Comment by warner25 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by warner25 | Hacker News Reader

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> gets a lot of things right... having every network participant relay some internal traffic

There are trade-offs. The Tor Project has its reasons for not doing this (from https://support.torproject.org/alternate-designs/):

"...many Tor users cannot be good relays — for example, some Tor clients operate from behind restrictive firewalls, connect via modem, or otherwise aren't in a position where they can relay traffic. Providing service to these clients is a critical part of providing effective anonymity for everyone, since many Tor users are subject to these or similar constraints and including these clients increases the size of the anonymity set..."

"...we need to better understand the risks from letting the attacker send traffic through your relay while you're also initiating your own anonymized traffic. Three different research papers describe ways to identify the relays in a circuit by running traffic through candidate relays and looking for dips in the traffic while the circuit is active. These clogging attacks are not that scary in the Tor context so long as relays are never clients too..."

Doesn’t that make i2p less vulnerable to an issue tor suffers from - that of hostile-owned relays and exit points? I remember reading something about how a large part of them were controlled by US intel.

That was the parent comment's point. My point is that there are trade-offs. You make the network less vulnerable to that particular attack, and open up other vulnerabilities instead. Anonymous communication service design is full of such trade-offs.

There's a theory that intelligence agencies control many relays. I've haven't seen evidence of it. Tor does its best to be secure even when it can't trust the relays.

Not often a network protocol / communication thread breaks out

Neat point. I wonder if the percentage of bandwidth shared could be relative to the speed or openness of network available?

I think it would be exactly like that, because that's how it already works for relays. The Tor Project operates a measurement system that tests relays in various ways and records their status in the public consensus document. Clients then use weighted random selection (along with some screening criteria) to choose relays in proportion to how much bandwidth they provide, according to the consensus.

Having something like that turned on by default but being able to disable it would be a good choice.

Ultimately until someone can satisfy a user’s concern about the privacy and security of what flows through their connection there will be scrutiny on this piece. Being able to interject one’s own proxy or vpn tunnel could be interesting.

Right, I think that it could be good. But it's not obvious that it would be good while it would definitely add complexity, bugs, and attack surface, and discourage at least some people from using Tor.

> Being able to interject one’s own proxy... could be interesting.

I think this is essentially what the Tor Project wants to see instead: if you're in a position to do so, operate your own relay and make it your entry guard. That adds capacity for the network and helps you by mitigating the risk of connecting to a malicious guard.

I feel it would be a good choice to give users rather than force all users into it. Not all users stories are the same.

You’re right as well as this is one way it could be, and there could be other ways.

Tor might want to see that, but I’m not entirely sure how well it’s going when hosting exit relays can be an issue for the hoster.

Originally Skype and Spotify had their own peer-to-peer networks and distribution.

Both stopped using them because it worked so badly.

For a long time Skype's P2P architecture worked great. It was the absolute best A/V calling experience, handily beating every other contemporary mainstream offer from MSN to Y!IM. It had issues such as getting crushed by patch Tuesday, and I assume it was likely not robust enough to adversaries, but one thing you can't say about Skype was that its P2P architecture didn't work. It absolutely did.

I think even though there were many things that could've lead to the demise of Skype's P2P network, it was pretty undoubtedly the rise of mobile phones. Android or iOS, Skype was just dreadful; they were clearly ducktaping mobile support in. Sometimes you'd be sending messages and everything would appear to be working, little did you know the other person was responding but you weren't actually seeing anything. Push notifications? Sometimes you get them, but it was a crapshoot as to when you would get them. It probably was expensive to try to bridge their P2P network to mobile phones, and it definitely didn't work very well.

I guess anyone can just say these things and it's really difficult to back them up since a large part of it is subjective (and aside from some reverse engineering efforts, I am not really intimately familiar with much of the details behind Skype and its transition off of P2P) but I think there is one thing that most people would definitely not disagree with: Skype was far more relevant and well-regarded when it was peer to peer. That's not to say that the move off had anything to do with its downfall, more just to say that if it was so awful, I think it would've been the other way around.

> it worked so badly.

Skype has a much worse quality now after the switch for all people I know who used Skype at the time.

The real reason for switching was iPhone. First, Apple did not allow long-running apps in favour of centralized notifications. Periodically start Skype to check events did not help recwicing calls. Second, users moved to smartphones, which depleted the active nodes network. So there has been an increase of short-lived nodes without balanced increase in long-lived. So to prevent the p2p network model to start failing, Skype moved to a centralized one. And probably the government regulations (to store and decrypt messages) took place, but this was probably not very public.

Microsoft buying Skype must have added additional incentives to centralize. Regulatory, organizational control, auditing, etc. And tinfoil take would include surveiling.

http://www.h-online.com/security/features/Skype-s-ominous-li...

Skype was P2P pre-acquisition.

Microsoft’s acquisition changed Skype to centralize it through their servers (and introduce all sorts of call quality issues).

It’s less about focusing on tinfoil and more about how creating $ for cloud usage allowed for centralization and surveillance.

Skype has been enough of a turn off from the performance issues it has / had hat many people moved elsewhere.

In the early 2000s there was a lot of discussion about a US law that required phone providers to provide for wiretapping, with no mention of the underlying tech. Being P2P, that wouldn't work for Skype, so a journalist asked the Skype CEO whether they would comply with the law and he said "We're not US company. Why would we?"

So I don't think it's all that tinfoily to think that once Skype became a US company, the government might have pressured them into making wiretaps possible, since there was a specific law that arguably required it. Considering all that Snowden revealed later, I'm not sure I'd put any digital surveillance in the tinfoil category.

Microsoft at that time said they are moving Skype to centralized server from distributed to reduce code complexity.

Tor was invented with a purpose of giving users with poor, restricted connections to access forbidden stuff untracked. Think journalists under oppressive regimes in the third world, or, of course, undercover agents.

I2P was invented to give people with relatively good, usually excellent, connectivity a way to access forbidden stuff untracked. Think media "piracy" first and foremost, also dark-grey market stuff, etc. Everything else is better served by either your own VPN, or the public Internet.

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