Because people believe a VPN or a seedbox is gonna save them from legal repercussions. They paid for it with their real information and credit card too, for convenience. They compromised their private tracker identity and must abandon the trackers the moment the legal landscape incentives companies to pursue individual copyright infringements. But most probably won’t, and face the consequences if that ever happens.
From what I have read on the upcoming implementation on i2p in qbit, I do not forsee it being adopted by the core torrent user base. The main issue I have with it is that while you can download from clearnet peers, you are only able to seed to other i2p peers. This completely eliminates any adoption by anyone using private trackers. Its not like the guys in brazil are going to jump through an extra hoop to hide their ip since they never needed to in the first place, so they can be ruled out for adoption as well. What I really fear is that its going to create a completely unnecessary schism in the userbase with a sort of ‘leechnet’ walled garden of i2p users which would hurt the greater availability of seeders. I also haven’t gotten a straight answer from anyone how ports are going to work in i2p, since normally its imperative to have a forwarded port in order to be a full participant. Unless i2p users can seed to clearnet users without issue, I am going to be worried about the impact on torrent health as a whole.
I’m not saying you’re wrong because I don’t know the i2p details, but it sounds like you may be mixing up being connectable with seeding vs leeching.
Once a connection is established, data can go in any direction, seeding (uploading) or downloading. Getting a connection between two peers in the first place needs one party to be connectable via an ip:port. That is already a problem with a massive number of clients behind NATed VPNs
I would also say that this is because anonimity is not needed by all countries. I know that in Spain torrenting is not a big issue and ISPs don’t care that much (even though distributed Copyrighted content is still not allowed). They usually go after people profiting from distributing copyrighted company rather than people downloading or distributing for free.
Disclaimer: I think some of my info is a bit outdated so if anyone has more recent info about Spain’s situation please tell me.
that all depends on your college and how much your IT admins have locked down their connection… Usenet will work on any connection… unless it’s being actively blocked.
Usenet can yes… absolutely… but likely only for the text groups… for binary newsgroups you’re going to have to pay and you’ll need to do your research to find one that’s (ideally) not a highwinds backed supplier as they automate DMCA takedowns.
I had someone explain to me how it really isn’t a privacy concern to use usenet but financially it does feel like a bit of a bamboozle but you have to realize that usenet often will max out your download speed which is pretty nice and it has some magic that prevents people from knowing what you’re trying to access so it’s likely worth the like $10/mo
Shouldn’t a VPN hide you? I get that port + user agent can be an identifier, but all you have to do is stay up to date and change your port every so often, then you’re good. If not, let me know, cheers
tl;dr bit torrent is just a way to overcome file distribution issues in a secure and repeatable way and by secure I don’t mean private and yes vpn can work if implemented correctly but theres lots of failure modes for vpns which will leak your info. Just about any old turd with php skills and no real knowledge of how privacy works can spin up a legitimate enough looking vpn company to dip into all of the people looking to skirt Netflix rules.
I said specifically “in that protocol” all bit torrent does is it breaks down everything to a hash that can be looked up in a dht wich holds all of the addresses of the individuals sharing that hashed data. I’m not wrong. You can always have a vpn I mean look how hard China tries to stop vpns and still will likely never really nail it down so long as cryptography on the internet is necessary. They would have to deploy Red Star Linux and a whole gestapo to randomly audit chinese citizens computers directly. So long as we have open source hardware keeping big tech and five eyes etc countries and spy agencies a touch more honest we will have lots of ways around all of the censorship and antipiracy trashbags.
You just rambled on for a bit without really answering my question: how does taking the proper measures (VPN, changing port, updating client, using anonymous mode if available) not make you more private during the file sharing?
I understand how the bittorrent protocol works, but with constant randomization you should have no unique identifier except if youre the only seeder on 10 old torrents… So please clarify
If you look around you can get it for $3.50 a month (I have an account with News Demon that’s unlimited for that price, which I don’t remember exactly but I think I got it during a black friday sale)
i’ve messed around with i2p, it requires much more technical knowledge than just torrenting and there’s a bit of a learning curve to navigating and configuring it. plus it honestly hasn’t changed much in years, and i’m not sure how much i trust the developers working on it. i do agree that it’s better than tor though
Tor was really struggling and I wasn’t looking forward to learning how to use something else safely. I2P was such a massively huge improvement at least for my use case.
Agreed. Even getting support over an issue (initially) was troublesome. But somehow I ended up solving it through other channels. But just like torrenting, or any other tech, once you get enough experience to solve issues on your own, things get a bit easy.
A tech being easy to grasp can be an issue too, leading to more script kitties messing in with the protocol.
I’ve been doing it for 20 years and have never been caught. I’ve never even heard of i2p until here just a couple of weeks ago. The fact that certain people are pushing it so hard and referring to standard methods in such a derogatory way makes me highly skeptical of trying it out.
And just because there is some new method available doesn’t mean you’re retaining your privacy there either. I have a VPN to hide my IP and as far as I’m concerned that’s enough ‘privacy’ to avoid any issues.
What’s the worst that’ll happen, my ISP sends me a letter telling me to knock it off? You’re acting like this is some sort of top secret black ops mission in need of complete secrecy.
That’s my point, that’s significantly more effort then just implementing i2p. You shouldn’t have to worry about that because we should be using better protocols. It’s the protocol’s fault here, and VPNs are band-aid solutions.
BiglyBT handles all of the I2P router itself if you don’t have a existing install, you can point it to an existing I2P install if you have one that’s running 24/7 so is well integrated which is what I do
I think non technical people find the concept of a network within a network confusing. I think its more of i2p itself.
I do think it is the future of filesharing and if I was to create a torrent I’d use i2p. Hopefully with more clients implementing support it sees further adoption.
In internet years, Torrenting is old. I2P is old. Even torrenting in I2P is old. Nothing about this is “the future”.
Ideally, the future of file sharing would involve a fully/natively integrated anonymous network with content-addressable distributed filesystem.
But this will probably not happen, as that architecture didn’t see large scale success before, except in Japan where at least some elements of this architecture are used in their popular P2P networks.
The I2P crowd themselves tried with Tahoe-LAFS, but that was never really a network, even aMule over I2P had more traction, and by traction I mean tens or hundreds of users, not thousands or beyond.
Ironically, the one content-addressable distributed filesystem that gained some attraction (outside Japan) is IPFS, which doesn’t offer anonymity, or replication, or anything special really. Yet for some reason, some hype-susceptible techies liked it, together with the NFT crowd, a great fit.
The future of file sharing will depend on where most content will land where it will be easily accessible and quickly grabbable. How those networks will look like? Nobody knows.
that architecture didn’t see large scale success before, except in Japan
Perfect Dark is a major network in Japan. Freenet is a network most people in the globe are not aware of. Hell, Perfect Dark may have a larger Japanese user-base than Freenet’s global one.
It’s worth mentioning that the former leader of the Freenet project wasn’t the most competent. Combine that with him spending years trying (and failing) to cater to the needs of imaginary dictatorships’ defectors (anyone of them using Freenet instead of Tor is the imaginary part), instead of focusing on maximizing the reliability and performance of the network to help its actual users. So it’s not just the ignorance of the masses that was at fault. The default FN user experience was often a horrible one. And users needed to ignore the officially-recommended microblog/forum applications, and even use a patched FN version, to get a decent performance out of the network.
Anyway, Freenet is the past and the present. And as I wrote in the parent comment, I hope a Freenet-like network would become a major success in the future, but I’m not holding my hopes up.
I feel that there’s so much potential in Freenet that’s not being utilized. Or “Hyphanet” as it’s now called. It could be one of the coolest things ever, but as it is I wouldn’t recommend anyone to go there because of the default FN experience.
Apparently Ian and “Locutus” decided that they wanted the Freenet name, so now Locutus is Freenet and Freenet is Hyphanet. I’m sure this won’t confuse anyone.
IIRC it doesn’t need a display, it’s a Web-based UI that you can use from another computer on the network if it doesn’t have a display, VNC would be overkill. Maybe they changed that.
It supported torrent for ages, but it has only one tracker that doesn't really have very much content. Now qBitTorrent or something else supports it out of the box.
I2P is very slow, slower than Tor. Maybe after more people join, it will be faster. Last time I tried it was painfully slow to even load most eepsites.
Because I’m not knowledgeable enough to make it work. I’ve managed to install it and figured out that I need to run the restartable version. Lots of text with screenshots or a video(s) would help. I’m not a digital native. This is one of many retirement projects. Listening to more music than I can afford to buy greatly improves the quality of my life.
It’s not really a hassle to configure your i2p node. I2p network recently went through a DDOS attack. Even during that point of time I had no issue surfing/torrenting.
Ah, I meant that there isn’t enough content on I2P because people are lazy to switch. For example, I torrent Asian media (using nyaa) and the last time I tried using I2P, I didn’t find a lot of what I wanted. Hence I decided to go for a seedbox.
I’ve used it to test, I don’t do it because I can torrent fine on clearnet and I feel like doing it is needlessly congesting the network, consuming traffic that I don’t really need.
No, you can set limits on how much bandwidth you want it to use when you setup java I2P it goes through a introduction and tests your Internet speed and asks how much of it you want to give to I2P
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