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Curious: how can they detect whether you're torrenting commercial media if you've enabled Bittorrent protocol encryption? Surely all they can see then is the o

Curious: how can they detect whether you're torrenting commercial media if you've enabled Bittorrent protocol encryption? Surely all they can see then is the outer (envelope) of the packets...?

Shank 5y ago
This is a bit of a misconception. Copyright holders have always gone after seeders based on people connecting to swarms, tracker info, and crawling DHT. There’s no reason to use DPI when the list of uploaders is just given out by trackers and DHT for free. See: https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/woot10/tech/full_papers/Wolchok.pdf https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/woot10/tech/full_papers/...
- tgragnato 5y ago
  Exactly Bittorrent protocol encryption is only useful to protest against the use of DPI for bandwidth shaping, it has no influence on privacy. Even with (the weak) encryption, connections to trackers and DHT nodes are easily identified
  - mikro2nd 5y ago
    Thank you for clarifying this!
- livueta 5y ago
  You're right that is how it generally operates, but in the case of Comcast I think this meme doesn't want to die because in the late 00s Comcast really did do DPI to interfere with torrents: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20071029/020756.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20071029/020756.shtml Fairly googleable with "Comcast sandvine". Afaik they haven't done anything like that for years, though.
tenebrisalietum 5y ago
Bittorrent trackers by design have a list of all IPs in the swarm and give to anyone who asks (that's how peers coordinate).