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'Silk Road Reloaded' Launches On a Network More Secret Than Tor
rossgneumann writes A new anonymous online drug market has emerged, but instead of using the now infamous Tor network, it uses the lesser known "I2P" alternative. "Silk Road Reloaded" launched yesterday, and is only accessible by downloading the special I2P software, or by configuring your computer in a certain way to connect to I2P web pages, called 'eepsites', and which end in the suffix .i2p. The I2P project site is informative, as is the Wikipedia entry.
Two people can keep a secret, but only if one of them is dead
But then, from the I2P page
I2P is beta software since 2003. Developers emphasize that there are likely to be bugs in the software and that there has been insufficient peer review to date. However, they believe the code is now reasonably stable and well-developed, and more exposure can help development of I2P.
So while "More secret than TOR", may be true, actually being secret is unknown by the users. But I bet the TLA LEAs will be keeping an eye on it and directing resources to test I2P limits (if they already haven't - they kinda don't like communications they can't tap)
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
I2P has been the successor to Tor for more than a decade, but people continue using Tor thanks to a successful campaign by media/state to maintain the protocols use in an effort to continue exploiting it and avoid having to deal with more secure alternatives. Check out fdroid.org for open source apps that enable i2p on android as well, and expect a wholesale ban on i2p traffic in the near future.
Good people go to bed earlier.
People have been designing virtual networks for decades. I2P is well advertised on Freenet, itself a well-known secure network.
Nothing new here. The security and reliability of none of this software is proven, it may not even be provable due to the distributed nature. That reduces the problem to one of how many people you're ok with knowing what you're doing.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Why don't you watch the talk and find out?
Actually I'll just summarise it for you. If you run a lot of Tor nodes you will eventually get picked to host a hidden service directory. Then you can measure lookups for the entries of hidden services to measure their popularity, and crawl them to find out what's on them.
It got closely linked with kiddie porn, has abysmal throughput and drops "non-fresh" content.
It actually seems like the perfect solution for hosting torrent magnet files though (not so good for static content you want to sit around for any given amount of time).