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
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.
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
What kind of speeds are you seeing per torrent and global with a few torrents running? I didn’t try torrenting on I2p yet but even with my node on 24/7 even browsing was hella slow ( i was port forwarded too)
Yeah that is really slow and they didn’t say if it was global or a single torrent. 500kbs is slow for one torrent but if 500kbs is all the torrents combined then that is extremely slow
A single one.
Anonymity makes it slower for sure.
Can’t tell you the global max, because I don’t know.
If you trust your vpn to not log stuff or to sell you out, then that will always be faster.
Speed is not a problem for me, but everyone’s different.
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.
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.
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.
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
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)
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
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 for libtorrent to iron out bugs and stablize and it takes more for clients to upgrade their embedded libtorrent to v2.x.
libtorrent 2 also has some issues. On unRAID for instance it causes crashes so I am forced to use v1 builds. And on other systems it has high memory usage so it’s not exactly ready for prime time.
I hate to put it this way because libtorrent is a wonderful piece of open-source software maintained by volunteers but as is typical with its history, releases are going to be bumpy.
Yeah my comment wasn’t a knock at the software or devs. I just think libtorrent v2 is not quite ready for widespread use yet. Since OP is talking people migrating to I2P then it needs to be more stable before that can happen. A few years from now I’m sure it will be a great option.
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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.
Doesn’t it make the use of private trackers obsolete when no one can get sued anymore because they’re all using an anonymous overlay network?
Its makes VPN obsolete, not sure about Private Trackers, they have a lot of things that public don’t due to retention.
BiglyBT can download/seed to both clearnet and I2P users
It says it can but I never had any luck getting it to work
yeah I dont always get i2p seeds when I’m downloading or uploading clearnet torrents but it does happen every so often
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
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.
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
So its using up all of my bandwidth?
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
Probably mostly cause:
What kind of speeds are you seeing per torrent and global with a few torrents running? I didn’t try torrenting on I2p yet but even with my node on 24/7 even browsing was hella slow ( i was port forwarded too)
Typically around 500kBps I’d say. I’ve seen speeds in the MBps too, but that’s rare.
That’s quite slow then. I can torrent an entire movie within two minutes or so.
Edit: Getting 12+ MiB/s with a popular movie from 2006.
Yeah that is really slow and they didn’t say if it was global or a single torrent. 500kbs is slow for one torrent but if 500kbs is all the torrents combined then that is extremely slow
A single one. Anonymity makes it slower for sure. Can’t tell you the global max, because I don’t know. If you trust your vpn to not log stuff or to sell you out, then that will always be faster.
Speed is not a problem for me, but everyone’s different.
How’s availability? What are you able to find, and do you find it the same way as usual, or is that separate as well?
Yeah that’s fair, I wonder how much faster it’ll get if I2P gets a ton more nodes and more people seeding torrents
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.
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.
There’s a Windows bundle that you download that sets everything up for you. No configuration required.
Install, start, wait 3 min to get integrated into the network, locate your favourite Linux distro on a tracker and click the magnet link. Easy.
On Linux it’s a bit more complicated, but that’s true for almost everything. Not a lot more, but a little.
There’s a Firefox extension that says up the proxy settings for you, you’ll just need to install I2P and start it
Which bundle is this? 😌 I shall try it.
Got to install Firefox first, then start the easyinstall.
https://geti2p.net/en/download/easyinstall
People don’t understand sometimes how much of a tech-ethusiast bubble we got going on here
Chicken or egg problem isn’t it. Most of these issues wouldn’t exist if more people used it I feel.
Likely because Usenet still works and so does xdcc via irc.
Does Usenet work over college wi-fi? I’m not sure how that would work.
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.
my first impulse is to say does bit torrent? Secondly usenet is an ancient protocol so maybe? Honestly have no idea
I see.
Can usenet be used without paying?
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
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)
Just remember that this is no longer Reddit and you’re likely welcomed to post links to things for other Lemmy users to find.
Torrenting often maxes out my download speed as well.
There’s almost no way to really hide you as a user in that protocol.
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
fiveeyes 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
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.
Can we make it *arr compatible?
I don’t see why not, they just scan torrent sites for content right?
I’d love that.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
The java version is plenty fast but uses alot more memory then i2pd and needs a display/vnc to configure compared to i2pd
You can configure it on a headless machine and just forward the webui over an SSH tunnel for configiration / monitoring
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.
3 billion devices run Java.
Hmm. What more can you tell me about these 3 billion devices? Are they in the room with us?
2 main issues with it:
Too slow for the average user. A lot less torrents available.
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.
This as fuck. Plus it’s not mainstream so people don’t feel pressure to try it
This is exactly what I’m looking forward too!
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.
Isn’t this just Freenet?
Yes. That was what I’m alluding to when I wrote:
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.
wtf, I missed that news.
https://www.hyphanet.org/
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.
@[email protected] 1 day
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.This is the best answer. The software just has to mature a little bit more. But it’s a matter of time.
Once we reach the phase where most mainstream bittorrent clients support I2P by default, it will become the new standard.
Most people don’t use bleeding edge features.
libtorrent 2 also has some issues. On unRAID for instance it causes crashes so I am forced to use v1 builds. And on other systems it has high memory usage so it’s not exactly ready for prime time.
I hate to put it this way because
libtorrentis a wonderful piece of open-source software maintained by volunteers but as is typical with its history, releases are going to be bumpy.Yeah my comment wasn’t a knock at the software or devs. I just think libtorrent v2 is not quite ready for widespread use yet. Since OP is talking people migrating to I2P then it needs to be more stable before that can happen. A few years from now I’m sure it will be a great option.
Damn bro. Opsec 💯