BitTorrent Devs Introduce Comcast-Proof Encryption 334
Dean Garfield writes "An article at TorrentFreak notes that several BitTorrent developers have proposed a new protocol extension with the ability to bypass the BitTorrent interfering techniques used by Comcast and other ISPs. 'This new form of encryption will be implemented in BitTorrent clients including uTorrent, so Comcast subscribers are free to share again. The goal of this new type of encryption (or obfuscation) is to prevent ISPs from blocking or disrupting BitTorrent traffic connections that span between the receiver of a tracker response and any peer IP-port appearing in that tracker response, according to the proposal.'"
Do arms races ever work? (Score:5, Insightful)
Another volley herd in The Pirate Bay (Score:5, Insightful)
Encryption is always a good thing. The more people that use encryption, the less eavesdropping there will be.
How about, "if you have nothing to hide, hide it anyways"?
Re:Do arms races ever work? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Traffic Analysis (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Another volley herd in The Pirate Bay (Score:5, Insightful)
How about, if you have nothing to hide, someone either the government, your boss, Etc. will twist it to either sell your info or make you look like a criminal, so hide it.
doesn't work (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I wonder... (Score:5, Insightful)
They can force the BitTorrent devs to produce a new version every few months, but in the long run I think they're on the losing end of the war -- if they want to stay in the data-transportation business, and assuming there aren't any major breakthroughs in cryptanalysis that render modern public-key technologies useless.
Re:Traffic Analysis (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Traffic Analysis (Score:2, Insightful)
Ha! Ha! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Traffic Analysis (Score:2, Insightful)
But that doesnt mean I dont agree with you, with only banks specifically though, im sure they would have re-created the banks networks to avoid this dilemma... only that by traffic analysis alone, I could easily see it failing...
Re:Traffic Analysis (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Do arms races ever work? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Another volley herd in The Pirate Bay (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Holy crap, a CCIE! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Do arms races ever work? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Traffic Analysis (Score:5, Insightful)
The point wasn't to block encrypted traffic just because it is encrypted. It would be to do traffic shaping, so that a connection generating dozens or hundreds of simultaneous encrypted connections to different destination IP's might be targeted; it is a traffic pattern would most likely be generated by a P2P program and not by normal internet use by a family.
Re:FTP. (Score:3, Insightful)
Ultimatly it wont stop comcast (Score:4, Insightful)
First Blood? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's going to get a lot more interesting from here on out. In the end, it will only benefit the consumers since they will receive technology that allows them to communicate a little more privately, and perhaps with a little luck, more anonymously too. One could only hope that TOR/Freenet technologies become as ubiquitous in their use as email. Perhaps a hybrid system with elements of Freenet, TOR, and Bittorrent all wrapped up into one would do the trick. I certainly think so.
I think, actually I know, that Comcast has fired the first shot in a losing battle.
I also just can't help pointing out the similarities to the Drug War. A million or so people in prison, and yet there are still plenty of users and suppliers. I would almost say it has effectively made no difference in the amount of people using drugs, or selling them. Especially, since the amount of drugs being sold and used in prisons is even higher then on the street.
So what is the point? If history has taught us anything, it is that governments (corporations even more so) will consistently fail at their attempts to limit/eliminate popular behavior. The elements may change from time to time, but the end result is always the same. The people will find a way to continue their behavior
"Greetings, Professor Falken. Strange game. The only winning move is not to play."
Re:Do arms races ever work? (Score:5, Insightful)
What about the collateral damage? (Score:4, Insightful)
One of the things I'm curious about is what kind of collateral damage this kind of thing does to legitimate traffic. Oddly enough, I couldn't get to expedia.com, transformers.com (hey, I have an eight-year-old), and store.apple.com when I first got Comcast. A couple of months later, when the news first broke that they were screwing with the traffic, those sites suddenly started working. Nothing changed at my house, and all of them started working at once.
Possibly coincidence. Possibly not.
Re:Traffic Analysis (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:First Blood? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Do arms races ever work? (Score:4, Insightful)
All you would need to do to circumvent that is use something stateless like UDP. If they want to limit UDP to something like no more than 100 different IP's sending you packets within a set time period, they just created an amazingly simple DoS attack against all of their customers.
Even without udp you could just make sure you fully close all your connections as soon as possible, if not sooner (i.e kill slow clients to make room for fast ones).
Also setting this too low could limit legit use, like when you start up your computer and have a burst of all your software checking for updates, checking for mail, rss feeds/podcasts/etc going off, all your IM clients connecting to their various servers, etc.
Re:Holy crap, a CCIE! (Score:2, Insightful)
Most of the best IT people I've ever worked with have no certs.
Most of the worst IT people I've ever worked with have one or more certs.
Go figure.
Technical question (Score:2, Insightful)
Non-trivial applications are almost always better off managing their own connection state in my experience. A lot of TCP/IP networking code seems to be written to work around the quirks of TCP connections rather than to take advantage of them. UDP is clearly the better choice in cases like this.
Re:Won't work: They clamp on traffic per flow (Score:3, Insightful)
Isn't that the very defenition of P2P to begin with? What needs reengineering about it?
Re:Do arms races ever work? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:FTP. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Comcast makes $$$$$ disrupting seeds (Score:3, Insightful)
Even massive amounts of P2P between their clients, not ever leaving their network, costs them money.
Adrian
(No CCIE, but I've been working with SP networks of sorts since 1997.)
Re:Do arms races ever work? (Score:5, Insightful)
2. Free markets are an arms race. When one business evolves, the other must to survive or perish.
Re:Traffic Analysis (Score:3, Insightful)
If it's the entropy, jpg and bzipped files have similar entropy too.
Are they interfering with those downloads as well?
How about https?
Re:First Blood? (Score:4, Insightful)
1) I pay for it.
2) It is unlimited. They set those terms, not me. They have continually advertised a position that was in fact the opposite of their true intentions. All that matters is the contract here though, and that states unlimited.
I don't know if English is your first language, since your use of grammar is a little off, which I don't say in a negative way at all. I just don't understand what you mean by "convection".
You say "normal average daily internet regiment". That is in of itself, an observation only. It is meaningless to the discussion since it just a statistic. No one is actually bound by contract, or any verbal representations by any ISP that they must maintain a normal level of use. Unlimited means that you cannot apply any limitations on the usage; "Normal" is a limitation.
You also talk about more important services. There are no "more important services". Everybody is unlimited, therefore all traffic is equally unlimited. The ISP must therefore treat all traffic the same according to the representations of an unlimited contract.
Now if at some point in the future, the ISP offers for people to voluntarily apply QOS principles to their network traffic, that is in the best interests for everyone. I have no problem being asked, nicely, to apply a QOS tag to all my communications, as it only helps me in the end. I also like the idea of being nice and cooperating with my neighbor, so that under heavy load conditions, his VOIP sessions will get the priority he needs. The contracts could redone to reflect this in the future.
Re:doesn't work (Score:5, Insightful)
There is a reason that it only is cable companies talking about bandwidth caps, and not the dsl companies.
Re:Do arms races ever work? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Do arms races ever work? (Score:2, Insightful)
You have to fight the fight of today in hopes that the win of tomorrow will result in a brighter future. Throwing up your hands should never be an option. If you want a brighter future, you have to work for it because it will never happen without that hard work.
That would be suicide... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Do arms races ever work? (Score:5, Insightful)
I can assure you, you don't want this. You assume that the ISP's are going to give you a "reasonable" block of data to transfer on a monthly basis and a reasonable price - they are not. They will use this pricing scheme to "extract value" from their customer base in the form of quotas that are properly tiered so as to be just below the common usage tier. The result will be many customers need to go a step higher, and are charged more, for considerably less than they had access to before. Do you really want to worry about whether the next movie you get off of iTunes is going to pop your quota? Or the next stream you setup?
Honestly, bandwidth in the US is what is causing a great deal of innovation at the moment - look at iTunes and Netflix now offering entire movies as either downloads or streaming. Caps will only stifle the adoption and innvoation of this type of technolgy. Customers will think twice about the double cost of streaming a video - the cost to their cap, and the cost of the service. There are I'm sure other bandwith based applications out there that we have not even thought of.
The answer is just in disclaiming that running certain types of services like bittorrent coupled with excessive transfer on a connection can lead to service degredation, not termination. They just need to put a process in place to handle this situation. Time warner claims that "5% of their customers use 50% of their bandwidth" - well - that seems pretty damn easy to fix doesn't it? Exceed a certain monthly transfer rate, send out a warning via e-mail - usage continues - put a cap that is far lower than their original amount.
In addition they don't really say that they are running out of bandwidth, so I'm not sure I see where the problem is.
Re:Do arms races ever work? (Score:4, Insightful)
They're not
Who is the most like to get what he wants?
Re:Do arms races ever work? (Score:5, Insightful)
That's a very important point. Comcast is going to have to spend $X to make their network tolerable, either by buying blocking P2P and other bandwidth-hungry application, or by expanding capacity. The first method gets them a nice, controlled, slow network and the hatred of all their potential customers. The second gives them a wild-and-woolly, fast network their customers love (and therefore more customers). So, again, given $X: do you invest it to lose business or gain business? That's really the choice here.
Given Comcast, they'll probably use it to put ultrasonic speakers on their modems so that teens don't want to use them, then five years lateer ask Congress for a bailout because they're uncompetitive.
Re:That would be suicide... (Score:3, Insightful)
90% of people with broadband probably only need 300kbit anyway, for browsing the Net and checking email. But they end up paying $40+/mo for faster, "unlimited" connections, because cable companies have monopolies or oligopolies on access and they don't offer low-bandwidth plans.
Heck, my parents (in rural New Jersey) are still paying Comcast $45/mo for ONE-WAY CABLE, meaning they need to dial in with a phone modem and send outgoing data at 56k. From what I hear, Comcast could upgrade our area to real 2-way cable just by spending a couple grand to update some hardware on their end. Why don't they? No competition, and thus no incentive to provide a non-terrible user experience.
Re:Do arms races ever work? (Score:1, Insightful)
In an arms race, more and more resources are spent, until the part with the least resources succumb. That is what happened to the Soviet Union. Now, in the case of bittorrent traffic, the unlimited herd of torrent-lusting geeks on the internet will have more resources than the MPAA. I am happy to say we'll win the arms race eventually. Their only chance is to do a wargame and win by not playing the game.