What is Digg?73 Comments
- robohoe, on 10/12/2007, -3/+40@diggadong:
Some of us can't help being on a ***** ISP - especially when it's the only ISP in the area. - geminitojanus, on 10/12/2007, -10/+33Encryption isn't supposed to be a way to defeat throttling, it's supposed to be a way to defeat snooping; while BitTorrent traffic is going to look like BT traffic no matter if it's encrypted or not, the bits of an encrypted message aren't in the clear, and are incredibly difficult to decrypt on the fly, meaning you have plausable deniablilty in the link. This cuts both ways; criminals can use BT to tranfser documents and data they shouldn't be trafficking, and normal users can transmit their data and be sure their privacy is insured.
For defeating throttling, you really need to go after different transmission patterns, such as batching packets in different ways, or port scattering. - klawz, on 10/12/2007, -0/+23Please let us all know who you are using as an ISP that would invade privacy like this, so we can make an educated decision to use them or not. I know, for some, there isn't a choice, but still, this would be good inof to know.
- Cyphase, on 10/12/2007, -5/+24"Some of us can't help being on a ***** ISP - especially when it's the only ISP in the area." - robohoe
You can blame government protectionism for that. - mrASSMAN, on 10/12/2007, -21/+35'Encryption isn't supposed to be a way to defeat throttling"
Yes it is. That's the purpose of it. - geminitojanus, on 10/12/2007, -3/+14It may be a reason people cite for it, but anyone who knows anything about networking will laugh at you when you tell them encryption (data obsfuscation) will defeat throttling (data limiting). The two issues are completely different. Why Encryption would work for defeating throttling for two seconds is that the header is obsfuscated and you can't just read the header and say "Oh, this is a BT packet, let's traffic shape it", instead you have to use a statistical method and shape based on the frequency of messages (encrypted or non-encrypted). The only way to defeat statistical methods would be to change the frequency of the messages, the hosts and ports the messages are going to, and the size of said messages.
It's like trying to block spam by blocking a specific sender, it's just not going to work. - kingkilr, on 10/12/2007, -0/+10Comcast, I would drop them but every other service in the area sucks, some new start up is doing good work near by so I hope they move in to my neighborhood.
- willpall, on 10/12/2007, -3/+12why is omghi2u2 being dugg down?
What he says is true. The MPAA/RIAA don't sniff the traffic mid-stream to find the copyright violators -- why would they do that? They just do the same things we all do in pirating media, they download it themselves and record the IP addresses of those they got it from. Whether it's encrypted or not doesn't make a ***** bit of difference. - Cerpin_Taxt, on 10/12/2007, -2/+10@ diggadong
It's not always the user's fault. The users are often left with little choice in their neighbourhood. In my area, I get 6000/800 cable (throttled) and 1000/400 DSL (due to poor wiring). If I were to switch, I would probably get the same speeds I do now on torrents, higher pings, and generally slow and unreliable service (frequent drops).
Guess why I switched to a throttled ISP.
Edit: robohoe beat me to the punch - geminitojanus, on 10/12/2007, -2/+10The latter statement isn't true at all. Protocol Encryption does actually use quite a bit of power, just not so much that its noticable on 2+GHz processors and dual core (non-stream encryption is highly parallelizable, and offloading encryption to one core with checksumming on the other makes it "feel" faster). This is incredibly bad on clients that are already running in abstracted machines (Java, Python; Azureus is probably the most incredible offender of this).
- ishmal, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8All traffic should be encrypted by default. If a person did so, then no ISP would bother with his reason for encrypting any particular stream.
- greekgoat91, on 10/12/2007, -7/+14Unless you're running a Pentium I PC the CPU shouldn't really be slowed down by Torrent Encryption
- Phil246, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7proof?
I have never, ever heard of an ISP doing this unless you do something to attract their attention like downloading over 200 gig a month or something silly.
Even then chances are they are just making an educated guess by the traffic patterns instead of actually determining what you are downloading, unless of course youve been nabbed by the p2p monitoring software companies who then throw out an automated email to your isp about your activites from ip address x, at time/date y, downloading file z - hakz, on 10/12/2007, -1/+8my isp are bastards. they're shaping all traffic, included encrypted, only http isn't shaped. everyone in the uk, stay away from plusnet, people.
- dewey, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7I've gotten an Email from Comcast to cease and desist my BT downloads, of course, I was pirating a movie, which they listed and said I was put on record, and if Comcast was ever subpoenaed my information would be sent along with anyone else who was caught.
- baxtermaddux, on 10/12/2007, -1/+8these ISP providers that are throttling and spying on their customers, are all going to the same place in hell that the RIAA is
- kavaliro, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5How can someone argue against encryption? That's just stupid. For a given situation, it's more often better to encrypt than not-- it's just not always feasible.
Email: you should encrypt it. You should push for your friends to get armed with encryption and to use it. Well, gently push. It should be the norm, not the exception. Why? Privacy. You may not have anything to hide, but then, you shouldn't let cops search your car either. It's the same principal.
Harddrives: encrypt 'em! It's not likely that you would be raided, even if you are a bad guy. But then, (and this applies to email too) thieves stand more to gain by grabbing bank account numbers off your drive than by stealing the computer itself. It's not just the computer forensics guys that want your data.
Speaking of bank accounts, go ahead--transmit those credit card numbers in the clear. Nobody is listening, I promise. wink wink.
Feel free to use telnet all you want. As for me, encryption makes way more sense. I'll stick with SSH.
Bittorrent is exactly the kind of thing that should be encrypted. It should have been encrypted from the start. - reddevil3, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Open program, click 'encrypt.
Works for all of them. - whisk3rs, on 10/12/2007, -2/+7And if you're downloading something illegally, which, of course, non of us are, this is EXACTLY why you want to encrypt any p2p traffic - even if they know it's BT (and not a zip file of the vacation pictures that you're sending to your friend), they can't know what exactly you're downloading.
- dagamer34, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Anyone know if the MPAA or RIAA actually setup a Bittorrent client and act like a normal user but just record IP addresses? I got a letter from my university and I'm not sure if they caught me because my traffic wasn't encrypted or I was sending data to a MPAA computer.
- whisk3rs, on 10/12/2007, -2/+7Also depends on what kind of encryption you use. RSA = exponentiation = slow. SHA1, SHA256, AES, 3-DES or any of the widely-used algorithms don't require THAT much processing power since they rely mostly on bit shifts, which are done in hardware. Still, like greekgoat said, if you're using PII 200Mhz, you might see some slow down. I don't know what encryption algs BT uses though.
- mrASSMAN, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5holy *****, I would cancel your service. they shouldn't be invading your privacy like that.
edit: comment written before klawz's post - baxtermaddux, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4in utorrent,
got to Preferences -> bitorrent -> outgoing -> enabled encryption
i dont know about incoming - brasso, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Incoming is always enabled in µTorrent.
- sbovisjb1, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Use I2P its a application layer shadow net. Speeds arnt the greatest at somepoints of the day, but they are fast at others.
Edit:
I use shaw and at one point i was getting download speeds of 5mb/s, then one day i got capped, no explanations or warnings... >. - solarstar567, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3this may sound silly, but how do you encrypt the BT data.
- kingkilr, on 10/12/2007, -3/+6I encrypt because my ISP emails whenever I dl anything if I don't, this means anything even legal stuff.
- Darth_tater, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3@baxtermaddux
to accept only incoming encryption in utorrent, deselect the Allow incoming Legacy Connections check box - molecool, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3That's why I usually run bittorrent on an older laptop I don't use much anymore - or at least nothing performance critical. With the price of laptops these days you can get yourself some old P2 for a few hundred bucks and hone it to suck down all the bandwidth available in your county :-)
- DontSayFanboy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I work for a university and I will confirm what whiskers said. We often get a dozen copyright infringement notices from BayTSP a day for students who are trading movies with Bittorrent.
We (the ISP) or BayTSP (the lackeys of the MPAA) absolutely do not sniff your network traffic to find out what you are sharing, so encryption really is not going to affect your situation at all.
As the ISP, we only care about how much bandwidth you are using. When we see a port with an excessive amount of traffic, we know where that data is going, because we have the source and destination IP. A system with hundreds of connections that stay connected for long periods of time is running P2P more often than not. Sometimes it is part of a botnet. Either way, we really don't care what you are doing as long as you play nice with others. Again, we don't need to snoop your packets to make that call.
From BayTSP's point of view, they do not need to snoop your packets either. They simply download a torrent from mininova (or wherever) and connect to the swarm like everyone else does. Once they are connected they know exactly who is sharing what and it's pretty easy to turn an IP address into a form letter to the ISP's abuse department. The ISP is required by law to take some sort of action to limit their liability. So they'll either pass the complaint on to you, shut off your port, throttle the traffic to minimize future complaints or who knows.
In my opinion, private trackers are much more effective at avoiding complaints than encryption. - Phatt138, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Thanks whisk3rs (edit: and omg).
I'm certain that your assumptions are correct. I've just been pondering the issue because - until this thread - I hadn't seen much ado about Comcast as a 'bad ISP,' whereas the deplorable speeds that I've gotten lately are decidedly the marks of throttled traffic. Again, I'm not so worried about the legal side of things - I've been careful to stray from the wares of the major media conglomerates and their affiliates, and dailymotion has fulfilled most of my day-to-day needs. I'm well aware of the fervor that surrounds IP and copyright issues right now, and in fact keep up with the outstanding legal cases as a matter of personal interest - I'm just not familiar with the process on the ISP end (other than that they'll contact you via email...assuming you have a POP3 with them). I was wondering if anyone else had been contacted via another method. Sorry if my question was poorly worded or otherwise oblique.
I just don't want to wake up to find that I've got to go ISP-shopping because I didn't heed some unreceived warning about BT traffic. Nor do I want to ask them about it. *grin* - BuddhaChu, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3But I thought they're Comcastic?
- IamTCM, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Encryption/Secure padding solves the problem of having a backbone or hop such as comcast detecting traffic mid-transmit. It does not protect you from RIAA and MPAA. Just think, if you can search for stuff to illegally download, then why cannot they? It's an inherent flaw of P2P, deal with it.
- omghi2u2, on 10/12/2007, -14/+15"And if you're downloading something illegally, which, of course, non of us are, this is EXACTLY why you want to encrypt any p2p traffic - even if they know it's BT (and not a zip file of the vacation pictures that you're sending to your friend), they can't know what exactly you're downloading."
UTTER NON-SENSE!
Encryption will not stop anyone from seeing what you are downloading/sharing out.
Copyright enforcement is done by simply making a connection to you and looking at the hashes of the files or parts of files that you have. It doesn't matter to them if they have to established an encrypted, or an unencrypted connection. - whisk3rs, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I would suppose it is stated somewhere in Comcast's TOS that they can terminate your access for whatever reason, and I believe they can definitely do that if you download illegally. Of course, it is in their interests to keep you as a customer until you start posing a great risk of THEM getting sued by the RIAA - i.e. multiple offences, for which RIAA can say "Comcast does nothing to prevent their customers from pirating," which, of course, is because you don't read your email. But I do think the second time they'll either call or write to you (prolly call and maybe even cut you off).
Speaking of open wireless, I haven't heard anything about this until I looked it up, but apparently the "open wireless network" defense worked in a RIAA lawsuit: http://www.wireless-weblog.com/50226711/dont_want_to_get_sued_by_the_riaa_just_disable_wifi_security.php
But of course, sharing your internet will most likely get your contract terminated by the ISP, Comcast or not, they absolutely hate that. - whisk3rs, on 10/12/2007, -3/+4Considering we're talking about ISPs filtering traffic midstream, omghi2u2 is being dugg down for being offtopic and too arrogant at that.
damager: "Anyone know if the MPAA or RIAA actually setup a Bittorrent client and act like a normal user but just record IP addresses? I got a letter from my university and I'm not sure if they caught me because my traffic wasn't encrypted or I was sending data to a MPAA computer."
Yes, they do. They pay 3rd party companies, like BayTSP (google for more info) to set up bots on p2p networks. You can email the network services department of your university and they should let you know why you got "caught" - I've seen emails received from such sniffer companies, they usually list a lot of info about why you're "caught" - your IP, what client you used, the file you tried to dl / ul, filesize, hashes, etc. - cplkai, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1It's in the preferences in Azureus.
- lordmetroid, on 10/12/2007, -3/+4A once man said once. "Anything that damages the information flow on the Internet is seen as a disease by the web and is rerouted around eliminating the damage."
This is what is happening, governments, companies and so on don't understand that the Internet is a user-based community and any attempts to interfere with the information is easily avoided by design. - baxtermaddux, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1thanks darth. good to know
- colinm, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1The Azureus Message Stream Encryption page makes for an interesting read - it tells you how BitTorrent encryption works and explains some of the design decisions (for example, adding padding bytes which contain no useful data, but prevent encrypted traffic being identified by its packet length).
http://www.azureuswiki.com/index.php/Message_Stream_Encryption - Phatt138, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I'm on Comcast and I, too, have noticed a major change in BT speeds lately. However, I've never set up an email account with them for various reasons. Anyone have any idea what their second line of communication would be? Will ISPs call/a-mail you to send cease & desists? Further, am I contractually accountable for whatever's contained in said message if I never recieve it?
Just wondering how they'd contact you besides email; I had never had any trouble with BT traffic before, but someone on my open wireless network may have caved and downloaded something more shady (not morally shady, mind you) last month, and now my speeds have been slashed. As I understand it, traffic shaping is a technique applied at the ISP level - not doled out as a 'punishment' to individual users, right?
Thanks for any response - just idle wondering. - cynicist, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Nice, I get dugg down by idiots.
- ITDefPat, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1let me q AND A
first. doesnt BT split downloads between a swarm of servers?
So really encyption is only a benefit if you store your downloads online/share out files. DEPENDING on the layer that the encryption occurs at (IPSEC at net? SSL or SSH at upper layers?). To prevent snooping by ISP/RIAA (etc), you would need to do 1 - ncrypt headers (include hide protocol info that could be used against you) OR 2 anonymizer - prevent them from knowing what sites you are visiting, including the swarm identities. hiding header/protocol could be done via IPsec. SSL/SSH would be a good add-on to protect login info, but off the top of my head, not helpful to hide. Any number of anonymizer/proxy/reverse proxy would be handy to keep ISP, RIAA,m etc. guessing (at least for a while).
If you look at it, the content if the torrent download is essentially encrypted (er, obfuscated, at least...) by going through the swarm.
Any other ideas? - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1"Some of us can't help being on a ***** ISP - especially when it's the only ISP in the area."
Move out of the sticks or quit ya bitching. - h0dg3s, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1They offer the option to fallback to non-encrypted for clients that don't support it. Ignorance is no excuse for being a dumbass.
- billyoneal, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1But, dont forget, your client has to be able to reassemble the pieces, right? Each piece has the number that it is and a hash transmitted as part of the piece, as well as the hash as the entire torrent, so that machines can sort out what pieces go with what torrent. The isp can simply reassamble these pieces as they sniff them off the wire, because they control it.
Why? Because they might be paid quite a bit by some certain regularity bodies *cough MPAA cough RIAA* might pay them, or threaten lawsuits. - jon3k, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1@dontsavefanboy
"In my opinion, private trackers are much more effective at avoiding complaints than encryption."
Bingo. Also make sure the tracker is using passkey so you can keep it private. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1since bram cohens sellout, his credibility should be severely questioned. hell, he might as well be considered an advocate for the entertainment industry speaking in their favor under the veil of his technical prowess. tread lightly; they've got it in for the torrent community.
- billyoneal, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1In addition, bittorrent only helps if you have to send a file to a lot of people. Most private documents are just that: private. This is why BT does not have encryption, because it's goal is to spread content freely. (Read: DHT)
It only needs encryption because some ***** want to steal things.
Support developers: If you like software, buy it! - yahoofrom, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I'm going to pirate Pirates of the Caribbean and I don't want RIAA to catch me. I'm all for encrypting BitTorrent traffic.
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