Freenet (aka Hyphanet) is 25 years old... it's been "stable" for decades. Biggest problem is that content is sort-of hosted locally and considering how much child porn and other criminal content is in its darker corners tha can be risky.
I like IPFS but decentralized storage is just awfully expensive to maintain without any reward. Main IPFS mirrors don't tolerate AA content, it's taken down very quickly.
And also IPFS rats our to the whole world all your network interfaces, MAC addresses, and internal network configs.
And even after multiple requests of supporting a Tor mode, have routinely ignored that with "but its too hard!"
And, I quit running IPFS back in the .31 version after adding some chat logs to my local machine's share, and found a google crawler within 1 hour and fully indexed them.
IPFS support interface binding, hard disk quotas, working as a router or not, and bandwidth quotas among several settings. Yes, by default can be a bit intensive.
You are right; it's a bit of a excuse. Tons of small services under Unix (by default) listen
on several interfaces and networks. I think Bitlbee itself listened on 0.0.0.0 instead
of localhost. Ditto with some UPNP/DLNA daemons.
It takes very little to set up IPFS to just listen to tun0, disable routing (let ygg do its job) and throttle the bw a little so it doesn't hog the whole network.
I would be surprised if the Kubo/IPFS developers didn't already configure Ygg for themselves, as both are software written in Go.
The author of NNCP https://nncp.mirrors.quux.org/ (and the other author from Tofuproxy) are pretty much aware of Yggdrasil.
I am aware of POW but that hasn't stopped the DDoS. If you look at chart from few months back, there was significant hit due to crazy DDoS carried out by DrugHub which was evident in a Dread post.
Better have a .onion. It's almost impossible to seize and you control the keys. YOU ARE THE OWNER, not some for-profit registrar. Onions should be the default, it's secure (you own the keys), decentralized and far better than relying on CAs for encryption.
Tor and I2P are great technologies. ZLibrary, for example, runs an excellent Tor hidden service and it is usually the most reliable way to access news from the site. However, this did not remain true for a while when two of the operators were arrested. Tor and I2P require you to have infrastructure online. The point of "check Wikipedia for news" is that you can have something persist even if you do not have your servers online. Nostr is the best technology available in this category.
> It's almost impossible to seize and you control the keys. YOU ARE THE OWNER
This also remains true for Nostr.
But furthermore, as an operator of several Tor hidden services corresponding to public web services. I can assure you that many users, especially those on mobile devices, will stop using your service in large numbers if you direct them to a hidden service. iPhones don't allow background processes without special dispensation from Apple so the Tor/I2P circuit dies every time someone switches between apps. It's also an extreme development challenge, as they don't allow subprocesses either, and then of course your app will have to abide by the GPL at least for I2P (nonstarter for some). "Just ruin your experience for all iOS users and switch to the GPL for all your client code" is not a realistic suggestion. Not that Annas-Archive has a their own client app.
Operational excellence is of course dependent on the operator but I would still think it's far easier to bring up onion as it's disposable and works behind NAT'ed VMs which makes it further easy to run.
I don't know anything about Nostr since it does not focus on anonymity and isn't as old as Tor (more than 2 decades of research and application), I wouldn't rely on Nostr for anything serious.
If they can't figure it out anything else, I think Tor is the most plausible tech to be used.
What are the alternatives if these other services don't provide enough traffic to sustent the download speed of the files? Something old like USENET certainly can't be used anymore.
I hope they follow the same pathway of The Pirate Bay or Rutracker.
Laundering the code through OpenAI to see if the GPL sticks through training, would make for an interesting court case if you asked ChatGPT to write an I2P clients "from scratch" for a closed source iOS client.
>It's almost impossible to seize and you control the keys. YOU ARE THE OWNER, not some for-profit registrar.
You may own the keys but the non-profit The Tor Project owns the network. And when they decide to shut it down your "ownership" of the domain keys doesn't matter in the slightest. You might think this is a silly scenario but actually it happened in 2021/2022 when the tor project unilaterally decided to kill the entire Torv2 network and all domains were made inoperable. All links between sites, everything that made .onion a web, was lost.
The Tor Project does this whenever they feel that there's a security issue. It will happen again.
As someone that spent 10 years building completely legal community sites on the .onion network with the delusion of ownship it really hurt me. I'm never using .onion again. It is not a place to try to build communities. It is only for people that need 'security' as a highest priority and don't care if everything gets wiped out.
They don't own the network. The people who run the relays do. v2 wasn't shutdown in an instant. It was necessary and you could have just redirected your users to v3 and tell them to use it instead but you had to whine about your short-commings on Tor?
It's not only for high-security. It's for the state-of-the-art anonymity.
All the links between .onion sites broke when the relay and other infrastructure operators started running the broken (no Torv2 support) releases the Tor Project put out. All the writings of sites about each other. Everything that made it a web.
It doesn't matter that it was technical possible to try to manually reach out to random visitors of my sites and try to tell them that the entire domain name was changing. That didn't fix the web or links aspect at all.
They did not. And many apps (Ricochet Messenger comes to mind) were not visited by a web browser. So it isn't like you could announce an HTTP 302 and just seamlessly transition.
I’ll never use Tor because I have no idea what the Tor client is actually doing. Is it enabling someone to use my network connection for cybercrime without my knowledge? No thanks.
Clients are never used as relays in TOR. You never route anyone's traffic until you setup it yourself. And you can't miss that part, and it's not a default, and requires additional configuration.
Also relays (not exit nodes) are pretty safe to operate and running them is a decent thing, supporting free internet instead of a corporate ads machine, let's not frame it as a "crime support".
> Also relays (not exit nodes) are pretty safe to operate and running them is a decent thing, supporting free internet instead of a corporate ads machine, let's not frame it as a "crime support".
Well the purpose of using Tor is to prevent any network operators from knowing who you're talking to. Which AIUI is primarily a concern if either you're not allowed to talk to whoever ("great firewall" type things), or you risk getting in trouble for talking to whoever (Silk Road etc, or disfavored politics).
I guess if you're worried about hacks and doxxing rather than LE? Or if you only call things crime when they should be illegal rather than when they formally are?
Using Tor browser and running a Tor node are different things, by using the browser you are not contributing to the network, you're just accessing it. If you're worried about someone using your network connection for cybercrime you shouldn't run a Tor node (although there is significantly less risk with a relay node), but you shouldn't worry about using regular Tor.
> by using the browser you are not contributing to the networK
That's false to some extent. Tor's promise comes from it's vast population of users. The more users it has, the better it is to improve everyone's anonymity. So in a way, even by using it, you are helping Tor network. And please, save the "criminal" bs (meant for the original comment).
Why? The utility of any network grows with the number of participants, even that of inherently asymmetric networks that strictly distinguish "producers" and "consumers". (More eyeballs make the network more valuable to content providers.)
This might not be how courts determine culpability of redistributing any potentially illegal content, of course.
>This might not be how courts determine culpability of redistributing any potentially illegal content, of course.
Which is precisely the point of this discussion.
Might as well argue "By protecting the environment you're supporting the drug trade, because people that a climate catastrophe would wipe out will be able to be drug users".
This here response continues to stretch "pedantic correction" to new levels.
What's "literally outlined" I'd guess is that the utility of the Tor network increases with adoption which nobody ever doubted.
What is discard is the tenuous over-stretched argument in this thread regarding fears of legality, that went like this:
GP: Using Tor browser and running a Tor node are different things, by using the browser you are not contributing to the network, you're just accessing it.
P: That's false to some extent. Tor's promise comes from it's vast population of users. The more users it has, the better it is to improve everyone's anonymity. So in a way, even by using it, you are helping Tor network.
As others have mentioned, that's not what Tor does by default. Just because you don't know how it works doesn't mean that it's generally unknowable.
And conversely, it's enough to visit a random website running WebTorrent or just a plain HTTP DDoS attack to possibly "use your connection for cybercrime".
Since RFC 3514 unfortunately never gained traction, distinguishing good, bad, and illegal traffic remains difficult.
They can't do jackshit. They are totally clueless and run by a bunch of extremely incompetent boomers. Next, they will try to ban Tor but guess what that can't happen as Tor is censorship-resistant!
Blocking the exit nodes is quite tivial [1] but it would indeed be hard to stop people from accessing Tor and .onion sites. More websites should add some Tor .onion nodes even if they have to put those in read-only mode on user-provided multimedia sites to avoid complex CSAM filters.
I'm not sure that's actually accurate. Using Tor or even many VPNs you get hit with a lot of block lists or bot detectors. I also heard that Tor is blocked in China. I mean isn't the list of entries and exits public?
Of course these groups are also shooting themselves in the foot. Tor was invented by the Navy after all and they like spies to go through it because connecting to "totallynotNSA.com" is a great way to get yourself found. But Tor also only works for those purposes if non bad actors make up the majority of traffic
Tor bridges allow people to bypass blocking of Tor entry nodes and look more like normal traffic and less like Tor traffic, here is an example of how to set one up.
Oh interesting, thanks. Do you know how well that compares with Mullvad? I know Tor and them collaborate on the browser but I'm traveling right now and Mullvad's is definitely getting picked up by some routers
I'll explain a bit what's going on here. The typical crypto ethos usually isn't aligned with governments or paying taxes at all.
Additionally, banks are heavily government regulated entities, they are almost part of the executive branch. Aiding in the collection of taxes, neutering economic incentives for illegal activities, and implementing public economic policy are common and unquestioned responsibilities placed on banks through laws.
Banks launder money for extreme illicit activities. Look at TD Bank or HSBC, they were find record breaking for laundering cartel money. Your naivety is not surprising since you refuse to dig deeper and discover the actual truth. Banks and govt doesn't care about you. Their purpose is to deceive, steal and manipulate their true motive from general population. They own your whole life.
Yes, it goes both ways but people always focus on monero's crime use which by the way indirectly hardens the protocol. Most people don't like to say it but it's the truth. The world's highest ranking agencies and billion dollar companies like chanalysis cannot break it, which means it actually works and the reason those actors wanna crack monero is because of some "illicit" usage.
It's an indirect audit being conducted all the time. The best chainanalysis could come up with was running malicious nodes to deanonymize users.
It does go both ways, but the ratio of legitimate to ilegitimate use is important, with banks and law enforcement it's like one in a million. With crypto, crime represents more than half of usage by mcap.
You are missing the entire point. The money itself is fake and artificially generated at will by these authorities. Monero and any major coin has actual value because you can't just create out of thin air. Fiat is on it's edge. Look at monero's price, it's growing at record breaking point. Why? People realize it's true value and anonymity/privacy aspects.
> Your own private bank which cannot interact with most financial institutions and merchants?
That's the whole point. Why would an privacy coin wanna interact with a corrupted banking sector? It's clearly not for you since you can't even see the actual point. You can use the banks, like everyone and let them profile (and sell your data), track and own your whole life.
What is? Not being able to use it for most things? Then how is it a private bank? How is it different from storing money in a safe in your home? Which, by the way, is more useful as you can use it for more things.
> It's clearly not for you since you can't even see the actual point.
That’s a cop-out, and a circular reasoning fallacy. Instead of making a point of why something is useful, you’re dismissing any questions or disagreements as “you don’t get it”. If someone invents a toilet which instead of flushing sends your dejects all over the bathroom, that’s not something people “don’t see the point of”, it’s a bad product. If Monero has a point that we’re missing and you want to defend it, explain what it is.
> You can use the banks, like everyone and let them profile (and sell your data), track and own your whole life.
Ah, yes, fear-mongering and assumptions with just a dash of false dichotomy, the next step in the non-argument. The only options aren’t “don’t use banks at all and be completely private” or “sign up for a bank and let them spy on you in your underwear”. There’s a spectrum. You can buy significantly more things with a bank account than with Monero. In many countries, Monero is the same as nothing. At best you could use it to trade for a regular currency (if you’re lucky), meaning you’re back at square one but with extra steps.
> How do you jump from banks to taxes? Taxes are for the government.
Many reasons to do that jump. I'll give two.
In some countries banks do collect automatically certain taxes that then go to the government. For example in the EU, in Belgium for example, if a stock I owned paid dividends and the bank is the custodian, the bank shall gladly take 30% off the dividends (+ add insane fees on top) and give that money to the government. As a sidenote it's wild that when you receive dividends in some countries you often end up with less than 50% of the actual dividends but I digress.
Still in Belgium: there's now an additional 10% tax on added value (since 2025), in addition to all the other taxes btw, that's always to be paid (say you sell shares of GOOG that went up... Even if you held for years: 10% are due in addition to all the other taxes on added values): and politicians are now wondering if those 10% shouldn't be seized immediately, with the banks collecting the 10% when you sell any equity (stocks/funds) and handing them over to the government. (so by the same mechanism that dividends are already immediately "taxed" by the bank).
"Banks to taxes" is a very real thing. Worldwide, but not in the US, there's the "Common Reporting Standard" (CRS): banks are basically little snitches that transmit all your accounts balances to the local IRSes. Which komrades shall hail has great progress but I digress again.
In addition to that banks have to comply with KYC/AML rules and are expected to do a certain amount of SAR (Suspicious Activity Report) to the government. Government which typically ain't much interested in crime: it's more interested in collecting money (like in the Al Capone case) on non-paid taxes (and the fines that go with it too). Ah, that's a third reason to do that jump: banks shall tell the government there's a suspicious activity from that person, governement then comes asking "where's that money coming from and where are the taxes you had to pay on that amount?".
I don't own any Monero but the link between "banks" and "taxes" is very real: I'm not saying it's good or bad. What I'm saying is that there's a very clear link between banks and taxes.
Now, and I'm still digressing, there are cases where the government/IRS ain't allowed to come see your accounts: some companies and individuals, in certain jurisdiction, have very strong protection against that (like actual jail time for bank employees that'd leak customers bank balances to journalists or the IRS). But, worldwide, it's not the norm.
And as I understand Monero, if someone has a balance in Monero on a self-custodian wallet, there's no bank that's going to report the balance to the IRS. Although now in the EU, for example, if you hold Monero on a centralized exchange (like Coinbase, the HN unicorn), then Coinbase shall send to your local IRS your balance of Monero each year to the government (it's a requirement of the MiCA EU legislation).
> Your own private bank which cannot interact with most financial institutions and merchants?
But you can gift $900 000 to the FSF which, itself, shall, I take it, have a way to transform these Monero into a currency that can interact with financial instutions and merchants right?
AIUI there are merchant accepting cryptocurrencies? Maybe not Monero but, still AIUI, you can use a decentralized exchange to convert Monero to another cryptocurrency the merchant accepts?
Yes, but let's not forget it's voluntary based. There are lots of high quality nodes, although less which are basically burning money and getting nothing in return. We all believe in a censorship-resistant and free web but only few are willing to take action. My two small guard/middle relays are rented at 10$/m each and is only 100Mbit/s non-metered up/down because it gets expensive.
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