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I2P Anonymous Network

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118 pointswhereistimbo46 comments

While I really like the concept, I2P is one of those P2P network strongly associated with the darkest corner of the Internet in my mind and something I would rather stay away from (because I would rather not get arrested randomly because I have used it).

Now I was just going through the I2P Wikipedia page and I couldn't find anything about that. Are my fears irrational?

Unless you live in a third-world country, I don't think you have to worry much, especially if you live a very uncontroversial life.

> Unless you live in a third-world country...

Funny how some people fantasize all the autocratic, dystopian shit must always be going down in the "third world". Too much Hollywood.

I think there is a basis for such worry, "Why Nation Fails" highlight the aspects of corruption and non-independent/transparent judiciary system and absue of police force as a big reasons why countries fail. And if you want to compare western police force corruption to others, I invite you to check what happened in egypt 10 yo.

Would you rather have a judicial "miscalculation" happen to you in the US or Iran?

The US will happily execute someone who could very well be innocent.

Robert Robertson is currently alive on a technicality[0].

[0] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/texas-set-execute-rober...

False equivalency

How? Spouting off the name of a logical fallacy is not a good faith response

Because spouting off the name of one person wrongfully convicted is meaningless. I didn't deny there are miscarriages of justice in any country. Iran's civil rights record is among the bottom in the world, bested only by NK and other hell holes.

What name would you prefer for the category that includes Myanmar, Turkmenistan, and Eritrea?

and Russia, Turkey, China, Hungary, UAE, and recently the United States of America.

Most 3rd world countries aren't advanced enough to catch you anyways. I'd be more worried in parts of the EU or UK

In 3rd world countries they don't care about piracy, drug dealing, or inappropriate content, but they do care about what you're saying about government. In first world countries it's the exact opposite, you can openly criticize government, hell you can make fun of politicians, but better watch out when looking for pirated content.

> strongly associated with the darkest corner of the Internet in my mind

Just like Tor?

https://support.torproject.org/#abuse_what-about-criminals

Tor is substantially more mainstream, in terms of awareness and perception.

I live in the USA and my ISP has never bothered me for running Tor or I2P. I even ran a Tor relay (non-exit node) for a little bit.

i tried running a tor relay and all hell broke loose with websites simply refusing to provide service and the such. not good!

Exit-node right?

no, a relay

What country is that? ISP?

Spectrum, United States

Exit node or relay?

relay

They do that because Tor users are a minority. The only way to combat this sort of discrimination is to convince a large number of people to use Tor. They can't afford to single us out if everyone is doing it.

I don't think authorities worry about I2P at this point, it is too small and requires some technical expertise to use. It is however much more anonymous and privacy-preserving than Tor, so yes, some corners are dark enough (you will rarely encounter them unless you want to go there, and from technical point of view, I2P is really interesting).

I have used it more than 10 years ago, and can confirm there's some horrible stuff on there. I didn't even have to search for it.

Needless to say I've turned it off swiftly. I don't know how it is today but I can recommend to stay away from it.

I believe there's a simple boot flag for tails OS that let's you use this instead of Tor.

It was removed from Tails in 2017: https://tails.net/doc/anonymous_internet/tor/why/index.en.ht...

how does this work? is it like a p2p tor where every participant is also an entry/relay/exit node?

Yes, except nobody is an exit node by default.

considering the stories you hear from tor exit node maintainers it takes quite some courage to participate in such a technology.

The completely anonymous, built-in torrents in I2P are hugely undervalued. I expected that every big torrent tracker would set up a mirror in I2P in order to allow their users to stay anonymous. I don't understand why they don't do it.

There's already the DHT that really removes the need of trackers in the first place.

It doesn't hide the IPs and doesn't help discovery.

Yeah it really isn't anonymous at all.

I don't think public torrent trackers would have much incentive to do so, as their legal justification is that they aren't hosting or linking to files themselves. If they were to run services like I2P they would probably have a harder time making that claim.

Private trackers probably wouldn't want to do that because it probably would mess with the largely IP-based seed ratio requirements which most private trackers have.

> If they were to run services like I2P they would probably have a harder time making that claim.

What are you talking about? Torrent servers in I2P don't store files either.

> largely IP-based seed ratio requirements

I thought it was largely account-based, not IP-based.

> What are you talking about? They don't store files either.

Running I2P would require more storage than the status quo of not running it. They usually store torrents and or magnet links, not the files themselves. I don’t know how much overhead running I2P would be over and above running a tracker also?

> I thought it was largely account-based, not IP-based.

Yes, those are not mutually exclusive. You have an account and the tracker binds the IP that downloads the torrent to a cookie or to a unique tracker announce url.

> Running I2P would require more storage than the status quo of not running it

I don't think it's significant. You might confuse I2P with Hyphanet (formerly Freenet), which is dedicated to anonymous storage.

> I don’t know how much overhead running I2P would be over and above running a tracker also?

The overhead will depend on whether you want to keep your tracker's IP hidden. If not, it should be minimal AFAIK.

You can seed from multiple IPs, e.g. a seedbox and your home connection. All the private trackers I know of simply use a token passed via URL query parameter to the tracker.

Torrents.csv would let anyone set up a public tracker these days, FYI.

That’s a really cool idea! I haven’t heard of it before.

> Torrents.csv is a collaborative git repository of torrents, consisting of a single, searchable torrents.csv file. Its initially populated with a January 2017 backup of the pirate bay, and new torrents are periodically added from various torrents sites. It comes with a self-hostable webserver, a command line search, and a folder scanner to add torrents.

Do you know of any other interesting projects that involve p2p/torrents/debrid/i2p/tor or adjacent things like dht/freenet/willow/veilid?

Here’s some interesting debrid stuff I found that may be of interest to you or others.

https://github.com/debridmediamanager/awesome-debrid

Its because I2P torrents are horrendously slow, like 10kbps.

More users, more nodes, more bandwidth.

Free beer tomorrow

Not in my experience. Make sure you crank up your bandwidth settings.

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