Controversial take: TOR shouldn’t be used to download large amounts of pirates stuff. The network is already slow and congested and should be kept available for people that need it to fight censorship or other forms of oppression.
Why not get a VPN? Even a free one like Proton allows DDL and gives you protection. And it’s also faster.
TOR needs to have a lot of ‘background noise’ legit use, otherwise the folks needing to hide in the weeds stick out like a sore thumb.
What kind of legit stuff can be done on tor?
I think they mean using it for other purposes like general use. Basically whatever else you would do on a browser, including pirating. Like just open it and use it for all the random stuff you do in your day to day, and if a lot of people do this, it can add additional coverage for people that need to use it for evading dictators and whatnot
i use it for Facebook because i don’t want the Facebook embeds in many websites to even pick up that i have the same ip as the dedicated Facebook browser
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Controversial take: TOR shouldn’t be used to download large amounts of pirates stuff.
Maybe only controversial amongst entitled filesharers (read: those who are simply too lazy or cheap to use something else). The Tor project has been recommending against this since even before 2010: https://blog.torproject.org/bittorrent-over-tor-isnt-good-idea/
I don’t since I live in a third world country. Can seed at 1Gbps with no warnings whatsoever, 20€ monthly
I that case, why not help spread a little freedom in the rest of the world by hosting an I2P node?
We should make torrenting over I2P the default.
Any dissidents in places like China who are caught using it could then plausibly claim they were just downloading a movie.
I seed around 5Tb monthly but that sounds interesting
I2P
isnt hosting a node a very easy way to get the police knocking on your door? i dont want csam flowing through my network
All traffic over I2P is encrypted unless you use an outproxy (which isn’t as common as a Tor exit node is), so no. Most, if not all I2P torrenting traffic never touches an outproxy, just like Tor hidden services (.onion sites and whatnot) never touch an exit node.
Hosting a Tor relay is fine even, as you are still just passing encrypted data around. It’s running an exit node that can get you into some sketchy waters with your ISP/law enforcement.
Who is running the exit nodes then? 3 letters agencies?
Yeah in some cases, and in other cases it’s still just volunteers with really good lawyers.
And even then, there’s still no definitive link from the exit node back to the guard (entry) node/relay. And, if you’re actually trying to be anonymous from 3 letter agencies, you wouldn’t be messing with the clearnet (and therefore exit nodes) through Tor to begin with. You’d probably be sticking to Tor hidden services.
If this was the first time the world heard of onion routing, then yes.
Now they can realize that you’re probably just one step in the chain. And with i2p there’s no way to know if they even reached the end of the chain (provided you host i2p for long enough).
Any dissidents in places like China who are caught using it could then plausibly claim they were just downloading a movie.
You really think that would stick? Just a couple days ago there was a news article of a guy getting sued for using a VPN for remote work
I don’t since I live in a third world country. Can seed at 1Gbps with no warnings whatsoever, 20€ monthly
I read
I don’t since I don’t live in a third world country.
Give your country more credit if you have a 1Gbps connection and it doesn’t enforce draconian idiotic laws. Just out of curiosity, can you name the country?
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I would guess Hungary. It has fast internet, but it also has idiotic laws.
You use a VPN, right?
They don’t need one. No enforceable copyright law.
Not really necessary everywhere. Still not a bad idea though I’m sure.
So, that’s a “no, I don’t use an anonymous network”?
The thing about second/third world countries is that if they don’t even care about what you download, they still care about what kind of resources you visit. So, you still have to use various tools for censorship circumvention, and conventional vpn services generally don’t work. Thus people often use tor, i2p, etc, but not for downloading (although tor, for instance, often doesn’t work without bridges in such countries). And to be honest, downloading via tor is a very bad idea, that’s not how it should be used.
I don’t like DDL over Tor as it is not really designed for heavy bandwidth. I2P could be the future once more users start using it, right now BiglyBT can crossover on the clearnet and I2P.
IIRC TOR is OK with a stream from one source (DDLs fit the bill), but isn’t made for handling many streams at once. I2P is good for that --> torrenting over I2P doesn’t stress the network as much.
I2P needs more nodes though. It’s much slower than TOR
Thank you for the correction, it is true that a DDL is a single connection usually, where as torrenting is many connections and that is what’s bad for Tor.
I toyed with i2p several years ago. Back then it was very frustrating - both slow as a snail and hard to find working, non-darknet resources.
I recently saw a c++ implementation, so I will toy with it again.
For now, a VPN is enough for me to be safe, and I can get speeds up to 15 MB on popular torrents.
I couldn’t get past “Firewalled” stage when I tried i2p. Too slow for me back then.
Is TOR good for direct downloads? Isn’t it pretty slow?
TOR now has quite some big nodes. If you’re lucky and your path goes through them, you can hit speeds of around 1MB/s - I know I have.
Plus, with a small linux box that downloads the stuff for you overnight, it’s not really an issue. You can use JDownloader with TOR as a proxy. Add links to it to download, go to bed and wake up with everything downloaded 🫰
I could not live with just 1MB/s down…
1MB/s is not enough? Most films are <1GB. That’s <1000s / ~17minutes to download a film. Well enough to watch a few TED talks, read some ArsTechnica articles, or read a single Salon article. Hell, it’s good enough to talk a short walk outside, fill up the dishwasher, tidy up the room a little, or lift a few weights.
Different priorities, I guess.
Most films are <1GB.
Do you watch pixel slideshows?
Looking at my library… I have 6662 movies.
77 movies are above 50GB…
236 are above 25GB
631 are above 10GB
1072 are above 5GB
3021 are above 2GB
5896 are above 1.5GB
6675 above 1GB (more files than I have unique movies in plex due to doubles/editions/nonimported)
11 files less than 1GB…Are you only downloading 720p? How the hell are you ending up finding movies that are less than 1GB and are still quality enough to actually watch?
720p < 1GB, 1080 < 2GB. The biggest film I have is 4k HDR at 8GB.
Still, between ~17 minutes and 35 minutes of download time are completely alright for me. I have loads of time and only watch stuff about 1-2 times a week.
I’m sorry, but I’m with the person above you… 4K movies should be 20GB+ if you’re getting true HDR, appropriate bitrates, and high quality audio. My copy of the Hobbit movies are as high as 75 GB each (extended version but still).
How the hell are you ending up finding movies that are less than 1GB and are still quality enough to actually watch?
Search for something, sort by number of seeders, download the top file around the size you want.
Also remembering uploaded names helps (yify comes to mind)
I understand that, my point was that at 1080p and less than 1GB of storage… that bitrate must be trash and virtually unwatchable.
Edit: To my point… A lot of my anime episodes are like 300-900MB… but those are ~25 minutes… To find a 90+ minute movie at 1GB… that’s an estimated 2/3 of the quality of an anime image which is usually easier to compress. I just can’t see a normal movie being 1GB and not looking like480p that was poorly upscaled to 1080p… like a camrip.
No, that’s really slow.
I agree if it’s the max speed of you internet line, sure. But I grew up with 56k and didn’t have >1Mb/s (notice Mb, not MB) until I left for university, so waiting for content is totally normal. Especially if that content can wait and if that speed is due to security. If I were at work and had to wait 20 minutes to download a docker image, that would indeed be unacceptable.
Sure but you didn’t have to download 100MB javascript files and 500 FHD images on each website.
😂 true
Well, we like quality on our server, everything 4k (if it exists) we recently decided to not take remux since they are often >100GB. But 20GB to 40GB is the norm for our movie files. You gotta use that 10Gb/s up line at our server for something, lol. (I know downscaling 4k down if on bad mobile network is very heavy computing, but in those cases we use the save offline feature of plex)
no, 97% via streaming http and the rest is via streaming torrent directly
Just use Usenet
Isn’t that pay to use? And is it anonymous?
Just as anonymous as a vpn (usenet instead of a vpn). Plus it’s the host taking the risk, not the customers; cops/copyright holders are interested in the distribution not the consumption. With torrents, you are the host and a consumer; usenet your just a consumer.
I pay 8$/mo for the usenet provider and indexer together and get a constant 45-50mbps download speed out of it (mostly limited by disk speed really). I’ve also found far more content available via usenet and one indexer vs the 18+ torrent indexers I used to use.
What service do you use?
Frugal Usenet for a service provider and NZBGeek for an indexer.
Me and a few friends pitch in together and pay for a seedbox. Much more convenient since I don’t need to keep my computer running to download/seed. And you connect to it via encrypted FTP.
Been doing some DC++ over Yggdrasil with good success
Yggdrasil
Doesn’t seem to be anonymous (emphasis mine)
Is Yggdrasil anonymous?
No, it is not a goal of the Yggdrasil project to provide anonymity. Direct peers over the Internet will be able to see your IP address and may be able to use this information to determine your location or identity. Multicast-discovered peerings on the same network will typically expose your device MAC address. Other nodes on the network may be able to discern some information about which nodes you are peered with.
I hope you aren’t relying on it for anonymity.
I should note that I’m not relying on Yggdrasil for anonymity inside the network, rather more for anonymity towards observations from outside the network. And also mostly anonymity towards what I’m communicating when observed from outside the network.
Understood. So, like torrents, anybody within the “swarm” would know what you’re accessing?
If you’re taking part in transmitting a torrent over Yggdrasil, then people you’ve peered with in the swarm will definitely see your Yggdrasil IP - which is based off of the encryption key you generate (and you can change whenever you wish) for the connection to the mesh.
Regarding obfuscation of what you’re accessing inside something like the bittorrent DHT, that could likely be done with multiple Yggdrasil connections and torrent clients - so each address only associates with one torrent, it’s just not a core feature of the network itself.The Yggdrasil network really isn’t meant to provide perfect internal anonymity between two directly communicating peers, it’s instead built to be an easy-to-use, end-to-end encrypted, mesh network - with great performance.
It’s there to protect the content and target of your communications from anyone beside you and said target, without adversely affecting the delivery of said content. Not to protect you from your communication target, though it can do a passable job at that too.My main use of Yggdrasil has actually been as an easily setup alternative route into NATed systems, seeing as I can easily hit 600Mbit and get below 15ms of latency over it, which I quite often use to run VNC or SSH (and SCP/rsync) over. And since the mesh can be established as long as you can reach a node, it becomes ridiculously easy to get a functional link over it.
Transmitting DC++ traffic without my ISP being able to detect any of that is just a bonus.
Define “anonymous”. I use Soulseek, but you need an account for that.
Anonymous as the source doesn’t know your real IP and intermediate nodes don’t know what you’re saying (encryption).
With I2P and TOR, only the entry nodes know your real IP, but they don’t know what you’re saying (thus don’t know what you’re accessing), and the target node or exit node doesn’t know who requested the data.
No. I’m in US and just use one tracker, torrent leech. It’s never caused my ISP to flag me and I’ve used it over 10 years now. If you have a good source for torrents you don’t need a VPN
I often use Tribler for torrents. It’s a TOR-like system specialized into torrent, and does work well with any torrents. (I’ll put a warning that the system might not be totally safe against targetted attack, but it should be against standard complaint to ISP)
For torrents, a VPN might be the best bet as others have pointed out. But for direct download, just DoH should be enough.
Yeah I seed some printable firearms files torrents over I2P, and seed other stuff I find on tracker2.postman.i2p
Enable full bidirectional encryption in your torrent client and only use reputable private tracker communities, and you won’t have these kind of issues
How does one find private tracker communities?
No idea sorry, I got into mine a decade ago. Know someone is best. Private trackers are hard to get into for this exact reason so yeah
Exactly. So it’s great that you are telling us that we should only be using private trackers that you got into a decade ago, and nobody else can get access to. Gatekeeping torrents…smh
is that why people are mad? wild, kinda funny
anyone can start a private torrent community for what it’s worth, you don’t have to get in, you just need it to be private. why doesn’t this community start one? it’s good digital hygiene
Some private trackers that I use say that the torrent client should not fully enable encryption due to the tracker not being able to track up/download stats iirc.
