This Will Make Comcast Very Unhappy…Oh and the RIAA.

Well there is a new P2P in town — Alliance. Has all the usual attributes of a P2P. But it does not stop there. First, it does not indiscriminately look for traffic partners. Those are set up by the Alliance participants. Sort of like a ‘Friends and Family Plan’ P2P. The second is the data packets are encased in SSL.

So why should Comcast be upset? Well the schema has been that they would look for patterns in the network data streams. If they found a candidate they would do a deep packet analysis to ascertain if a Torrent or P2P was occurring. Well that will be very hard to do if the underlying data packets are encrypted in a SSL layer. Best they will be able to do is monitor usage then do a simple block on the traffic rather than the usual packet reshaping to cause the traffic to cease. Its just more headache.

What makes this tough for the RIAA is that unlike normal P2P; Alliance requires that you be invited to join an existing Alliance network. So if 6 kids are off ripping CD’s [and ‘The Man’] unless one of the members of the network is crazy enough to invite an unknown to the network how are they going to know?

Alliance has versions for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. I can see quite a few uses for this type of P2P in the corporate world. Ad Hoc teams can pull together shares for projects without the hassle of waiting for IT. With AES-SSL encryption the teams can be in remote locations and not worry too much about loss of the data over the wire. A novel solution with commendable features.