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People have been sharing files by swapping external hard drives for a long time, definitely nothing new there, but I doubt it will be the new big thing. One of

People have been sharing files by swapping external hard drives for a long time, definitely nothing new there, but I doubt it will be the new big thing. One of the things private trackers like waffles.fm, what.cd, and OiNK cater to is people that want obscure things and these can't be had by calling up your friends for a hard drive party. There is obviously way more variety on the internet than what your friends might have. So, you are correct that there will be counter strategies implemented by the P2P community. This is the way it has always been. ISPs like Comcast started throttling torrents, so torrent clients started encrypting their transfers. Early on, when Napster was sued, new P2P programs emerged that lacked a centralized server, so you could never just shut down the community. I don't know if they will be able to encrypt and mimic http or mail protocols though, the volume and behavior of traffic just wouldn't match up. I'm not as sure about this so I might be wrong though, but wouldn't it be easier to mimic voip or some other streaming protocol?

cabalamat 18y ago
> I don't know if they will be able to encrypt and mimic http or mail protocols though, the volume and behavior of traffic just wouldn't match up. You're right; traffic analysis would be able to tell between filesharing and typical use of email or http. However, traffic analysis wouldn't be 100% effective and there would be plenty of false positives -- particularly people who used email or http in non-typical ways. I doubt if ISPs would (a) want to write software that propabilistically catches p2p-over-protocol use, or (b) piss off their customers by falsely accusing them of illegal filesharing. And I doubt if governments would enforce cutting off people's internet access based on probabilistic traffic analysis. > wouldn't it be easier to mimic voip or some other streaming protocol? VoIP may well be easier, especially if it included streaming video, since there would be more bandwidth in which to hide stuff.
- Xichekolas 18y ago
  > or (b) piss off their customers by falsely accusing them of illegal filesharing If the major ISPs cared about their customers this wouldn't be happening to begin with.

cabalamat 18y ago

> I don't know if they will be able to encrypt and mimic http or mail protocols though, the volume and behavior of traffic just wouldn't match up. You're right; traffic analysis would be able to tell between filesharing and typical use of email or http. However, traffic analysis wouldn't be 100% effective and there would be plenty of false positives -- particularly people who used email or http in non-typical ways. I doubt if ISPs would (a) want to write software that propabilistically catches p2p-over-protocol use, or (b) piss off their customers by falsely accusing them of illegal filesharing. And I doubt if governments would enforce cutting off people's internet access based on probabilistic traffic analysis. > wouldn't it be easier to mimic voip or some other streaming protocol? VoIP may well be easier, especially if it included streaming video, since there would be more bandwidth in which to hide stuff.

Xichekolas 18y ago
> or (b) piss off their customers by falsely accusing them of illegal filesharing If the major ISPs cared about their customers this wouldn't be happening to begin with.