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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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