this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2023
589 points (97.7% liked)

Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

54574 readers
472 users here now

⚓ Dedicated to the discussion of digital piracy, including ethical problems and legal advancements.

Rules • Full Version

1. Posts must be related to the discussion of digital piracy

2. Don't request invites, trade, sell, or self-promote

3. Don't request or link to specific pirated titles, including DMs

4. Don't submit low-quality posts, be entitled, or harass others



Loot, Pillage, & Plunder

📜 c/Piracy Wiki (Community Edition):


💰 Please help cover server costs.

Ko-Fi Liberapay
Ko-fi Liberapay

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 
  1. It doesn't make you anonymous. Torrent protocol wasn't designed with anonymity in mind and there are a million ways you're going to leak your actual IP address.
  2. Tor is a TCP only network.
  3. While this doesn't give you the anonymity you wanted, it will hurt the network for other users.
top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] supervent@lemmy.dbzer0.com 102 points 1 year ago (2 children)

For bittorrent and p2p it is better to use i2p, tor only to surf the internet.

[–] atlasraven31@lemm.ee 52 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Mind giving a little info about i2p for the clueless?

[–] Referable2424@lemdro.id 85 points 1 year ago

I2P is a P2P darknet. on tor the network is run by volenteers (~6000 nodes) while on I2P everyone on the nerwork is a node, and their are no built in exit nodes (in i2p their called outproxies). the official I2P router has a built in torrent client as well. like torrents the more people on i2p the faster the network, while the opposite is true for tor.

[–] ReversalHatchery@beehaw.org 22 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (15 children)

It is a different anonymity network, which works differently in many aspects.

I2P and Tor comparison: https://geti2p.net/en/comparison/tor
I2P on Bittorrent (mostly a client dev guide, but has some interesting info): https://geti2p.net/en/docs/applications/bittorrent

Currently BiglyBt supports I2P and it has been that way for quite some time.
If you use qBittorrent, I2P support will come in version 4.6. you can try it out now with the published release candidate version. Probably other clients are working on it too as the support is coming from the libtorrent programming library, which is used by other clients too.

Right now, I2P is quite slow in my experience, in terms of loading I2P websites. I hope that it's just a misconfiguration on my part, or that these specific sites I tried are just overloaded.

load more comments (15 replies)
[–] CAVOK@lemmy.world 15 points 1 year ago

There's an i2p community here on lemmy. Click my username for a link.

[–] alvvayson@lemmy.world 32 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Indeed.

Torrenting over I2P is the future. No need for VPN and no dependency on donated bandwidth like with Tor.

The technology needs a bit of refinement and it seems they are struggling to attract and maintain good developers.

In my opinion, the fundamental protocols of I2P need a revamp to make torrenting faster and more efficient.

It will take a few years before we solve these problems.

[–] Staccato@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I2P is still around? I remember experimenting with it a decade ago. Sounds like it's still a slow experience.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] littlecolt@lemm.ee 38 points 1 year ago (7 children)

I pay monthly for access to a SOCKS5 proxy service from a company called BTGuard, and tell my BT client to connect through that. It is not expensive and works great I've been using it for about 12 or 13 years, and found it after getting an email from my ISP saying they identified me downloading TV shows. In that time, I have only had issues a handful of times. More reliable than most other services I pay for and I've never seen another DMCA notice since.

load more comments (7 replies)
[–] JCPhoenix@beehaw.org 30 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I didn't think people torrented over TOR. Aside from the security issues (which I didn't know about in the first place), I would think it's gotta be insanely slow. Is it not?

[–] onlinepersona@programming.dev 27 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I keeps getting brought up because TOR is the most popular anonymizing network. It's not far-fetched to think "how can I make myself anonymous while torrenting?" search for "how to be anonymous online", find TOR and put two and two together. It happens all the time, which is why the blog post by TOR was made about it.

[–] JCPhoenix@beehaw.org 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Gotcha, yeah that checks out. I guess I never made that connection, even though I use TOR and torrent here and there. Probably also because I'm more concerned about download speeds over privacy when torrenting. And regular web traffic over TOR is often insanely slow compared to the clearnet.

Ever since getting a copyright strike several years ago, I've switched to using a commercial VPN while torrenting. I don't know if that's the all-in-one solution for hiding from my ISP, but it seems to work. But I also rarely torrent these days, too, so not as many opportunities for them to catch me, I suppose.

[–] Moxible@monyet.cc 27 points 1 year ago (4 children)

is it okay if I download a .torrent file from private trackers through TOR browser?

[–] Thrift3499@lemm.ee 24 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I wouldn't bother tbh. As soon as you start using it in your torrent client other users can see your IP address anyway.

Seedboxes are a pretty good solution.

[–] lemmyingly@lemm.ee 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Unless you use a VPN or proxy.

Seedboxes are good but only seem worth the cost if you're utilizing it a lot/frequently?

[–] Thrift3499@lemm.ee 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

The cost is reasonable, you can get 1tb of storage for around £10 a month. Most Seedboxes will let you install VPN servers on them as well, I'm not sure what you pay for specific VPN software nowadays. So you could theoretically replace Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu etc and have a VPN.

They're basically required for building ratio on private trackers nowadays.

[–] netchami@sh.itjust.works 18 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Yes, but make sure to use a VPN or a Seedbox for the actual torrenting

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] ipkpjersi@lemmy.ml 6 points 1 year ago

Use a seedbox IMO although with private trackers you're generally pretty safe.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] FrostyPolicy@suppo.fi 27 points 1 year ago
[–] MigratingtoLemmy@lemmy.world 25 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Did I2P take off enough for one to use it?

[–] onlinepersona@programming.dev 11 points 1 year ago

Depends. It's definitely smaller than TOR because people don't know of it. It's slower, but if you don't need things on demand, have a seedbox or some way to torrent 24/7, things are quite acceptable.

[–] neutron@thelemmy.club 10 points 1 year ago

It would be great if big trackers started encouraging use of I2P as an alternative.

[–] jack@monero.town 24 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] yoz@aussie.zone 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

What's i2p? I downloaded i2p from fdroid and installed it. It showing peers and active peers but my IP is still the same. Can you please ELI5 ? Thanks

[–] jack@monero.town 44 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

I2P is a truly anonymous darknet where every user is a node in the network, unlike TOR where everyone is leeching off of the 6000 nodes. I2P also works great for torrenting. I2P is only for accessing I2P sites and not for anonymous clearnet browsing.

I have never tried the mobile version, but here's some info for desktop:

There is a java version simply called "I2P" and there is a C++ one called "I2Pd". Start with the java one, it's easier and has built-in torrent webclient.

Install I2P from geti2p.net and start it. You are now a node/router in the network. To access I2P darknet websites like http://planet.i2p you have to tell your browser to use I2P proxy. You should use a different browser profile for using I2P, on firefox you can create one at about:profiles .

Enable I2P on firefox: Settings -> General -> Network Settings. Set manual http and https proxy to 127.0.0.1 port 4444 . You should now be able to visit eepsites (sites ending with .i2p). Always put http:// manually at the beginning. If it tells you to use jump services because it can't find the site, just click on one of the suggestions.

Torrents are on http://tracker2.postman.i2p . Find one, copy the magnet link and go to the torrent webclient: 127.0.0.1:7657/i2psnark . Add the torrent there. Done, you are now anonymously torrenting.

[–] beastlykings@sh.itjust.works 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Isn't it dangerous to have every client also be a node? Sure, my torrents would come out someone else's node, but someone else's torrent could easily come out mine.

I don't think my ISP cares whether it was actually me who used my IP to get a piracy complaint?

Or maybe I just don't understand how it works?

[–] melmi@lemmy.blahaj.zone 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Unlike Tor, which is built around accessing the clearnet anonymously, I2P is primarily designed around keeping traffic in the darknet. When you join I2P, you route traffic for other nodes but only within the I2P network, it will never leave through your clearnet address.

The equivalent of Tor's exit nodes are called "outproxies", but they aren't often used, there aren't very many of them, and you have to specifically set them up manually as it isn't the default behavior like it is for Tor.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] scarilog@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Can you explain how the anonymity works?

[–] jack@monero.town 5 points 1 year ago

On a high level, I2P is an overlay internet on top of the regular web. Everyone has a router address that acts like a regular IP address, except that this one is purely inside the I2P software. So unlike IP addresses that go over your ISP to connect to the internet, on the I2P network your router can connect to other routers directly without the concept of ISP.

Your traffic makes multiple unidirectional hops over nodes in the network before it accesses the site/peer you want to connect with. Connection from your peer back to you goes back over another set of unidirectional nodes (unlike TOR where contacting and receiving uses the same set of nodes). The connection between the nodes uses the latest encryption methods of course.

For more details you would have to ask someone else.

[–] yoz@aussie.zone 3 points 1 year ago

Thanks. I really appreciate it.

[–] Natanael@slrpnk.net 3 points 1 year ago

I2P doesn't behave like Tor by default, it's designed around connecting to internal peers within its network so your browser won't treat it as a proxy but default and you have to specifically configure it to route traffic to the I2P network

[–] zaknenou@lemmy.dbzer0.com 18 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Tor is a TCP only network.
Can someone ELI5 this point for me? I know there is TCP and UDP, is UDP safer then ?

[–] Zatore@lemm.ee 50 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

TCP is a protocol where all the data is verified when sent. There is extra back and forth communication along with the payload to check that the payload arrived safely. Its great for downloading files when you want to make sure nothing is missing or damaged. UDP is more like a constant data stream where the sender doesn't care if it all gets to you. The advantage is that you send less data overall, useful if you don't care if one frame of a video stream looks weird.

One protocol isn't safer than another, its all about how much bandwidth you have/need. Torrenting over TOR uses up way more bandwidth than needed. Depending on the implementation, TCP can use 50% more bandwidth.

[–] emptiestplace@lemmy.ml 25 points 1 year ago (1 children)

and sometimes we do care about successful delivery but need to handle that ourselves so we use UDP to avoid layering delivery verification mechanisms.

https://openvpn.net/faq/what-is-tcp-meltdown

[–] PraiseTheSoup@lemm.ee 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

and sometimes we do care about successful delivery but need to handle that ourselves

Am I right to assume this is generally carried out by the users' torrent client which is why we prefer UDP for torrenting?

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] zaknenou@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 1 year ago

thank you sir!

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] nhu@programming.dev 13 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

Edit: I misread the statement. Thanks for pointing this out to all the repliers! My fault.

The first point of the answer is misleading. Tor is indeed designed with anonymity in mind. The leaks occur in different layers, like the for e.g. chosen BitTorrent client.

https://blog.torproject.org/bittorrent-over-tor-isnt-good-idea/

[–] VerPoilu@sopuli.xyz 45 points 1 year ago

He said torrent, not tor.

[–] onlinepersona@programming.dev 12 points 1 year ago

Torrenting over TOR doesn't make you anonymous. How is that misleading?

[–] prole@beehaw.org 6 points 1 year ago

That's kind of what they said though?

[–] Anders429@programming.dev 2 points 1 year ago

Don't worry, I misread it the exact same way

[–] Fleppensteijn@feddit.nl 10 points 1 year ago (4 children)

That's what Tribler is for

load more comments (4 replies)
[–] Syl@jlai.lu 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Any plan on doing torrent over veilid?

[–] onlinepersona@programming.dev 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

How does veilid compare to I2P?

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments
view more: next ›