OFF: New tactic in piracy wars

[Arjan Hulsebos]

On Sat, 24 Nov 2007 15:54:55 +0100, Arjan Hulsebos wrote
> On Sat, 24 Nov 2007 12:52:03 GMT, M Holmes wrote
> > Shiver me timbers. The cheese-eating surrender monkeys are going to make
> > web users walk the virtual plank:
> > 
> > http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7110024.stm
> 
> Hmm, maybe the French ISPs do not mind loosing half their subscriber 
> base, and the remainder downselling to their absolute zero product. 

There are more implications. As this is not required by law, the ISPs pick up
the price tag, and transfer the bill to their subscribers. Furthermore, the
ISPs need to capture every single packet in their network, including the payload.

And since the ISPs then have the infrastructure to intercept all traffic in
their network, the various secret services will be very tempted to tap into
that feed.

On the other hand, it's not too difficult to render this scheme useless (well,
maybe not in France), and that's to build encryption into the p2p
infrascructure. Part of the client installation process, you generate a
public/private key-pair, and every time you want to download material, you
send your public key to the sender, and (s)he encrypts the datastream with it.
Your client has the private key, so it can decode the goodies. You can
probably communicate the stuff you're offering for downloading encrypted in
the same fassion to the tracker.

This is nothing new. Skype probably works in the same way. The German secret
service allegedly can't decrypt Skype calls.

Gr,

Arjan H

--------------------------------
Rock in the 70ies:
   substance inhalation, hotel devastation, and amplifier obliteration