BitTorrent Devs Introduce Comcast-Proof Encryption

Dean Garfield writes "An article at TorrentFreak notes that several BitTorrent developers have proposed a new protocol extension with the ability to bypass the BitTorrent interfering techniques used by Comcast and other ISPs. 'This new form of encryption will be implemented in BitTorrent clients including uTorrent, so Comcast subscribers are free to share again. The goal of this new type of encryption (or obfuscation) is to prevent ISPs from blocking or disrupting BitTorrent traffic connections that span between the receiver of a tracker response and any peer IP-port appearing in that tracker response, according to the proposal.'"

Comments

Re:Do arms races ever work?

[MightyMartian]

Or they could just do the sensible thing, cut out all the bullshit "unlimited" advertising (which should be against the law anyways) and start selling customers a set block of gigabytes, with an over-limit charge per gig, just like the dialup ISPs did with time online in the olden days. That's what I did at the small ISP I worked for. I wrote and maintained the billing software, and just sucked in usage stats off our Radius servers once an hour. The system was even set up to send out an email when a user was close to his gigabyte limit letting him know that the meter was going to start running and what the charge per gig was.

We tried shaping P2P traffic, and it just annoyed customers, and annoying customers is not exactly a long-term strategy for success.