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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.
Honeypot???
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
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)
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'Silk Road Reloaded' Launches On a Network More Secret Than Tor
*sigh* Sure was a nice secret network we had going up until five minutes ago. Thanks a bunch, timothy!
TL;DR - shut uuuuuuup!
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
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.
How would you do a traffic study on a network that is encrypted or otherwise as private as it is?
Truth be told, it's not the media. We live in a world that is far freer than many would like to acknowledge, and for most purposes tor is a hassle or pointless. The end result is that tor is mostly only used when there is a very good reason for it, and since we live in fairly free society, that reason tends to be stuff that gives tor a bad reputation.
There is also this paradoxon that, if we lived in a society where tor would make a difference, tor would most likely not exist or be useless. This is the situation in Saudi Arabia and other similar places. This is so because the real weakness of tor is that, since it is not possible to hide the exit or entry nodes themselves, the network is easy to shut down or to filter out.
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)
"There was a study done recently" that shows anything you want it to.
To ensure perfect aim, shoot first and call whatever you hit the target
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.
One of the things that makes pointing this out difficult for some people though is that there are a non-trivial number of people who use it for ideological reasons, so they always have their own small community to point to as examples for legitimate use. But just like the other groups you point out, ideological usage is still not common usage since it provides an inferior network experience for mostly symbolic gains, which the average user has no use for.
Bit of cognitive dissonance there. Even if the overwhelming majority of usage really is for nefarious purposes, that still implies a non-negligible minority of usage for legitimate purposes. That's not "in theory", that's in practice.
Couple that with the fact that I suspect such claims of "overwhelming majority" are looking at bandwidth, and porn is liable to be much more bandwidth-intensive than accessing information suppressed by oppressive regimes, and you could end up with a very different picture.
But hey, stamping out kiddie-porn is a much bigger priority than coordinating people fighting against oppressive governments that would casually murder those children instead, right?
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
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).