Anomos - anonymous bit torrent - using Onion Routing...

[John M. Schanck]

On Tue, Nov 09, 2010 at 04:55:06PM +0000, Cav wrote:
> Hi Or-Dev,
> 
> I have stumbled across this torrent client. My first thoughts, upon
> seeing Onion Routing in the description, was wondering if this is
> using the Tor network.
> I have included a link and some details about this torrent client below.
> 
> In which case, does this then mean its likely to clobber the Tor
> network with p2p traffic ? - this bodes ill for Tor servers ?
> Does anyone have any thoughts ?
> [snip]

Hi Cav,

I'm an Anomos developer so hopefully I can answer your questions :).
Anomos does not rely on the Tor network in any way. The blog does
suggest that clients could use Tor to make their announce requests, but
that functionality isn't built into Anomos directly. Even if users chose
to announce over Tor, it would amount, at most, to a few small HTTPS
requests per client per hour. The file transfers themselves are done
entirely peer-to-peer, with clients connected to the same tracker
serving as relays for each other. So, Anomos certainly wouldn't clobber
the Tor network, and ideally it would alleviate some of the load on Tor
by drawing BitTorrent users off of it.

-John