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?

Bandwidth is not free. ISP’s are doing an amazing job of making it look very very cheap. It is Street Magic otherwise known as sleight of hand but it is an illusion.

To do this illusion, they are using statistics that have some built in assumptions based upon what they expect a user to be doing. Bittorrent as we are currently using it is breaking those assumptions, that is a bad thing for everybody. Having the illuison appear to be real is in everybodies best intrest.

What needs to happen is that we need to find a way so that the virtual networks that are created by bit torrent and other P2P protocols map correctly on top of the real networks. This would allow things like your machine would look for people on the same ISP to provide the data to you before going outside of your ISP. As said internal ISP traffic is very cheap and can be very high speed as compared to traffic that has to come or go outside of your ISP.

To see the slight of hand look at the following:
what is the cost of a T3 like what your ISP would have to buy? 5k-15k per month according to http://www.t1-service.us/t1-internet-service-research.htm (I thought that it was a little cheaper) That can handle 30 DSL connections that offer 1.5 Mbit connections. 30 DSL connections at 50 USD per month income of: 1500 OPS!! where are they getting the other 3.5-13.5k USD? magic.

In this scenario, caching does not help, the only place you could cache would be on the EU’s computer…. and what’s the point in that?!?

Personally I prefer good honest upfront usage caps.

There’s ways to restrict BitTorrent that *don’t* violate network neutrality; for example they can simply give users a weekly or monthly budget and start progressively traffic shaping the whole connection. That way you only get the restrictions kicking in if you overdo the downloads (of whatever protocol, http, ftp or BT etc. etc.)

Who do the ISPs think they are to restrict what use you make of your connection anyway? Restricting *overuse* is fair enough if it exceeds the contention ratio you’ve *paid* for. Otherwise it’s censorship. Why pay for an ISP that censors you?

I would be interested to see this survey, which countries it covers and which ISP’s.

Most ISP’s have started to use “deep packet inspection” which means it’s not just the headers that are checked, it looks for the encrypted headers used by the protocol and deep inspects the data packet. It checks that it’s traffic that should be restricted and takes the relevant action, some ISP’s have their systems setup so that should over 40% of your data packets turn out to be restricted traffic that they don’t bother inspecting the rest just restrict all your traffic.

[quote]I haven’t heard of any ISP throttling and caching BitTorrent traffic at the same time. Caching essentially helps your downloads, so an ISP that’s caching BitTorrent traffic is not likely to throttle it as well.[/quote]

NTL, in the UK, was one of the first to trial bit torrent caching and whilst they don’t traffic shape all areas of their networks they do some, at the same time they do cache data.

[quote]The ISPs are being hostile towards their customers if they start to limit BitTorrent traffic, often even without letting them know[/quote]

This is a silly way to react to an ISP, before joining an ISP you should do good research on them to ensure that you are switching to a suitable provider for your needs. If ISP’s do start to traffic shape after you have joined them and fail to let you know, if would be worth checking your T&C’s and considering complaining if they have breached them, a further idea would be to complain to the regulator of the industry to get this practice stamped out.

As an overview I do agree with your arguments FOR encryption, why not make everyone switch it on? Those ISP’s that don’t invest in their network or are simply hostile to the protocol might find their customers do get faster access. However I do feel your arguments lack research or any evidentiary support.

Finally turning on encryption inside your client isn’t the only way to try and bypass traffic shaping. In fact there is a far more effective way around it. Setting up a VPN connection with a company like relakks.com not only encrypts ALL your internet traffic meaning it can’t be shaped by your ISP it also protects against deep packet inspection as the data packets look like VPN traffic rather than bit torrent, meaning it doesn’t get throttled, the vast majority of ISP’s don’t throttle VPN traffic (in fact some have it in its top tier) and probably never will do so as it’s used by so many business users.