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)
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.
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Re:Or maybe.... (Score:5, Funny)
I dunno... could have used a car in it somewhere...
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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:Or maybe.... (Score:5, Funny)
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I'll take your bet. You lost.
I ran out of ice and the stench was killing me. I ditched the corpses shortly after Halloween.
NOT Troll. (Score:3, Informative)
If you consent, any "illegal search" premise is lost, and anything they plant or actually find will then be usable. It is a dirty trick and cops in the USA have been using it for a long time. They have to get you to consent to a search, even if they trick you into it. Otherwise the court system is still relatively usable
Re:Or maybe.... (Score:4, Informative)
There is more than just law enforcement that is interested in the contents. BSA, RIAA and MPAA are the ones I was not mentioning by name. The US post office can open your mail.. But there is a huge red tape procedure to follow. X-ray is one thing to look for explosives. Opening every letter to see if it has the lyrics of a popular song by the RIAA is not permitted by the post office. Inspecting every letter by the DHS for bomb plans is also not permitted, except electronic mail. The post office may know you mailed a CD to your buddy. The package is not inspected to see if it contains the latest teen pop rap.
Online the privacy standards are now seen as a problem to internet users as attacks on users are clogging up the court system an fleecing many to pay the extortion money to the settlement support center. If there was privacy, this would not be a problem.
http://www.p2pnet.net/story/6337 [p2pnet.net]
http://recordingindustryvspeople.blogspot.com/2005/09/suits-against-settlement-support.html [blogspot.com]
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20051004-5382.html [arstechnica.com]
I did a Google search for the settlement support center. It must not be very popular. I could not find a link to the site.
I had to search for RIAA demand letter to find the info. Even then, I found just refrences to the letter, but not a copy of the letter with information to the settlement support center.
http://recordingindustryvspeople.blogspot.com/2007/04/uc-santa-cruz-passes-along-riaa.html [blogspot.com]
Re:I tracked down the settlement support center (Score:4, Informative)
The page with the link to the letter is here; http://consumerist.com/consumer/riaa/the-riaa-p2plawsuit-letter-sent-to-college-students-241054.php [consumerist.com]
The Settlement demand letter is here; http://consumerist.com/assets/resources/2007/03/riaaletter.pdf [consumerist.com]
https://www.p2plawsuits.com/ [p2plawsuits.com] Settlement support center link is here.
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Not really. Trunks have locks, and require keys to open them. Reading encrypted packets also requires keys. Granted, 256 bit encryption is probably a bit more secure than the average trunk.
Re:Or maybe.... (Score:5, Funny)
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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.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Encryption increases SPEED, does NOT lower risk (Score:5, Funny)
He's not a complete dumbass. Encrypted torrents will defeat the purposed ISP level copyright-filtering that some telcos (*cough* AT&T *cough*) are advocating. How do you tell if that encrypted data is the source code to Windows 2000, a Linux ISO or a collection of Chuck Norris jokes?
The Chuck Norris joke collection is easy - the packets perform their own QOS by kicking the hell out of any other packets in their way.
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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.
Re:Or maybe.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Or maybe.... (Score:5, Interesting)
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:Or maybe.... (Score:5, Funny)
It's always great when they comment on the fact that they walked by no less than 6 PCs on their way to the Xbox and double check that they're ONLY installing the Xbox... yep.
Then they will throttle all encrypted traffic (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Or maybe.... (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Won't Work (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Won't Work (Score:5, Interesting)
It's also probably illegal, and definitely unethical, to circumvent the network security this way.
Re:Won't Work (Score:5, Informative)
When I connect to a https site, during the handshake the remote site gives me a copy of its certificate. I (my browser) do two things with that certificate: I validate that the domain name embedded in the certificate matches the name of the website I was asking to connect to, and I verify the signature on the certificate using the public key of the signing authority.
Unless the ISP has private key of the signer, there is no way that they could possibly generate a false certificate on the fly - so I *know* I am talking to the server I wanted to connect to, not to an intermediate proxy server.
once that handshake is complete, I and the remote site have a private encryption key which we both use to encrypt/decrypt traffic between us. The ISP can't do anything with that traffic but pass it through (or block it).
The *only* way that an ISP could get in the middle would be for them to block ports 80 and 443 and insist that you configure your browser to use *their* proxy server. If you ever come across an ISP that does this, don't walk, run, to another ISP.
Re:Won't Work (Score:5, Informative)
You understand how HTTPS works, but not how a proxy works for HTTPS.
When your browser connects to a proxy for an HTTPS method, it makes a CONNECT request. The proxy makes a TCP connection to the IP address and port requested and passes the traffic both ways unchanged and uncached. The browser then performs the usual certificate validation on the contents received from the remote web site.
An ISP could force the use of a proxy. An ISP could disable HTTPS through their proxy. An ISP could slow down HTTPS through their proxy. An ISP could monitor your traffic volume through their proxy (or their routers). An ISP could record every encrypted bit going both ways. An ISP could also corrupt the encrypted traffic bits. But an ISP cannot interpret the bits in your encrypted traffic, nor modify them, in any meaningful way, without cracking the encryption.
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Windows update is not https, which I've always felt was the biggest security hole in Windows (but maybe there's better security behind the scenes?).
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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.
They'll demand the right.. (Score:2)
They'll demand the right to see what's being encrypted.
Guy Fawkes masks all around
Maybe... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Maybe... (Score:5, 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:Maybe... (Score:4, Funny)
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.)
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The police will happily break into your house at night and shoot you if they have t he wrong address for a drug bust. It happens all the time. They've even shot and killed little old ladies in these busts gone wrong. I don't trust the police farther than I can throw them; they're mostly just jack-booted thugs on a
Encryption Alert: +1, PatRIOTic (Score:2, Funny)
To: All Revolution Participants
From: Agent 1011128
Encrypt all communications because Mr. Evil [whitehouse.org] is listening. [rawstory.com]
Regards,
Kilgore Trout, ACTIVIST
Could someone clarify... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Could someone clarify... (Score:5, 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)
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: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.
Excellent question (Score:2)
If the scheme does not use a crypto-based trust mechanism, then there may be ways to decrypt and find out who is downloading what. OTOH if its really clever, then a snoop might be able to see what's being downloaded without seeing who.
Re:Could someone clarify... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Could someone clarify... (Score:5, Informative)
Encryption prevents traffic analysis, which means that a router can't easily detect that something is a BitTorrent connection and throttle it.
Really this seems to be a case of "the more you tighten your grip, the more will slip through your fingers". The excessive amount of filtering first made sure that about everything learned to talk over port 80. Now they'll add encryption over that, so that ultimately a large percentage of traffic will be completely opaque and going through port 80, making it pretty much impossible to filter.
There might be a consequence for the RIAA though: It means that no traffic analysis will tell you what somebody is downloading. Sure you can see which computers and tracker are involved, but you don't know what's the file being transferred. So no way to tell anything by listening to traffic at strategic points, now you need to maintain a connection with a tracker for every file you want to monitor.
As an user this doesn't seem like such a bad thing, but as a sysadmin it has the potential of becoming quite annoying. Read on what it takes to stop Skype from working for a preview of what might become universal eventually.
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Then of course, P2P will just institute TCP/IP port knocking to randomize and protect itself.
Re:Could someone clarify... (Score:5, Interesting)
Rogers Canada throttles all encrypted packets, (I use citrix to connect into work) so this year I dropped them as an ISP, and told them why. Having no problems with my current provider, and they still supported me, when I told them I was running all Ubuntu/Debian on my home network.
> Their pipes, their rules.
Except you have paid to lease that pipe with a promised level of service. XXX GB/month cap, or "unlimited" YYY MBPS means exactly what it says. Would you still pay your full electrical/gas bill if they drop your line voltage/gas pressure 90% every time you really need it? They have oversold their service and can't deliver.
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Encrypted data simply looks random. So does compressed data.
You could of course detect SSL connections (since the protocol is predictable), but that only works if you have some sort of detectable handshake or metadata around the compressed stuff.
Here's one workaround that comes to mind, for example: Establish a completely normal SSL session by HTTPS with another computer, exchange keys, close that connection, then start an encrypted connection using those keys, withou
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Get this: There's no such thing. If they agreed to provide 1MBps without monthly limits, then they agreed to provide 1MBps without monthly limits.
No, they want to throttle because they know people won't sign up for a "30GB/month max" account, and they can't offer 512Kbps when everybody else is offering 4MBps. They can't sell you a 4Mbps account and then th
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: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.
Is encryption private? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Is encryption private? (Score:5, Interesting)
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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.
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Why he is assuming that I am breaking the law, I do not know.
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"I'm not sure if the DMCA says anything about it, but it seems to me that any person looking at any traffic you aren't sending to them is (or should be) illegal. How would this be relevantly different from an illegal wire (phone) tap?"
Because BitTorrent isn't a one-to-one, private transaction. It's anonymous, one-to-many. You make that Kanye West rip available, and anybody with a BitTorrent client can get it. It makes no difference if they're another Kanye West fan, or the record label that would very m
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.
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
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How did that go? I have considered configuring my system to reject any unencrypted email. (It would surely cut down on spam for a while, though that is not the primary goal.) However, after talking to my friends and family about it, I concluded that none of my family and few of my friends would ever email me again, and my phone bill would go way up.
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But it's perfectly legal for me to wear a ski mask into a bank. It's even perfectly legal for me to carry a gun into a bank. (no, I'm not kidding, though in California you'd need a permit to carry a gun in a public place)
What's illegal is robbing the bank. Wearing a ski mask is not a crime. Carrying a gun is not a crime. It's robbing a bank that is a crime. D
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.
Thank intelligent filtering (Score:4, Insightful)
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I got new for you (Score:2)
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.
Re:Captain obvious moved to the UK? (Score:5, Insightful)
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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?
In this case it is not automatically assumed. A significant portion of bittorrent traffic is in fact infringing copyright. If a bunch of it suddenly goes encrypted, I don't know why you wouldn't suspect that the encrypted traffic wasn't largely illegal as well. It may well not be, but the fact that it's encrypted works against that assumption based on the legality of unencrypted traffic. You can see that a large portion of visible traffic is infringing and you can exclude from your stats the stuff that isn
Perhaps... (Score:3, Insightful)
TorrentFS? (Score:2)
Now what would rea
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b: Why would BitTorrent users store your encrypted data on their systems for free and provide you with free bandwidth? Remember, in "normal" BT use, everybody gets something.
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if you change a file in a torrent, you pretty much have to make a completely new swarm and all that entails, as that change requires a new hash for that file and a new hash for the torrent on the whole.
i don't see how bittorrent would work for that (unless it might be doable through some interesting hack, like Azureus's alternate distributed tra
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Unless you meant building a private torrent network, where every peer is a computer you own&control. In which case you would probably be better off usin
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If the encryption really works, then I might distribute a lot of my own personal storage to torrent networks, and just cache locally only copies of what I need to access fast and often.
Similar concept to Freenet, but Freenet is really really slow and no guarantee you'll ever get back anything you put on it. As for bittorrent, that only works if you can convince a bunch of people to not only download the "files" you want to distribute, but to keep them available for downloading at some undetermined point in the future. Bittorrent is great for propagating large files in high demand to many people quickly, but it really sucks as a persistence system.
You would be better off either getting
evolution (Score:5, Insightful)
Or maybe... (Score:2)
It should come as no surprise that if people think they can hide illegal activity they will attempt to.'
Or maybe it's all the traffic profiling we've been hearing so much about. And when they finally force all the pirates that don't want to become debt slaves for the rest of their lives into fully anonymous encrypted networks and all sorts of wierd shit go unchecked, they can whine and complain all they want but then they've really screwed themselves up one side and down the other.
People hide illegal activity? (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes it is the LEGAL activities that surprise me at how much people try to hide. Look at slashdot. My name, my real name, is right here. You can look me up and call me or visit my home. I hide nothing, why should I? Yet most of you are hiding your identities for whatever reason -- and how many of you are doing something illegal by posting here? Browse the blogs, too, and see how many people use their real names.
We hide more than that -- I brought up the question of sex (marital) with a friend, and he freaked when I asked him about his sex life. As if sex when you're married is immoral or illegal, but still people hide behind the idea that we need privacy about such matters.
Most of what the law officers do is hidden, with even FOIA acts not bringing much information to light. This is supposedly legal operations of people who serve me, and yet I have no ability to discern what they're doing, and if they're doing their jobs right. Again, hidden yet probably legal actions.
The more I look around my life, the more I am amazed at how private people are, because they're afraid that some of their actions may be construed as immoral, or immature -- yet most of the people in my life are doing the exact same thing as others, and just hiding it. We post on forums and blogs, but we feel we must keep our names private because others might see what we write, even if others are thinking the same thoughts, or if those same others pretend to believe in freedom of expression but may secretly use it against you.
In terms of encrypting torrents, I do. I run a video sharing site for church videos, and all our torrents are legal and public domain. Yet we encrypt it because unencrypted torrents seem to run slower (I'm sure there is a reason for this, but I never really inspected the protocol specs). Therefore, we encrypt not to obfuscate the legality of what we're sharing, but because the market's limitations on torrent sharing give us a need to encrypt so we can provide a higher bandwidth for the sharing of legal, public domain content.
Are most torrents legal? I have no idea, but I do use torrents to send large files to multiple people every day in a variety of markets I do business in. For me, the torrent is an awesome solution to a problem I've had for years dealing with large files.
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What is known about you can be used against you.
Just search for senator sex scandals and the subsequent end of their careers.
Another example: before WW2, it was common to ask immigrants about their ethnic origin. This information was archived, and later used when concentration camps for Japanese were created.
Or, imagine ultra-orthodox "Born Again" christians take over the US government, and start "cleansing" (read: slaughtering) the "tainted" (read: anybody practicing sex, any religio
Libel, anyone? (Score:4, Insightful)
Encryption == Illegal Activity (Score:3, Insightful)
Criminalizing Encryption (Score:2)
Pre-emptively... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Taking it a step further, I believe ALL data communication should be encrypted...just because. Email, IM, thumb drives, etc. If only to emphasize that it's no one else's damn business.
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.
Thank the traffic-shapers... (Score:2)
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.
Remember... (Score:3, Interesting)
pfft.... (Score:2)
And it should be remembered that the best way to live outside the law, is to live within it..."
encryption and crime (Score:2)
Like DRM.
A comment from a non-tech person (Score:5, Interesting)
I was kinda taken aback by that and had quite some trouble retaining my calmness at the question alone. But he was dead serious. Outlaw that crap and the problem is gone.
His train of reason was that he can't check what his kid does on the computer, whether he engages in the sharing of copyrighted files and thus it's easier for him if it was just outlawed. What doesn't exist can't be a problem.
That was quite an eye opener for me, especially why crap like our current legislations can happen without any kind of resistance. Actually, there are people supporting it. Mostly because they don't know jack about the situation at all. My question why he would like to incriminate his son automatically when he uses the program was answered with "If it is illegal to have it, he can't get it". It took quite a while to explain to him that the internet is international and that it's no problem to get it from abroad.
I received a horrified blank stare at this revelation. And the quite insecure question "He can get it from abroad? He doesn't have a credit card, he can't get stuff from there."
I'm not kidding you, this is not made up, this is real. Those people do exist. They don't realize that borders are meaningless on the internet, that national laws prohibiting the possession of software don't affect a thing, except to criminalize people who did nothing wrong. I had a very hard time convincing him that a law against P2P would only harm his son, not solve the problem.
I think this was the moment when I learned that I have to reconsider my strategy for getting support against such BS laws. First of all you have to explain to people that laws like this only criminalize the ones they want to protect, their kids, but laws like this don't protect their kids from breaking the law, intentionally or unintentionally. They want to protect their kids by eliminating the problem rather than trying to solve the problem. They do not want to deal with it.
And that's the underlying problem.
Is closed source a conduit for criminal activity? (Score:3, Interesting)
"It should come as no surprise that if people think they can hide illegal activity they will attempt to."
'People' also means groups of people, which can also include Microsoft, who has long since denied any wrongdoing of growing their collection of software and inventions since their inception. Yet... they insist that they are protecting their Intellectual Property by hiding the source code to Windows and other Microsoft softwares. How can we know for sure (in the public eye) that they themselves have not stolen software from others over the years. Law is about absolutes. It is enforced with absolute counter-measures, unless a payoff can lessen a punishment and the bribe can be hidden from others eyes that care about such matters.
So this goes for corporations as well as common citizens, no?
And another thought....
And I always thought the death of Gary Kindall, was a bit fishy.
http://www.ipopisp.com/marksofesteem18.asp [ipopisp.com]
Perhaps he could have shut down the operations of a particular large monopolistic software company with some carefully placed testimony that closed source software could not conceal?
Maybe he got hit with a thrown chair at the bar and died?
I certainly hope this did not happen. But mafia-types tend to protect their profits in unlawful and immoral ways. (Did you ever see the Godfather movie series? If my comments are considered slander, I blame it on watching the Godfather as a kid and seeing "the Pirates of Silicon Valley." )
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The power of an open internet... showing mankind itself for all it is...
Where are the SSL bittorrent trackers? (Score:3, Informative)
This is almost certainly what Comcast is doing. After setting up Azureus to use only DHT and Peer Exchange for peer sources, it is once again possible to seed torrents, in spite of Comcast's evil doings. It is still not at all great, but much improved. Not nearly as good as my new ISP though.
If you run a tracker, please consider using SSL in the future. Ideally, requests for
Azureus over I2P (Score:3, Informative)
Let's all switch now and incorporate this by default in any clients...