movie-web was just taken down with all its repos, Yuzu was taken down, then suyu forked it on gitlab and was taken down, countless clones of nintendo games, platform emulators, and a bunch of other things are taken down because they are hosted on the clear web.
If you’re a dev and planning to write software for piracy, host it on I2P!
Just don’t use public and free services like GitHub or GitLab. Setup your own webspace with a trusty provider, install Gitea/Forgejo and host the code yourself. It’s that easy!
Not Gitea, they got bought by a for-profit company or something
Ah yes. Forgejo is the current community fork.
So far nothing bad has happened and the company was founded so they can sell support hours to businesses. Just like lots of other companies behind Open Source projects do it. 🤷♂️
Then they can request the provider to hand out your details just like they can with github, gitlab, codeberg, or whatever.
But they can’t just DMCA it under false premises. GitHub and others just don’t want to risk anything and are pretty quick with taking down repos without checking anything.
Also there are still a few countries that don’t bow before the US-invention that is the DMCA.
If they don’t honor DMCA, what stops them from suing you? And if they got that far, wouldn’t you rather want a DMCA?
Probably staying on the clear web is good for discoverability, but that’s a two edged sword, because if you piss them off enough, a DMCA would be the best outcome.
Clearweb platforms could have an auto synced mirror, and development could happen on i2p
That’s one way to do it 👍
At least in Germany, many of these copyright claims have no real legal grounds and wouldn’t hold up in an actual trial. All cases I’ve read into so far ended with a settlement - as the private person was too afraid of even more legal fees. Or were dropped completely after a while (full of empty threats) if the people never engaged with the other party.
Can’t they just DMCA the provider then? To request to disable your account
DMCA is only valid in the US. Those other countries obeying it are usually just doing it to avoid trouble, but there’s no real legal obligation. (But if ignored, it is pretty safe to assume that any bigger company would look into local laws and try to find a different way.) But from what I’ve heard, hosters don’t just close your account because of some DMCA. They will actually look into it and work with you to solve it.
And in the end, you could simply host it on a Raspberry Pi at your home. The ISP can’t be held responsible for the data you transfer, so they won’t just shut down your Internet connection. And if you get a strongly worded letter from some company, you can send it directly to the recycling bin.
I remember trying to play with I2P back in the day and it being slow. Now I wouldn’t even know how to access it. Is there something I can read or watch that can reintroduce me and teach me the basics?
Seconded. Maybe start the how-to with what it is.
https://geti2p.net still exists.
I2P is still slow, but that’s because there aren’t many nodes. It is faster than a few years ago though. I can get download speeds of 100 KB/s or more. It’s like TOR in the early days with mostly private nodes and few hosted nodes. It’s easy to get a VPS and host and I2P node for a fiver a month or less.
What’s the advantage of I2P over Tor? It’s been a while since I used I2P, but it always seemed like “Tor with more open ports and higher CPU usage” to me.
It’s important to note that if you set up Gitlab over any kind of hidden service, you disable CI/CD systems, because a CI/CD pipeline doing a HTTP call will easily de-anonimyse the server. Set up appropriate firewalls and disable any features you may not want, or you’ll easily find yourself de-anonymised!
Benefits of Tor over I2P: C, not Java (ewww)
Benefits of I2P over Tor: Java, not C (ewww)
Tor is being rewritten in Rust :3
How is that coming along?
idk really, this is the site of the project: https://arti.torproject.org/
It looks to be quite active. That’s nice.
I hate C as much as most programmers, but there are very few low-level networking tools that make me think “I wish this was written in Java”. At least Tor is being rewritten into Rust, so the point will be moot soon enough.
The Java 8 + ant instructions on Github also make me suspect that they’re not using a particularly recent version of Java either. There are even components that seem to be written for Java 6, and Java 7 runtimes seem to be the default target for most operating systems.
I was sort of hoping to see I2P be an early adopter of Project Loom for high performance, but I guess they’re focused more on keeping old and outdated computers compatible.
A lot of those advantages seem very… subjective. Peer-to-peer in itself doesn’t have any advantage, but the comparison seems to be written by someone who thinks it does.
Purely because of the larger user base I would pick Tor over I2P in this scenario but for piracy in general I2P does seem like a much better fit. I do wonder how the situation will change if Veilid ever takes off, though.
i2p allows torrenting over it
I don’t really see the advantage in the context of hosting a Gitlab server for developing pirating tools.
I thought you asked about advantages/differences in general.
I see, I should’ve been more specific. Apologies for the confusion!
Is that the only advantage at this point? I feel like you’d have to be downloading/seeding some shady fucked up shit if just using a VPN isn’t enough. Though maybe I’m thinking about this from the pov of someone who mostly leeches their torrents.
I2P is better for P2P stuff. TOR is not. If you are I2P you can also take advantage of anonymous torrents with qbittorrent or the builtin torrent client.
I have a few nodes and the CPU usage is minimal. But there’s also a C++ implementation if you like that better.
Also check out Radicle, it’s basically decentralized Git. @forgejo@floss.social is also working on a federation solution: @ForgeFed@floss.social (https://forgefed.org/)
Radicle can still suffer under a DMCA if it’s on the clear web. They just have to take down the node(s) hosting the repos, same as github, gitlab, et al. However if radicle works on I2P, that would be… rad 🤑
They are working on support for Tor, I2P and other networks: https://radicle.xyz/faq#is-there-a-way-to-run-radicle-over-tor-i2p-or-other-censorship-resistant-networks
Wow, that’s great! once they have stable support for TOR and I2P, it could become amazing for hosting such projects.
What is I2P?
Thanks! I think it would be a good idea to add a short info blobb directly in your main post tho :)
It’s not my post so you’d have to ask OP to do that.
Sound like the tor network? Or am I missing something?
https://geti2p.net/en/comparison/tor
Perhaps the main differences are:
- Unidirectional tunnels instead of bidirectional circuits
- Fully distributed and self organizing
- Packet switched instead of circuit switched
- Tunnels in I2P are short lived
- i2p puts an emphasis on communicating within the network, whereas Tor puts more emphasis on communicating via the network to outside
Together these provide some additional resilience and protection against traffic analysis compared to Tor, arguably improving security.
Thanks!
Torrents over i2p: yes! Torrents over tor: no!
Different purposes. Tor was intended so you could access the real web anonymously.
I2p the whole thing is an anonymous web. Everybody is a node. Tracing a packet never ends because you can’t be sure you found the origin of the packet. Which only gets worse the longer somebody remains connected to i2p. And it even can handle torrenting, a torrent client is built in.
I2P sadly gets a lot less funding/support.
The Invisible Internet Project (I2P) is a fully encrypted private network layer. It protects your activity and location.
Think of it as TOR, but for P2P. (TOR is not for P2P).
I2PD is an implementation is I2P, a way to anonymously share Disney’s IP without showing anyone IP to the ISP.
just skimmed through that link and it seems like it’s for self hosting gitlab ? is there an instance on i2p so I don’t have to self host (I don’t want to) ?
There is one, but it’s also on the clearweb. Dunno if somebody hosts one purely on the darkweb
A side question : I’m making a similar protocol, anyone knows some space where you discuss stuff like I2P, IPFS etc?
They all have their pros and cons, and I’d like to see if my protocol and its possibilities would interest.
Cheers
That’s a good question. Unfortunately, I don’t know. IPFS does have a matrix channel where you could ask questions though.
I’m stupid, can someone please quickly tell me what I2P is?
If you know TOR, I2P is TOR but with P2P support.
But in general terms, it’s anonymization network. Data is sent over multiple hops/nodes and the original source is not included. The nodes are hosted by random people. The downside is that the slowest node in the chain of nodes between the source and the target means that’s how slow the entire chain is (at least). So, the more nodes, the better for anonymity, and the faster the nodes are, the better for speed.
