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The Pirate Bay's Plans To Encrypt the 'Net
Keeper Of Keys writes "According to newteevee.com, The Pirate Bay, those fun- and freedom-loving Swedes, have embarked on a project to encrypt all internet traffic, probably by means of an OS-level wrapper around all network connections, which would fall back to an unencrypted connection when the other end is not similarly equipped. The move has been prompted by a recent change in Swedish law, allowing the authorities to snoop on network traffic. This will be a boon to filesharers and anyone else concerned about authorities and trade groups' recent moves towards 'policing' network traffic at the ISP level."
Should already be encrypted. If they weren't, they were being pretty careless.
This will lead to governments putting pressure on ISPs to block all P2P traffic. Say goodbye to downloading Linux or other software P2P once P2P clients default to encryption.
Sounds like a poor man's implementation of IPsec to me...
oh wait, without the standardisation of course.
I can't see a downside from a user perspective, and the only Govt/ISP/etc justifications not to do this are an invasion of privacy (packet headers could be used for QoS, etc). It's like, I dunno, posting all your mail in an sealed envelope instead of on a postcard - you can still put an economy or airmail sticker on it, it just means the postman can't (easily) read your message anymore.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
More people running TOR servers...
Why go fast when you can go anywhere? O|||||||O
reply:
"pirate bay has become a haven for child pronographers. shut it down"
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
If several million people all started encrypting all of their traffic, there's gonna be a whole lot more CPU usage and therefore more power consumption going on. ThePirateBay, think of the penguins!
(Come to think of it, the consumption increase might be offset by firefox 3 raping CPUs less than firefox 2 used too :)
Today's weirdness is tomorrow's reason why. -- Hunter S. Thompson
I'm not sure, but as it stands there seems to be an even simpler attack. Mallory, the man in the middle, just makes sure that when Alice establishes the initial, unencrypted connection to Bob, Bob's reply is forged to indicate that he doesn't support encryption. As a result, all traffic will be unencrypted.
How many users do you know that (a) even knows what dns is (b) controls the dns name for their ip (c) is able to configure said dns to include their public key?
OE works fine for geeks, but is too heavy if the goal is to get average home users encrypted.
If J.K.R wrote Windows: Puteulanus fenestra mortalis!
i know it shouldn't be that way but...the world isn't as it should be. If someone wants to start encrypting anything and everything, including legitimate usages without heavily sensitive information (which is fine and dandy and helps privacy, so its all good and fine), don't start associating it with people who DO have something to hide.
TPB is doing a huge disservice now. The idiots up there will automatically be like "SEE SEE SEE ?!?!?! Encryption == Piracy, pirates download porn, porn == child porn, think of the children, ban free usage of encryption!!" And then we'll be -worse- off than we are now.
Clean up your act first, THEN advocate encryption, and all will be well.
The purpose of this thing is to enable regular home users to avoid the dragnet filtering that the swedes are implementing. Forging replies for every tcp/udp connection crossing the swedish border would make that filtering a lot more expensive.
If J.K.R wrote Windows: Puteulanus fenestra mortalis!
You're complaining about shortcomings in implementation. That's a general problem with crypto... crypto geeks don't care about iser interfaces. RSA goes back to 1977, and we still don't have good PGP/GPG support in most email clients. The solution is not to invent a new protocol, it's to invent a new user interface that's compellingly easy. SSL is a pain in the neck... except when you're using it in a web browser it's almost invisible, and SSH bootstraps from it to make something that's much easier to set up than SSL telnet.
Yes, Crypto Barbie, if TPB doesn't at least make it possible to use IPSEC as the encryption layer (whether they have a workaround for ISPs that block IPSEC or not) they're not part of the solution.
Not to forget some people would probably argue that your general privacy and freedom to talk to others with no one listening is more important than file sharing.
Some other people would probably not since those are the people which hopes to catch some bad guys using techniques such as this one and don't care about the breach of their own privacy since they have nothing to hide them self and trust everyone to be good.
If we don't start encrypting our activities on the Net, be prepared for increased government intervention in everything we do. Here in Latvia, if you are caught with one illegal song, your entire computer is confiscated. Encryption makes sense.
Please don't blindly use TOR for P2P. You'll bring TOR to its knees. TOR is supported by volunteers and isn't designed for the massive load P2P would put on it. Plus, TOR only provides anonymity at the destination, and it only hides your IP. TOR does not provide encryption. Snooping at your ISP would still show all packets in the clear.
TANSTAAFL GIGO Acronyms to live by!
Of course, I could just go to that site's web site and see what they advertise, assuming that most people are going there for that purpose. If I'm sniffing the user's connection at their ISP, I could also see if they're connecting to 10-20 other user sites simultaneously, which would look a lot like bittorrent.
But that workaround doesn't account for :
- Hosting service that host several web sites on a single server, thus all sharing the same IP but answering to different DNS names in the HTTP request. It happens a lot, almost any of the cheap hosting service works that way.
=> You'll get multiple connections anyway, and there's no single website to check for advertised content.
- Although there *are* bittorrent trackers written in PHP, there are a lot of people using a simple web server for the website and indexing only and running the tracker on a separate machine.
In that case there won't be anything to check on the same IP address, the website has a different address compared to the tracker.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
You do understand that the Internet has usefulness beyond that of consumer entertainment, right? And can you understand that someone with the skills to set up what he described might also have more important things to do with his time than pop heads in Counterstrike?
It's amazing. Everyone defends privacy as a "human right" in principle, but when they actually encounter someone who's willing to do more than talk about it, they treat him like a freak. This phenomenon isn't limited to discussions of privacy; anyone with interests beyond "what was on television last night" has been on the receiving end of the same insolent smirk from Johnny Average: "Well, sure, I guess X is important and all, but why would you waste your time doing that when you could be partying instead? Whatever, buddy!"
Speaking of wasted time: bye bye, Slashdot.
The IPsec RFCs were the most overly-complicated, vaguely/badly written standards docs ever, resulting in IPsec implementations that were all bloaty, incompatible pieces of sh*t on every OS that tried to do it. (I worked on an IPsec implementation, so I know firsthand).
Horrible protocols, designed by committee, extended by big early adopters in ways that totally made any latercomer's implementation a living nightmare (looking at *you*, Cisco and MS).
Hell, the standards didn't even specify adequately how connections should be renewed, so everyone just does it differently. You might be able to connect to an alien IPsec endpoint, but good freaking luck trying to get the connection to renew properly when both ends don't make the same assumptions. Don't even bother asking about using certificates between different vendors' stacks, the lab that does interoperability testing just laughs at the whole situation.
SSH tunnelling (or even openVPN) ends up being so much easier it's just not worth even looking at IPsec.
It was so bad they started working on IKEv2 before anyone even had significant success with IKEv1. Bleah.
believe it or not, some people don't think that taking other peoples work for free is cool. When you grow up and get a job, you will understand.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games