Surge in encrypted torrents blindsides record biz

[Colt Seevers]

The legal crackdown and publicity blitz aimed at people who share music, videos and software online may be having an unintended consequence for the troubled record industry. The number of file-sharers disguising their BitTorrent activity with encryption is skyrocketing.

Figures from a large UK ISP obtained by The Register show that the portion of BitTorrent traffic encrypted by file-sharers has risen 10-fold in the last 12 months, from four to 40 per cent.

This time last year, unencrypted torrents accounted for about 500Mbit/s of bandwidth, while files that had been scrambled by uploaders swallowed just 20Mbit/s.
The latest data shows that bandwidth used by unencrypted torrents has fallen to 350Mbit/s. Sharing of masked music, video and software has meanwhile exploded to average more than 200Mbit/s.

Matt Phillips, spokesman for UK record industry trade association the British Phonographic Institute, told The Reg: "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."

"When encryption is used to cloak torrent traffic it tends to be to hide something, and attracts greater attention for that reason. If certain ISPs are experiencing disproportionately high volumes of encrypted torrent traffic we expect it is partly in response to a combination of effective ISP abuse teams the enforcement efforts of the police and industry."

The last year has seen a significant escalation of the movie and music industry campaign against copyright infringement. The RIAA secured its first jury trial against Jammie Thomas, popular tracking site TorrentSpy was ordered to collect user data, and the supposedly private UK-based OiNK network was busted.
The file-sharing public's response has been revealed by analysis of data from deep packet inspection (DPI) technology, such as that made by Ellacoya and Cisco's P-Cube. Many ISPs, including BT here and Comcast in the US, have now deployed the kit to help throttle the amount of bandwidth consumed by P2P and other greedy net applications. Some BitTorrent encryption is certainly an effort to avoid such restrictions.
While DPI is able to identify and manage encrypted file-sharing packets, it is unable to look inside those packets for copyright infringement.

The trend towards encryption means current efforts by music publishers and government to cut a deal with ISPs to create a monitoring system to boot persistent copyright infringers off the internet, which we revealed last month is likely to be rendered pointless.

Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/11...ion_explosion/

[Ænima]

Encryption couldn't have blindsided them, as if they didn't see it coming, unless I completely overestimated their intelligence.

I do not believe filesharers even need to advocate the legitimacy of sharing copyrighted material without the copyright holder's consent. If filesharers should get backed into a corner, they would just escape through the trap door of encryption, never to be seen again. Non-programmers just need to sit back and wait for that door to appear.

I'm just being practical: filesharing cannot be stopped if encryption is allowed by the government. I hate being a roaming radicalist with no regard for the ethics of a society, but law-enforcers cannot do much when the packets they are monitoring are encrypted.

It is widely known that encryption is vital for secure and otherwise legitimate transactions over the internet. The integrity of some companies such as New*gg.com, all of whose sales are enacted, AFAICT, via the internet, depend on encryption.

Although encryption may not be completely outlawed, the government may force ISPs to rationally limit the amount of encryption to and from the IP address of a regular user, unless that user has some permit or license to use encryption without restraint. That's a scary thought; and even though I believe the R*AA and the M*AA may try to pass some law that enforces such restrictions, half of me doubts that it will ever happen while the other half believes the associations could pull it off, should filesharers back them into a corner and make them cry for mercy.

[TheFoX]

Encryption... The main issue with regulating encryption, as several senators found out, is that the internet is global, not regional.

There are numerous encrypted sites. Most noticeable are banking and online stores, who need to ensure that customer data cannot be intercepted by criminals.

There are other genuine reasons for encrypting traffic, such as when transmitting sensitive data from one server to another (FTP or other protocol).

If any country passed a law that required encrypters to obtain some sort of license, then there would be a public outcry about civil liberties, as it is our human right to privacy, and if we want to send something to someone else without the worry of a third party being able to intercept, for whatever reason, then we should.

We all have a right to privacy, and just because several organisations are supposedly losing money to piracy, this should not affect our level of privacy. If it does, then there is something seriously wrong with society.

[Ænima]

Lol, thanks for reassuring me, fox.

[sabo1]

wholeheartedly agree with thfox

[Aaxel21]

Wow you think they would of learned by now. For ex. I'm sure the record indrustrie thought P2P would of never taken off like it did. And now for them to be blindsided by encryption...HAHA. They might as well just give up.

I agree with TheFoX about our right to privacy, but in this case we are talking about the RIAA. If they are able to sue somebody for $150,000 for downloading some songs I'm sure with their global political influance they will find a way. Most likely they will make up a fancy name or say it is their right or something like that.