

The Pirate Bay Wants to Encrypt the Entire Internet - reazalun
http://newteevee.com/2008/07/09/the-pirate-bay-wants-to-encrypt-the-entire-internet/

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

~~~
bluelu
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...](http://www.heise.de/newsticker/Zeitung-Google-von-YouTube-
Werbeerloesen-enttaeuscht--/meldung/110665))

~~~
josefresco
Yeah it definitely didn't workout for the YouTube founders. Better luck next
time I guess.

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michael_nielsen
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>

~~~
huhtenberg
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.

------
iamelgringo
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.

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

~~~
aggieben
Or IPv6, right?

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

~~~
aggieben
I couldn't find a more authoritative source on very short order, but FWIW,
here's the TLDP ([http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Linux+IPv6-HOWTO/chapter-encryption-
au...](http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Linux+IPv6-HOWTO/chapter-encryption-
authentication.html))

    
    
      Unlike in IPv4, encryption and authentication is a 
      mandatory feature of IPv6. Those features are normally 
      implemented using IPsec (which can be also used by IPv4).
    

Seems to me that if support for encryption is mandatory for IPv6, even if it's
not on by default, using that somehow would be a better route than writing
your own New Thing.

~~~
wmf
What does "mandatory" mean? What happens if you don't implement it?

I agree that the Pirate Bay should join forces with the IETF BTNS effort that
is already underway, but this is still orthogonal to IPv4/IPv6.

~~~
aggieben
The essence of IPSec is a mandatory feature of IPv6. I don't see how this
could mean anything other than "packets don't have to be encrypted by default,
but encrypted packets must be allowed to be sent and received at any time".
That makes IPv6 very much not orthogonal to the topic at hand.

What I'm trying to get to is this: why are they trying to figure out how to
encrypt the internet when they can just use IPv6 (presuming that existing
implementations support all the "mandatory" features)? The only rational
answer I can come up with off the top of my head is if they think governments
will have backdoors for transparently observing the traffic unencrypted, but
that wasn't mentioned in the article as a rationale for anything.

------
josefresco
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.

------
j2d2
I'm not sure how this problem isn't solved by onion routing already

~~~
wmf
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.

------
sebastian
I love it ;)

------
kaos
I really love this guys!

