Hacker News Reader

Comment by JonnieCache | Hacker News Reader

>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.)

View on HN

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.

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.

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.

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com