Rich Fiscus
18 Feb 2008 23:58
It was only a matter of time before the BitTorrent community decided to take on the "network management" practices of ISPs like Comcast. According to TorrentFreak that's exactly what a small group of developers is doing.
They're working to implement what's being termed as Peer List Obfuscation, referring to its goal of hiding the list of peers returned by a torrent Tracker when queried by a client. This list is apparently used by Comcast's Sandvine network management system to locate BitTorrent traffic in order to falsify reset packets, telling a client uploading a particular file that the computer on the end closed the connection. In reality the message comes from Comcast, and is reportedly used to shut down any file being uploaded using BitTorrent without a corresponding download.
Ironically, if this project is a success it will mean not only that ISP's like Comcast won't be able to shut down most BitTorrent traffic, but also that they'll end up with even more traffic due to the overhead from encryption.