and other "criminals" are relatively out in the open also. Sure, there are a lot of criminals who attempt to obfuscate their identity or actions to try to get ahead of the law, but in reality, the best way to perform a crime profitablly is to just pay off the overseers of the law. Problem solved, and you can expand your market because you can be more open about it.
Yes it is the LEGAL activities that surprise me at how much people try to hide. Look at slashdot. My name, my real name, is right here. You can look me up and call me or visit my home. I hide nothing, why should I? Yet most of you are hiding your identities for whatever reason -- and how many of you are doing something illegal by posting here? Browse the blogs, too, and see how many people use their real names.
We hide more than that -- I brought up the question of sex (marital) with a friend, and he freaked when I asked him about his sex life. As if sex when you're married is immoral or illegal, but still people hide behind the idea that we need privacy about such matters.
Most of what the law officers do is hidden, with even FOIA acts not bringing much information to light. This is supposedly legal operations of people who serve me, and yet I have no ability to discern what they're doing, and if they're doing their jobs right. Again, hidden yet probably legal actions.
The more I look around my life, the more I am amazed at how private people are, because they're afraid that some of their actions may be construed as immoral, or immature -- yet most of the people in my life are doing the exact same thing as others, and just hiding it. We post on forums and blogs, but we feel we must keep our names private because others might see what we write, even if others are thinking the same thoughts, or if those same others pretend to believe in freedom of expression but may secretly use it against you.
In terms of encrypting torrents, I do. I run a video sharing site for church videos, and all our torrents are legal and public domain. Yet we encrypt it because unencrypted torrents seem to run slower (I'm sure there is a reason for this, but I never really inspected the protocol specs). Therefore, we encrypt not to obfuscate the legality of what we're sharing, but because the market's limitations on torrent sharing give us a need to encrypt so we can provide a higher bandwidth for the sharing of legal, public domain content.
Are most torrents legal? I have no idea, but I do use torrents to send large files to multiple people every day in a variety of markets I do business in. For me, the torrent is an awesome solution to a problem I've had for years dealing with large files.
Actually, I expect a full scale move to encryption for all web traffic. ISP's can rob the web sites (which are supported by advertising) by using deep stream filtering and reconstruction to rip out adds from the web site and replace them with adds that they are paid to display. The equipment that Comcast is using is quite capable of it. Once the web sites realize the threat by malicious middlemen, we will see them pony up for crypto hardware and move en-mass to HTTPS. At that point, essentially all traffic will be encrypted and middlemen will be blocked.
When people can communicate without government or big business listening, it must be illegal and it emboldens the terrorists!! It has to be stopped!!
Rogers Canada throttles all encrypted packets, (I use citrix to connect into work) so this year I dropped them as an ISP, and told them why. Having no problems with my current provider, and they still supported me, when I told them I was running all Ubuntu/Debian on my home network.
> Their pipes, their rules.
Except you have paid to lease that pipe with a promised level of service. XXX GB/month cap, or "unlimited" YYY MBPS means exactly what it says. Would you still pay your full electrical/gas bill if they drop your line voltage/gas pressure 90% every time you really need it? They have oversold their service and can't deliver.
My rights don't need management.
except for the vast majority of people who just run whatever "Install The Internets" package provided by their ISP; this package will add a special ISP trusted root certificate to keep the browser from reporting an invalid certificate when they transparently proxy your HTTPS sessions and replace the keys (so they can still monitor/modify your traffic)
I had a talk about P2P networks recently with someone who is very non-tech (his son has a computer, and he won't go near it without a good reason and maybe some holy water to dispell the bane that resides within, despite being anything but a religious person). We had a talk about illegal filesharing and lawsuits, and it culmunated in his question "why don't they just outlaw that crap?"
I was kinda taken aback by that and had quite some trouble retaining my calmness at the question alone. But he was dead serious. Outlaw that crap and the problem is gone.
His train of reason was that he can't check what his kid does on the computer, whether he engages in the sharing of copyrighted files and thus it's easier for him if it was just outlawed. What doesn't exist can't be a problem.
That was quite an eye opener for me, especially why crap like our current legislations can happen without any kind of resistance. Actually, there are people supporting it. Mostly because they don't know jack about the situation at all. My question why he would like to incriminate his son automatically when he uses the program was answered with "If it is illegal to have it, he can't get it". It took quite a while to explain to him that the internet is international and that it's no problem to get it from abroad.
I received a horrified blank stare at this revelation. And the quite insecure question "He can get it from abroad? He doesn't have a credit card, he can't get stuff from there."
I'm not kidding you, this is not made up, this is real. Those people do exist. They don't realize that borders are meaningless on the internet, that national laws prohibiting the possession of software don't affect a thing, except to criminalize people who did nothing wrong. I had a very hard time convincing him that a law against P2P would only harm his son, not solve the problem.
I think this was the moment when I learned that I have to reconsider my strategy for getting support against such BS laws. First of all you have to explain to people that laws like this only criminalize the ones they want to protect, their kids, but laws like this don't protect their kids from breaking the law, intentionally or unintentionally. They want to protect their kids by eliminating the problem rather than trying to solve the problem. They do not want to deal with it.
And that's the underlying problem.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
This caught my eye...
"It should come as no surprise that if people think they can hide illegal activity they will attempt to."
'People' also means groups of people, which can also include Microsoft, who has long since denied any wrongdoing of growing their collection of software and inventions since their inception. Yet... they insist that they are protecting their Intellectual Property by hiding the source code to Windows and other Microsoft softwares. How can we know for sure (in the public eye) that they themselves have not stolen software from others over the years. Law is about absolutes. It is enforced with absolute counter-measures, unless a payoff can lessen a punishment and the bribe can be hidden from others eyes that care about such matters.
So this goes for corporations as well as common citizens, no?
And another thought....
And I always thought the death of Gary Kindall, was a bit fishy.
http://www.ipopisp.com/marksofesteem18.asp
Perhaps he could have shut down the operations of a particular large monopolistic software company with some carefully placed testimony that closed source software could not conceal?
Maybe he got hit with a thrown chair at the bar and died?
I certainly hope this did not happen. But mafia-types tend to protect their profits in unlawful and immoral ways. (Did you ever see the Godfather movie series? If my comments are considered slander, I blame it on watching the Godfather as a kid and seeing "the Pirates of Silicon Valley." )
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The power of an open internet... showing mankind itself for all it is...
This is easily detectable and rejectable.. Unless they are going to have different certificates for each site they are intercepting, and are willing to forge (and the CA is willing to forge) the certificate info to mask what is really happening.
It's also probably illegal, and definitely unethical, to circumvent the network security this way.
Get this: There's no such thing. If they agreed to provide 1MBps without monthly limits, then they agreed to provide 1MBps without monthly limits.
No, they want to throttle because they know people won't sign up for a "30GB/month max" account, and they can't offer 512Kbps when everybody else is offering 4MBps. They can't sell you a 4Mbps account and then throttle your whole connection to 512K either.
The remaining solutions are kicking you out/throttling after you reach a limit, which doesn't make for good PR, or only throttling P2P to avoid affecting normal usage, like say, youtube.
Early mail systems in the 1800's were pneumatic tubes. Just like in the movie 'Brazil'.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
He's not a complete dumbass. Encrypted torrents will defeat the purposed ISP level copyright-filtering that some telcos (*cough* AT&T *cough*) are advocating. How do you tell if that encrypted data is the source code to Windows 2000, a Linux ISO or a collection of Chuck Norris jokes?
Granted, I think this is a good thing. It's none of my ISPs business what are in my packets.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
I dunno, that sounds suspiciously like "security through obscurity" to me!
Not really. Trunks have locks, and require keys to open them. Reading encrypted packets also requires keys. Granted, 256 bit encryption is probably a bit more secure than the average trunk.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Give me a fucking break. There are justifications for protocol encryption that go beyond warez and music. Like obtaining a decent download rate for your legal torrents, which you can't do without encryption because your ISP has decided that bittorrent is bad.
Sorry, but it's most definitely NOT "a good thing".Why? As the volume of encrypted traffic goes up, those of us using encryption for whatever reason (be it privacy or the desire to mask something illegal) blend into the crowd better.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.