The Pirate Bay Wants to Encrypt the Entire Internet

http://newteevee.com/2008/07/09/the-pirate-bay-wants-to-encrypt-the-entire-internet/

by reazalun • 18 years ago

37 22 18 years ago

sebastian• 18 years ago

I love it ;)

John Gilmore (employee number 5 at Sun, and co-founder of the EFF and cypherpunks) tried something similar in the late 1990s: http://www.toad.com/swan.html

reazalun• 18 years ago

From the article, it seems his goal was not met yet. However he is very proactive in fighting the illegal net spying. Maybe the Pirate Bay guys should consult him too.

huhtenberg3• 18 years ago

Just to add to the above - FreeS/WAN project was too heavy on an ideology and it had a major impact on their technical decisions. They refused to support DES, because it was weak, nor did they want to include X.509 (PKI) support, because it was a hierarchy "controlled by selected ones". This limited practical usefulness of the project and it was one of the primary causes of its demise. Others were the fact that it was hard to install (required patching and rebuilding the kernel from the source) and tricky to configure.

It was officially shut down in April 2004 - http://www.freeswan.org/ending_letter.html

There is a fork called strongSwan, which is still being developed even though it's Linux-specific and there is a native IPsec implementation in Linux 2.6.

martey• 18 years ago

I think the most useful part of this article is the last paragraph, where the author notes that none of The Pirate Bay's lofty projects have come to fruition yet. Until there is something that I can download and install on my computer, this is just vaporware.

SCVirus• 18 years ago

Except the biggest Bittorrent tracker one, and a few other finished projects.

bluelu• 18 years ago

Their projects only succeed if they use illegal content to push them.

This was also the reason youtube succeeded and right now they are only selling ads for about 4% of all content, because for the rest of the content, the original post doesn't own the copyright.

(only have german source http://www.heise.de/newsticker/Zeitung-Google-von-YouTube-We...)

iamelgringo• 18 years ago

Well, we have to do something with all those extra cores we're getting courtesy of the hardware guys. We might as well encrypt/decrypt the data that we're using with the extra cores that we're going to have.

kaos• 18 years ago

I really love this guys!

j2d2• 18 years ago

I'm not sure how this problem isn't solved by onion routing already

wmf3• 18 years ago

Onion routing solves a different problem: anonymizing traffic. This "project" doesn't aim to provide anonymity, just resistance against sniffing and some MITMs. Onion routing provides encryption as a side effect of anonymity, but it's massively inefficient compared to just encryption.

aggieben4• 18 years ago

Yeah, onion routing will grind your data rates way, way down. It also very much works against the inertia of the internet as it stands, which it turns out to not be all that useful.

josefresco2• 18 years ago

Too bad TorPark (aka xBrowser and a lot of other things) swayed too far from the Mozilla/Open Source path and into the hands of a semi shady privacy company.

Was a cool project.

huhtenberg3• 18 years ago

In short - they are trying to re-invent IPsec (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPsec).

aggieben4• 18 years ago

Or IPv6, right?

wmf3• 18 years ago

IPv6 and IPSec are orthogonal. Despite persistent myths to the contrary, IPv6 is not encrypted by default.

The Pirate Bay Wants to Encrypt the Entire Internet

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