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The Register Misunderstands BitTorrent Encryption
from the it's-about-throttling dept
The Register recently had a story about an explosion of encrypted BitTorrent traffic. They speculate that this is an attempt to evade the recording industry and law enforcement officials who are cracking down on illegal file sharing. But as TorrentFreak explains, El Reg is fundamentally misunderstanding the rationale for BitTorrent encryption. The whole point of BitTorrent is its ability to share files with complete strangers. Copyright holders can connect to BitTorrent swarms as easily as anyone else can, and encryption won't stop them from determining the IP addresses of the other swarm participants. Rather, the goal of BitTorrent encryption is to obfuscate BitTorrent traffic and thereby make it harder for ISPs to detect. This feature was added to a number BitTorrent clients after some ISPs started throttling BitTorrent connections to save bandwidth. The encrypted network connections are harder to identify as BitTorrent streams, and therefore are harder to block. But that brings up another puzzling thing about the Register story that TorrentFreak points out: since the whole point of BitTorrent encryption is to avoid identification as BitTorrent traffic, how does the Register know the traffic it's seeing is BitTorrent traffic and not something else? Of course, it's quite possible that a lot of BitTorrent users are making the mistake the Register did, wrongly assuming that using encryption will keep them safe from the prying eyes of the recording industry. It won't, but there might be users who use the encryption features hoping that it will.
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Reader Comments (rss)
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demonoid
"The CRIA threatened the company renting the servers to us, and because of this it is not possible to keep the site online. Sorry for the inconvenience and thanks for your understanding."
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Common misconception
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Anonymous Sources
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But it's not at all a surprise that a reporter doesn't clearly understand what they are talking about, hehe.
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Then just over halfway down the first page we get the RiAA connection and obviously they want to identify BitTorrent and throttle it "..Many ISPs, including BT here and Comcast in the US, have now deployed the kit to help throttle the amount of bandwidth consumed by P2P..."
If you'd read the story properly you wouldn't be so confused/outraged. There's only a couple of comments in the whole article about DPI and inability to look inside encrypted packets which are confusing but that's probably just a bad edit rather than a "fundamental missunderstanding".
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I still say trust no one
I too view reporting from anonymous sources and nothing else a bit suspect.
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Re:
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Learn to use technology
If someone wanted to block traffic from the MAFIAA (RIAA, MPAA and such organization), they would be using an IP Filter List (Google Bluetack).
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Re: Re:
If you want to understand it's better to take the same care online as you would take in person.
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Re: Orlando
SARCHASM: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.
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peer guardian
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:(
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Too bad...
With more and more servers being overseas, the US have given up control over all these sites to other people thereby having no more control.
Great job in shooting yourself in your own foot!
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Re:
News of The Pirate Bay's death has been greatly exaggerated.
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Torrent Encryption
More on protocol encryption for BitTorrent can be found on
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent_protocol_encryption
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Re: Too bad...
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Re: Common misconception
Peer Guardian.
That's right folks, look it up, download, install, update and USE it. It's the best way to avoid those prying eyes!
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Argh...
Amazing how some ones have the capacity of doing wrong statements. Hehehehehehe!
All right, all right, they measure bittorrent traffic, where they cannot see anything else of a set of "scramble-out-of-sense-data" gi'me a breack!
Well, I'm going now cos I must to send my letter to Santa and put my socks on the fireplace :)
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PG2
And I use encryption not because I think Im pulling the wool over my ISPs eyes, but because I get better speeds because they throttle bittorent and it would be the day hell froze over that they could get away with blocking all encrypted traffic. Although, they would love it if that was the case.
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