New P2P Torrent Site 'Play' Has No Single Point of Failure (thestack.com)

Posted by timothy on Wednesday March 2, 2016 @01:52AM from the slippery-characters dept.

An anonymous reader writes: Play, a new peer-to-peer (P2P) site for downloading torrents, is practically impossible to shut down and promises to be the latest technology to revolutionise online downloads. The platform has appeared recently across ZeroNet, a Budapest-based open source site which is looking to offer a home to decentralised platforms which employ Bitcoin-crypto and BitTorrent technologies. As no central server exists, every additional user is a further point of connection inside the network, helping to avoid potential failures. As the first torrent site to appear on the network, Play can be accessed directly through a ZeroNet URL (only available with the tool installed). The site serves magnetic links sourced from RARBG, with which users can download films, series and other media files, in varying qualities. While ZeroNet itself is not an illegal platform, Play is identical to any other P2P download site in that it could face legal challenges over violating copyright.

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Re:how? by Anonymous Coward · 2016-03-02 06:16 · Score: 2, Interesting

It's new, so the media hasn't had time to scream "PEDOPHILES! PEDOPHILES!" yet in order to drive people back to the "safer"(snooped) internet.
No, not quite.
Your response implies that ZeroNet provides a layer of anonymity. With traditional P2P, it is still quite easy to detect who is downloading/uploading the content. ZeroNet makes it harder to shutdown the catalog/index/directory/metadata, since everyone shares it. As soon as someone requests the actual data, it is feasible for certain parties to de-anonymize them.
Freenet, OTOH, provides some anonymity since each node hosts a portion of the actual content. Furthermore, it is not possible to control what kind of content flows in and out of each node, or to even discern what the content is.