this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2023
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True, it's not like Russian need to use VPN to pirate stuff anyway.
Wait! You got it. We just encapsule https in the bittorrent protocol!
I was talking to someone from the UAE in some thread on lemmy.blahaj.zone a month back. Apparently, because the UAE doesn't like LGBT stuff, they block images hosted on that server.
I was seriously thinking there about what it would take to hide a VPN connection, and that BitTorrent Is actually not a terrible choice, as it generates a lot of bidirectional traffic.
IIRC I went looking and some guy did a prototype as his masters thesis some years back.
Lemme see if I can find it.
googles
Yeah.
https://github.com/danoctavian/bit-smuggler
EDIT: Ah, now I remember. Wasn't that they block images, but that they block the server. Gay UAE dude could use a permissable Threadiverse server and federation would let him talk to people on lemmy.blahaj.zone. However, the image-hosting is not federated. If someone put a post with an image up, he could view the text on another Threadiverse server, but couldn't see the images, because the images don't propagate to federated servers. The browser still tries to talk to the original server for that.
People in western countries use VPN to hide bittorrent traffics, while people living in an authoritarian countries uses bittorrent to hide VPN traffics. Life is sometimes stranger than fictions.
Very interesting project though. Thanks for mentioning it.