This is what Matt Phillips, of the record industry trade association the British Phonographic Institute told the Register: “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.”

So if it’s not hiding anything, why do people use BitTorrent encryption then?

I’ll try to explain it once more to the BPI, IFPI and RIAA and some tech journalists, just so they don’t embarrass themselves again in the future. BitTorrent encryption has nothing to do with hiding the data you’re sharing, it only hides the fact that you’re using BitTorrent to do so.

Encryption was designed to prevent ISPs from throttling BitTorrent traffic, which they started doing approximately 2 years ago. ISPs use so called traffic shaping devices to identify and slow down BitTorrent traffic because it takes up a lot of bandwidth (read: costs a lot of money). BitTorrent encryption, which is now supported by all the popular BitTorrent clients, hides the protocol header. As a result, these devices can’t detect that someone is using BitTorrent and you can download at full speed.

So, encryption does not hide the actual data people are sharing, everyone can still connect to a BitTorrent swarm, record your IP-address, and send you an infringement notice.

Now back to the claim that 40% of the BitTorrent traffic is encrypted in the UK. My first question would be, how do they know that it’s BitTorrent traffic if it’s encrypted? Apart from that I think 40% is a little too high, unless the ISP that reported the data is throttling BitTorrent traffic of course. We’ve been tracking the number of people who actually use encryption and it is currently slightly below 10%. It could be of course that these people are responsible for 40% of the traffic, but I seriously doubt that.

Bottom line is, anti-piracy organizations should take some time to read up on what filesharing actually is before they are going to accuse people of something, but I guess that’s wishful thinking.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

The new version has the option of only connecting to clients that support this feature but it has the option of connecting to all clients as well.

Protocol obfuscation has been the most requested feature by eMule users for several months. It has been reported that Brasil Telecom has been aggressively throttling traffic generated by eMule. This has made eMule practically unusable for thousands of Brazilian’s and although NeoMule, an eMule mod, added protocol obfuscation several months ago it only partially alleviated the problem.

NeoMule users represent a very small percentage of the ed2k network and although their protocol obfuscation feature works well, it only works if the users it connects to are also using NeoMule.

Recently, more and more ISP’s have began throttling P2P protocols. Numerous ISP’s have targeted the BitTorrent protocol and in response Azureus, BitComet and uTorrent have implemented protocol encryption.

Overall, their protocol encryption feature has been effective but Allot Communications claims that they have developed technology that allows ISP’s to specifically target and throttle encrypted BitTorrent traffic.

It’s clear that eMule’s protocol obfuscation feature will be well received by the eMule community but it remains to be seen how long it will take for ISP’s to figure out a way to throttle eMule’s traffic once again.

p2pnet

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Encrypting protocol headers is needed to fight ISP’s that are using bit-shaping applications to throttle the traffic that is generated by BitTorrent.

It should only ne a matter of time before other clients are going to implement this “new standard”. It is doubtful if the official clients is going to support it since Bram Cohen was not really enthusiast about these developments.

Links: Azureus, Bitcomet, uTorrent

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

The edition of Newsnight in question led to a lot of critique, and today Adam Livingstone Newsnight’s Ubergeek tried to calm things down and made a public apology.

First though, an apology. File sharing is not theft. It has never been theft. Anyone who says it is theft is wrong and has unthinkingly absorbed too many Recording Industry Association of America press releases. We know that script line was wrong. It was a mistake. We’re very, very sorry.

Good to hear some wise words after all

Link to torrent (non terrorists only)

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.