I was part of a team who have attempted to solve this problem before: http://anomos.info
It is a very, very hard challenge, and I wish them luck.
Researchers To Release an Anonymous BitTorrent Client
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Re: Researchers To Release an Anonymous BitTorrent Client
#12You can use torrents anonymously in I2P today. And I think this is the much better solution. I2P lets you do much more than just torrenting. And every user benefits from eachother's actions/traffic since the more traffic there is, the more peers there are, the more anonymous it gets. You can also use E2DK or Gnutella in I2P. Or plain HTTP. Or mails. Or IRC. Much nicer than being limited to just Bittorrent. As for spe…
It's my understanding that you can only torrent within the I2P network and can't reach out to the "outside" internet, is that true?
Re: Researchers To Release an Anonymous BitTorrent Client
#13This was already posted 16 hours earlier: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4056325 It's beginning to annoy me how HN rejects double postings in general, but includes the fragment identifier again allowing unlimited reposting.
Any URL can be reposted by adding a unique fragment ID. On the brigth side it means people can repost links that never got proper attention.
Re: Researchers To Release an Anonymous BitTorrent Client
#14You can use torrents anonymously in I2P today. And I think this is the much better solution. I2P lets you do much more than just torrenting. And every user benefits from eachother's actions/traffic since the more traffic there is, the more peers there are, the more anonymous it gets. You can also use E2DK or Gnutella in I2P. Or plain HTTP. Or mails. Or IRC. Much nicer than being limited to just Bittorrent. As for spe…
It's my understanding that you can only torrent within the I2P network and can't reach out to the "outside" internet, is that true?
Yes.
There are some "outproxies" but only 2-3 and they are slow. I2P is not meant to intermingle with the normal internet.
Re: Researchers To Release an Anonymous BitTorrent Client
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
> People stay on BitTorrent the same reason they stay on Facebook: everybody's there. This is true in general, but there are some major players who could just as easily move people to adopt. i.e. if one day TPB decides that magnet links doesn't solve as many problems as this, people would certainly follow. If anything, at the beginning people probably wouldn't mind having a different protocol or client just to run TP…
I think you underestimate the cost there is to switch. Suddenly you have to 1) install new software (unless an uTorrent update supports the new protocol), 2) lose all the content TPB had so far. I could be wrong, but that seems like a big showstopper.
I don't mean to say that it's an easy task to turn over all the content, but places like TPB have muscles to flex and as far as I can see, if they did it then others would follow. It wouldn't surprise me at all if uTorrent or other clients scrambled to push an update for it in that event...