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...?
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/...
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
Fairly googleable with "Comcast sandvine". Afaik they haven't done anything like that for years, though.
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
Thank you for clarifying this!
Re:Brave, the false sensation of privacy
by tenebrisalietum on Friday June 18, 2021 @12:27PM
(#27552039)
Bittorrent trackers by design have a list of all IPs in the swarm and give to anyone who asks (that's how peers coordinate).
As far as Comcast, I'm stuck with them, too. At least in my experience, they don't monkey with DNS - I run and use my own DNS servers, and have never seen interference.
They do run deep packet inspection, and if they detect you, for instance, torrenting commercial media, they'll inject scary messages in port 80 traffic. Given that nearly all web traffic is encrypted now, the main effect of this is to break things like automated `apt-get update`s.
One thing you can do to detect transparent DNS hijacking is to ask a nonexistent server a question. Something like `dig @13.14.15.16 news.ycombinator.com` should not give you an answer. If it does, someone's spying on and/or gaslighting you.