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Comment by grzaks | Hacker News Reader

Very nice. But the concept is not new. Don't you remember Kad/Kademlia network which was introduced together with eDonkey/eMule and invented back in 2002?

It didn't get any traction then but it was completely decentralized (based on distributed hash tables).

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Kademlia did get traction; it is the protocol for BitTorrent's use of magnet links, trackerless torrents and other features.

It was not designed to act as a gossip-like overlay network for indexing content (similar to eDonkey/eMule), it was designed to act as an overlay network for identifying metadata of known keys stored in DHT.

The BitTorrent checklist is as follows:

1. [X] peer to peer file transfer

2. [X] Kademlia/magnet links for decentralized metadata

3. [X] Kademlia/peer exchange for decentralized tracking

4. [X] Gossip protocol for indexing magnet links

5. [X] integrated data proxying for anonymity/plausible deniability

Tribler solved step 4, OneSwarm and some others are trying to solve step 5.

We're indeed on the cusp of an impenetrable file sharing network.

>impenetrable

Until they just block the protocol with deep packet inspection. (Encryption won't work, you can analyse packet size/timing to fingerprint protocols pretty accurately.)

Rogers already does this (cripples download and limits upload to ~80KBps). They've forced me to switch to Usenet as even popular Torrents slow to a crawl on their Ultimate plan (50 down/2 up).

Curious why you would move to Usenet unless you are using a free service? The remaining DDL services (such as DepositFiles and RapidShare) are cheaper and tend to have faster DL times. Something I'm missing?

Megaupload was taken down and people are leaving DDL serves in droves. Usenet is a relatively safe, very fast, and a service thats been around for years.

I pay less than $7/month for my Usenet connection, which is relatively cheap if you use it frequently. The connection is over SSL so it's completely secure end-to-end. My average download speed is 9 MB/s (saturating my line) which means I can download a 720p HD movie in just under 13 minutes. There's also (like with torrents) the ability to set-up TV show RSS feeds, so my shows automatically download to a folder, ready to watch, as they're released. It comes down to ease of use.

There's also the possibility of a 'seed box,' a remote server that downloads your torrents, then you just directly download them to your local machine from the server. I've heard of them (mostly through reading articles/comments on TorrentFreak), but I've never been curious enough to investigate the economics of them.

Wouldn't it be possible to randomize packet padding and delays to get around this?

If packet timing or sizing gives away the protocol, then it seems to me that one could re-rig it to mimic the timing and sizing of another protocol.

Interesting. Has there been any success in disguising encrypted BitTorrent traffic as another protocol? I guess it'd have to be a protocol whose packets contain a large amount of random data and a large number of connections with different foreign addresses. Hmmm.

Skype would seem to fit the bill.

That was my best guess too, and Skype is also ubiquitous and would be extremely difficult (popularity wise) to censor. But I doubt video data is truly random -- it probably has some structure to it.

Encrypted video/voice data looks like encrypted Bittorrent data.

Oops, forgot Skype video was encrypted. Duh. In that case it'd do fine.

It's important to note that, at least in the U.S., the Supreme Court ruled in Reno v. ACLU that blanket censorship of online content simply because they can be illegal is unconstitutional.

It is further reaffirmed in MGM v. Grokster that a filesharing service is only accountable for its actions if it advertises or supports the service's use of violating the law.

This is absolutely inevitable. Attacking file sharing will just lead to better file sharing technology. We should be thanking the RIAA and MPAA really.

Sort of like the rabbit thanking the eagle for the evolutionary pressure to make them faster and faster?

I was being sarcastic

Sarcasm or not, it's a good point. It's hard to see a viable endgame for the MPAA/RIAA if newer file sharing technology simply routes around the obstacles they through up.

The broad trend has been toward easier, faster, more secure file sharing. Does anyone really believe that trend is going to reverse course?

Oddly enough, the top levels of the piracy chain still use FTP and IRC. Even though security improved right after the early 2000 busts, it has remained relatively unchanged since then (even taking into account the RELOADED-related busts ~8-12 months ago). But I guess it all comes down to scale.. it's easier to control the security of 100 users over the security of millions.

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