Pirate Bay wants to help you encrypt the whole Web

Cyndy Aleo-Carreira — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 00:21:19 -0700

NewTeeVee reports that The Pirate Bay has added a new project to its ever-growing to-do list: encrypting the entire Internet. With increasing pressure from government agencies and industry lobbyists to crack down on filesharing, The Pirate Bay feels that the best solution is a project called IPETEE, a transparent end-to-end encryption system for the entire Internet.

In the technical proposal for IPETEE, the goal is described as involving a crypto layer between the IP-stack and the application. Information would be encrypted and sent once keys are exchanged. If the user and/or server couldn't authenticate, it could failover to a non-encrypted system. IDs would be randomly generated to prevent any storage of data.

For the non-techie, what does this mean? Well, if it were implemented with YouTube, for instance, Viacom would have no information to be asking Google for in the first place. This has obvious applications in the banking and finance industry, as well as any other applications that transmit sensitive data, such as medical information, but there is certainly a large community of file-sharers who would celebrate IPETEE's implementation.

NewTeeVee notes two potential pitfalls for IPETEE, however. One issue is that the encryption would do nothing to thwart bandwidth throttling by ISPs, since the encryption would only hide the data and not the originating and receiving servers, nor the file size. the other issue is that The Pirate Bay has a list of projects that have been left unfinished. History is against IPETEE ever seeing the light of day, but anything is possible.

More news, commentary, and predictions from The Industry Standard:

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News: UK telecom regulator hints at action against file sharing