Live data from Hacker News

I2P: End-to-end encrypted and anonymous internet

github.com

21–30 of 124 posts

Re: I2P: End-to-end encrypted and anonymous internet

#21
For those who wondering: best practical use of I2P is to tunnel SSH access to obscure devices behind NAT where you can't or dont want to use something like Tailscale. Or imagine you have that torrent box you using for seeding obscure book or music collection. You can pay for the server with crypto, but I2P is good to make sure you can access and configure it privately.

Re: I2P: End-to-end encrypted and anonymous internet

#23
post #3

I really like I2P as a project, and I think it gets a lot of things right. For example having every network participant relay some internal traffic, instead of relying on altruism from relay operators, makes it much harder for a single entity to control enough hops to deanonymize users. Sadly, outside of torrenting I2P doesn't seem to have much traction, losing out to the better funded tor project

Does I2P torrenting operate at remotely comparable speeds to without? 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.

But isn't it enough to use it just for metadata and not the pyload itself? (provided that's possible)

Re: I2P: End-to-end encrypted and anonymous internet

#24
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does I2P torrenting operate at remotely comparable speeds to without? 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.

But isn't it enough to use it just for metadata and not the pyload itself? (provided that's possible)

If you want to avoid copyright notices, then you need to do it for the payload too.

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.

Re: I2P: End-to-end encrypted and anonymous internet

#27
post #4
post #3

I really like I2P as a project, and I think it gets a lot of things right. For example having every network participant relay some internal traffic, instead of relying on altruism from relay operators, makes it much harder for a single entity to control enough hops to deanonymize users. Sadly, outside of torrenting I2P doesn't seem to have much traction, losing out to the better funded tor project

Torrenting is I2P's foot in the door for much wider adoption, which would help drive other types of usage. I really hope it takes off, especially since qBitTorrent 4.6 just integrated support; the current stagnation of filesharing, especially w.r.t. needing a VPN for everything, needs some shaking up.

We will still need VPNs to get good connectivity to other residential ISPs until some government entity (or market condition) inspires ISPs to invest in more hardware and peering with each other. CDNs and VPN providers are now sadly a requirement for the internet to work the way we expect it to.

Re: I2P: End-to-end encrypted and anonymous internet

#29
post #3

I really like I2P as a project, and I think it gets a lot of things right. For example having every network participant relay some internal traffic, instead of relying on altruism from relay operators, makes it much harder for a single entity to control enough hops to deanonymize users. Sadly, outside of torrenting I2P doesn't seem to have much traction, losing out to the better funded tor project

I remember I2p torrents being horrendously slow, like 20kbps at max(do you even remember the last time someone used kbps as units?) for popular stuff. Has that changed in the last few years?

I get on the regular up to 200-500kbps depending on number of peers, and their router configuration (I have my bandwidth configured above the defaults, which are very low).

I understand that is unheard of from someone living in the "instant access era" but their protocol has a cost.

Post reply on HN