Privacy In BitTorrent By Hiding In the Crowd 240
pinguin-geek writes "Researchers at the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science at Northwestern University have identified a new 'guilt-by-association' threat to privacy in peer-to-peer (P2P) systems that would enable an eavesdropper to accurately classify groups of users with similar download behavior. While many have pointed out that the data exchanged over these connections can reveal personal information about users, the researchers shows that only the patterns of connections — not the data itself — is sufficient to create a powerful threat to user privacy. To thwart this threat, they have released SwarmScreen, a publicly available, open source software that restores privacy by masking a user's real download activity in such a manner as to disrupt classification."
Re:only works with Vuze (Score:3, Informative)
Bloat is not the word.
Vuze is a F-ing multimedia billboard.
It even plays commercials while you try to figure out what the F--k you just launched!
All the tools to tweak it as to not piss off my ISP are gone. I went uTorrent and kicked myself I didn't do it sooner.
Re:only works with (Score:2, Informative)
i use torrent flux, and it destroys everything else. LAMP based, so I can access it from any computer in my house. I strongly recommend it. http://www.torrentflux.com/ [torrentflux.com]
Re:only works with (Score:4, Informative)
Re:only works with (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Download random data from BitTorrent (Score:1, Informative)
If you actually read the details you will find that it's not really random, but random from a set you give it. So, if you give swarmscreen a site w/, legal software, then it would only download from there.
Re:Summary of Story (Score:3, Informative)
What world do you live in?
Associating with known terrorist groups will automatically get you labeled as a terrorist and win you either execution or jail time.
Re:only works with (Score:4, Informative)
Set it to Run in "Advanced Mode" on startup. And for "just downloading a torrent", I don't think anything will beat rtorrent from console.
Re:only works with (Score:3, Informative)
Funny is, these are the same people demanding 64bit Flash plugin because they run 64bit browser on an 64bit OS.
If Apple was decent enough (or developers could code anything actually multi arch) to release Snow Leopard for 64bit G5 Macs, I would upgrade to 8 GB (from 4.5 GB) on my Quad G5 in no time. Its max is 16GB btw.
Re:only works with Vuze (Score:4, Informative)
Re:only works with (Score:3, Informative)
Openoffice is written in c++.
http://download.cnet.com/OpenOffice-org-Windows/3000-2064_4-10263109.html [cnet.com] ...OpenOffice.org runs on Solaris, Linux (including PPC Linux), and Windows. Written in C++ and with documented APIs licensed under the LGPL and SISSL open-source protocols, OpenOffice.org allows any knowledgeable developer to benefit from the source...
Re:only works with Vuze (Score:4, Informative)
seriously, i used Vuze last night. there were no ads, no commercials, nothing. i always run in advanced mode. there is a menu bar and 2 windows: uploads, and downloads. i don't use it to play media or manage the files. dump files to the desktop and i move them where i want.
shit, if there are commercials in the new version i am not going to update.
Re:only works with (Score:3, Informative)
Your bizarre "I've got so much memory I'd better use 300 megs to do tasks that could be done in 3 so as not to waste it!" made me laugh, so thank you.
But if you have more than enough RAM to cover all the other tasks along with the torrents you are running why should you care? You seem to be complaining about usage of the system resources that is a pittance in the total pool of available memory and CPU.
You're making the assumption that there is enough RAM to cover all the other tasks, but that's an assumption you're making based on your own usage patterns. Wasting a few hundred megs will reduce the amount of memory you can comfortably allocate to virtual machines, for example. Some software will happily suck up as much memory as it can to improve performance, e.g. database software (maybe he does development against large databases on his machine)? Games can use a lot of memory and are also good candidates for using as much as they can get in order to improve responsiveness in a highly visible manner.
Additionally, while you're correct in that any memory not being used in a given moment is in a way "wasted", in that it can't be saved for later use, you also need to factor in the extreme cases that might occur comparatively rarely. As the person you're replying to said, torrents are considered by many to be a background task. Even when it's finished downloading, it is still doing useful work, and so many people prefer to leave it running all the time. In the case of a developer working on a memory-intensive application, that 300 meg hit to have a bloated torrent client in the background may be too much of a hit to take, resulting in them having to keep stopping and starting it depending on their activity.
This is fair enough and expected for a computer with limited memory -- you can't possibly do everything at once. However if there's no compelling reason for a torrent client to be using 300 megs of memory, why would you want to bother stopping and starting it every time you need to do a bit of heavy lifting? Why not just run a client that uses a tenth or a hundredth the amount of memory and leave it running all the time and never have to worry about it?
The other obvious problem is that most people have more than one application running at a time. What if your torrent client, your instant messenger, your web browser, your music player and your email client all decide to use a few hundred megabytes of memory for no apparent reason? Now you need 2 gigs of memory just to do very basic things. That's a waste of memory, in very real terms, and it's also a waste that's forced on everybody, not just those who choose to overspec their machines "just in case".
What's wrong with PeerGuardian? (Score:4, Informative)
If one doesn't like eavesdropping, what's wrong with simply dropping connection attempts from the IPs of known or suspected eavesdroppers? If I'm using PeerGuardian, why do I need SwarmScreen?