ISPs and Bit Torrent Traffic

Like I said I don't think they will attempt to digest all their traffic, they will filter for just the IP address of the person in question and analyse that. From there they can filter even more tightly to capture just the torrent stream if they want.
There a re a few products that can replay a captured buffer onto the wire. We have Observer which can do that, plus as solo mentioned it can reconstitute both http transactions and voip calls, redisplaying the pages viewed or replaying the actual audio of the conversation as appropriate. I'm sure it is possible for torrents too

How would the RIAA find out in the first place? Do they just get a list of IPs that are on torrent sites and have the ISP inspect the traffic more?

They have a number of tactics such as setting up "honeypot" sites and the suggestion you made i.e. getting IPs lists from "guilty" sites.

So it seems that it is easier to figure out what the traffic contains than I thought; however, it is just luck of the draw if you are a choosen one.

if if were you ill tell your friend to start using peer guardian 2. you can find it here phoenixlabs.org/pg2/ . Also some torrent clients like Utorrent and bittorrent have encryption build in them.

Hope this helps.

This Peer Guardian 2 looks rather interesting. Is anybody else running it? What are your thoughts?

A buddy of mine (actually a user here on f.cx) attended DefCon last weekend. And we were introduced to Tor. Is peer guardian and Tor along the same lines of keeping packets private?

Cheers,

ZiPPy