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."

Comments

Re:But all decent pirating services...

[shmlco]

You can encrypt anything you want, but in the case of encrypting P2P traffic there's a simple solution: charge per use.

Encrypted or not, an effective P2P torrent system MUST transmit and receive gigabytes worth of data. Encrypted or not, it HAS to move a lot of bytes. It's simply the nature of the beast.

So let ISPs charge for upstream traffic on a per kilo/mega/gigabyte basis, and the whole thing falls apart. More and more users leach instead of seed. And the number of seeds decrease as no one wants to pay the piper for the OTHER person's free copy of Iron Man.

Besides, the government can simply declare the use of encryption for illegitimate traffic illegal in and as of itself. Start broadcasting gigabytes of encrypted data to a myriad of sources (another P2P trait), and HS starts knocking on the door. Or, for that matter, just ban non-commercial use where the endpoint isn't using a registered certificate.

You KNOW the government isn't going to jut sit still and what gigabytes of encrypted traffic flow by. Think of the children...