I found I2P much better than Tor network, and now it supports BitTorrent protocol too https://geti2p.net/en/docs/applications/bittorrent .
Why haven’t the pirates migrated to I2P? Why are we still using clearnet and making people backout of seeding cause of DMCA?
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
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.
Can you trust Tor or VPN? Tor was developed with the help of US intelligence to help build a anonymous network.
Read all of the source and research who hosts the relays to determine their trustworthiness. Decide for yourself
I self-host my VPN and it’s open source
That’s great. But not everyone is interested learning and setting up their own VPS. If it was trivial no VPN service would be in business.
It is kinda trivial?
But it’s primarily cost and service intensive.
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
Why is it in Java??
There is a more performant C++ implementation but it’s been a long while since I’ve used either it or the java implementation. Worth checking out.
3 billion devices run Java.
Hmm. What more can you tell me about these 3 billion devices? Are they in the room with us?
Likely because Usenet still works and so does xdcc via irc.
I would like I2P to be implemented as a default by pirates, but it looks like people (including myself) are lazy
Yeah, I just can’t be bothered to switch when torrenting works fine as is.
And in almost all cases is faster.
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.
Cheers
Yeah that’s one big hurdle to get past sadly, it’s like getting people to switch to a new chat app “no ones on it I talk to so I’m not bothering”
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.
I’m from there and I can confirm this is still the case nowadays.
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.
I do think it is the future of filesharing
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.
Ideally, the future of file sharing would involve a fully/natively integrated anonymous network with content-addressable distributed filesystem.
Isn’t this just Freenet?
Yes. That was what I’m alluding to when I wrote:
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.
Or “Hyphanet” as it’s now called.
wtf, I missed that news.
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.
This as fuck. Plus it’s not mainstream so people don’t feel pressure to try it
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.
Your not congesting the network, when you run a router to access I2P you also help the network
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.
Probably mostly cause:
- Slow speed unless you you keep your router 24/7
- People are used to download torrents fast
- Clearnet has much bigger torrent database
- if you configure your node correctly, you won’t see much difference in bandwidth.
- i2psnark can be fast.
- but clearnet comes with an issue of tracking.
I think your response answers the question.
If configured correctly. Can be fast. IMO, once those statements are less conditional and prone to error, we might see the pro of privacy carry more weight.
People don’t understand sometimes how much of a tech-ethusiast bubble we got going on here
How so. Only idea what I can get is reduce number of hops.
Of course. Your idea is THE idea. You CANNOT get mass adoption without a minimal amount of hops. You won’t get the hordes of pirates running around reading wikis on how to configure their router for piracy and how to get an i2p provider and how to get an index etc.
Torrenting right now is so broadly adopted because you just download a Torrenting client, click the magnet, click OK and you’re good to go.
If you HAD to set up port forwarding, some magnet handling register in windows preferences, just those two would stop the bulk majority of pirates. And that’s not even 1/4 of what you have to do to use i2p correctly.
The main reason is that
libtorrent, which is the literal backbone of most torrenting clients, has implemented supported for I2P only recently in its latest v2.x branch… It takes time forlibtorrentto iron out bugs and stablize and it takes more for clients to upgrade their embeddedlibtorrentto v2.x.The more people who use I2P for relatively normal reasons like piracy, the safer it is for people who want to avoid censorship.
Its reputation of Dread bezo addicts is probably why nobody uses it unfortunately
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.
2 main issues with it:
Too slow for the average user. A lot less torrents available.
real answer? im way too stupid to figure out how the hell to use it. i spent 3 straight days trying to get it working a couple years ago with no luck.
I was in the same circumstances when I started. But then I asked around which helped me properly configure it.
