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SSL Encryption Coming To The Pirate Bay

Posted by Soulskill on from the privacy-arms-race dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The Pirate Bay, in response to Sweden's new wiretapping law, will start offering SSL encryption to its user base this week. Although copyright issues really have little to do with national security, The Pirate Bay knows its population is uneasy with the recent legal change. The encryption will mostly benefit Swedish users living under the current law. Since The Pirate Bay and its servers are not hosted in Sweden, the additional security offered to outside users could be comparatively minimal."

6 of 267 comments (clear)

  1. Re:speed by ozamosi · · Score: 5, Informative

    The actual file transfers are peer-to-peer, so they won't be effected (also, they're usually encrypted already, to avoid bandwidth throttling). This is for accessing the website and/or for contacting the tracker.

    Web pages have been using SSL for years without being especially slow.

    Contacting a tracker is a lightweight request that is being performed once every 30 minutes or so - if it was a few seconds slower, nobody'd notice anyway.

  2. Re:speed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    Won't that slow things down quite a lot? We're talking 20KB files here. The encryption will only affect the tracker search portal and the torrent file serving. I'd rather have an encrypted site that takes a couple of ms more to respond than something fast that spews out visible data left and right. All the data transfer is run by the peers and there encryption depends on the individual client settings (and many people already use full stream encryption w/o any slowdown). So "not really" would be an appropriate answer to your question.
  3. Re:speed by Bandman · · Score: 4, Informative

    There are really a lot of hardware solutions to speeding up SSL.

    The real issue is that, typically speaking, the server which is responsible for the server-side processing is also responsible for encrypting the stream.

    By putting a hardware or software solution in front of the client-access machine, you offload encryption to that host, leaving the application server free to concentrate on serving applications.

    This can also be useful for debugging sessions, as you (the provider) have an unencrypted stream to examine.

    Securing that stream between the application and the encryption device becomes of paramount importance, in that case.

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    Check out my sysadmin blog!
  4. Re:speed by thermian · · Score: 4, Informative

    Um, no, this change has nothing to do with torrent swarms, so downloading of the files referenced inside a torrent would be unaffected.

    --
    A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
  5. Re:speed by just_a_monkey · · Score: 5, Informative

    There are pros and cons to living in Sweden. This law is a big con. So are the taxes, and the regulations. A penal system which is not based on homosexual rape is a pro, though.

    --
    How inappropriate to call this planet Earth, when clearly it is Ocean.
  6. Re:speed by orzetto · · Score: 4, Informative

    In Scandinavia, there are no "federal pound-in-the-ass" prisons. The prisons are top-notch, just google around: here is a couple of articles.

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