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)
Re:Do arms races ever work? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Do arms races ever work? (Score:4, Funny)
In 10-15 years, p2p will stand for Person to Person, as we will have placed the computers inside our heads, we will share thoughts. No more picture based porn, when you "download" the new porn, it will appear as you in it. And you will not only get to see/heard, but also smell, taste, and feel. More importantly, cyber-sex will be much more like real sex, as a virtual world will be just as real as the real world.
Oh, and in 20 years legislation will have been past severely restricting this new technology to anyone under 21 years of age, and in some states, cyber-anal-sex will be a capital offense. In 23 years, Comcast will start 'degrading' this new service for due to 'QoS' concerns. After a few million people have their virtual parters turn into cows during virtual sex, a riot breaks out leaving America as a second world nation.
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Re:Do arms races ever work? (Score:5, Funny)
However, the packet drop in windy places would be too much.
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Re:Do arms races ever work? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Unless one side suddenly blows away the other, I don't see this ending. It may breed innovation, but said innovation only seems useful for this one problem.
As far as I followed, most Bittorrent based "inventions" were done because of attacks by dark companies (media defender), fake seeders etc. Comcast is practically DOS attacking their own customers so someone finds a workaround for it. If it is good enough, all those bittorrent clients will adopt it in no time and they will end up with horrible publicity, paranoid customers, FCC investigation for nothing. Technical karma :)
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Obviously, you didn't understand what I said: nothing you do on your end would matter, because the computer on the other end of the connection -- the one you're downloading from or uploading to -- will still receive the fake RST packet that Comcast sends them in your name. In other words, even non-Comcast-users would have to cooperate in order for it to work, and that's not likely to happen (because RST packets are, otherwise, a good thing).
Re:Do arms races ever work? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Do arms races ever work? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Do arms races ever work? (Score:5, Insightful)
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"100 simultaneous connections are reasonable for all legal uses of the Interweb."
Then all p2p would be fucked, not just BT.
Re:Do arms races ever work? (Score:5, Interesting)
We tried shaping P2P traffic, and it just annoyed customers, and annoying customers is not exactly a long-term strategy for success.
That would be suicide... (Score:4, Insightful)
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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
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?
Source of the unsolicited traffic (Score:5, Interesting)
Insecure machines that were taken over by hackers and whose clueless owners did not notice anything. Or even don't care.
Now if ISPs start selling traffic by the gigabyte (again - it was not uncommon a few years ago), the owner of those spam-slaves would notice it on their internet bills. At that point, I think securing one's machine would become a lot more popular and the botnets would shrink. Overall result:
less spam and DDOS attacks.
Considering the inbound hacking attempts, my father still has a 2 GByte/month plan and so far I've heard no complaints about suddenly increasing bills. So it seems to be not that much.
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:Do arms races ever work? (Score:5, Interesting)
What does strong crypto have to do with it? (Score:4, Interesting)
Even if it only takes an ISP 0.1 seconds to "crack" a packet then there's no way he can crack the millions of packets per second flowing through his routers.
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: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.
Traffic Analysis (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Traffic Analysis (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Traffic Analysis (Score:5, Insightful)
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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 f
Re:Traffic Analysis (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Traffic Analysis (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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If it's the entropy, jpg and bzipped files have similar entropy too.
Are they interfering with those downloads as well?
How about https?
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Re:Traffic Analysis (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Traffic Analysis (Score:5, Informative)
The fact that you are buying service from the attacker doesn't make them not an attacker. The counter measures developed to fight attackers may have limits, but they are there and are useful in this context.
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And then instead of a FIN packet, rely on the timeout.
That isn't too big of a change, just comment out some code. It would mess with some routers, but the connections couldn't be stopped by a MitM attack.
Or something like TCP over UDP with those changes. SCTP sounds close, but that isn't encrypted at the transport layer, and is probably vulnerable to the same type of attack. It is different, so the Comcast forgery-throttling software doesn't at
FTP. (Score:3, Informative)
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I agree that normal browsing and P2P are going to look obviously different so hiding P2P within HTTP is not going to be too difficult to detect. However, P2P could look a lot like an FTP download. How's traffic analysis going to be able to tell the difference between a P2P movie download that looks like FTP from real and legit FTP?
In one case you have one or two connections to a single server. Traffic during a download will be in one direction only. In the other case you have connections to multiple destinations. There is significant traffic in both directions to each destination. Do those sound similar at all?
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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: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.
Re:Another volley herd in The Pirate Bay (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Another volley herd in The Pirate Bay (Score:4, Insightful)
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Beautiful. New signature.
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How do you know who has anything to hide, unless you search everyone?
How do you know who is a terrorist, unless you search everyone?
You know after the fact, but it is impossible to preserve privacy and to know for sure "who has anything to hide". The people who wrote the constitution chose to err on the side of privacy. Now, we are choosing to err on the side of... no liberty.
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doesn't work (Score:5, Insightful)
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Yes, hopefully they will, because it makes life easier for the rest of us.
Why do you think Comcast is doing that? To annoy people? Because they are evil? They're doing it because a small number of people are eating up a lot of bandwidth and degrading service for the other users.
Don't let the door hit you on the way out.
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.
Comcast makes $$$$$ disrupting seeds (Score:4, Informative)
Holy crap, a CCIE! (Score:5, Funny)
I am not worthy.
m(_ _)m
Re:Holy crap, a CCIE! (Score:5, Insightful)
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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.
Re:Holy crap, a CCIE! (Score:5, Funny)
Professor Sir Calum, MP, PhD, MsC, Esq.
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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.)
Ha! Ha! (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm glad this is all happening (Score:3, Interesting)
Throttling encryption (Score:4, Interesting)
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Won't work: They clamp on traffic per flow (Score:5, Informative)
The only way around this is to open multiple connections to different addresses, transfer small amounts per connection, and then shut it down, opening the next connection to a different endpoint. It requires a total reengineering of P2P, although the BitTorrent mechanism is closest to what would work.
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Isn't that the very defenition of P2P to begin with? What needs reengineering about it?
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We all need to band together and find a way to send a giant FU to these guys. How about a mass switch, at the end of the next quarter, to Verizon? Make them show a huge "surprise" to Wall Street and have to explain it in the context of their "net neutrality" position?
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."
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You say that as the cost of the drugs go up, the use goes down. Sounds quite logical, I must admi
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:First Blood? (Score:4, 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.
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The past couple months, web browsing is unbearable while running BT with Comcast. As soon as I start it up, even at 15 KB/s upload, websites take 5-10
I don't want to blow my own trumpet but... (Score:3, Interesting)
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=450792&cid=22391864
Happened a little later than I expected, but it still happened! Good work.
Ok so we have Britain proposing the monitoring of the entire internet, Australia is proposing an ISP-level filter, US cable companies are doing their own selective torrent throttling and various countries such as China already have expansive firewalls and filters in place. Even if this proposal falls through, or is modified somehow, I think we're going to have to accept that governments are in the pockets of the media companies and service providers will target users of p2p because, in their opinion, they aren't making as big a profit as they might like.
The next step is to ask what we, as the science, engineering and computer-loving community who have been using BitTorrent and various other protocols for legitimate uses before all the kids figured out they could score Amy Winehouse albums for free, can do to either circumvent the policies initiated by the above various groups or to bypass them completely.
Napster, Limewire and the first generation p2p clients collapsed so BitTorrent was designed and users flocked to it. Now it appears that BitTorrent is going to suffer the same fate (if not now than definitely in the near future - the increasing pressure put on ISP's and governments around the world by copyright holders is going to see to that).
We can't afford to fight fire with fire. Invasive laws and techniques used by companies such as Comcast may be un-Constitutional, or against the terms of service but the average p2p-user can't afford to launch a civil case against one of the biggest corporations in the USA. My suggestion is for a new protocol to be established, with the emphasis on sharing legitimate files such as patches, Linux ISO's, videos, game demo's etc. Inevitably the first people to jump onto the new system will be the true geeks (By this I mean your average Slashdotter) and by doing so, they can utilise it to its full extent (Something like the early days of BitTorrent) whilst the MPAA/RIAA flog a dead horse.
Of course it's only a matter of time before pirates jump onto the new protocol and then we watch the whole show unfold again. However p2p-users have proven resourceful and it's only a matter of time before yet another protocol is developed and the cycle continues. But the advantage lies with us. The cost to the developer of something like BitTorrent is minutely small when compared to the hundreds of millions of dollars MAFIAA throws away in its attempt to stop piracy. If we keep it up long enough we might finally get the message across that p2p != piracy, or we might simply bleed them dry.
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: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.
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Re:I wonder... (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:I wonder... (Score:5, Informative)
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- shadowmatter
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