oneswarm
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watch the video at the first link gives a good explanation

might take away the need for trakers and increase privacy, could be a viral disaster too ?

it's got some good points, and some bad points.

bad point: the "friends" are added via a bot on UofW's gtalk bot server. If this goes down, you can't add friends, also it allows them to see who all is using it, and possibly be talked into turning over information.

Good point, the transfer of information is routed like a tor connection would be, it's through different nodes and allows user x to never know he is sending data to user y since it goes through users a-f

bad point: the only way to get very large on it is to "know" the people you are sending to, so unless you have a network of 50000 friends, you won't be getting data out unless you have a commond friend to connect to

i suppose a "server" could give out an email address for everyone to add, then they can see files of "friends of friends" to get all the files in that network, but it still relies on UofW servers to handle all the friend trading initially, and i think it would be faster for a site to do that handling themselves (basically like DC++ works except distributed like torrents)


really the solution to the problem MOST people face starts at tunneling your torrent transfers. if each and every single peer you connect to does a simple sort of VPN between the two of them, this provides end to end security.

The next problem is bad people in the swarm, that's something much harder to stop and probably never will be done since the idea behind anonymity is well....anonymity, unless you can identify everyone, you can't identify bad people. so either everyone is open with identity, or no one is

quoting mazuki:
The next problem is bad people in the swarm, that's something much harder to stop and probably never will be done since the idea behind anonymity is well....anonymity, unless you can identify everyone, you can't identify bad people. so either everyone is open with identity, or no one is

end quote

this is what i saw as being a posible major problem. there are many ways to get the word out and add people, but how do you keep the bad ones out, exactly maz.

i think encrypting all your connections is pretty good to at least keep the data your sharing safe.

i think you use linux mazuki, could you suggest a good vpn program or setup?

and as always thanks for your input

i wouldn't suggest a VPN program, it needs to be added as a plugin or a feature to common clients in order to be really effective

it should be an option you simply enable in micro-torrent or azureus like encryption except it would be TRUE encryption, not just a quick RC4 stream encryption. The downside is that you would lose a little performance, but that is to be expected and it wouldn't be anything near running through something like tor

yeah i tried tor at one point and it really uses a lot of bandwidth. network manager has a vpn option, ill be looking into that. along with iptables ;) tx maz!