June 5, 2003

Privacy in P2P Apps

Verizon is basically screwed. 


At the end of the NY Times article, one of Zeropaid’s founders claims that P2P apps will keep getting better at protecting privacy, making this ruling irrelevant.  We’ve discussed anonymity on P2P networks briefly before (make sure to see the comments), and I’ve mentioned Blubster, which has an interesting bit of anonymizing.  Coincidentally, Zeropaid has a report on an app with even more privacy protections: Earthstation5.  That’s an impressive list of features (if they work). When will services like KaZaA be more like this?

* Filed by Derek Slater at 3:17 pm under Big Ideas
* 1 Comment

One Response to “Privacy in P2P Apps”

  1. Eric Eisenhart
    June 5th, 2003 | 6:49 pm

    “MANOLITO is anonymous. Why? because UDP is unreliable.”

    IMO, this is BS.

    Yes, using UDP instead of TCP means some things, but it doesn’t make things anonymous. It does mean you can possibly claim “I didn’t receive that data” with more believability, but it won’t protect any against determining who sent the data in the first place. Besides, even with UDP, you’ll have to request data and rerequest data, etc. The second the “attacker” (RIAA) bothers to analyze the contents of those UDP packets instead of just the IP headers, they’ll see the same fundamental type of sessioning as with TCP.

    Though, using UDP for search results in order to limit network flooding is a good idea, IMO, it’s a good idea for technical reasons, not anything that will give users meaningful amounts of anonymity.