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Privacy In BitTorrent By Hiding In the Crowd
pinguin-geek writes "Researchers at the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science at Northwestern University have identified a new 'guilt-by-association' threat to privacy in peer-to-peer (P2P) systems that would enable an eavesdropper to accurately classify groups of users with similar download behavior. While many have pointed out that the data exchanged over these connections can reveal personal information about users, the researchers shows that only the patterns of connections — not the data itself — is sufficient to create a powerful threat to user privacy. To thwart this threat, they have released SwarmScreen, a publicly available, open source software that restores privacy by masking a user's real download activity in such a manner as to disrupt classification."
(From the one of the software authors) UTorrent doesn't support plugins and is closed source. If that were to change, we'd happily develop for it.
That'd be +1 Informative.
Set it to Run in "Advanced Mode" on startup. And for "just downloading a torrent", I don't think anything will beat rtorrent from console.
Agreed. The word is adware.
what in the devil are you talking about? is that a new version? are you running it in simple mode?
seriously, i used Vuze last night. there were no ads, no commercials, nothing. i always run in advanced mode. there is a menu bar and 2 windows: uploads, and downloads. i don't use it to play media or manage the files. dump files to the desktop and i move them where i want.
shit, if there are commercials in the new version i am not going to update.
If one doesn't like eavesdropping, what's wrong with simply dropping connection attempts from the IPs of known or suspected eavesdroppers? If I'm using PeerGuardian, why do I need SwarmScreen?