SSL now available for citizens of Dubai (and others)!

Posted: Wed Jun 25, 2008 2:00 pm

YOU CAN NOW SEARCH SECURELY WITH ISOHUNT.COM

Worried about having your traffic sniffed? Concerned about privacy? We've got your solution. A connection via ssl allows you to communicate with us privately, bypassing caching servers and deep packet inspection hardware.

Thanks in no small part to the work of Spike, we are proud to offer SSL on 2 of our sites. https://isohunt.com https://torrentbox.com and https://forums.torrentbox.com are all now valid urls for reaching us. This should mean that folks in Dubai, who have recently had to start using an alternate domain of ours, should now be able to visit us directly. If you have issues with transparent proxies or mean people snooping on your connection, this should come as fantastic news for you. We'll be evaluating how much extra load this places on our servers over the next few weeks, and if there's a large outpouring of people preferring to browse isoHunt or TorrentBox securely, we'll be investing in some dedicated hardware to handle the SSL connections. ( Soekris vpn1401 's have hifn chips with some very nice linux kernel drivers for crypto offloading, so they'd make our SSL stuff faster, and be completely transparent Smile

)

Just a heads up: we did in fact buy certificates, but loading some pages may cause warnings due to ads and digg not being on SSL secured connections, so please don't complain if you see these warnings. Your communication to isohunt.com and torrentbox.com are fully secure when browsing under https://.

Also, there's a poll attached to this announcement, PLEASE give us your feedback regarding whether you'll be using SSL or not.

Reference: Stress testing experiment with redirecting all traffic to SSL (our servers handled it fine and SS did some optimizations to handle extreme load better)

Posted: Wed Jun 25, 2008 10:39 pm

I cant view the dubai link

Posted: Wed Jun 25, 2008 10:43 pm

link fixed

Posted: Wed Jun 25, 2008 11:21 pm

Very welcome move and seemingly a well deployed change.
Seems no change in load times either here or at Torrentbox, even though it seems all internal pages are now using SSL.
IH buy the guy responsible a large beverage of his choice. Wink

Posted: Thu Jun 26, 2008 2:42 am

If you are using Internet Explorer and want to get it to shut the hell up every time you refresh the page do the following;

Navigate to Tools>Options>Security>Custom Level
Scroll down to Miscellaneous>Display Mixed Content
Change the option from Prompt to Enable
Click OK, OK.

Now you should be able to navigate webpages without recieving the popup warning about secure/insecure content. Note: This will affect all websites with mixed content, not just isoHunt. The warning is disabled by default in FF/Opera so there is no need to do anything with those two browsers.

Posted: Fri Jun 27, 2008 7:02 am

i will definitely be using the ssl from now on. feels great.

Posted: Fri Jun 27, 2008 4:06 pm

zannettis wrote:

can someone explain me how can i access the site via ssl
i'm new in these things...

The 1st post explains it instead of http:// it's https:// as in

https://isohunt.com

Posted: Sat Jun 28, 2008 1:06 am

thanks 4

u

Posted: Sat Jun 28, 2008 6:29 am

Those trackers have nothing to do with isoHunt. It is this site that is secure and the communication between you and this site not whatever tracker url's you happen to be using in your client, isoHunt has no control over those.

Posted: Sat Jun 28, 2008 6:48 am

OG wrote:

Those trackers have nothing to do with isoHunt. It is this site that is secure and the communication between you and this site not whatever tracker url's you happen to be using in your client, isoHunt has no control over those.

OK, so is my downloading from iH completely transparent and not detectable then? I ask you, OG, to please bear with those of us who do not have your expert knowledge of things Bittorrent Smile

Anyhoo, does this mean goodbye to PeerGuardian, proxies, VPN tunnels etc?
Then I am mightily impressed as well as enjoying a peace of mind hitherto unknown...why, then the use of encryption must be *the* brainwave since Bram Cohen invented the bittorent protocol, no shit Idea

Posted: Sat Jun 28, 2008 7:29 am

This will only keep what you do on site private, like what pages you're looking at and what .torrent files you download from isoHunt. What you do elsewhere, including what you do with your torrent client and whatever .torrent files you download from isoHunt are not affected by this. It is also not a replacement for a Peer Guardian, though it may help users who have had to use a proxy or VPN to reach isoHunt.

What you download at home is entirely down to you. SSL on isoHunt will not stop possible action against you should you be caught infringing copyright.

Posted: Sat Jun 28, 2008 7:35 am

Alright, thanks OG.

Posted: Sat Jun 28, 2008 12:17 pm

Just to mainly be sure that this is being done correctly, feel free to correct me at any time.

By adding an "s" to HTTP:// to = https://

I am accessing isohunt securely as apposed to openly?

Thats it, just fix my bookmark and never give it another thought?

And concerning Vuse, formerly known as azurus (my preferred bit torrent download software), if I activate the encryption protocols... and tell it to accept nothing unencrypted and send nothing unencrypted...

My privacy issues are fairly well covered? Yes? No? Kinda? Should I be asking that question here? Just figured that since we're on the topic of security, may as well ask a few questions.

Are there more ways to cover my butt than previously mentioned? Firewalls are up and all, don't even respond to incoming pings... But I can't help but feel as if I could do more.

Just wondering out loud is all.

Thanks for the update isohunt, its appreciated.

cheers:)
protilius

Posted: Sat Jun 28, 2008 12:52 pm

Client encryption means little as anyone else with a torrent client can send and recieve data to/from you. As anyone can run a torrent client, including those you may want to avoid sending data to, no ammount of firewalls, encryption, blocklists, ect will stop unwanted traffic 100% of the time.

Posted: Sat Jun 28, 2008 9:37 pm

so...now there are 2 versions of the site? a http:// version and a https:// version?

why I ask this is because when I type isohunt.com in the URL bar of my browser the http://isohunt.com opens...

you guys should do something about this...like re-directing the users to the https:// version of the site...

but this is a great move...