Free Anonymous BitTorrent Becomes Reality With BitBlinder
Written by enigmax on June 11, 2009There can be little doubt that the provision of an effective and free service for BitTorrent anonymity would prove hugely popular. Today we bring you a detailed report on BitBlinder – a brand new open source project which promises to cloak your torrents, hide your browsing and get round many obstructive filters.
A question which regularly pops up in the TorrentFreak mailbox is “How do hide myself online? How can I get free anonymous BitTorrent?” Our answer is usually something along the lines of “Free anonymous BitTorrent isn’t really a reality right now. You could use TOR but please, please don’t. It’s slow and really, the people who run TOR do not want it flooded with torrent traffic. Your best option is to use a VPN service, but this will cost you a few bucks.”
Maybe, just maybe, in future our answers will be different. Allow us to introduce BitBlinder, a new and free cross-platform (Mac support coming soon) open source project which not only claims to make anonymous BitTorrent transfers a reality but also hides your IP address while browsing the web. Its functionality also extends to the bypassing of some web filters and in the future will be compatible with more applications, such as email, IRC and instant messaging clients.
Although anonymity with the previously-mentioned TOR is good, using it for torrents is a big no – it’s too slow and the operators of the network do not appreciate it. BitBlinder was born to solve the problems that TOR couldn’t. TorrentFreak caught up with Josh Albrecht, one of the creators of BitBlinder, for the lowdown.
“BitBlinder is an attempt to address the aforementioned issues with Tor – we want to make online anonymity fast, usable, and ubiquitous to the point that organizations give up on spying and filtering us,” Josh told TorrentFreak. “BitBlinder is actually built on much of the same technology as Tor, though we have a completely separate network.”
The anonymity itself is provided by BitBlinder’s own P2P network, inside which everyone is required to contribute their own bandwidth to proxy other users’ data. The diagram below shows a standard user setup, without anonymity;
As seen in the diagram below, your request for data using BitBlinder is passed encrypted through multiple peers. Each peer in the chain only knows the IP address of the next person in the chain, not the original requester/sender.
Since decent BitTorrent-capable anonymity services cost money these days, how can BitBlinder offer the same for free? The key is to think of it as operating a little like a private BitTorrent tracker.
In order to maintain a good ratio on a private tracker, at a minimum you need to upload the same amount of data as you downloaded. With BitBlinder there is a similar system – in order to get the service for free you have to proxy X GB of data for other people inside the swarm if you want to share X GB of anonymized data. In common with some new accounts on private trackers, BitBlinder accounts come pre-loaded with some free credit to get the user going – 2GB to be precise. If anyone prefers not to be bound by ratio rules in the future, just like on many private trackers it will also be possible to buy ‘upload credit’ to use BitBlinder, but there is no reason why people can’t use it for free, as long as they share their bandwidth as detailed above.
At this point some readers will be asking how it’s possible for no-one to know what’s going on inside the BitBlinder swarm, yet somehow BitBlinder manages anonymity ratio tracking. It is possible though, and for those interested to learn about the micro-payment system BitBlinder’s is based on, further (highly technical) reading can be found here (pdf).
Of course, since traffic is sent from your PC to others in the BitBlinder swarm before reaching its destination in order to anonymize it, it won’t be as quick as regular non-anonymous BitTorrent use, but Josh told us speeds should be respectable and in any event, much faster than TOR. Indeed, within a few seconds of starting a ‘Steal This Film’ torrent from The Pirate Bay, we experienced speeds in excess of 2Mbit/s, which is massively faster than my previous experiences of BitTorrent over TOR.
For Windows users the BitBlinder package comes in a 17mb installer. The torrent client is a custom version of BitTornado and although it doesn’t have all the features of say uTorrent, more features will be added as time goes by. The bundled anonymous browser is naturally built on Firefox.
Josh told us that the BitBlinder network could be made to work with uTorrent or another browser such as Internet Explorer but unfortunately both applications are closed source, which means that it’s impossible to be certain that all data will be sent through other users (proxies) in the BitBlinder swarm and not directly to the Internet. For the same reasons, Flash is unavailable in the bundled version of Firefox.
Another trick up BitBlinder’s sleeve is the development of techniques to bypass web filters.
“BitTorrent encryption is pretty good at avoiding ISP level restrictions but it doesn’t do much for things like avoiding university or corporate firewalls. One of Tor’s goals is to circumvent the Great Firewall of China and we hope to make BitBlinder even better,” explained Josh. “Filters generally work by either blocking ports, a certain IP address, or by inspecting the traffic itself for specific protocols. We’re working hard to make BitBlinder effective against all three of these methods, but we still have some work to do on these features, so results may vary.”
Since BitBlinder has an anonymous browser, it should prove useful if you don’t want your employer knowing what you’re doing on Facebook or other social networks, for example. Indeed, if these sites are blocked it’s possible to use the BitBlinder network to access them. Of course, the anonymity would also be useful for signing up to and using the HTTP element of a torrent site.
Inevitably there are some issues with an anonymity system such as BitBlinder, and they parallel those experienced by users of TOR. Any traffic generated inside the BitBlinder network eventually needs to escape to the wider Internet. In order to facilitate this, some users need to act as an exit point. In basic terms, this means that an exit node operator’s IP address will be associated with the traffic leaving the network.
Before panic sets in, this is not necessarily bad news. Acting as an exit node provides the operator with plausible deniability, since they will have no idea what data is passing through. It would also be difficult to say if the data leaving that PC had originated from there or elsewhere, extending the deniability of their own traffic too. And it’s not as if that user’s IP address wasn’t perfectly visible already before BitBlinder came along.
For most users, however, opting to act as a beginning or middle proxy in the BitBlinder network means that no-one outside can see any traffic emanating from their PC and the good news is that this internal traffic still adds upload/download credit to the user’s account.
Time will tell if BitBlinder lives up to its dreams (and everyone else’s) but from what we’ve seen so far in the beta version, things are looking very promising indeed. That said, remember folks this is a beta and it is likely people will uncover bugs so please be patient and consider allowing the app to send crash reports, it will help the team a lot.
BitBlinder can be downloaded here – don’t forget to register and please read the instructions on how to forward ports etc, it will be good for your ratio.
New users should note that invite codes will be sent out at a controlled rate. Early adopters will be able to register fairly quickly but as more and more people apply, the longer the wait will become. This is merely to ensure a healthy network with an adequate number of quality proxies.
Previously: Scanner Darkly Producer Puts Latest Movie on BitTorrent
Next: Fleet Foxes Thank Piracy For Their Success
139 Responses
looks interesting…
i might give it a try.
And yet, I have a cap of 60 GB.
EPIC! Lets hope others start to follow on this and make P2P safer.
Don’t forget similar technologies like I2P: http://www.i2p2.de
You might want to look here first
http://anomos.info/wp/category/anomos/
This isn’t bad, but they’ve not done much to solve pre-existing problems with this type of anonymity relay network aside from enforcing a tit-for-tat style metering system.
If lots of people were to use it (including people with shitty adsl connections), the network throughput would drop quite a bit. It still might be a little quicker than TOR, but probably not much. Relaying data a few times between peers before the destination is reached is an expensive operation, both in terms of bandwidth and latency.
And if this IS any good, why pack it in with a bittorrent client and web-browser? It should have a SOCKS interface so any client or browser can be used with it.
Whoa, they’re trying to get profit from this? I don’t think that’s a good idea. They’re making business with illegal Internet traffic. They’ll most probably get the MPAA/RIAA/WHATEVER lawyers crawling up their asses very soon.
Hey everyone, thanks for the nice comments!
We’d heard of anomos before, but I didnt realized that they just launched a few days ago. The problem with anonmos (and correct me if I’m wrong) is that you have to find special torrents that go over their network. You can use any torrents you want in our network.
@Jimbob: it actually does use a socks interface, and you can use it with other applications, it’s just that that kind of stuff is very complicated, especially if you really want to be anonymous. That’s why we have the browser and client bundled–so people can be sure it is configured correctly and not leaking information.
Thank you RIAA, MPAA, IFPI, France, New Zealand, Sweden (FRA,IPRED), Australia, Sarkozy…. you have truly been an inspiration in making us come till here, in just a little while, you will see the baby you have helped conceive.
Again, I say “Thank You” for downloaders around the world.
@BitBlinder people: I can’t find the source code anywhere on the site. Am I missing something?
“in order to get the service for free you have to proxy X GB of data for other people inside the swarm if you want to share X GB of anonymized data”
In other words, you’ll get sued for other people’s downloads instead (like say for instance kiddy-porn), now how exactly is that supposed to help?
Either that or apparently pay them for using other people’s bandwidth…
Looks really interesting.. Sadly I have to wait for an invite code now. Thanks for getting my hopes up.
@10
Do you also think that VPN tunnels are used only for illegal traffic?
They are making business with anonymous traffic just like any VPN operator.
Sounds a lot like freenet to me, or did I just not understand everything?
I’m not sure how they want to get higher speeds than tor without “magic”.
For example in the graph the triffic is tunneld over 3 peers.
This follows that you have to tunnel also the traffic for 3 persons. You’ve a 6000dsl and 736kb/s upload.
Then you have a fourth of the capacity which are 184kb/s=23kbyte/s
So you just can download and upload at an speed of 23kbyte/s, which i also get with tor
Another thing I should point out is that we use 1-hop circuits by default so that the traffic is not ridiculous. It’s very easy to change–simply click the dropdown menu and select “Paranoid Mode” :)
As for the source, there is a link on the download page, which you get access to when we send the invite code. Information about how to access our SVN repo is also on that page.
I wish we didnt need invite codes and garbage, but then we’d be overwhelmed :(
I don’t see how this solves any of tors problems. Unless everyone has a synchronous 100 mbit connection (or at least, say, 16 mbit synchronous) it will fail once they’d make it public at the latest, maybe even earlier. Case in point, the best available speed in my area is 32 mbit down / 2 up over cable, so even if I dedicate all my bandwidth to this service, (provided I have a perfect connection) there’s a large up/down gap. And there are lots of connections that are worse.
You know, we have a lot to thank the copyright enforcers for. They went after Napster, which at the time was about the only file sharing site up.
With the death of Napster came whack-a-mole. Each time one gets taken down, more is learned about the processes and needs to make a better file sharing system.
File sharing is so wide spread now, they know they have no hope of closing it down through the regular channels. They are at best getting less than 1% of the file sharing crowd and even there, those that are on back log to be sued aren’t finding the court time open to bring them all in.
This has spawned their attempt to go after the numbers which they believe to be the younger college grouping. Doing so has helped a generation to understand that business as usual won’t work and they are dropping out of supporting the traditional methods of getting music.
Seeing that their handiwork is blowing up in their faces, they are now hot and heavy after the ISPs to do the police work and take the burden of of the bad publicity. Something I might add that the ISPs as a whole want nothing to do with.
All this clamor over file sharing costing them their livelihoods is all smoke and mirrors to begin with.
There are more entertainment dollars being spent today than there was during the heyday of music. The real problem here isn’t that it isn’t being spent. Instead it’s being spent on something besides music. Games are doing well compared to music. In fact they have gained a major percentage of the pie, leaving music sucking hind tit.
What the problem is, is that major music now has a bad PR problem with sue’em all. No one wants the trash they are putting out. Their idea that the back catalog is the 30% money maker of their income, has taken a crap. The numbers of the music listening people are now younger and are not so much interested in the 30 year old tunes. New tunes have no life so the future of the catalog is very much in doubt.
This newer client may not be the end all answer to the file sharing anonymity. It is however a sign it is being worked on and problems are being addressed that will yet again present stumbling blocks to the copyright enforcement crowd. The escalation continues without letup and again they are left in the dust, wondering why no one is buying their trash.
I don’t have a problem with this. There is nothing on the airwaves at present I desire. I’ve had a long time to get the old stuff I did desire. I don’t need to buy it all again. I’m not playing that game of replacing everything over and over because of file format changes.
So all I got to say, is keep on keeping on. Can’t wait for the day that major music has to close it’s doors because of it’s obstinate and wayward ways.
What can I say… this is good news.
looking forward for more info on this in the future :)
and that you get every help you can developing it.
good luck guys ;) the world realy needs this..
it looks nice in the diagram but weird in real-life. the crediting system thingy has its bad sides (the same ones as in the private tracker ratio counters). d/l : u/l ratios are at least 4:1 so this thing will harm d/l speeds. nice idea though but i guess ill have to wait for something more efficient
The good thing about this is that people HAVE to upload to be able to download – thus there will not be a TOR like scale of leeching (hopefully).
Stuff like this already exist. I am pro-piracy big time, but I do not like to see people trying to make money off stuff like this. For that reason, I will never touch this software.
Right now, I think OneSwarm is the most promising answer to the anonymity problem.
This looks to me like BT mixed with freenet, except it could be proved that your computer was used to traffic pirated stuff, or worse. Wheras, the traffic going through your computer on freenet is encrypted, so nothing can be proved.
Is your internet slowed down by the slower internet ISP of the other peers?
who the hell wants to be an exit point?
Being an exit node in TOR isn’t so cool. I can’t edit wiki cause it blocked TOR exit nodes because tor devs decided to put exit nodes IP on websites, ofc all-in-one and without registration ;/
And what is bad that even when I stop being exit-node the ban will be forever ;/
This seems quite a good idea. The big advantage over tor is that micropayment motivates people.
Be honest, most people don’t want to give something away for free. ALT solved this by enforcing a ratio, and the exact same could work here.
Then however i see a conflict with alt and bitblinder. I have my system running 24/7 to get my ratio clean on my favorite alt – because of the adsl ratio..
If I were to use BitBlinder, I would have to upload TWICE for each MB of download – to my alt account AND to my bitblinder account.
So long as people are using this to look @ CP or some other highly illegal things, I’d be more than glad to be an exit point..
OMG….Not meeeeeeeeeeeeeee.
How do you know what ‘they’ are downloading?
btw it is “Tor” not “TOR” ;)
Could be allsorts of nasty gubbins…?????
Bastard…..
@22
Formally request a different IP at your ISP if that doesn’t work change ISP
I’m jumping on the “same fundamental problems as Tor” bandwagon.
1) Bad scalability. As peers with poorer connections connect to the network, network latency and throughput suffer.
2) No end to end encryption. People often mistake “anonymous” to mean “secure”. If Bittorrent is your primary target, then create a Bittorrent protocol which is encrypted end-to-end. The reality is, with this current system, traffic between the exit node and the corrosponding BitTorrent peer may still be filtered by ISPs.
I can’t say much about this BitBlinder, but I will say I2P (url mentioned in a previous comment) has its own torrent trackers and you can upload/download torrents without the need to access any unencrypted internet.
I actually did a blog post about it:
http://www.censorshipsucksballs.com/2009/04/share-files-anonymously-via-i2p-torrents-gnutella-eepsites-and-more/
What happened to the secure bittorrent protocol the pirate bay folks were developing?
Being an exit is the sticking point. Sure, you will have plausible deniability if The Man comes a-knockin’. However, the charges being dropped eventually would still probably mean your computer being seized, your reputation smeared and legal costs to boot.
That said, good use of P2P technology. Hopefully more developments will be forthcoming soon
I guess this would be a good reason to use Peerguardian
The reason BitBlinder works like this (instead of like I2P) is that you can just use whatever torrents you normally would, but through BitBlinder. With anomos and i2p, you have to convince everyone else on the internet to change how they use torrents before the system is really useful.
I2P and anomos are still really neat, but I think most people want to be able to use normal torrents anonymously, not have to find special ones?
The key is to make exit points in areas where the laws are favorable to file sharing like Holland, or where the gov doesn’t give a shit like Russia.
Cross-platform… but no mention of Linux?
Open-source programs that ignore open-source OS’s… :( Lame.
I’ll wait until it is safely compatible with Flash, Vuze, and IE.
I don’t know much about programming. I used to use WinMX and I found it a great peice of software. I could move files around to where I wanted them and then just share the folder. When someone searched “XYZ” they would find all “XYZ”’s on the network. It was supposed to be anonymous, I wouldn’t know, in honesty. The program still works great, only most of the stuff the network is old, or not in the more recent formats. To the point, can’t someone make a program or revamp that one and just patch or fix the enharent problems with it? If the packets were not fixed and obvious that would have changed the course of WinMX right there. ISP’s could tell when you were using it. Anyone know anything about WinMX and why it’s not in use as much anymore, or updated even?
Complete and absolute anonymity will happen eventually. The RIAA/MPAA is forcing it to happen, but don’t think that the RIAA/MPAA is not wise to this. They are attempting to promote legislation that makes anonymity illegal.
I doubt they’ll succeed though. They’ll be long gone and dead before they can ever outsmart us.
WinMX used to be a great program, with all the features you’d want. One problem was that the ISP’s could easily tell when you were using it. It was supposed to be anonymous, I’m not a programmer and don’t know. The program still works great, though you mostly find older files, formats, etc. Why isn’t this program good enough anymore? Can it not be patched, updated? It was one of the best programs, and gave lots of control and options. Easily move files to the folders you wanted to have them in and rename them. After that all you had to do was share the folder the files were in and poof. There were not a 100 copies of the same files they were all hashed regardless of the file name. Any comments? or thoughts?
LOL sorry the first post wasn’t showing up. WinMX by Anonymous
This is no better than TOR. Even just a 3 node relay is a 4 fold reduction in bandwidth.
Practically everyone has shitty 6M/768kb connections. This would be somewhat useful if most people had a connection of 10/10Mb, but most people can’t even upload at 100kB a second, let alone 1MB.
That combined with latency issues as the network overhead increases and the problems with Tor persist here.
Also, any decent private tracker generally logs IPs. If they see you in 3 different countries, chances are you will get banned.
This naturally wont work for pvt trackers.
When the RIAA/MPAA sends their usual legal threats to ISP’s, they’ll get them all to block ports 9001 and 9030 rendering this BitBlinder completely useless.
development ,, i love it !! ;P
There are quite a few posts to respond to.
@Scalability:
BitBlinder will never be as fast as the internet at large- tunneling traffic has two effects: 1, it adds latency at each hop, and 2, it imposes a bandwidth cap of the slowest relay in the circuit.
However, BitBlinder should be faster than tor which is a major goal. For one thing, the Tor network is absolutely abused by leechers- tens of thousands of people send their traffic through dozens of relays- this will not be the case with BitBlinder since we basically enforce a ratio. We also allow users to send their traffic through a single relay instead of forcing them to send it through three which drastically reduces the load on the network; many use cases, like filter avoidance, only need a single relay to work.
@Other Solutions
We thought about making our own BitTorrent network with our own unique protocol which is probably the better solution technically; The problem, is that we would have to convince the rest of the bit Torrent community to adopt our system to make it usable. Whats the point in being the first person to join that network? Whats the point in even being the ten thousandth person to join that network? In our opinion, this has been the major stumbling block of many other anonymous BitTorrent applications.
@Linux+Open Source
We didn’t want to expose our web server to people downloading the client before they could even use it. Sorry about that, we were worried about digg killing us. Both can be found here: http://bitblinder.com/download/
@Making Monies
Jash and I have been working on this project for on average 12-15 hours a day 7 days a week for 8 months. Obviously, that means that we can’t do other things in the mean time; besides paying rent and buying food + internets, we have to pay to run the infrastructure (its low, but is still another drain). At some point, we will need to be self sustaining so we can survive, or we will have to move on. I don’t think this is unreasonable- in fact, we even let the rest of the world use the code we developed under the least restrictive open source license (MIT). Jash and I have also discussed paying relays for their bandwidth in the case that we actually do make money- that has to happen first though.
@Anonymity != Security
This is exactly right and a difficult user education problem for us. Unfortunately, we can’t force end to end encryption from above onto the Internet, though I would prefer that solution.
@Exit Nodes
Being an exit node will be a problem for some users because of the risks. However, some countries have extremely strong protections for such users or simply don’t care at all. Logically, it doesn’t make sense to hold them accountable (do ISPs get in trouble for the actions of their end users?), but unfortunately, the law is not logical.
Hell yeah. Finally, people starting to work on this. I will definitely be sure to give it a try. Guys, don’t diss it until you try it. Lets be open minded about this. We need more developers working on this.
ok, for everyone dissing it, do you read the damn article? Did you not hear how they said that you have to contribute what you take or it’s not free? That means if you don’t contribute enough, you have to pay to balance out the give-take ratio. That’s how they will be able to maintain the speed of the network. It’s a good idea in my opinion as long as these guys prove to be honest and the software is legitimate and trustworthy.
THEY MAKE UP FOR IT WITH MONEY !!! ok, so if you have slow upload speed and you want to have a fast download speed, you have to basically make up for the extra with money. It’s not that hard to figure out.
100 % anonymity is impossible. People should realize this. The goal is to make it so hard and time consuming that companies stop wasting their time on going after sharers.
Very interesting indeed, but for countries like Canada where upload speed is HIGHLY limited (like 50k/s) how could those users keep a decent ratio?
Who lives in asia must have a smille right about now.
The minimum speed in real life in japan for optical is 25Mb megabits(or 3MB megabytes) down and 5Mb megabits(or 625KB kilobytes) upstream.
Just download the fedora DVD (3.3 Gigabytes) and it took 20 min on bittorrent if I would use the HTTP I bet it would have been in half the time. And whitout testing nothing I’m expecting this same download over bitblinder to take something on the order of hours which it’s not bad if you are truly anonymous and use encryption end to end that is the part I don’t like it, it is not encrypted this means you have a hole where people could ask you to filter others at the end points.
If you can change the chart to show my ISP not filtering my traffic and limiting my fckn uploads to 50 kbps then this would be the best! I think you need to make a program that kills my stupid ISP!
Asia is a prime market for anonymous encrypted high speed bittorrent it already have all the infra structure in place.
Besides optical have a great advantage over cable(DOCSIS 3.0) you don’t share your line with others you don’t have to care if people are flooding the pipes.
This sort of thing wouldn’t work very well in Australia and some other countries due to bandwidth caps.
As it is, I need to manage my bandwidth usage as it is; I get 7GB and can download about 4 movies a month.
If other uses use my bandwidth, I would end up paying extra for the usage.
What would happen if someone runs an exit node, and some bad user downloads child pornography?
Is there a way to catch those really bad people, or will the exit node owner get all the blame?
It is always the last person in the chain that will feel all the heat.
And we all know the Mafiaa (private or state) doesn’t care about proper evidence, it just has to look proper enough to get YOU into trouble.
I stay with out-of-MY-country VPN services.
I AM sorry, but there is no way in hades that I will pay for bandwidth to pirate Already pirated media. They can screw themselves! They tried that @3&! with rapidshare. Took me awhile to figure it out, but RS is free too.
i know being an exit point gives you deniability, but tell that to the other people in your house and even @ work when the cops raid ur house and search ur work for child pron. its all a bit too late. the danage has been done, i dont trust joe public with my internet connection
cool story bro :)
Sounds really nice but users will need to be informed about what it means to be an exit point.
Deniability does not go for every country. Didn’t the UK proclaim that if you have an open WiFi and your neighbour downloads a film you as the owner are still responsible for that? No deniability on that part.
I also saw a mention of the Netherlands here in the comments, this too can be bothersome. While downloading for private use is (still) legal in the Netherlands sharing and uploading are not. Meaning that if you’re on the end of the chain uploading for someone in the middle you are still going against Dutch law.
It would be nice if BitBlinder could give out a list of countries where the end-nodes could be without any risks, that would support their users and their network.
That is why end to end encryption is important it turns null the question of responsibility as no one knows what is passing and unless they make privacy a crime there is no way someone could be criminalized for being a distribution node of encrypted data.
@kans
Whos idea was to suggest using it for surfing facebook, myspace etc, yours or enigmaxes? I bet you do realise that half of the exit node owners will be sniffing their outgoing traffic, and as with tor, the secure use will be possible only with additional encryption layer?
This just means that instead of anyone being only blameable for what they do on their own, you are now potentially pursueable for whatever anyone participating might have done and used your node for in the end, including all kinds of child pornography etc pp.
Obviously you can TRY for plausible deniability, but a) it’s CP, we’re now in the happy place of legislation changing so the burden of proof is suddenly ON THE DEFENDANT and not the prosecutor and b) you suddenly are under fire for shit you didn’t do in the first place instead of your own actions alone.
Sorry, but I dare say this is still rather sub-ideal. Unless there is an option to restrict traffic to inside the network and inside the network of participating peers ONLY, it’s no good. And then you end up back where it began – with a better encrypted and “mixed” closed gnutella-like network(like that whole MUTE or ants stuff or what it all was called).
Let’s face it – short of legislation actually becoming liberal and p2p friendly, we’re still nowhere near a bearable solution.
@44. WinMX was superceded by Winny when it was found to be insecure. Winny was later superceded by Share, and most recently, that has been replaced by Perfect Dark after 3 people were arrested for uploading on it. (In recent news, Perfect Dark is also insecure) These never really took off outside of Japan, so you can only really find Japanese content on them. (more info: anonymous-p2p.org/programs.html)
These rely on security through obscurity rather than providing a well documented infrastructure liek the already mentioned. They don’t help solve any problems with bittorrent traffic either.
Sounds like a great way to get busted for someone else’s illegal activities
@77
http://patch.winmxconex.com/patch_information.html
this the latest on WinMX , i still use it and still the most Anonymous way i know on how to share files safely (i first get them from BT tho )
ment @70
Just a heads-up, I don’t know whether this was posted before.
Do not rely on BitBlinder for completely Anonymous browsing, EVER. Although it is probably good as a proxy to bypass filters, there are MANY security flaws present. TOR (vidalia, firefox, torbutton, privoxy) is way better for this purpose, and there IS a reason it is slow.
@69
You are absolutely right.
Anomos have now also released their first version! We’re starting to see some alternatives stacking up, let the best (and not just first to end up at TorrentFreak) win! Remember, utorrent was very late compared to many other clients but it’s gooood.
anomos.info
There is already a similar project along those lines called Gnunet, with the only downside being that the number of files being shared are few and it is very slow.
Let’s hope Blitbinder improves that.
Never mind all this bull shit Anonymous..just get seedbox (Dedicated Server) Easy and your ISP won’t know what your doing, then download your torrents from FTP to your PC! i do seedboxs here > http://www.247-hosting.org
Great article from the Guardian Newpaper in the UK about the cost of filesharing to the music industry…
http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2009/jun/09/games-dvd-music-downloads-piracy
Digg away guys!!!!
evolution even applies to this…
say it with me:
l-i-n-u-x-!-!-!-!
somebody say profit from this….come on in serbia paypal is not finish with operating service so what is keeping you 2 give 5$ e yen , what ever when wee can pay on-line i will always leave a couple of dolars for great movie or program come on people there are somebody making you all this happend show them some resp…but if there is soething else here there is always a way 2 get almost anything from anybody here if u have something in your brain..greetings from devils playground SERBIA
There seems to be 3 new anonymous bittorrent clients right now.
bitblinder
anonomos
anotorrent
Does anyone know anything about anotorrent? Doesn’t have a way to download the software yet.
http://www.anotorrent.net/
Read about all 3 and it would be great if torrentfreak did some kind of review on all 3 for us. Anybody like to give their opinion on which they think is best?
Anonomos uses a central server for some reason. Anotorrent uses decentralized network somehow. Anyway, can’t wait to see which one wins.
So what good does this do? If you act as an exit node, the **AA busts you for downloading X.mp3. You use plausible deniability to say “No, I didn’t download X.mp3″ since someone else downloaded it through your computer. That’s nice, but meanwhile they have your computer and find out that you DO have Y.mp3 on your hard drive and sue you for that instead.
Sorry, but this is just putting a band-aid on the real problem.
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@43: Enjoy waiting forever then.
List of anonymous p2p technologies already available.
http://www.anonymous-p2p.org/programs.html
Choose one and be happy :)
The whole “omg CP on tor” and “running an exit node is dangerous” debates are dead horses that have been beaten to a pulp. Read this extremely well-written FAQ first: https://www.torproject.org/faq-abuse.html , *then* think of moral or anti-exit-node arguments.
@manky goes to bollywood: You, my friend, have the awesomest name.
@31 keb: Pretty sure both are fine, as TOR stands for The Onion Router
I use bitTorrent around once every two weeks as I’m not on the internet.
I milk it for everything I can over a night/two nights.
Therefore I can’t use this. Shame.
Great idea though, hope it’s a success.
pedophiles are the ones who will be so happy if real anonymity ever works.
the closet pedos are not out because its too dangerous and they dont have the know how to be anon.
give them a newb friendly and guaranteed anon service, and they will be all over the place…
there no such things as Anonymous in tcp unless you using proxy or udp.
generally i am against monetising data transactions because it is a further tax on sharing. good business models are all about appropriation of value (look how M$ appropriated the value of the PC revolution by selling little pieces of paper and plastic called “licenses”) in this case a few highbandwidth exit routes will dominate and aggregate the micro-payments into a little fortune for a select few
however, it is open source, if people dont like the idea of paying for anonymous bandwidth then alternative and free networks will arise and prevail
nice idea. i support this for as long as the code remains open source and the network is unregulated as to who can erect an ingress/egress service
http://www.h33t.com where sometimes time goes backwards
Sounds great, I’ve been waiting for something like this!
very interesting paper on economics – quite possibly a basis for a new underground economy which is at this point still nessisary
I’m curious to know what was done about network poisoning by malicious exit nodes.
How do you know that the data send it is not being manipulated at the exit by some ill intended guy?
This is a real concern on the TOR network that is only adressed with encryption.
i made somehting like this in a white paper in 2001 before bittorrent was invented…HAHA you are all so far behind
> i made somehting like this in a white paper in 2001 before bittorrent was invented…HAHA you are all so far behind
A “white paper”? Don’t make me laugh. MojoNation (which employed a certain Bram Cohen and from which BitTorrent was derived) had all of this back in 2000; it also had end-to-end encryption and made the stored data persistent. It was slow as shit (as this system will be) and had all of the same problems that this system will have (e.g. the “economy” will be gamed to death, it suffered from a lot of the same network black-boxing and probing attacks that will make this system trivial to monitor by a larger entity, etc.)
Wake me when someone actually comes up with something new that has a decent chance of living up to the claims they are making.
is will it work or is it another gimmick for spam
Sounds great but its site is blocked here at school.
The reason I like I2P is because it has it’s own network on top of the internet. No exiting needed to upload/download torrents or share files in any way.
As long as you have to exit an anonymous network to get something, you will have to rely on the exit node and have to trust them to a degree. Not many people are willing to run exit nodes due to possible legal threats and fear.
When it really comes down to it, if you want to be anonymous while using something like torrent or gnutella.. you must use a network that doesn’t require any traffic to enter or leave the network. People are much more willing to run a relay than an exit.
I2P is a little slow but still outperforms TOR in many areas and the devs of I2P encourage things like torrent trackers and p2p sharing on I2P. The more people that put stuff up on a network like I2P, the more stuff will be available. Also be sure sure to share enough bandwidth if you use any anonymous network or it will remain slow.
School?
I remember math, would it be possible to use a equation to describe a file and send little equations to be solved all over the place and have them be send back as building blocks that will be reconstructed according to some blueprint that don’t go outside?
Questions?
- Would this create some pattern that can be detected?
- Would it need encryption since all the internet see is the building blocks and not really any data.
- Could it be modified so people store the blocks and are asked to send those via little equations that can morph into various forms and be encrypted.
- Could it possible work?
Sounds great for torrents… but the idea of “anonymous” browsing scares me. What about people who use the internet for child pornography, or terrorism, etc? Can someone comment
Juz, read this FAQ about abuse on TOR network: https://www.torproject.org/faq-abuse.html.en
TOR is a similar service to BitBlinder, so the answers there also apply to BitBlinder.
Haha, YES
Now instead of infringement, we’ll get Assisting making available..
Nearly there!
How about a mechanins that map webpages to actual data and transform that into files and uses a swarn to search the internet for the patterns it needs LoL
http://offsystem.sourceforge.net/
Wow this looks amazing.. and to answer everybody’s question about different internet speeds.. i would guess that the traffic can go multiple routs to max out the connection..
that way your not stuck with 1 slow dude, the traffic splits apart and goes different routes until the connection is maxed..
or at least that sounds good in theory..
This is a great idea, I’ve registered and I’m just waiting for an email from them now
http://antimatter.atbhost.net/?p=49
Until they knock on your door, cart you away, bang you up and you get bum raped by BUBBA…..No thanks i’ll stick with a vpn.
“With BitBlinder there is a similar system – in order to get the service for free you have to proxy X GB of data for other people inside the swarm if you want to share X GB of anonymized data.”
what about people like me with a shitty upload speed but an awesome download speed <.< 65kb/s~ up and about 1 to 1.5mb/s download speed. If i can only give 65kb/s upload, that means my downloads peed will be limited to 65kb/s ?
Awesome work. Keep it up!
“It would be nice if BitBlinder could give out a list of countries where the end-nodes could be without any risks, that would support their users and their network.”
I agree. Although, at the end of the day, I’d sleep better with an end to end encryption scenario.
What someone needs to come up with is, rather than just ratio tracking, they need real time bandwith tracking as well- the same way that the bigger pipe is rewarded in the bt swarm, the bigger pipe needs to be rewarded in the BitBlinder swarm with other bandwith endowed relays. In other words, those that are ULing at high rates get access to nodes that are DLing at high rates. In that scenario, you have no ‘weakest link’ issues- crap nodes are delegated to other crap nodes. You give what you get. Period- both in the amount of data as well as the speed at which you are passing it.
Because of the potential for tremendous speeds and the pseudoanonymity, the big guns would flock to this in droves. You wouldn’t have to worry about being the first or the ten thousandth user on the network. It could then be completely contained- end to end encryption.
The end result would be far from egalitarian, but it would be just. Those that want faster speeds would have to invest in bigger pipes (or pressure their ISPs to upgrade their networks). Just as bittorrent has singlehandedly driven networking progress, this would drive it that much further.
Bittorrent worked so well/became so popular because it supported the concept of natural selection. It’s the survival of the biggest pipe. In order for pseudoanonymous networks to thrive, they have to embrace the same philosophy.
You wrote: “For Windows users the BitBlinder package comes in a 17mb installer.”
I tried downloading it and it was 8 billion times larger than what you said, viz. 17 MB… What’s a millibit, anyway?
“Acting as an exit node provides the operator with plausible deniability, since they will have no idea what data is passing through.”
That is total BS, tracker owners also use this excuse but they continue to get busted.
I use Tor, ip2p, Peergaurdian (currently blocking: 729,220,587 IP’s), uTorrent (Blocking: 489,471 IP FILTER) yet I still got a 2.1MB connection for 3 actively downloaded torrents. I don’t see why TOR is bad. I am using all of these protections but yet, I don’t notice ONE, NOT ONE slow connection on my internet. And the weird part is I am on Wifi…..
While it is true that most, but not all, prospective file sharers on the Internet have an imbalanced download/upload ratio, heavily weighted towards downloads, it is also equally true that their connection is often idle. If, for instance, you were to download a movie, and it took only an hour, you could hope to seed that movie in just four hours. Leaving the connection open while you sleep, or while you’re at work does nothing to impeded your regular use, and will effectively maintain your seed ratio.
The tit-for-tat requirement simply makes you more conscious of using your idle bandwidth.
this is crap
someone is gonna get the heat for sharing anyway, not the user that asked the file but some other dude, and don’t be happy, next time it happens to him
all this does is passing the potato to another…and slows traffic
crap, crap, crap
AHAA (2,188,663,558 PG2), meins bigger blocklist that is :P
and thx for all the useful links guy´s.
But of course I want to be an out-proxy for all the bozos who download movies that haven’t been released yet.. and the kiddie-abuse perverts, spammers, fakers, crackers
and all the other garbage ..
@117 Jun 13, 2009 at 09:16 by anonimous vpn user.
Think about it this way, bittorrent today is no more secure then a bathroom without doors so at least you have some measure of protection, besides if this grows and there a millions of exit points there is a very good chance that nothing will happen, and if the bittorrent client comes with encryption by default it turns the argument of illegal sharing mute because the exit point cannot see or managed what is going on you have to go to the other end and get it to disclosed what was transferred or be listening after the receiver have decoded the message so it will not be the exit point, but I still think that the encryption of the bitorrent client should be mandatory and not optional without it you put exit points at risk unnecessarily.
I’m waiting for the day where they by law force ISPs to maximize download speed – for streaming, pay-per-view TV application and such – and minimize upload. Because only terrorists and pirates need big upload, right? Gotta be illegal.
Kill ratio sites, fair sharing etc pp in one go.
Not that I’d personally care. They could force me to use 8 kb/s: I’d just download at 8kb/s 24/7 and still get what I want.
Currently it’s already insane: 16 mbit down, 0.5 mbit up. If you don’t realize what the real game is by now(replacing TV with internet streams, “selling” the internet to you piece by piece by enabling fast DL but forcing slow UL so that there can be no autonomous freedom or internet society), then you never will.
use i2p
JAVA sucks!
I’ve been happily using I2P and it seems like a better solution to me in that nobody is exposed. I guess running this will mean you can’t really be accused since there is no way of knowing if it was you downloading but one can still get targeted and if anything turns up when the police seize your equipment…
Speeds will be slower than regular Bittorrent with all solutions so there is really not much point in complaining about that. You can take the risks associated or try to lessen them by using something like I2P or this.
I tried Tor and found it a pain in the ass to use, so I might give this a go (the anonymous browsing also appeals to me, as other anonymous networks have struck me as unreliable and overly complex – probably because I don’t know shit). I agree that the ratio system is probably too constricting to use it for everything, but it might be valuable for choice things, and its a good step on the path ahead. Thanks to the developers.
One problem though has been covered in the book Big Brother. If an ISP sees a large amount of encrypted data, they may start investigating why a home user is sending and receiving all of this data. It could also fall under Patriot Act and allow the government to investigate for terrorist activity.
Thanks to 70 and 72 for the input on WinMx.
126 xanfantasy. Now that is a very likely out come. And not likely a good one at that.
Pirates aren’t going to have anything to pirate anonymously once the illegal trackers have been shut down. Intent it almost impossible to conceal on the internet. Anonymous services aren’t technically illegal, but if it’s discovered that they are helping to aid in piracy, they will get shut down too.
ok here is my big question before I get into this…
Now if this program has you share proxies with other people and they share your proxy… THEN WOULDNT YOUR IP ADDRESS NOW SHOW YOU DOWNLOADED WHAT OTHER PEOPLE DOWNLOADED???
In my opinion if this is true I feel a lot safer with the torrents I choose to DL from my own IP rather than the ones that other people I dont know download saying its from my IP.
I think this is a valad point!
COMMENTS…
Sounds great. Just the thing for my server.
P2P anonymity systems will always have the same problem, and that is information security. Sure, your traffic is encrypted through your ISP, but the exit node will always be able to see an unencrypted version of all the traffic. This creates problems using this system for sites with logons and is a big risk for users of private trackers which don’t use an https announce.
Bottom line: The exit node will see private tracker passkeys in plaintext. The moment you use this system on a private tracker you can consider your account compromised.
LOL So the guy at the end gets screwed and blamed for MY download? Thats shitty! I wouldnt wanna be the last guy! lol
Typo dude:
“How do hide myself online?”
@18..
Evolution of File Sharing..
Natural Adoptation.
Hope it does not turn into an Artificial Intelligence Crap but surely, the internet still grows every second you click on ads and stuff.
exit proxy spying and vulneralibity of the open-internet trackers to legal action are problems that do not exist in networks that do not focus on trying to anonymize the usage of the normal www, whether the Bittorrent, eDonkey and Gnutella supporting I2P or the distributed storage networks like Freenet.
Check out http://www.entertane.com for a new meta-search engine – faster, simpler – access to all your favorite torrent searches
Condoms are great, but still dont pick a disease ridden hor. Thats the best you can do with torrents as well. The best prevention (since we all can’t obstain obviously) is picking the best torrents as possible. Lots of leaching, and reputable uploaders that have been around for a bit
@ 128 you can’t shut down every machine in the world if the program is decentralized. This also goes for if the program is open source or people want to crack the program if closed source if they want to use it either. If the company gets shut down and the program or whatever is decentralized, it can’t be completely shut down.
@Gss
The AnoTorrent site http://www.anotorrent.net seems to have some progress recently.
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