[tor-talk] Tor and P2P

[grarpamp]

>>> Given that these services are surely coming in force... and from
>>> directions that see these networks more as a raw transport than
>>> say, primarily for the purposes outlined on their respective web
>>> pages... it seems the usual echo of "we're a nice project, don't
>>> do that, too much load" may not be useful. This should not imply
>>> fault, but merely suggest that it's dated and hopeless.

>> I tend to agree but I am not sure. At the moment I don't believe the Tor
>> project will die soon. It's fine with me if we can continue use it for
>> anonymous browsing, circumvention and so on for the next years.

I didn't mean to beat on Tor or suggest Tor was dying, only BSD is :)
Just that that response, like any "don't do that" response, is going
to be ignored by some. So if there's some room for obvious design
improvements, best see about preparing for that case rather soon.
Dated/hopless probably wasn't the best word choice.

>> It's also questionable if the Tor project should try to get a big share
>> of the people interested in anonymous p2p.

Tor doesn't really advertise itself as catering to P2P, even though
it can transport it in part. It's currently all about browsing,
email and performing various tasks.

>> I tend to think no, because
>> this opens up the project for a lot negative press. That increases the
>> risk for a new law to forbid the whole network in even more countries.
>> Let other networks try that out.

As far as dual use goes, so far the light side of the force has won
out. The US gave up the crypto battle with Bernstein. So long as
these networks remain strong, against seeing the data at a minimum,
it would seem very hard for US-like countries to put them back in
the bottle.

> Yeah. Due to my distributed systems background, I read "P2P" in this
> thread as "peer to peer", not "filesharing". I assume that was the case
> for most of the other Tor people commenting in this thread.

P2P could be anything, the original context was messaging, I think :)

> I would love it for Tor to support ways for people to communicate
> without revealing either their social network or message content to the
> network or infrastructure. I literally cannot stand the fact that there
> are no ways to communicate right now without handing your social graph
> to someone who wants to datamine it or sell it, or both.

It's a disgusting situation indeed.

> Because of this, I would be annoyed if people wrote bittorrent clients
> that used hidden services the way I2P does. I would prefer it if people
> focused such efforts on networks other than Tor, because I like Tor to
> remain useful for things other than simply filesharing.

Tor has a unique exit feature. Other than being worth leaving Tor
be to preserve that in its own right, other networks have attractive
features for sharing.

> I recognize we don't have a whole lot of options to prevent such abuse,

There is the parallel universe option... those who like the mechanics
of Tor using the same code but booting into different nodes for the
purpose of running higher bandwidth, large mesh applications. Later on
there could be some design optimizations traded back and forth.

> but I am not opposed to stopgaps such as throttling loud clients and QoS
> mechanisms to impact the popularity of resource-intensive filesharing
> apps...

How would this segregate similar looking traffic such as bitcoin
startup and subsequent transactions, a popular hidden site (wiki,
forum, merchant, voice of america streams), etc.

> I suspect most of the other Tor folks in favor of "Tor and P2P" are in
> the same boat.

Tor's pretty cool. It's a hard problem. Maybe "don't do that" is right :)