Bittorent has become increadibly popular over the last two years. A few months ago I read that Bittorrent traffic now makes up more than a third of all Internet communications.
But how safe is it?
Are the people who use Bittorent going to get a knock on the door by the RIAA, as many who use Kazaa, et al did? What would it take for a third party to find out, or track, what a person has been downloading? What about specific clients, do they make any difference in regards to privacy and security? Azureus is currently the most popular client, how does it fare in these matters?
There is nothing in bittorrent that adds anonymity. So people that are downloading from you know your IP address just like most of the other p2p programs out there.
They are already knocking. The article refers to the people who run the tracking servers, but it is no harder to go after individual uploaders.
In order to download (completely legal public domain files) anonymously, one would have to use a complex and inefficient program like freenet, set up a complex network of zombie computers, or use a different public library terminal every day (and wear a disguise ).
Freenet is easy to download from, once you understand the proper “downloading technique”. It’s inserting material for sharing/upload that’s the bother. That’s the reason there’s not a whole lot on it; it’s the part someone needs to work on. … And Freenet demands 24/7/365 uptime to work well. If leaving your computer running constantly is not your thing, then Freenet is not the game for you.
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You’re looking at anonymity, which was never a priority (or even a concern) when the protocol was developed. Only speed and efficiency of data distribution was.
When your BitTorrent client connects to the tracker, it is issued a list of IPs of other clients with which it can share data. (Read the .pdf entitled ‘Economics Paper’ from here for much more info) Knowing this, it’s obvious that anyone who wants to know what users are downloading can just query the tracker for IP addresses.
I’ve had long e-mail talks with mods about talking about these things on this board. For some reason, illegal drug use is OK, but filesharing is not. Whatever.
Before this is closed, I just want to say that as a 3 year veteran BT user (I got in early), there are ways around this. I won’t talk about details here, but my e-mail is listed under my profile.
Aside: Bram Cohen, who wrote the script, is getting next to nothing for inventing the protocol. I feel sorry for the guy
Unlike Napster or Kazaa-type programs, Bittorrent was created in a post-Napster environment to be used for legal purposes. Businesses or individuals can use it to distribute large files at high-speeds with reduced load on their own fileservers (because the downloaders upload to each other). World of Warcraft currently uses it to distribute patches.
That said, why would a program like that make any attempt to give its users anonymity? Anonymity necessarily makes downloading programs slower, because then clients need to “discover” peers as opposed to simply getting them from a central tracker (a la Bittorrent). Bittorrent is really not at all “secure” in terms of protecting the anonymity of downloaders.
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