Torrenting is I2P's foot in the door for much wider adoption, which would help drive other types of usage. I really hope it takes off, especially since qBitTorrent 4.6 just integrated support; the current stagnation of filesharing, especially w.r.t. needing a VPN for everything, needs some shaking up.

We will still need VPNs to get good connectivity to other residential ISPs until some government entity (or market condition) inspires ISPs to invest in more hardware and peering with each other. CDNs and VPN providers are now sadly a requirement for the internet to work the way we expect it to.

With modern tech, I should be able to launch a web server, give you my ipv6 that never changes, route a few ports through fw and we’re good.

Yggdrasil? https://yggdrasil-network.github.io/

With modern tech I should never have any identifier that doesn’t change whatsoever. Mac,ip,etc should randomize every nth second lol

It's already possible (and quite easy) to assign a static IPv6 for incoming traffic e.g. webserver, then configure a private and constantly rotating IPv6 for all outgoing traffic.

Can you share a link, please?

I second this motion

How do VPNs improve connectivity between residential ISPs?

Not OP, but I'd expect it's so that separate residential locations can communicate directly with another, bypassing limitations imposed by the ISP, double NAT, dynamic IPs, etc. Depending on region ISPs have purposefully blocked residential users from exposing public Internet services.

Net neutrality is dead. For some reason, I get much faster torrent speeds with a VPN than without.

Does I2P torrenting operate at remotely comparable speeds to without?

I recall hearing that it was vaguely frowned upon with Tor back in the day for saturating the networ and it didn't seem like there was much reason to use it over basically any VPN, especially speed wise, assuming your motive was to avoid copyright notices.

But isn't it enough to use it just for metadata and not the pyload itself? (provided that's possible)

If you want to avoid copyright notices, then you need to do it for the payload too.

That's because a copyright holder could easily host a copy of some pirate film on your new network, and then just see the destination of the data packets.

Wait, but if the copyright holder is sending the actual payload to you as a client, couldn't you make the argument that they implicitly authorized you to have it?

AFAIK, cops can't deal you actual drugs and then arrest you for it.

What you're describing is entrapment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entrapment

Sometimes its legal, depends where you are and how it was done.

The copyright holders are not agents of the state, this is not entrapment.

If that was a concern, they could always cut off the connection right before sending the data packet.

This is absolutely true in many states in America. Not sure why you received any down votes.

The key there is the attempt. As South Park so memorably pointed out, they don't actually go through with it before arresting you.

It's something Prenda Law got up to and is among the things that did them in.

> An expert witness affidavit stated that IP addresses linked to Prenda's Minnesota and Florida offices and John Steele, had themselves been identified in 2013 as the initial "seeders" (sharers) of some pornographic media, tagged for "fast" sharing on file-sharing networks, which would be followed up by threat of legal action

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prenda_Law

> AFAIK, cops can't deal you actual drugs and then arrest you for it.

Why not? This sounds like a misunderstanding of entrapment

Cops can totally do that.

"Entrapment" is actually quite narrow. IANAL, but my understanding is it requires showing that you wouldn't have done the illegal activity without the involvement of the police.

Harassing a person for months to buy weed qualifies; posing as a drug dealer and offering drugs to the people who pass by you, does not.

Yeah I imagine it would pull the network down a lot.

I remember I2p torrents being horrendously slow, like 20kbps at max(do you even remember the last time someone used kbps as units?) for popular stuff. Has that changed in the last few years?

I get on the regular up to 200-500kbps depending on number of peers, and their router configuration (I have my bandwidth configured above the defaults, which are very low).

I understand that is unheard of from someone living in the "instant access era" but their protocol has a cost.

Hm. Regular torrents tend to touch the 100 Mbps to gpbs range - so not really an alternative?

One of the reasons people were wary of Freenet, where every user would participate in the hosting, was that if the encryption algorithm was ever broken, people would undoubtedly be revealed to have been passing CSAM along. Unwittingly, but still. Does I2P’s model not spark the same concerns?

Do ISPs worry about relaying TLS traffic because if the encryption is ever broken, it will be revealed that they were relaying CSAM? There isn't any difference to an i2p node relaying encrypted data and and ISP doing it.

ISPs are, especially in the wake of mergers in many countries, large corporations with lawyers. An I2P node might be run by an individual who lacks that security, and this is just something that can be used against that person if he comes to the attention of the authorities for whatever reason. It’s like the risks of individuals’ running Tor exit nodes, which are well known.

It's the same risk as running a Tor exit node: you getting arrested, having all of your electronics confiscated and facing life ruining charges because someone was caught downloading illegal content from IP addresses that point to your servers.

Even if charges get dropped, or you win in court, that's quite a burden.

Does any transmission method where the message is even partially concealed from the messenger not spark the same concern? E.g. Postal services.

I am pretty sure not blaming the messenger for the message is a legal notion that predates Hammurabi's code.

There is a big difference between storing CSAM (Freenet) and transiently transferring it (I2P).

> gets a lot of things right... having every network participant relay some internal traffic

There are trade-offs. The Tor Project has its reasons for not doing this (from https://support.torproject.org/alternate-designs/):

"...many Tor users cannot be good relays — for example, some Tor clients operate from behind restrictive firewalls, connect via modem, or otherwise aren't in a position where they can relay traffic. Providing service to these clients is a critical part of providing effective anonymity for everyone, since many Tor users are subject to these or similar constraints and including these clients increases the size of the anonymity set..."

"...we need to better understand the risks from letting the attacker send traffic through your relay while you're also initiating your own anonymized traffic. Three different research papers describe ways to identify the relays in a circuit by running traffic through candidate relays and looking for dips in the traffic while the circuit is active. These clogging attacks are not that scary in the Tor context so long as relays are never clients too..."

Not often a network protocol / communication thread breaks out

Neat point. I wonder if the percentage of bandwidth shared could be relative to the speed or openness of network available?

I think it would be exactly like that, because that's how it already works for relays. The Tor Project operates a measurement system that tests relays in various ways and records their status in the public consensus document. Clients then use weighted random selection (along with some screening criteria) to choose relays in proportion to how much bandwidth they provide, according to the consensus.

Having something like that turned on by default but being able to disable it would be a good choice.

Ultimately until someone can satisfy a user’s concern about the privacy and security of what flows through their connection there will be scrutiny on this piece. Being able to interject one’s own proxy or vpn tunnel could be interesting.

Right, I think that it could be good. But it's not obvious that it would be good while it would definitely add complexity, bugs, and attack surface, and discourage at least some people from using Tor.

> Being able to interject one’s own proxy... could be interesting.

I think this is essentially what the Tor Project wants to see instead: if you're in a position to do so, operate your own relay and make it your entry guard. That adds capacity for the network and helps you by mitigating the risk of connecting to a malicious guard.

I feel it would be a good choice to give users rather than force all users into it. Not all users stories are the same.

You’re right as well as this is one way it could be, and there could be other ways.

Tor might want to see that, but I’m not entirely sure how well it’s going when hosting exit relays can be an issue for the hoster.

Originally Skype and Spotify had their own peer-to-peer networks and distribution.

Both stopped using them because it worked so badly.

For a long time Skype's P2P architecture worked great. It was the absolute best A/V calling experience, handily beating every other contemporary mainstream offer from MSN to Y!IM. It had issues such as getting crushed by patch Tuesday, and I assume it was likely not robust enough to adversaries, but one thing you can't say about Skype was that its P2P architecture didn't work. It absolutely did.

I think even though there were many things that could've lead to the demise of Skype's P2P network, it was pretty undoubtedly the rise of mobile phones. Android or iOS, Skype was just dreadful; they were clearly ducktaping mobile support in. Sometimes you'd be sending messages and everything would appear to be working, little did you know the other person was responding but you weren't actually seeing anything. Push notifications? Sometimes you get them, but it was a crapshoot as to when you would get them. It probably was expensive to try to bridge their P2P network to mobile phones, and it definitely didn't work very well.

I guess anyone can just say these things and it's really difficult to back them up since a large part of it is subjective (and aside from some reverse engineering efforts, I am not really intimately familiar with much of the details behind Skype and its transition off of P2P) but I think there is one thing that most people would definitely not disagree with: Skype was far more relevant and well-regarded when it was peer to peer. That's not to say that the move off had anything to do with its downfall, more just to say that if it was so awful, I think it would've been the other way around.

> it worked so badly.

Skype has a much worse quality now after the switch for all people I know who used Skype at the time.

The real reason for switching was iPhone. First, Apple did not allow long-running apps in favour of centralized notifications. Periodically start Skype to check events did not help recwicing calls. Second, users moved to smartphones, which depleted the active nodes network. So there has been an increase of short-lived nodes without balanced increase in long-lived. So to prevent the p2p network model to start failing, Skype moved to a centralized one. And probably the government regulations (to store and decrypt messages) took place, but this was probably not very public.

Microsoft buying Skype must have added additional incentives to centralize. Regulatory, organizational control, auditing, etc. And tinfoil take would include surveiling.

Skype was P2P pre-acquisition.

Microsoft’s acquisition changed Skype to centralize it through their servers (and introduce all sorts of call quality issues).

It’s less about focusing on tinfoil and more about how creating $ for cloud usage, which allowed for centralization and surveillance.

Skype has been enough of a turn off from the performance issues it has / had hat many people moved elsewhere.

In the early 2000s there was a lot of discussion about a US law that required phone providers to provide for wiretapping, with no mention of the underlying tech. Being P2P, that wouldn't work for Skype, so a journalist asked the Skype CEO whether they would comply with the law and he said "We're not US company. Why would we?"

So I don't think it's all that tinfoily to think that once Skype became a US company, the government might have pressured them into making wiretaps possible, since there was a specific law that arguably required it. Considering all that Snowden revealed later, I'm not sure I'd put any digital surveillance in the tinfoil category.

Microsoft at that time said they are moving Skype to centralized server from distributed to reduce code complexity.

Tor was invented with a purpose of giving users with poor, restricted connections to access forbidden stuff untracked. Think journalists under oppressive regimes in the third world, or, of course, undercover agents.

I2P was invented to give people with relatively good, usually excellent, connectivity to access forbidden stuff untracked. Think media "piracy" first and foremost, also dark-grey market stuff, etc. Everything else is better served by either your own VPN, or the public Internet.

Doesn’t that make i2p less vulnerable to an issue tor suffers from - that of hostile-owned relays and exit points? I remember reading something about how a large part of them were controlled by US intel.

That was the parent comment's point. My point is that there are trade-offs. You make the network less vulnerable to that particular attack, and open up other vulnerabilities instead. Anonymous communication service design is full of such trade-offs.

There's a theory that intelligence agencies control many relays. I've haven't seen evidence of it. Tor does its best to be secure even when it can't trust the relays.

I2P has a community of people that actually use the darktubes, as opposed to Tor. 99% of Tor users use Tor to browse the vanilla internets just. There is no real 'Tor community'

> There is no real 'Tor community'

What a bold statement. r/onions has 400k members. Where else would you sell someone's credit card or fentanyl? Ebay?

What's wrong with Ebay ? It seems to be the choice for a lot of "people". /s