The site offers real-time insight into Internet traffic statistics, and show how much bandwidth is used by various applications.

A quick look at the stats shows that P2P traffic in Europe accounts for more than a quarter of all bandwidth, and 40 percent of all packets sent. Nearly all comes from BitTorrent.

During the night the share of BitTorrent traffic exceeds 50%.

“We want the Internet Observatory to become an Internet seismograph, an information service for everybody seeking reliable data about what happens on the Internet in various regions of the world, at every time of the day,” says Klaus Mochalski, responsible for the project at Ipoque.

The traffic stats are currently limited to Europe only, but other regions will be added in the near future.

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

The report concludes that the proportion of P2P traffic is slightly declining, while file hosting services and streaming websites show an increase. Most P2P users come from Eastern Europe, where 57% of all Internet traffic comes from BitTorrent users.

Southern America has the least BitTorrent traffic at just 20% of total, with the filesharing application Ares continuing to dominate with 28%.

The data further shows that BitTorrent’s market-share of P2P traffic is still increasing. In Southwestern Europe it went up by 45% in 2008, in Eastern Europe by 23% and the proportion of BitTorrent traffic increased by 40% in the Middle East.

Interestingly, the report shows that approximately one quarter of all BitTorrent traffic uses protocol header encryption. Encryption doesn’t have any privacy advantages, but aims to hide the fact one is using BitTorrent, which makes it harder for ISPs to throttle their subscribers.

Overall we can conclude that BitTorrent has grown significantly over the past year while eDonkey took the biggest hit. Percentage-wise, P2P traffic is declining, but this is due to the increase of streaming and file-hosting services rather than a decreased interest in P2P.

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

The paper, which claims to “provide an as objective as possible assessment of the countermeasures for P2P” initially left us skeptical. But, with one or two exceptions, it does what it claims to do. Other companies and politicians should take note of this. Below we look at the conclusions of the report – some we were actually moved to applaud, while others were slightly cringe worthy.

The Good

DNS Blocking

“Blocking of IP addresses could be an additional measure in a combination of different measures, but is not the salvation of the problem itself.“

Ipoque comes to the right conclusion here. Indeed, DNS blocking is not very effective. As has been proven by The Pirate Bay in their dispute in Denmark, these methods really don’t work.

URL Filters

“URL filters are widely available. Centrally hosted services such as Piratebay and even BitTorrent trackers could be blocked. An up-to-date list of URLs is a necessary prerequisite to make this measure effective. Unfortunately, it is nearly impossible to keep the URL database current. Affected sites could rapidly change URLs and propagate these changes. Ultimately, this would result in a never-ending cat and mouse game.“

Again the report is spot on. The Internet Watch Foundation in the UK showed that blocklists don’t work well when applied to known sites and content. On a sidenote, file-sharers who use blocklists like PeerGuardian to filter peers of uncertain identity, face the same problem.

Swarm Poisoning

“[The injection of counterfeits] have driven file sharers to the BitTorrent network, that is nearly immune against injection of fake files, mainly because content distribution is organized through web based torrent directories such as thepiratebay.org. Conclusion: The injection of counterfeits is no effective countermeasure anymore.”

They are right, it doesn’t. Not on well moderated torrent sites at least.

Fingerprint systems

“Due to its computational complexity, fingerprinting does not work in real-time for high-speed networks. Also, even though ever more file and compression formats are supported, fingerprinting is blind to encrypted archive files (e.g. password-protected ZIP files), and these are becoming more and more popular. Largescale deployment of fingerprinting technology would push the popularity of all kinds of encryption and render the whole technology useless as a countermeasure.”

This ties in with what we said last year about such systems and BitTorrent. These methods are highly ineffective.

DRM

“In the past, any DRM mechanism was hacked or otherwise circumvented. This is highly likely to happen to new systems as well.”

DRM doesn’t work, and has not worked. One person breaching it is all it takes, thanks to the Internet. Spore is a great example of how DRM only affects legitimate purchasers, and not the people it attempts to target.

The Summary

“First, and most importantly, content providers need to provide other high-quality, well priced and easily accessible online content. New business models are inevitable. In the long run, this will make illegitimate sharing of copyright-protected material through the Internet a lot less interesting.”

This is the crux. It’s why rights owners are burying their heads in the sand, in the hope it will go away. It’s not surprising, however, that rights owners do not wish to move to a model that gives a smaller return-per-unit.

The Bad

URL Whitelisting

“An example is Ipoque’s BitTorrent tracker whitelisting, that allows access to guaranteed legal BitTorrent content, while blocking access to all other P2P content. This approach works because nearly all legal P2P content is distributed over BitTorrent using dedicated and controlled BitTorrent trackers.”

Simply banning a huge number of BitTorrent trackers because they are open to all users doesn’t seem to be a good idea. One of the most eye-opening things about P2P is the sheer wealth of data it gives access to. Some may be in violation of civil or criminal law, but a lot isn’t. The same applications that can be used to share a game, can be used to promote a band, or distribute political protest by groups large and small.

Automatic detection tools

“Such systems can detect infringements nationally and internationally. The location is not important. Especially automatic detection systems work highly efficiently and produce court-proof evidence data. This measure is very difficult to circumvent”

Yes, the only problem is that these tools are not very accurate. They target dead people, printers, those that have never shared, and everyone else falsely accused. Strangely, they point this out themselves 2 paragraphs earlier:

“Active monitoring has garnered a bad reputation because content providers have in the past often tried to criminalize copyright infringers and imposed ridiculous penalties as a deterrent. In addition, there have been flawed lawsuits with verdicts about persons with no Internet access. Careful investigation along with adequate penalties are necessary to improve the reputation of this measure”

The Ugly

Using Exploits

“As for any computer system, attacks are possible, and there are commercial providers offering this as a service. An attack on eDonkey, for instance, may have the effect that the downloaded file is larger than the original, and the download never finishes. There are similar attacks for BitTorrent.”

Using exploits in file-sharing networks and clients is of course insane. Moreover, depending on the vulnerabilities exploited, this could be a violation of criminal law. At best, as with the Sony Rootkits, exploiting software systems like this is at least reputation-damaging. Of course, there’s also…

The Great!

Encrypted communication

“Encrypted communication and private file sharing networks can only be controlled by criminalistic methods involving a high effort.”

Again we applaud Ipoque for reaching the right conclusion. Not much we can say about this, except it’s the truth, and can’t be repeated often enough.

Is it a paper that is objective? Well, its the most objective one yet, but then that’s not saying much.

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

Ipoque reports in a preview of their 2007 P2P survey that BitTorrent is generating between 50-75% of all P2P traffic. P2P traffic is responsible for 50%-90% of all Internet traffic which means that BitTorrent traffic is generating somewhere between 25% and 65% of all Internet traffic.

However, there is quite a bit of regional variance in the use of P2P applications according to Ipoque: “eDonkey exhibits a regionally varying popularity with shares between 5-50% of all P2P. In certain regions, other protocols have gained a significant importance. In the Baltic States, for instance, DirectConnect has a proportion of about 30% of all P2P traffic”

Ipoque reports that all P2P traffic is still growing. Joost is not yet posing a threat to ISPs, but media streaming services and VoIP applications show significant growth. For example, Ipoque reports that Skype generates up to 2% of the overall traffic in certain networks.

It is probably good to know that this Internet traffic research is often conducted by companies that offer broadband management and optimization solutions. It is in their best interest to overestimate these figures because they design the traffic shaping applications that help ISPs to manage their precious bandwidth.

The 2007 P2P survey will be presented at Technology Review’s Emerging Technologies Conference at MIT, more details later.

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

Ipoque studied survey anonymized date supplied by some large German network operators and concludes:

Illegal P2P file sharing has had tremendous effects on the film and music industry. Now they are struggling to curb Internet piracy. ipoque’s survey demonstrates that user behavior remains unaffected by their efforts. The massive police action initiated by the state prosecutor’s office of Cologne, Germany, supported by the German branch of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) caused a short-term decrease of P2P downloads of 15%. In the course of only three weeks, download volume bounced back to its previous level.

And the future?

ipoque predicts that such massive legal actions will not significantly change the overall amount of illegal downloads. It will only drive users to new, more elusive file sharing platforms

A while ago we already reported about the ineffectiveness of p2p raids.

On February 21 The Belgian police managed to shut down Razorback2′s servers. Razorback2 was considered to be the heart of the Edonkey2000 network, with over a million users. However, Cachelogic’s Vice President David Ferguson concluded from their traffic statistics on the Edonkey2000 network that it had NO EFFECT on Edonkey’s traffic. It just relocated the problem.

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