It’s not straightforward to distribute via Bittorrent anonymously.
N.B.: I also updated my post to include using a tor hidden service. I thought I had included it originally.
From the responses I have read it seems that I should have been more clear that I was also taking censorship resistance into consideration.
Seeding via Tor? You need to configure Torrent client to use Tor, make sure it doesn’t leak anything (DNS lookups, publishing to DHT or tracker, some stuff on the protocol level was a problem as well). There’s nothing that comes working out of the box. Of course it’s not rocket science, it’s just a bit more work.
Hosting just via hidden service is actually worse than uploading to random locations on clearnet:
1) Still no way to do load balancing with hidden services
2) It’s usually slower anyway
3) If your server gets compromised you’re toasted, unless you use hacked servers, or buy your servers with Bitcoins or stolen CCs.
The best network for publishing that kind of leaks would be Freenet or I2P + Tahoe. But those are not nearly as popular (and secure) as Tor.
More importantly hosting via hidden service is not worse than uploading to depositfiles. Hidden services protects both the uploader's and the downloader's anonymity and it is much, much, much more resistant to censorship. I am not sure what "hosting gets breached" has to do with the discussion.
This is how some people running CP sites via Tor were caught.
This is completely tangential, but can you point me to the Tor investigations? The interaction of tor/law-enforcement is something I am extremely interested in.
Not necessarily, the CP sites were hacked using PHP vulnerabilities or something similar, not to mention your hosting provider could just get interested in your network activity for whatever reason.
> This is completely tangential, but can you point me to the Tor investigations?
Nothing I have bookmarked, sorry.
With bittorrent you need at least one seeder that is available long enough to feed the swarm (in decent time), during that time a lot of things can go wrong (if anything goes wrong when uploading to a free hosting service you just start over, nothing lost).
> With bittorrent you need at least one seeder that is available long enough to feed the swarm (in decent time), during that time a lot of things can go wrong (if anything goes wrong when uploading to a free hosting service you just start over, nothing lost).
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent_(protocol)#Web_seed...
I'm guessing that few hosting companies make that easy to do, since you often have to go through some form of queue to even get the ticket needed to download it.