Hacker News Reader

Comment by yieldcrv | Hacker News Reader

I’ve heard passing mention of people switching to i2p because they feel the design choices of the Tor project are questionable - suggesting compromise. But these were vague assertions, is there more reading or ability to substantiate this?

View on HN

I2P has been designed with "hidden services" in mind. AlphaBay, which until a few months ago was the most modern and progressive dark web market had fully moved to I2P. Stating that they saw no future in Tor, as the Tor Project refused to address major design issues even though they have heaps of money.

So far using i2p has been very nice to use and the tools are well developed. I run a node myself. The way i2p works is very interesting. Some services like Dread which provide i2p access have only been accessible via i2p in recent times due to the load on tor.

We'll have to see how i2p holds up when it inevitably takes over Tor and becomes a target of ddos itself.

https://geti2p.net/en/comparison/tor

Yeah I think I saw AlphaBay’s complaint and was hoping there was an elaboration

Like is it like that Swiss encryption company that kept bricking the encryption for the CIA and employees kept noticing intentional encryption flaws and being told to work on something else?

or something else

What was alphabay's specific complaint?

I was curious so I went and found this : https://geti2p.net/en/comparison/tor

```

Benefits of I2P over Tor

...

Java, not C (ewww)

```

Excuse me?

I feel like “written in a memory-safe language” is a fair selling point, especially when we are talking about a tool designed to accept completely untrusted data from the network and keep you safe from attackers with significant resources.

All of the "boring crypto" has been written in C.

https://cr.yp.to/talks/2015.10.05/slides-djb-20151005-a4.pdf

Unfortunately, Java encryption libraries are far from boring.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/bouncy-castle...

https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-7637...

People have done a lot of things, the track record so far has shown that to be a terrible idea.

If you really dislike Java that much, there are other I2P implementations like this:

https://github.com/PurpleI2P/i2pd

On the same site:

> Benefits of Tor over I2P

> ...

> - C, not Java (ewww)

It's a joke.

It's joke that every one will hate one or the other. They make the same joke the other direction.

Wow, yeah I would definitely not make a decision to do something critical like that based on that kind of "evidence" lol

Reply on news.ycombinator.com