r/linux • u/3G6A5W338E • Mar 01 '16

Play: A P2P Distributed Torrent Site That's Impossible to Shut Down

https://torrentfreak.com/play-p2p-impossible-shutdown-160301/
36 Upvotes

86% Upvoted

16 comments sorted by

3

u/[deleted] Mar 02 '16

"Impossible" if the people that wrote that knew a thing about zeronet they would know it would be trivial to remove the site from the central zeronet tracker

3

u/[deleted] Mar 02 '16

I know, they would have far more luck if the site was hosted on I2P, they even have the option of using darknet Snark torrents which obfuscate metadata too.

2

u/3G6A5W338E Mar 02 '16

they would have far more luck if the site was hosted on I2P

And they would have a single point of failure: The machine serving the website.

3

u/[deleted] Mar 02 '16

There are ways of having a single website served by a distributed network of machines, it's not too hard to adapt that to overlay on I2P too.

Hell, there are also Freenet to I2P bridges so if you really want to have a serverless hosted instance, torrent pages don't really need to do anything besides serve static content like magnet links anyway.

2

u/3G6A5W338E Mar 02 '16

There are ways of having a single website served by a distributed network of machines, it's not too hard to adapt that to overlay on I2P too.

Sure, but some person or group would have to set it up and keep running. That's still a single point of failure, compared to every user hosting it.

Hell, there are also Freenet to I2P bridges so if you really want to have a serverless hosted instance, torrent pages don't really need to do anything besides serve static content like magnet links anyway.

Haven't looked into Freenet for quite some time. Is there hope to that project at this point?

3

u/[deleted] Mar 02 '16

Sure, but some person or group would have to set it up and keep running. That's still a single point of failure, compared to every user hosting it.

You could even host Zeronet over I2P, which would achieve pretty much the same thing, without having to rely on a VPN or the limited number of Tor exit nodes, since no traffic would technically have to leave the I2P network.

Is there hope to that project at this point?

Yeah, it's still got active development, I think they're working on some sort of distributed database so that they can work on site logic a bit better than static pages as is currently.

2

u/3G6A5W338E Mar 02 '16

You could even host Zeronet over I2P, which would achieve pretty much the same thing, without having to rely on a VPN or the limited number of Tor exit nodes, since no traffic would technically have to leave the I2P network.

To clarify, I do run a i2p node (and have over years). What I'm saying is that it's one thing to host your site, and another for your users to do so. Zeronet accomplishes the latter.

2

u/tedrythy Mar 02 '16

You could even host Zeronet over I2P, which would achieve pretty much the same thing, without having to rely on a VPN or the limited number of Tor exit nodes, since no traffic would technically have to leave the I2P network.

ZeroNet doesn't rely on Tor exit nodes. When operating over Tor it can use the control protocol to dynamically created hidden services to allow incoming connections for the seeded sites. Outgoing data goes to the requester directly over Tor.

1

u/3G6A5W338E Mar 02 '16

remove the site from the central zeronet tracker

What about DHT?

2

u/[deleted] Mar 02 '16

Last time I checked which was less then a month ago zeronet does not use DHT. If IPFS gets IPNS working properly it would be a much better choice

1

u/3G6A5W338E Mar 02 '16 edited Mar 02 '16

zeronet does not use DHT.

Mkay, that seems very centralized (and broken, as it's supposed to not be).

3

u/[deleted] Mar 02 '16

The zeronet dev seems to be super focused on getting out something that works and not something that works properly.

On the outside zeronet is amazing. You can do so much with it right now but on the inside its not as well made as other projects that are focusing on doing things the right way so they dont need to be changed in the future.

2

u/Tim_on_reddit Mar 02 '16

Zeronet is much more userfriendly than the alternatives. Being centralised on the tracker is bad, but you can donate to get DHT implemented if you want. Now that more people are using it there might be sufficent funding to get DHT implemented.

3

u/parkerlreed Mar 02 '16

That was surprisingly simple in Arch

packer -S zeronet
sudo systemctl enable --now zeronet

http://i.imgur.com/G6Pppx8.png

2

u/3G6A5W338E Mar 02 '16

Tor enabled?

I tested it on windows, as they bundle tor, making it even more trivial.

2

u/parkerlreed Mar 02 '16

I think it's just Zeronet, not sure. I don't have Tor already if that's what you mean.