Sadly, outside of torrenting I2P doesn't seem to have much traction, losing out to the better funded tor project
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..."
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.
Neat point. I wonder if the percentage of bandwidth shared could be relative to the speed or openness of network available?
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.
> 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.
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.
Both stopped using them because it worked so badly.
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.
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.
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’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 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.
I2P was invented to give people with relatively good, usually excellent, connectivity a way 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.
Even if charges get dropped, or you win in court, that's quite a burden.
I am pretty sure not blaming the messenger for the message is a legal notion that predates Hammurabi's code.
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.
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.
AFAIK, cops can't deal you actual drugs and then arrest you for it.
> 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
Sometimes its legal, depends where you are and how it was done.
"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.
Why not? This sounds like a misunderstanding of entrapment
What a bold statement. r/onions has 400k members. Where else would you sell someone's credit card or fentanyl? Ebay?
I understand that is unheard of from someone living in the "instant access era" but their protocol has a cost.