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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.
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
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!
Isn't that the point? If all your traffic is encrypted, how is the ISP supposed to tell what is what?
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
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.
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!