Brave, the false sensation of privacy

Re:Brave, the false sensation of privacy by mikro2nd on Friday June 18, 2021 @10:29AM (#27550687)

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...?

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Re:Brave, the false sensation of privacy by Shank on Friday June 18, 2021 @10:41AM (#27550869)

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/...

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Re:Brave, the false sensation of privacy by livueta on Friday June 18, 2021 @12:33PM (#27552115)

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.

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Re:Brave, the false sensation of privacy by tgragnato on Friday June 18, 2021 @11:49AM (#27551605)

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

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Re:Brave, the false sensation of privacy by mikro2nd on Friday June 18, 2021 @11:53AM (#27551662)

Thank you for clarifying this!

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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).

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