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Privacy Encryption Security The Internet

SSL Encryption Coming To The Pirate Bay 267

An anonymous reader writes "The Pirate Bay, in response to Sweden's new wiretapping law, will start offering SSL encryption to its user base this week. Although copyright issues really have little to do with national security, The Pirate Bay knows its population is uneasy with the recent legal change. The encryption will mostly benefit Swedish users living under the current law. Since The Pirate Bay and its servers are not hosted in Sweden, the additional security offered to outside users could be comparatively minimal."
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SSL Encryption Coming To The Pirate Bay

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  • speed (Score:3, Interesting)

    by youthoftoday ( 975074 ) on Sunday June 22, 2008 @11:21AM (#23894537) Homepage Journal
    Won't that slow things down quite a lot?
    • Re:speed (Score:4, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 22, 2008 @11:25AM (#23894571)

      Won't that slow things down quite a lot?

      Better slow downloads than meeting your new Swedish boyfriend in jail.

      • Re:speed (Score:5, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 22, 2008 @11:33AM (#23894625)

        Hmm... A Swedish jail boyfriend.

        A List? Lets.

        Pros:
        Funny Accent? Check
        Athletic? Check
        Likes Wooden Shoes? Check
        Digs Meatballs? Check

        Cons:
        Makes you scream in a funny accent? Check
        Athletic (in all the wrong places)? Check
        Likes pain and Abuse? Check
        Digs _your_ Meatballs? Check

        It's a hard call.

      • Re:speed (Score:5, Informative)

        by just_a_monkey ( 1004343 ) on Sunday June 22, 2008 @12:16PM (#23894899)
        There are pros and cons to living in Sweden. This law is a big con. So are the taxes, and the regulations. A penal system which is not based on homosexual rape is a pro, though.
        • Re:speed (Score:5, Funny)

          by igibo ( 726664 ) on Sunday June 22, 2008 @12:26PM (#23894973)

          A penal system which is not based on homosexual rape is a pro, though.
          Speak for yourself.
        • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

          by Anonymous Coward

          There are pros and cons to living in Sweden. This law is a big con. So are the taxes, and the regulations. A penal system which is not based on homosexual rape is a pro, though.
          Wouldn't that make it a penile system?
        • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

          by Anonymous Coward

          The Swedish pen system is based on bean sacs and tv games with three months for rape and five years for tax fraud.

          With such small times inside the rapers never get the time to build up enough lust.

          Now let's hope FRA doesn't read this...

      • Re:speed (Score:5, Informative)

        by orzetto ( 545509 ) on Sunday June 22, 2008 @01:01PM (#23895291)
        In Scandinavia, there are no "federal pound-in-the-ass" prisons. The prisons are top-notch, just google around: here is a couple [ynetnews.com] of articles [aftenposten.no].
        • Re:speed (Score:4, Informative)

          by BrentH ( 1154987 ) on Sunday June 22, 2008 @01:35PM (#23895585)
          I daresay such prisons don't exist in all of non Anglo-Saxon West.
          • Re:speed (Score:4, Insightful)

            by mollymoo ( 202721 ) on Sunday June 22, 2008 @04:14PM (#23896905) Journal
            Don't lump the rest of us Anglos-Saxons in with the Americans. UK prisons may not the most pleasant in the West (though they are currently overcrowded), but they're a damn sight more civilised than those in the USA.
      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Haeleth ( 414428 )

        Better slow downloads than meeting your new Swedish boyfriend in jail.

        Even better, how about paying for your movies, games, and music? That way you can download them as fast as you like, and the government won't try to put you in jail even if they spy on you doing it!

        I realise this is Slashdot, where "not getting busted for copyright infringement" is apparently categorised as a "right", so I'm probably about to be modded into oblivion -- but hey, that's life, isn't it?

        • Re:speed (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Maxo-Texas ( 864189 ) on Sunday June 22, 2008 @01:18PM (#23895443)

          I agree with your general point and agree that recent material that is still in print should be either paid for or ignored.

          That being said, I torrent.

          I use it for
          1) Movies that I can't buy if I want to.
          2) Comics that I grew up with and can't buy if I want to.
          3) Anime that isn't for sale in the U.S. (This has lead to be buying anime when it does become available- like Stand Alone Complex)

          And I do draw the line 28 years (the original terms before our governments sold out to disney and other companies and sold away the public domain to them). And I could get fined or go to jail for that activity. I keep that in mind, so I use peer guardian and other techniques to keep a low profile. But mainly, I stay away from new hot shit. Mostly, new hot movies you can buy for $5-$7.50 within 18 months of them coming out. Why risk prison/ fines to see a movie 18 months early? And more importantly, creators do deserve *some* compensation for creating.

          • Re:speed (Score:5, Insightful)

            by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 22, 2008 @03:46PM (#23896691)

            ...creators do deserve *some* compensation for creating.

            Which is EXACTLY the point. They're product isn't *worth* anything if it isn't scarce. With digital medium nothing is scarce making it worth whatever the public is willing to pay - simple economics. What pisses me off is that media companies are allowed to force artificial scarcity. I have no sympathy and don't believe hiding their greedy little faces behind corrupt bureaucrats should be tolerated by the general public.

        • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

          by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Sunday June 22, 2008 @01:22PM (#23895481)
          Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • Re:speed (Score:4, Insightful)

          by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 22, 2008 @01:30PM (#23895549)

          Oh, I'll pay, when they offer me what I want to buy, not what they want me to buy.

          I certainly don't want to pay for drm, which I can't play in Linux without having to circumvent their stupid restrictions.

    • Re:speed (Score:5, Informative)

      by ozamosi ( 615254 ) on Sunday June 22, 2008 @11:34AM (#23894633) Homepage

      The actual file transfers are peer-to-peer, so they won't be effected (also, they're usually encrypted already, to avoid bandwidth throttling). This is for accessing the website and/or for contacting the tracker.

      Web pages have been using SSL for years without being especially slow.

      Contacting a tracker is a lightweight request that is being performed once every 30 minutes or so - if it was a few seconds slower, nobody'd notice anyway.

      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        ... nor will they be affected.
    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      Possibly, but it's a trade-off. Do you want speed or do you want security? (Yes yes, I know, everyone wants their cake and wants to it too.)

    • Re:speed (Score:4, Informative)

      by Zero__Kelvin ( 151819 ) on Sunday June 22, 2008 @11:36AM (#23894645) Homepage
      Most likely not, and it depends ...

      On the server side, presumably the bottleneck is the network connection or the storage medium access times, and not the CPU of the server. The network overhead to an SSL connection is minimal, to the point where it is negligible. The access times to the storage medium will not change to any measurable degree. The only way this will slow downloads considerably would be if the CPU was already at or close to 100% utilization, or if it is pushed "beyond 100%" utilization (i.e. the bottleneck becomes the CPU) due to the need to calculate SSL certificates, etc. Since The Pirate Bay is doing this in a planned and intentional way, they have almost certainly thought of this and will likely add processing power if need be on the server end.

      From the client side, YMMV, but the above holds true in general. If you are downloading and doing CPU intensive things in parallel, then yes, things will slow down considerably.
      • It's not just about processor time, but also about network latency. Adding encryption is likely to introduce a couple more round trips, which can be very noticeable, depending on the latency-sensitivity of an application and the way things are implemented.

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          "Adding encryption is likely to introduce a couple more round trips"

          If only I had thought to address the network connection issue somewhere. I think if I could do it all over again I would have done it in the first sentence of the first paragraph of my post.

          "Adding encryption is likely to introduce a couple more round trips, which can be very noticeable, depending on the latency-sensitivity of an application and the way things are implemented."

          ... and in this case we know the application. It is downloadin

    • Re:speed (Score:4, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 22, 2008 @11:46AM (#23894717)

      Won't that slow things down quite a lot?
      We're talking 20KB files here. The encryption will only affect the tracker search portal and the torrent file serving. I'd rather have an encrypted site that takes a couple of ms more to respond than something fast that spews out visible data left and right. All the data transfer is run by the peers and there encryption depends on the individual client settings (and many people already use full stream encryption w/o any slowdown). So "not really" would be an appropriate answer to your question.
    • Re:speed (Score:5, Informative)

      by Bandman ( 86149 ) <bandman AT gmail DOT com> on Sunday June 22, 2008 @11:49AM (#23894737) Homepage

      There are really a lot of hardware solutions to speeding up SSL.

      The real issue is that, typically speaking, the server which is responsible for the server-side processing is also responsible for encrypting the stream.

      By putting a hardware or software solution in front of the client-access machine, you offload encryption to that host, leaving the application server free to concentrate on serving applications.

      This can also be useful for debugging sessions, as you (the provider) have an unencrypted stream to examine.

      Securing that stream between the application and the encryption device becomes of paramount importance, in that case.

    • Re: (Score:2, Redundant)

      You're only download the actual .torrent file through the encrypted connection. All the downloading done with your client will go through your normal (unencrypted) connection. Unless you sign up for TPB's paid encrypted connection service.
      • All the downloading done with your client will go through your normal (unencrypted) connection.

        Actually, many BitTorrent clients nowadays can use encrypted connections for data transfer. I don't know if the tracker connections are encrypted, though.

    • by aliquis ( 678370 )

      No.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by daBass ( 56811 )

      No, it won't - as long as the hardware is up to scratch.

      There are three ways to implement SSL:

      1. Let the server CPU do it. Nice for small sites with tons of spare CPU because those cycles were not used for anything else anyway. Way too many sites use this and it is what gives SSL its bad name for speed. (that and when it first came out, your local PC was slow at crypto as well, now it won't break into a sweat over it)

      2. Crypto card. An PCI card that the web server can off-load SSL to. Not very many people u

  • A broader lesson (Score:5, Insightful)

    by dfaulken ( 1312005 ) on Sunday June 22, 2008 @11:31AM (#23894607)

    While this particular instance doesn't concern me, it seems that, more and more, we're seeing reasons to start encrypting most data that we send across the Internet--certainly we would encrypt IMAP/POP3 sessions, Jabber and whatnot--why not HTTP as well?

    Yes, there might be some performance drawbacks, but, on the whole, it seems to me like the less data we send in plaintext, the less we open ourselves up to identity theft, and being spied on by governments (not necessarily our own, mind you).

    So I tend to think that this is just a manifestation of this broader trend towards encryption in all Internet transactions. I think the real question is whether we'll see people using SSL/TLS for things like checking the weather or sports scores.

    • Re:A broader lesson (Score:5, Interesting)

      by GIL_Dude ( 850471 ) on Sunday June 22, 2008 @11:35AM (#23894641) Homepage
      I agree with you here.
      I think it will be an escalation though between the people who want to know what everyone is doing and those of us who want privacy. For example, if we encrypt everything - how long will it take these same wiretapping morons to pass more laws requiring that sites make the decryption key available for all "official agencies" or some such?
      • Re:A broader lesson (Score:4, Interesting)

        by NormalVisual ( 565491 ) on Sunday June 22, 2008 @12:55PM (#23895231)
        Quite a while, I'd hope - pretty much all of the court cases that I've read about that touched on the subject ended up treating it as a Fifth Amendment situation, with the end result being that you can't be forced to divulge the passphrases to your keys. I don't know whether any of those cases form precident though.
      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Here in the UK you can already get locked up for failing to hand over encryption keys upon request.

        I was wondering though... couldn't you setup a script on a linux server to regenerate keys on a regular basis? You can only hand over the latest set of keys then and I believe there is currently no law requiring you to archive/keep keys.

        • I was wondering about the 'Right to Silence' regarding this particular law, and came across this website [cyber-rights.org].

          Briefly, it states that under sections 34-37 of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, you would, by not disclosing information to unlock encrypted files, risk adverse inferences being drawn from that silence.

          I guess you can have your cake, and eat it, but don't expect it to taste great or not poison you.

          Regarding the parent, you ask about automatic regeneration of keys. IANAL, but I would ha
    • by oodaloop ( 1229816 ) on Sunday June 22, 2008 @11:44AM (#23894701)
      It's about time. If you look at the postal system, people have been using security envelopes or at least sealed envelopes since pretty much the beginning. The only mail postal employees are allowed to read are postcards, since it's pretty hard to stop them. Unencrypted email is basically like a postcard, and it pains me to hear people complain that governments are reading them. Do they complain that postal employees are reading their postcards? If it's important or private, use a security envelope or encryption. Otherwise, don't complain when someone reads it.
      • by dfaulken ( 1312005 ) on Sunday June 22, 2008 @11:50AM (#23894741)

        If you look at the postal system, people have been using security envelopes or at least sealed envelopes since pretty much the beginning.
        This is exactly the problem, though--people are accustomed to using envelopes, whereas getting people to use e-mail encryption requires some serious additional effort, which most people aren't willing to put in.
        • Re:A broader lesson (Score:4, Informative)

          by 99BottlesOfBeerInMyF ( 813746 ) on Sunday June 22, 2008 @12:26PM (#23894967)

          This is exactly the problem, though--people are accustomed to using envelopes, whereas getting people to use e-mail encryption requires some serious additional effort, which most people aren't willing to put in.

          The real problem is that people have to put in additional effort, because their e-mail program doesn't handle it seamlessly. Their e-mail doesn't handle it seamlessly because it isn't easy to do, because there is no one dominant standard, but there is one dominant e-mail client (Outlook) which is controlled by a monopolist who has no incentive to make things better for their customers (because they have a monopoly). This is one of the many hundreds of ways the computing industry is constantly being held back by MS's monopolies.

          • Re:A broader lesson (Score:4, Informative)

            by CastrTroy ( 595695 ) on Sunday June 22, 2008 @01:25PM (#23895499)
            As far as email encryption goes. PGP is pretty much the defacto standard. I'm sure there are some other methods, but PGP seems to be the way it's done in most cases. I wouldn't be hard for the mail client, outlook or otherwise to completely automate the system. Key exchange would be a little difficult, but not so much. You could either meet someone in person to exchange public keys, or get their public key from somebody else who already has it, who you already trust and share keys with.
            • Re:A broader lesson (Score:5, Interesting)

              by devman ( 1163205 ) on Sunday June 22, 2008 @01:42PM (#23895645)

              I disagree, email clients have native support for S/MIME and signed PKI certificates. Conversely, most clients do not have native support for PGP, though you can get it through plug-ins (Thunderbird).

              Certainly you can get a email signing cert from Verisign by paying for it (It's very inexpensive and integrates well with most email clients). You can also generate your own key pair and get it signed by Thawte (so long as you complete there "Web of Trust" requirements), if you are worried Verisign might keep a copy of your private key (they don't).

              The problem with the whole system is that while only you need a PKI cert to sign an email (recipients client will auto verify it), but in order to encrypt an email your recipient must have a PKI cert and you must have there public key. That means both parties must care enough to encrypt email. This is where the envelope analogy breaks down, because to receive a sealed envelope in the mail I don't have to do anything.

              • I think this is where the envelope analogy breaks down. Envelopes aren't secure in any way shape or form. Sending a letter is an envelope is like sending an email with the important data in an attached zip file. You can't see the contents of either the zipped email, or the letter in the envelope in proper processing methods. However, either is extremely easy to circumvent. Anybody who delivers the mail could easily open the letter, and read it, and pretend it got lost. Or just put it in a new envelope
            • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

              by DigitAl56K ( 805623 )

              PGP is the worst mechanism for e-mail encryption. Sure, it might be strong and mature, but it is an absolute pain the the ass to use, PGP Corporation charges an arm and a leg for it, and GPG is a mess - trying to find all the bits and pieces you need installed, configured, and working well with a clearly make-shift UI that is *not* easy to use is beyond most people.

            • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

              by yabos ( 719499 )
              S/MIME is built into every email client I can think of. PGP is NOT built into about every email client I can think of. I use S/MIME and getting certs is a little cumbersome but easier than having to install PGP on every computer you want to send encrypted stuff to.
          • Ok, but, nobody has written an easy way to do this! Thunderbird (for example) has no easy, seamless and simple way to do this (and certainly no way that is built in.) Blaming Outlook is a cheap cop-out.

            Most business email is a matter of public record anyway. MS has very little reason to push these features. Particularly when the hard-core users don't even care enough to write the features for OSS clients.

            It really is kind of sad, since people are sending postcards to everyone and do not know they're doi
            • by aliquis ( 678370 )

              Yeah, because everyone wants their address, passwords, orders, partnership deals, job applications, so on so on in the open?

              Of course there is a reason, it's just that it's to hard to understand and handle for the typical Microsoft user.

            • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

              by jroysdon ( 201893 )

              Enigmail [mozdev.org] is an OSS plugin for Thurderbird that gives GPG/PGP support.

              Firefox and IE also don't have built-in Flash or Java support, but we all fix that within the first 5 minutes of an install, right? Email encryption should be no different.

              The hardest problem I find is getting people to maintain their keys and a real trusted way to exchange keys w/o man-in-the-middle attacks.

              Just putting your key in pgp.mit.edu [mit.edu] or on your homepage doesn't prevent man-in-the-middle attacks any more than an SSL cert not sig

          • by fluch ( 126140 )

            It is sometimes astonishing how little effort people want to put into learning something new. Even if you would give them a hands on lesson which would not take longer than 30 minutes! "It is sooooo complicated!" is equivalent to not more than "I did hear a new word!".

            Encrytion is not in every circumstance easy to set up, but for example Thunderbird together with EnigMail... just plain easy to use and doesn't take a long time to teach. It is simple to create a key, to distribute the key by mail or upload it

            • Re:A broader lesson (Score:4, Informative)

              by mrchaotica ( 681592 ) * on Sunday June 22, 2008 @04:03PM (#23896825)

              Encrytion is not in every circumstance easy to set up, but for example Thunderbird together with EnigMail... just plain easy to use and doesn't take a long time to teach.

              I actually just set that up (literally -- I created my key immediately before typing this), and I think it could be easier. Namely, after installing EnigMail in Thunderbird, it didn't immediately work. Why was this? Because I needed to install GnuPG separately, which was not mentioned in the "how to install in Thunderbird" steps on EnigMail's Thunderbird addon page [mozilla.org]. Either it ought to be added to that list, or (better yet) GnuPG itself ought to be somehow included in the EnigMail installer itself.

      • by Bandman ( 86149 )

        I really think the issue is that people expect a modicum of privacy from their government, and our governments are not really willing to accede to their requests

        • Right, a modicum of privacy in a medium that is as inherently open as sending a postcard. It seems private to regular users, but it's no more private than talking on a cell phone in public; anyone can listen in, from governments to individuals. If it's out in the open, expect people are listening. If you don't want them listening, use something more secure. Don't blame the government because they're reading your open emails or postcards.
          • Don't blame the government because they tap phones without a court order either. Normal phone calls are made in the clear. You just have to get on the actual wire carrying the call between the two recipients. Yet nobody thinks it's ok for the government to snoop on their phone calls. I don't see why the same shouldn't be true for email. Sure you should take responsibility and just encrypt your email. But that doesn't give the government the right to snoop in on your email.
      • by Kjella ( 173770 )

        If you look at the postal system, people have been using security envelopes or at least sealed envelopes since pretty much the beginning.

        All I need for an envelope is an address - I'm not in any way guaranteed who'll open it. The mailman could just rip it open and read it if he wanted to as easily as the intended recipient. The thing that's annoying about encryption is that you have to exchange public keys, it's more iike sending a safe that needs a key than an envelope. Exchanging that key in a safe way is really very annoying, since it usually means using some out of band method. It's what you have to do as you can't tell read bits from u

        • "All I need for an envelope is an address..."

          And, the cost of the envelope, the time placing the letter inside the envelope and closing the envelope, paying for and putting the stamp on it, and the time it takes to write/print the address (and the return address)

          Although the whole mail analogy works fairly well, comparing envelopes to encryption isn't, something like the Enigma Machine would be better, the envelope is simply the "packet" the data is contained in, there are certain things you can find out fr

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by ultranova ( 717540 )

        If it's important or private, use a security envelope or encryption. Otherwise, don't complain when someone reads it.

        If it's important or private, meet with the other guy face to face in a crowded and noisy place. That way there is nothing to read.

    • by nine-times ( 778537 ) <nine.times@gmail.com> on Sunday June 22, 2008 @11:58AM (#23894793) Homepage

      Yeah, it seems to me that it was an oversight that networking wasn't encrypted in the first place. When lots of these protocols were being developed, security didn't seem to be much of a consideration.

      It's about time that these things got rectified, but I'm not sure what the best course is. For example, using SSL concerns me in that we've accepted the convention that certificates should be issued by certain set organizations that require exorbitant fees. I mean, hundreds or thousands of dollars per year for an SSL cert? Seems a bit much to me. Yeah, I know you can generate your own, which will cause you to get complaints from your websites' users when they see what looks to them like an error message.

      I'm not a security expert, but I get the sense someone needs to go back to square one and figure out how to build a coherent, open, and secure model for networking that doesn't rely on giving such control to a small number of companies.

      • by Free the Cowards ( 1280296 ) on Sunday June 22, 2008 @12:27PM (#23894981)

        If TCP/IP had been encrypted from the beginning, we'd be worse off, not better.

        Why? Because any crypto available from that time is trivially crackable today. So instead of an obviously insecure communications medium, you'd have an insecure communications medium that everyone thinks is secure because, hey, it's encrypted! It wouldn't change anything except make people more complacent.

      • by David Jao ( 2759 ) <djao@dominia.org> on Sunday June 22, 2008 @12:30PM (#23895023) Homepage

        Yeah, it seems to me that it was an oversight that networking wasn't encrypted in the first place. When lots of these protocols were being developed, security didn't seem to be much of a consideration.

        You may be too young to remember this, but until 1997, it was for all practical purposes illegal to transmit cryptography software over the internet because of ITAR regulations [wikipedia.org].

        As a result, during the formative years of the internet when networking protocols were being designed, there was no practical way to include security as a requirement. A cynic would interpret this state of affairs as being exactly the goal that the US government had in mind when they made cryptography illegal.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        Yeah, it seems to me that it was an oversight that networking wasn't encrypted in the first place.

        Correct me if I'm wrong here, but as I understand it security was outside of the scope of networking technology when it was first created. ARPANET was created in order to facilitate information sharing, and it started out quite small. Encryption at that point would've been counterproductive. Security wasn't much of a consideration because the network was connected and used by trusted nodes, namely research

        • Re:A broader lesson (Score:5, Interesting)

          by jc42 ( 318812 ) on Sunday June 22, 2008 @01:15PM (#23895407) Homepage Journal

          ... as I understand it security was outside of the scope of networking technology when it was first created. ARPANET was created in order to facilitate information sharing, and it started out quite small. Encryption at that point would've been counterproductive. ...

          Well, yes and no. Note that the ARPAnet project was funded by the US Dept of Defense. There were security experts around from the beginning. But it was well understood back in the 1960s that building the security into the low-level networking code was a bad engineering design. Everyone involved pretty much understood that you got (data) security by end-to-end encryption, and doing encryption at any level below the user app was simply a waste of cpu cycles. So the network-level design goal was reliable transport on unreliable ("battlefield") hardware. The design meant that the people working on the network layer could concentrate without distraction on the job of getting the bits reproduced accurately at the other end.

          The primary argument against low-level encryption has always been the same: The two endpoints have no reliable knowledge of or control over most of the data path. The history of encryption is full of stories about someone cracking someone else's encryption and reading their messages for a long time before they were found out. We must assume this can happen with any encryption scheme. This means that if a low-level link in the middle of a data path is decrypted (or even intercepted), the endpoints generally have no way of knowing it has happened, and also have no way of changing that link's encryption scheme. Low-level encnryption is thus only usable if you control every piece of hardware in the data path. This requirement would totally eliminate the wide-area networking that ARPA was trying to achieve. So if the ARPAnet was to meet its design goals, encryption of low-level data links was a pointless waste of cpu time.

          End-to-end encryption at the application layer, however, is totally under the control of the endpoints. It can be changed at any time, for any reason. It eliminates dependence on the security of the low-level links that aren't controlled by the entpoints.

          And there's a reasonable argument that end-to-end encryption increases security: It means that the data packets can be scattered across many different data paths, making it difficult for anyone to intercept all of the packets for a given conversation. Previous secure communication required tight control of the data path, and usually meant that there was a single data path for a given conversation. This is easy to intercept and either block or subvert, giving a copy of the conversation to an enemy. But if your packets are sprayed across all the available paths, interception and packet collection become nearly impossible.

          This is, of course, a very loose, off-the-cuff summary. But it's easy enough to find the early ARPAnet docs in various Internet archives, where you can easily spent far too much time learning about the subject.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Kjella ( 173770 )

        I'm not a security expert, but I get the sense someone needs to go back to square one and figure out how to build a coherent, open, and secure model for networking that doesn't rely on giving such control to a small number of companies.

        We could, but not without a huge increase in complexity. With a simple tree structure, it's pretty much a binary - either you're trusted or you're not, but it places all the control at the top. Without it, you need to manage who you trust, those that want to get trusted has to get many signatures that others trust them and everybody has to deal with all sorts of partial trust through unauthoritative peers. It's been tried with PGP email and the results are:

        1) People want an oracle, not trust management
        2) P

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          That would be nice, as you could still have all the autheticity you have now by getting that same cert signed by multiple authorities, and even get away with things like specific authorities for specific things and not have it nearly as complex as it is now. For example your govt's banking oversight group could verify and sign all your banks certificates, and if you didnt see their name/icon/whatever you'd know bankofamerika.com was not legit.

          Would just need a secure enough way to get those certs to the end

      • by tsotha ( 720379 )

        In addition to what others have posted, I'd like to point out nontrivial encryption/decryption takes a fair amount of computing horsepower. For a modern processor it's an afterthought, but if they had included encryption in ARPANET the project would have died in the lab for lack of system owners willing to connect.

        • That doesn't seem like a very good reason to me. What I mean is, that's a good reason why you wouldn't have everything encrypted at the outset, but that's not a good reason not to build out the protocols/infrastructure with the option of security/encryption in mind. Because even in cases where encryption is computationally too expensive for every transaction, you might still want to offer the option of encryption for for cases where encryption is worth the expense.

          I guess it just seems a bit like the Y2K

    • by Znork ( 31774 )

      and being spied on by governments (not necessarily our own, mind you)

      These types of laws typically have provisions against 'domestic spying'. As does the swedish law.

      The traditional way to get around that is to simply listen on foreign traffic, then exchange that info with foreign intelligence services (A method which the swedish law explicitly allows).

      whether we'll see people using SSL/TLS

      Perhaps.

      If you really want to make things hard for the listeners, start putting encrypted input from /dev/random as a .

    • by HeroreV ( 869368 )

      why not HTTP as well?
      With the current way things are done, that would require millions of costly security certificates, to ensure that the public keys you're getting are really from the people you think they're from. We're talking about enormous amounts of money.
  • Problem with laws? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Don't like the law? Open source the government [wikipedia.org].
  • About time (Score:5, Insightful)

    by nurb432 ( 527695 ) on Sunday June 22, 2008 @11:42AM (#23894681) Homepage Journal

    Lets hope this is just the beginning.

    *everything* should be encrypted by default, and no unencrypted connections should be offered.

    I don't care that i'm doing nothing wrong, its no ones business.

    ya, there is a performance hit, but thats just part of the deal to have your communications remain private.

    • by You ain't seen me! ( 1237346 ) on Sunday June 22, 2008 @12:43PM (#23895133)

      *everything* should be encrypted by default, and no unencrypted connections should be offered.

      If you were to start using unlimited encrypted connections here within the UK, I guess the thought-police will immediately assume you to be a terrorist and bang you up for 42 days.
    • A firefox plugin? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by anilg ( 961244 )

      I've been thinking about this. Gmail provides a https interface, but i've seen people just type in gmail.com and be done with it (the session then uses http)

      So my idea of a firefox plugin would be one that automatically tries for a 'https' version of any site (or lookup a list for it) and move to that if it exists.

  • by nurb432 ( 527695 ) on Sunday June 22, 2008 @11:47AM (#23894725) Homepage Journal

    Since they are publicly announcing they are using SSL to circumvent a law as its primary goal, can they be held personally liable?

    • by endemoniada ( 744727 ) <nathaniel@@@endemoniada...org> on Sunday June 22, 2008 @11:52AM (#23894761) Homepage

      The law says that the government has the right to listen, nowhere does it demand that everyone speaks loud enough to be heard. We still have every right to encrypt everything we want, and newspapers/tabloids here in Sweden have already been running articles like "5 ways to not get wiretapped" and guides on encryption techniques.

    • No. If they were, then any shopping, banking or other website that used encryption to protect its customers would be too.

      • by nurb432 ( 527695 )

        The stated intent is different. The bank doesn't say ' we are doing this to circumvent the law'..

        Personally i don't have a problem with with what they are doing, but if i ran around "im going to do xyz to circumvent a law" i bet i get arrested.

        • by fluch ( 126140 )

          Which law is the Piratebay trying to circumvent? The people in Sweeden which are running the Piratebay are not breaking Sweedish law as far as I know. And enabling SSL is also not against any law there as far as I know.

        • Circumventing a law isn't illegal, breaking it is.
    • by aliquis ( 678370 )

      Circumventing what? It's not illegal with encryption in Sweden.

      And if it was I'd still use it.

  • by frdmfghtr ( 603968 ) on Sunday June 22, 2008 @12:09PM (#23894853)

    " Although copyright issues really have little to do with national security... "

    Try telling that to the US Gov't.

    • by Eudial ( 590661 ) on Sunday June 22, 2008 @12:16PM (#23894897)

      " Although copyright issues really have little to do with national security... "

      Try telling that to the US Gov't.

      You're getting the lawmaker newspeak confused. Smoking pot is terrorism, piracy is the same as child pornography and paedophilia.
    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by mini me ( 132455 )

      Do you think terrorists plot their next attack in silence? No, they listen to their favourite Metallica songs downloaded from a P2P networking program. Ergo, copyright infringement = terrorism.

  • by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Sunday June 22, 2008 @12:17PM (#23894901)

    Now duh. You spy on me, I counter with encryption. No, really? Who would have thought?

    Now, let's assume for a moment that those laws are actually enacted to counter terrorism, as they allegedly are. Now, we see how companies and organisations act who are (allegedly) no target for those laws, and behold, they can very easily avoid being affected by the laws.

    Question for 500: Are terrorists affected?

  • If you start encrypting all your traffic then will the govenments just have any data the cannot decrypt directed to /dev/null instead of letting pass through.
  • by mlwmohawk ( 801821 ) on Sunday June 22, 2008 @02:46PM (#23896259)

    As more and more wiretapping laws and eavesdropping systems come on line, the more and more the technology movers will make it impossible.

    Every last thing is going to be encrypted, IM, web, email, etc. The more of this crap they pull, the more they will be unable to do. If they break the encryption, we'll make it better.

  • by ymgve ( 457563 ) on Sunday June 22, 2008 @03:06PM (#23896403) Homepage

    So, they get SSL on their site. That doesn't do anything to hide the fact that you were visiting The Pirate Bay, only what you did when there.

    Depending on the circumstances, that visit might be enough probable cause for "further investigation", even if you just hit their front page.

  • by ArIck ( 203 ) on Sunday June 22, 2008 @03:48PM (#23896703)

    Whereas most of seasonal users have moved to private torrent sites, it is better late than never for those casual downloaders who still havent heard of private sites!

"Conversion, fastidious Goddess, loves blood better than brick, and feasts most subtly on the human will." -- Virginia Woolf, "Mrs. Dalloway"

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