The traceless search engine DuckDuckGo has witnessed a massive boost in visitors, and this week the new encrypted messaging service from Peter Sunde raised $100,000 via crowd-funding in just one day.

Kim Dotcom’s Mega, which brands itself as “The Privacy Company,” is also expanding its offering in the encryption niche. Currently the site allows users to store their files fully encrypted, but the company will soon expand its services with several private communication tools.

Mega is working with a team of developers to launch a private messaging platform and an encrypted email service. Kim Dotcom informs TorrentFreak that the web-based messenger is scheduled to be released this summer and other communication services will follow soon after.

“We expect to have messaging within Mega in four to six weeks, and within apps in two to three months A full-scale encrypted email service is expected to be released in six to nine months,” Dotcom told us.

“That’s the roadmap. There is always a chance for delays depending on the challenges we encounter,” he adds.

Mega’s CEO Vikram Kumar confirmed that the new tools are in the works. In a blog post he mentions that there’s a new crypto-war going on, which is certainly not limited to the recent NSA revelations.

“Global concerns over governments collecting, storing, and analyzing all Internet traffic is growing. New laws are sprouting everywhere like the UK’s proposed ‘Snooper’s Charter,’ metadata retention for law enforcement agencies in Australia, and an update to lawful interception in New Zealand,” Kumar notes.

The authorities are not fond of encryption, although they have a good track record of cracking it, but Kumar stresses this is nothing new. In 1997 the FBI voiced concerns that encryption allowed “drug lords, spies, terrorists, and even violent gangs” to hide their illegal activities.

“Exactly the same concerns still drive the continuing war on crypto. Only, this time, the vocabulary has been updated to include words like national security, cyber espionage, and paedophiles,” Kumar writes.

While some of the concerns may be warranted, that doesn’t mean that ordinary people should allow Governments to sift through their private communications. This is the main reason why Mega will roll out their new services soon.

According to Mega’s CEO, governments will have to accept that people will stand up for their privacy, as is their right.

“One thing is certain: the end result will be the same as the previous battles- an uneasy truce in which governments will accept that they have limited ability to control crypto being used by people and businesses.”

“That will be a victory for the public good and the Internet’s indispensable role in our daily lives. Until the next crypto battle erupts,” Kumar concludes.

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

One of the reasons for isoHunt to implement SSL encryption, however, was a recent block by the Dubai government. isoHunt founder Gary Fung told TorrentFreak: “We decided to implement SSL to avoid eavesdropping on search, to bypass slow proxies, and to get around blocks like in Dubai.”

Earlier this year, Dubai started to block access to several BitTorrent sites, including isoHunt. With SSL, however, the site can be reached again, without any problems. There seems to be quite a demand for secure browsing as according to a poll on isoHunt, more than 80% of the users indicated that they will browse the site on an encrypted connection from now on.

Not only is isoHunt now accessible via SSL, its sister site TorrentBox, and the TorrentBox forums can also be reached over an encrypted connection. In the weeks to come, the isoHunt team will monitor how many users are browsing over SSL.

“We’ll be evaluating how much extra load this places on our servers over the next few weeks, and if there’s a large outpouring of people preferring to browse isoHunt or TorrentBox securely, we’ll be investing in some dedicated hardware to handle the SSL connections.”

For now, SSL is a great, and much needed, solution to censoring ISPs. Dubai is not the only country that blocks BitTorrent sites. Turkey does the same, so does a Danish ISP, and earlier this year the Kuwait government ordered ISPs to block access to 20 BitTorrent sites.

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

Unfortunately, protocol header encryption doesn’t help against more aggressive forms of BitTorrent interference, like the Sandvine application used by Comcast. A new extension to the BitTorrent protocol is needed to stay ahead of the ISPs, and that is exactly what is happening right now.

Back in August we were the first to report that Comcast was actively disconnecting BitTorrent seeds. Comcast of course denied our allegations, and ever since there has been a lot of debate about the rights and wrongs of Comcast’s actions. On Wednesday, Comcast explained their BitTorrent interference to the FCC in a 57-page filing. Unfortunately they haven’t stopped lying yet, since they now argue that they only delay BitTorrent traffic, while in fact they disconnect people, making it impossible for them to share files with non-Comcast users.

In short, the Comcast interference works like this: A few seconds after you connect to someone in a BitTorrent swarm, a peer reset message (RST flag) is sent by Comcast and the upload immediately stops. Most vulnerable are users in a relatively small swarm where you only have a couple of peers you can upload the file to.

For the networking savvy people among us, here’s an example of real RST interference (video) on a regular BitTorrent connection. In this case, the reset happens immediately after the bitfields are exchanged. Evil? Yes – but there is hope.

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.

“This extension directly addresses a known attack on the BitTorrent protocol performed by some deployed network hardware. By obscuring the ip-port pairs network hardware can no longer easily identify ip-port pairs that are running BitTorrent by observing peer-to-tracker communications. This deployed hardware under some conditions disrupts BitTorrent connections by injecting forged TCP reset packets. Once a BitTorrent connection has been identified, other attacks could be performed such as severely rate limiting or blocking these connections.”

So, the new tracker peer obfuscation technique is especially designed to be a workaround for throttling devices, such as the Sandvine application that Comcast uses. More details on the proposal can be found at BitTorrent.org, which aims to become a coordination platform for BitTorrent developers.

TorrentFreak talked to Ashwin Navin, president and co-founder of BitTorrent Inc. who has some of his employees working on the new extension. He told us: “There are some ISPs who would like people to believe that “slowing down” BitTorrent or “metering” bandwidth consumption serves the greater good. Consumers should be very weary of this claim.”

“In recent months, consumers enjoyed unprecedented participation in the political process thanks to the ability to upload opinions and feedback in the YouTube presidential debates. Musicians, filmmakers and artists are finding ways to connect with their audiences across the world thanks to MySpace and BitTorrent. Students are engaging with interactive learning tools in their schools. Which bandwidth intensive application will banned or shaped or metered next by these ISPs? The creative spirit of millions has been ignited, and our need to participate, to communicate will not be silenced.”

“The US government should encourage ISPs to innovate and invest in their networks,” Ashwin said. “Permitting them to interfere or interrupt in the communications of consumers, to protect ISP profit margins, would be a tremendous set back for our country and economy, when we are already slipping behind the first world (UK, EU, Japan, Korea, Singapore, etc) in its broadband capacity.”

We wholeheartedly agree with Ashwin on this one, as we’ve said before. The Internet is only a few years old, if the plan is to keep using it in the future, ISPs need to upgrade their networks. So, invest in more Internet gateway capacity, 10Gbps interconnect ports, and peering agreements. BitTorrent users are not the problem, they only signal that the ISPs need to upgrade their capacity, because customers will only get more demanding in the future. The Internet is not only about sending email, and browsing on text based websites anymore.

The new protocol extension is still under development, but the goal is of course, to get it out as soon as possible.

Hang on…

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

In a response to the BitTorrent protocol encryption that is now supported by many BitTorrent clients, companies like Ipoque that provide bandwidth management hardware, claim that they found a way to detect and block these encrypted (obfuscated) transfers. Ipoque doesn’t provide any details on how they are able to detect encrypted BitTorrent traffic, and it is doubtful whether they can be sure that the traffic they block is indeed generated by BitTorrent.

In addition to the ability to throttle encrypted BitTorrent transfers, Ipoque’s bandwidth managing devices now also support the use of BitTorrent tracker whitelists. “Desired legal trackers such as tracker.opensuse.org can be registered in a whitelist so that their BitTorrent traffic is accepted. All other BitTorrent traffic can be blocked.”, says Ipoque in a press release.

Lately, more and more companies claim that they have found a way to detect encrypted BitTorrent traffic. The fact is however that none of these companies actually provides data on the effectiveness of these systems. Until they open up their methods I seriously doubt the effectiveness of these devices.

Interestingly, a few weeks ago, Canadian ISP Rogers even decided to throttle all encrypted traffic (not only BitTorrent). Apparently Rogers doesn’t need a device that is able to detect encrypted BitTorrent traffic on their network, they simply throttle everyone who is using encrypted transfers.

The cat-and-mouse game continues.

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

But if we look at their advise to configure your BitTorrent client, it appears that Shaw has other intentions. One of their suggestions is:

“Set the KB/s LAN max upload speed [0:unlimited] value to 1.”

So they basically say: don’t share! I’m pretty sure that if you do this, sharing files wont be that “quickly and easily” anymore.

Shaw is obviously not a fan of BitTorrent. Apart from giving wrong advise to its customers, they also throttle BitTorrent traffic in general, like many other ISPs. Here’s my advise for all Shaw customers that want to use BitTorrent: Turn on protocol encryption, and try to find a better ISP, they’re not worth the money.

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

So in the near future it could be that you’re downloading your favorite torrents from your ISP’s server instead of some random seed or peer at the other side of the globe.

Currently, “regular” BitTorrent is traffic is suffering from throttling ISP’s that claim that BitTorrent traffic is cluttering their pipes. This morivated the developers of the most popular BitTorrent clients implement encryption to protect BitTorrent users from being slowed down by their ISP’s.

However, Bram Cohen, the creator of the BitTorrent protocol and the developer of the mainline BitTorrent client did not believe that encryption was the solution, and found (tohether with Cachelogic) a more ISP friendly alternative. However, this new and improved version is promising the opposite, downloads will be accelerated instead of throttled. However, only for commercially licensed content.

Ashwin Navin, President and Co-founder of BitTorrent states:

“CacheLogic has developed an innovative solution to address a major problem that all ISPs face with respect to network congestion. Today, people use the Internet for many bandwidth-intensive services and consumers are increasingly aware of the quality of service needed for their favourite applications. With the popularity of BitTorrent usage worldwide, ISP networks are being taxed in a way they weren’t designed for. As a remedy to this, the Cache Discovery Protocol is providing carriers with an economical and scalable solution that improves the end-user experience for applications that consumers are growing to love.”

press release.

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

Easter Egg: Go to the About screen and press the T key on your keyboard. Sweet!

Download
Changelog

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

Currently both Azureus and uTorrent included this new form of encryption (specs) in their latest Beta’s. The fact that these two clients are actively working together to implement this new feature is promising and will make this form of encryption the new standard since the users of these two clients cover the majority of all BitTorrent users.

There are two “encryption modes” available.

The 2 different payload encryption methods plaintext transmission and RC4 provide a different degree of protocol obfuscation, security and speed. Where the plaintext mode only provides basic anti-shaping obscurity, no security and low CPU usage the RC4 encryption obfuscates the entire stream and not only the header and adds some cryptographic security at the price of spent CPU cycles.

The question now is.. Does it work? and how effective is it? If it works it will definitely offer a great solution to all BitTorrent users who suffer from traffic shaping ISP’s.

Bram Cohen, the creator of the BitTorrent protocol reacted quite negatively on these new developments. He questions the need for encryption since only a few ISP’s are actively shaping traffic. Among other things he also fears incompatibility between clients and increased cpu usage. Although these arguments can be countered quite easily, developers should keep them in mind.

But the fact is, if this new encryption method is launched successfully it will be a huge step forward for the BitTorrent community.

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