Encrypted Torrents Growing Fast In the UK 432
angryphase writes "The British Phonographic Institute (the UK's RIAA) has noticed a significant increase in the amount of encrypted torrents — from 4% of torrent traffic a year ago to 40% today. Whether it follows a trend for hiding suspicious activities or an increased awareness of personal privacy is up for (weak) debate. Either way, this change of attitude is catching the eye of ISPs, music industry officials, and enforcement agencies. Matt Phillips, spokesman for the UK record industry trade association explains, 'Our internet investigations team, internet service providers and the police are well aware of encryption technology: it's been around for a long time and is commonplace in other areas of internet crime. It should come as no surprise that if people think they can hide illegal activity they will attempt to.'"
Or maybe.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe... (Score:3, Insightful)
Could someone clarify... (Score:5, Insightful)
Is it just me? (Score:5, Insightful)
I use encryption all day long in a very legal, legitimate form. (ssl/ssh/mcrypt) It's a core part of my operating principles - I don't even allow unencrypted connections to my production systems - EVERYTHING IS SSL ENCRYPTED.
So it really annoys me when the case is made that (encryption == criminal). Yes it can be used for illegal purposes. So can cars, guns, and tennis rackets. It's not the tool that identifies the crime, it's the crime that identifies the crime.
Thank intelligent filtering (Score:4, Insightful)
Captain obvious moved to the UK? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why why why why is it automatically assumed that encryption by non-government entities is in actual fact an attempt to cover up illegal activity?
I believe that in general, western societies have set up laws that generally respect the rights of an individual to whisper a secret in the ear of a friend and not be forced to reveal the message to anyone else. If I choose to encrypt email and torrent files, there is no reason that I should be thought guilty of some crime... fscking idiots.
It would entertain me greatly for them to find out that these illegal encrypted downloads were in fact, a Linux distribution.
Perhaps... (Score:3, Insightful)
evolution (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Could someone clarify... (Score:5, Insightful)
Libel, anyone? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Could someone clarify... (Score:5, Insightful)
the purpose is to make the traffic not recognizable (to a degree) as torrent traffic so it can bypass the mindless traffic shaping of torrent traffic by some ISPs.
Re:Could someone clarify... (Score:5, Insightful)
But in all seriousness, it's not hiding the activity from the end users, but from the ISPs that are blocking torrent traffic.
Re:Or maybe.... (Score:0, Insightful)
exactly - especially the latest 'official' bittorent client (the one based on utorrent)
pls mod parent up
Not just that... you realize this is a piece... (Score:3, Insightful)
They have to get the regular sheeple to clamor for back doors to be put into all encryption software.
It has little to do with "stolen moozak" or whatever crap they're claiming. That's just to make a legit story.
"We want to know what you ate for breakfast" is not going to sit so well with the common sheep as "moozak is being stolen, save us, those illegal encryptors are stealing our muzak!!"
And it will be the MASSES that vote themselves out of this freedom, also... it will not be the few, the intelligent, the strong, the resilient or the self sufficient, to whom these tools are useful.
PS - I agree on the encryption. My servers accept nothing without it
Encryption == Illegal Activity (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Or maybe.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Your snail mail is able to deliver packages in plain brown wrappers. Online the delivery is in clear plastic baggies and carried by many people besides the government post office. In addition, third parties are able to examine your packets. Now that expensive attacks are happening because of the contents of some of these displayed packets to others, the search for security envelopes has began. The mail from an to my bank is not in clear packages. My online packets should have the same expectation of privacy.
Vendors of the envelopes has noticed the users crying the packages are transparent and the carrier is not providing privacy. Vendors are responding with providing security envelopes in place of the transparent packaging.
The real world security breaches have shown the need.
Re:Captain obvious moved to the UK? (Score:5, Insightful)
Pre-emptively... (Score:4, Insightful)
Serves them right (Score:4, Insightful)
The solution? Unencumbered, reasonably priced, possibly watermarked legal product. Even Radiohead strategy yields 1/3 of the downloaders paying.
Re:Could someone clarify... (Score:5, Insightful)
"I think it could be argued that you're sending some data... Its just that their client happens to apply some algo to it that happens to put it together in the style of a MP3/OGG or something else."
This would be about as useless as a child pornographer arguing that all they did is send JPEGs; it was the client who just happened to put it through a JPEG decompresser.
The laugh test applies to this one. If you're using a tool to break copyright law -- any tool -- the particulars of the storage mechanism don't mean much.
The Internet (Score:5, Insightful)
"The internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."
Recording Industry associations: You are now being routed around. Congratulations.
Re:Maybe... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Could someone clarify... (Score:4, Insightful)
Effective for what? Who gives a shit about pirates? ISPs are interfering with torrents whether copyright infringement is happening or not. If Comcast is going to forge packets that interfere with your Ubuntu download, then you need to have that download happen inside a secured pipe, so that packets from the other end are authenticated.
And yes, that will help.
Personally, I think bittorrent is a generally bad idea; http should usually be used instead, so that the ISPs can cache things closer to the downloader. But they're not doing it! Instead of trying to really solve the network load problems in a non-user-hostile way, they're filtering. So the trend toward using crap like bittorrent is going to continue. And to make it reliable, it's going to be encrypted. We're heading toward a situation where everything needs to be encrypted anyway.
If that makes things harder for the xxAA, oh well, too bad. But like you said, they can just participate in the torrents, and gather info that way.
Re:Is encryption private? (Score:5, Insightful)
"Somebody should create a file sharing program that has the user create a small copyrightable piece of art, and encrypt it along with the data to be transfered. Any attempt to decrypt the data is also (illegally) decrypting your copyrighted art."
Stuff like that's been tried. I recall somebody writing a script to ROT13 song names in P2P indexes. This was in the days of Kazaa or even the original Napster, if I recall. The reason was the equally bogus claim that undoing the ROT13 violated the DMCA.
Some time ago I ran a pretty popular site exposing Make Money Fast letters and their writers. A popular claim at the time was that if you called your chain letter a "recipe exchange" or added the words "please add me to your mailing list" when you sent your money, you were actually paying for a service. Like your decryption idea, these served solely as panaceas to make the participant think they were getting one over on the powers that be. That is all.
Putting it another way: courts have something called "the laugh test" and this would not pass it. A false hope that somehow you can sue a record label for decrypting your artwork might get you some sympathy from the uninformed masses (the same legal geniuses who've marked your post "Insightful"), but will do you not one bit of good when the record company takes your house.
Re:Or maybe.... (Score:4, Insightful)
OK.. Here goes. Cars have windows permitting anyone on the street to see anything in your car. When you lock your valuables in the car, it is recommended you lock the laptop, purse, and other valuables in the trunk out of sight. The old packets did not have a private trunk in which to transport valuables. Bad guys could see your valuables. Having an expectation of privacy is the same reason we wear clothes. You may have an ides what someone is concealing in there, but it's none of your business.
Other things you expect a car to protect to some degree besides the contents of the trunk and glove box, is the code to your garage door and your home address. Government has access to this information, but third parties can't send you settlement letters demanding $5,000 based on the contents they see in your trunk.
Re:Is it just me? (Score:5, Insightful)
I use encryption for my email, and I decrypt those emails in RAM so that there is no record left on my end. This technique could be used for the following, very serious crimes:
But, it also has many legitimate uses:
And those are just the obvious. Arguing that something should be illegal or otherwise disallowed because it might be used for a criminal purpose, even for serious crimes, is nonsense, unless you have no respect for a person's freedom to wear what they want or have a private life.
Re:Could someone clarify... (Score:5, Insightful)
the purpose is to make the traffic not recognizable (to a degree) as torrent traffic so it can bypass the mindless traffic shaping of torrent traffic by some ISPs.
The reason for encryption was to prevent people outside the swarm from easily seeing that certain packets were bittorrent traffic. ISPs wanted to do that to throttle bandwidth. Now, the ISPs can connect to all the torrents and figure out what to block, but that is a hassle, so they mostly don't. In that respect encryption was a success; it made bandwidth throttling much harder and people got faster download speeds. But it has nothing to do with the **AA.
There have been some attempts at 'private' trackers - registered users only can connect to the tracker. This might be useful in recording upload ratios, but isn't really useful against the **AA, who can register like anyone else. Some sites try to be 'invitation only', and presumably the **AA won't be invited to the party. I am unaware of any large-scale useful network of this sort (but I might be uninformed).
Another issue here are blocklists, which any filesharer should use: PeerGuardian, SafePeer, lists from BlueTack, etc. These are constantly-updated lists of **AA and other malicious IPs that you can automatically block. This might be a partial solution to hiding a client from the **AA, but an unreliable one. It does, however, improve download speeds, if it blocks anti-p2p agents that attempt to 'poison' swarms.
In the end, bittorrent was never meant to let people share data covertly. Attempts to make it do so are cumbersome and impractical. Yet, despite this shortcoming for file-sharers, it is still highly popular, simply because it is easy to use and fast, and at this point has basically every type of recent content you could want - movies, TV shows (on the day after, if not the same day), music, etc.
Re:Won't Work (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Maybe... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Maybe... (Score:5, Insightful)
Really?
There's over 100 million units of firearms in private hands in the USA. If the majority of them were used for crime, there'd be a lot of crime...
Re:Or maybe.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Holy crap! Do people really do that? Seriously what ISP needs to install something on your computer in order for it to work? I've always taken the coaxial cable...
I think you just lost the average user with the words "coaxial cable." Seriously, some people will switch off after the first technical-sounding word -- the length of the conversation thereafter is then proportionate to the amount of money they are willing to spend to get this "internet thingy installed"
Re:Is encryption private? (Score:3, Insightful)
Why he is assuming that I am breaking the law, I do not know.
Encryption increases SPEED, does NOT lower risk (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know if it's "security breaches" per se. After all, encrypting the torrent does NOTHING to prevent anyone who knows that that torrent contains copyrighted material from finding your IP from the tracker and going after you legally.
The ONLY thing it does is bypass some ISP-level throttling aimed at BitTorrent traffic. In other words, the ONLY reason people use it is because it makes the torrents go faster, rather than being stuck at low speeds.
That said, more people are probably doing it because it's on by default. And the reason it's on by default in more clients is because it's faster.
So yeah, the spokesman here is an idiot. Encrypted torrents will NOT help you evade responsibility for sharing copyrighted materials. Not even a little bit. This guy is a dumbass.
Re:Maybe... (Score:5, Insightful)
(It is actually 192 million, including 65 million handguns, ref. Cook PJ, Ludwig J. Guns in America: Results of a comprehensive national survey on firearms ownership and use. Police Foundation. Washington DC. 1996.)
You assumed that the majority of them used for crime.
A majority is more than 50 percent.
50 percent of 100 or 192 million is 50 or 96 million.
The fact that you can step outside your home without being peppered with lead should make it clear that you're wrong on the majority = crime part.
And I won't try debating with you about the fact that criminals will always have guns, as they always had. And I will not say that short of orbital bombardment there is only one thing to keep YOU safe from millions of enemy guns: billions of guns in the hands of neighbors that are mentally sane, lawful and courageous. (It's actually sufficient to have them sane and friendly.)
Re:Won't Work (Score:1, Insightful)
Unethical most certainly won't.
Re:Or maybe NOT.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Encryption benefits Terrorists: check.
Encryption benefits Pedophiles: check.
Encryption benefits Drug Dealers: check.
Encryption benefits Hackers (music thieves!): check.
Yup, we're doomed. Sadly, it seems that most voters will respond irrationally to having one of those four buttons pushed.
Re:Or maybe.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Nice straw man. Too bad you had to go and knock him down.
--
I get other things in plain brown wrappers... What they are is NOYB even if it isn't illegal.