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Evolution of bittorrent

Posted: Sun Jan 04, 2015 11:17 pm
by Mr. Oragahn
https://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-ano ... wn-141218/
While the BitTorrent ecosystem is filled with uncertainty and doubt, researchers at Delft University of Technology have released the first version of their anonymous and decentralized BitTorrent network. "Tribler makes BitTorrent anonymous and impossible to shut down," lead researcher Prof. Pouwelse says.
While the bittorrent protocol gets adopted by large official brands, there's still much work left to do to circumvent any attempt by ever more dictatorial-wannabe governments to keep them out of everyone's businesses.
At least, today we can know for sure that amongst the many available solutions, evolution of the exchange of data across the whole web is headed the right direction. Internet should really be about everyone acting as a more or less anonymous relay.

Tribler isn't the only system to aim for such goals, but the project is well fed and structured. The end product is also well done in terms of use (interface remains quite messy though at times), but relies on a large quantity to reach maximum potential.
My concern is that it calls to be outside of the Tor network (and Tails) since it makes its own, but why would taxpayer money fund such a project? This seems odd to me.

In the end, it doesn't give your a false IP, it simply adds yours to a whole bag of IPs which are used to host and exchange files which tend to be illegaly copied. Also, there's got to be a receiving end which, somehow, might get "spotted" or intercepted by guessing who's before or after a given hop (1). The problem of tribler is that it's clearly dedicated to file sharing that screams illegal copying. If a company puts up tons of nods and somehow finds a way to collect data from being inside the Tribler network and knows that a delivery or request is yet to go through more than one hop, couldn't it legitimately consider the collected IPs to be the ones making those requests or getting the files?
I'll be looking more into how the IPs themselves cannot be scooped in one fell swoop.

Re: Evolution of bittorrent

Posted: Tue Jan 06, 2015 2:37 am
by Mr. Oragahn
Tribler team's implementation of the darknet func is some BS. Between the languages used and the methods called, it's a true mess.
It's perhaps worse than Tor, which at least benefits from a ton of nodes, even though Snowden himself told that it was far from safe (if something is forbidden by Tor, although you can unlock it with one click, just avoid using that thing - like Flash for example).
With Tribler, the sniffers you want to keep out of the loop could actually have a severe head start by being a large group of providers of nodes.
If they own a significant percentage of nodes, their capacity to trace both ends of a chain increase a lot and they can snoop the entire string of IPs there.
Looks like despite all the shit they're taking, VPNs aren't going out of fashion anytime soon.