On another note, somebody should write a personal bittorrent cache, which simply latches onto popular torrents and helps to seed – with the aim of plausible deniability. Where FreeNet is legal, so should this be.

thanks

changed the wording ;)[/quote]

It’s still not correct though as it is Azureus that introduced DHT into the BT world, and then Bram chose to implement another flavor in his client.

As for Bram “choice” to implement encryption I don’t think it’s because it became “good” to his eyes, it’s simply because it became a necessity to not be left behind.

Let’s say every torrent user would encrypt his BT-traffic, don’t you think isp’s would find it weird that all the default BT-traffic has disappeared and then something new starts to slurp alot of bandwidth from them?

Why Encrypting BitTorrent Traffic Is Good posted at IndianPad.com…

If the ISP is trying to protect it’s internet-side links, then there is a good reason to both throttle, AND cache. Any BT traffic coming out of its cache does not (appreciably) go over the internet-side links, so there’s less reason to throttle it. This, of course, means that BT traffic that comes out of the cache is far faster than traffic that has to go through the throttling AND the internet-side link, so it favours BT data that’s already in the cache.

The same applies if the ISP is trying to both protect it’s downstream AND upstream links.

Nicely said old-time p2p’er, I was going to say the same thing. The original motivation for research into DHT’s was not for p2p apps, but for large-scale, fault-tolerant networked applications. Given their suitability for p2p, they were of course quickly picked up by the community.

hmmm… statements like that suggest that the author only stepped into the P2P world recently. DHT was once a major conversation topic within the P2P community long before DHT was ever adopted by BitTorrent.
[/quote]

changed the wording ;)

http://img187.imageshack.us/img187/1444/diggthingtg0.png

two torrent freak stories on the top stories part of the site in digg and one on the front page. Torrentfreak FTW

hmmm… statements like that suggest that the author only stepped into the P2P world recently. DHT was once a major conversation topic within the P2P community long before DHT was ever adopted by BitTorrent.

Cohen did not invent DHT (distributed hash tables), nor was he the first to create a major DHT decentralized network. Azureus’s DHT was developed months earlier (which explains why there are now two competing and incompatible DHT (BT) protocols, since Cohen decided against using Azureus’ existing DHT implementation) Other decentralized P2P networks such as eDonkey’s Overnet started implementing DHT about two years before Bittorrent.

DHT is only one form of decentralized P2P network. Anatomic P2P was actually the first decentralized Bittorrent (not counting Exeem), but Anatomic P2P’s network protocol was based on a Gnutella-like Supernode network configuration, instead of DHT.

So really encryption is only a benefit if you store your downloads online/share out files. DEPENDING on the layer that the encryption occurs at (IPSEC at net? SSL or SSH at upper layers?). To prevent snooping by ISP/RIAA (etc), you would need to do 1 – encrypt headers (include hide protocol info that could be used against you) OR 2 anonymizer – prevent them from knowing what sites you are visiting, including the swarm identities. hiding header/protocol could be done via IPsec. SSL/SSH would be a good add-on to protect login info, but off the top of my head, not helpful to hide. Any number of anonymizer/proxy/reverse proxy would be handy to keep ISP, RIAA,m etc. guessing (at least for a while).

If you look at it, the content if the torrent download is essentially encrypted (er, obfuscated, at least…) by going through the swarm.

Any other ideas?